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

“All right,” I said. “We’ll send off the minicap and then jump to the event horizon.”

“Yes,” Kane said.

Ajit said, “I’m going to go back to work. Tirzah, if you and Kane want to go up to the observation deck, or anywhere, I’ll prepare and launch the minicap.” Carefully he turned his back and sat at his terminal.

I led Kane to my bunk. This was a first; I always went to the scientists’ bunks. My own, as captain, had features for my eyes only. But now it didn’t matter.

We made love, and afterward, holding his superb, aging body in my arms, I whispered against his cheek, “I love you, Kane.”

“I love you, too,” he said simply, and I had no way of knowing if he meant it, or if it was an automatic response dredged up from some half-remembered ritual from another time. It didn’t matter. There are a lot more types of love in the universe than I once suspected.

We were silent a long time, and then Kane said, “I’m trying to remember pi . I know 3.1, but I can’t remember after that.”

I said, through the tightness in my throat, “3.141. That’s all I remember.”

“Three point one four one,” Kane said dutifully. I left him repeating it over and over, when I went to jump the probe to the event horizon of Sag A*.

The second breach of the hull was more serious than the first.

The third minicap had not arrived from the probe. “The analogues are probably all dead,” Kane said dully. “They were supposed to jump to one-twenty-fifth of a light-year from the event horizon. Our calculations were always problematic for where exactly that is . It’s possible they landed inside, and the probe will just spiral around Sag A* forever. Or they got hit with major radiation and fried.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “How is the massive-young-star problem coming?”

“It’s not. Mathematical dead end.”

He looked terrible, drawn and, again, unwashed. I was more impatient with the latter than I should be. But how hard is it, as a courtesy to your shipmates if nothing else, to get your body into the shower? How long does it take? Kane had stopped exercising, as well.

“Kane,” I began, as quietly but firmly as I could manage, “will you—”

The alarms went off, clanging again at 115 decibels. Breach, breach, breach…

I scanned the displays. “Oh, God—”

“Breach sealed with temporary nano patch,” the computer said. “Seal must be reinforced within one half hour with permanent hull patch, type 1-B, supplemented with equipment repair, if possible. For location of breach and patch supply, consult—” I turned it off.

The intruder had hit the backup engine. It was a much larger particle than the first one, although since it had hit us and then gone on its merry way, rather than penetrating the ship, there was no way to recover it for examination. But the outside mass detectors registered a particle of at least two kilos, and it had probably been moving much faster than the first one. If it had hit us directly, we would all be dead. Instead it had given the ship a glancing blow, damaging the backup engine.

“I’ll come with you again,” Kane said.

“There won’t be any particle to collect this time.” Or not collect.

“I know. But I’m not getting anywhere here.”

Kane and I, s-suited, went into the backup engine compartment. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was nothing I could do. There is damage you can repair, and there is damage you cannot. The back end of the compartment had been sheared off, and part of the engine with it. No wonder the computer had recommended a 1-B patch, which is essentially the equivalent of “Throw a tarp over it and forget it.”

While I patched, Kane poked around the edges of the breach, then at the useless engine. He left before I did, and I found him studying ship’s display of the hit on my wardroom screen. He wasn’t trying to do anything with ship’s log, which was not his place and he knew it, but he stood in front of the data, moving his hand when he wanted another screen, frowning horribly.

“What is it, Kane?” I said. I didn’t really want to know; the patch had taken hours and I was exhausted. I didn’t see Ajit. Sleeping, or up on the observation deck, or, less likely, in the gym.

“Nothing. Whatever that hit was made of, it wasn’t radiating. So it wasn’t going very fast, or the external sensors would have picked up at least ionization. Either the mass was cold, or the sensors aren’t functioning properly.”

“I’ll run the diagnostics,” I said wearily. “Anything else?”

“Yes. I want to move the ship.”

I stared at him, my suit half peeled from my body, my helmet defiantly set on the table, pushing the statue of Shiva to one side. “Move the ship?”

Ajit appeared in the doorway from his bunk.

“Yes,” Kane said. “Move the ship.”

“But these are the coordinates the minicap will return to!”

“It’s not coming,” Kane said. “Don’t you listen to anything I say, Tirzah? The uploads didn’t make it. The third minicap is days late; if it were coming, it would be here. The probe is gone, the uploads are gone, and we’ve got all the data we’re going to get from them. If we want more, we’re going to have to go after it ourselves.”

“Go after it?” I repeated, stupidly. “How?”

“I already told you! Move the ship closer into the core so we can take the readings the probe should have taken. Some of them, anyway.”

Ajit said, “Moving the ship is completely Tirzah’s decision.”

His championship of me when I needed no champion, and especially not in that pointlessly assertive voice, angered me more than Kane’s suggestion. “Thank you, Ajit, I can handle this!”

Mistake, mistake.

Kane, undeterred, plowed on. “I don’t mean we’d go near the event horizon, of course, or even to the probe’s first position near the star cluster. But we could move much closer in. Maybe ten light-years from the core, positioned between the northern and western arms of Sag A West.”

Ajit said, “Which would put us right in the circumnuclear disk! Where the radiation is much worse than here!”

Kane turned on him, acknowledging Ajit’s presence for the first time in days, with an outpouring of all Kane’s accumulated frustration and disappointment. “We’ve been hit twice with particles that damaged the ship. Clearly we’re in the path of some equivalent of an asteroid belt orbiting the core at this immense distance. It can’t be any less safe in the circumnuclear disk, which, I might remind you, is only shocked molecular gases, with its major radiation profile unknown. Any first-year astronomy student should know that. Or is it just that you’re a coward?”

Ajit’s skin mottled, then paled. His features did not change expression at all. But I felt the heat coming from him, the primal rage, greater for being contained. He went into his bunk and closed the door.

“Kane!” I said furiously, too exhausted and frustrated and disappointed in myself to watch my tone. “You can’t—”

“I can’t stand any more of this,” Kane said. He slammed down the corridor to the gym, and I heard the exercise bike whirr in rage.

I went to my own bunk, locked the door, and squeezed my eyes shut, fighting for control. But even behind my closed eyelids I saw our furious shadows.

After a few hours I called them both together in the wardroom. When Kane refused, I ordered him. I lifted Ajit’s statue of Shiva off the table and handed it to him, making its location his problem, as long as it wasn’t on the table. Wordlessly he carried it into his bunk and then returned.

“This can’t go on,” I said calmly. “We all know that. We’re in this small space together to accomplish something important, and our mission overrides all our personal feelings. You are both rational men, scientists, or you wouldn’t be here.”