Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“I know, Tirzah.”

“With the risk of radiation killing us all—”

“Not yet. Give me a little more time.”

I rested a moment against his shoulder. “All right. A little more time.”

He put his arm around me, not in passion but in comradeship. None of us, we both knew, had all that much time left.

Kane was only temporarily defeated by the contamination of the probe data. Within half a day, he had aborted his shadow-matter theory, archived his work on it, and gone back to his original theories about the mysteriously massive young stars near the hole. He used the probe’s new data, which were all logical amplifications of the prelim readings. “I’ve got some ideas,” he told me. “We’ll see.”

He wasn’t as cheerful as usual, let alone as manically exuberant as during the shadow-matter “discovery,” but he was working steadily. A mountain, Kane. It would take a lot to actually erode him, certainly more than a failed theory. That rocky insensitivity had its strengths.

Ajit, on the other hand, was not really working. I couldn’t follow the displays on his terminal, but I could read the body language. He was restless, inattentive. But what worried me was something else, his attitude toward Kane.

All Ajit’s anger was gone.

I watched carefully, while seemingly bent over ship’s log or embroidery. Anger is the least subtle of the body’s signals. Even when a person is successfully concealing most of it, the signs are there if you know where to look: the tight neck muscles, the turned-away posture, the tinge in the voice. Ajit displayed none of this. Instead, when he faced Kane, as he did during the lunch I insisted we all eat together at the wardroom table, I saw something else. A sly superiority, a secret triumph.

I could be wrong, I thought. I have been wrong before. By now I disliked Ajit so much that I didn’t trust my own intuitions.

“Ajit,” I said as we finished the simple meal I’d put together, “will you please—”

Ship’s alarms went off with a deafening clang. Breach, breach, breach .

I whirled toward ship’s display, which automatically illuminated. The breach was in the starboard hold, and it was full penetration by a mass of about a hundred grams. Within a minute, the nanos had put on a temporary patch. The alarm stopped and the computer began hectoring me.

“Breach sealed with temporary nano patch. Seal must be reinforced within two hours with permanent hull patch, type 6-A. For location of breach and patch supply, consult ship’s log. If unavailability of—” I shut it off.

“Could be worse,” Kane said.

“Well, of course it could be worse,” I snapped, and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to snap. That I had done so was an indication of how much the whole situation on the Kepler was affecting me. That wasn’t allowed, either; it was unprofessional.

Kane wasn’t offended. “Could have hit the engines or the living pod instead of just a hold. Actually, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before. There’s a lot of drifting debris in this area.”

Ajit said, “Are you going into the hold, Tirzah?”

Of course I was going into the hold. But this time I didn’t snap; I smiled at him and said, “Yes, I’m going to suit up now.”

“I’m coming, too,” Kane said.

I blinked. I’d been about to ask if Ajit wanted to go with me. It would be a good way to observe him away from Kane, maybe ask some discreet questions. I said to Kane, “Don’t you have to work?”

“The work isn’t going anywhere. And I want to retrieve the particle. It didn’t exit the ship, and at a hundred grams, there’s going to be some of it left after the breach.”

Ajit had stiffened at being preempted, yet again, by Kane. Ajit would have wanted to retrieve the particle, too; there is nothing more interesting to space scientists than dead rocks. Essentially, I’d often thought, Sag A* was no more than a very hot, very large dead rock. I knew better than to say this aloud.

I could have ordered Ajit to accompany me, and ordered Kane to stay behind. But that, I sensed, would only make things worse. Ajit, in his present mood of deadly sensitivity, would not take well to orders from anyone, even me. I wasn’t going to give him the chance to retreat more into whatever nasty state of mind he currently inhabited.

“Well, then, let’s go,” I said ungraciously to Kane, who only grinned at me and went to get our suits.

The holds, three of them for redundancy safety, are full of supplies of all types. Every few days I combine a thorough ship inspection with lugging enough food forward to sustain us. We aren’t uploads; we need bodily nurturing as well as the kind I was supposed to be providing.

All three holds can be pressurized if necessary, but usually they aren’t. Air generation and refreshment doesn’t cost much power, but it costs some. Kane and I went into the starboard hold in heated s-suits and helmets.

“I’m going to look around,” Kane said. He’d brought a handheld, and I saw him calculating the probable trajectory of the particle from the ship’s data and the angle of the breach, as far as he could deduce it. Then he disappeared behind a pallet of crates marked SOYSYNTH.

The breach was larger than I’d expected; that hundred-gram particle had hit at a bad angle. But the nanos had done their usual fine job, and the permanent patch went on without trouble. I began the careful inspection of the rest of the hull, using my handheld instruments.

Kane cursed volubly.

“Kane? What is it?”

“Nothing. Bumped into boxes.”

“Well, don’t. The last thing I want is you messing up my hold.” For a physically fit man, Kane is clumsy in motion. I would bet my ship that he can’t dance, and bet my life that he never tries.

“I can’t see anything. Can’t you brighten the light?”

I did, and he bumped around some more. Whenever he brushed something, he cursed. I did an inspection even more carefully than usual, but found nothing alarming. We met each other back by the hold door.

“It’s not here,” Kane said. “The particle. It’s not here.”

“You mean you didn’t find it.”

“No, I mean it’s not here. Don’t you think I could find a still hot particle in a hold otherwise filled only with large immobile crates?”

I keyed in the door code. “So it evaporated on impact. Ice and ions and dust.”

“To penetrate a Schaad hull? No.” He reconsidered. “Well, maybe. What did you find?”

“Not much. Pitting and scarring on the outside, nothing unexpected. But no structural stress to worry about.”

“The debris here is undoubtedly orbiting the core, but we’re so far out it’s not moving all that fast. Still, we should had some warning. But I’m more worried about the probe—when is the third minicap due?”

Kane knew as well as I did when the third minicap was due. His asking was the first sign he was as tense as the rest of us.

“Three more days,” I said. “Be patient.”

“I’m not patient.”

“As if that’s new data.”

“I’m also afraid the probe will be hit by rapidly orbiting debris, and that will be that. Did you know that the stars close in to Sag A* orbit at several thousand clicks per second?”

I knew. He’d told me often enough. The probe was always a speculative proposition, and before now, Kane had been jubilant that we’d gotten any data at all from it.

I’d never heard Kane admit to being “afraid” of anything. Even allowing for the casualness of the phrase.

I wanted to distract him, and, if Kane was really in a resigned and reflective mood, it also seemed a good time to do my job. “Kane, about Ajit—”