Scanned by Highroller. Proofed by the best elf proofer. Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet. Mother Lode by Zach Hughes CHAPTER ONE The X&A ship U.P.S. Rimfire blinked into normal space a quarter of an astronomical unit from the bustling spaceports of the administrative planet Xanthos. The officer on the navigation bridge, Lieutenant Erin Kenner, studied the scanners carefully and waited for clearance from Xanthos Central before giving engineering the order to make the last of an epic series of blinks. Rimfire disappeared instantaneously to reappear at a two-hour, sub-light distance from her assigned orbit. Erin buzzed the captain's quarters. «We'll be ready to go to debarkation stations in two hours, Captain,» Erin said, as she punched orders into the board to start the ship moving. After over five years in space every man and woman on board was more than ready to feel a planetary mass underfoot. An almost tangible current of excitement was running through the ship. Captain Julie Roberts, dark haired, almost spare in her service blues, looked as if she'd spent the last two hours in front of a mirror instead of having a quick nap in her cabin. When she came onto the bridge, she checked the scanners and frowned. «Heavy traffic?» she asked. Erin had never seen so many ships congregated in one area of space, but she made no comment. Julie Roberts punched the communicator. «Xanthos Central, Rimfire. « «Rimfire, Xanthos Central, go ahead, please.» «Xanthos Central, Rimfire. Concerning your assignment of position. The designated area looks a bit crowded tome.» «Rimfire, Xanthos Central. Hold one.» There was a pause. The communicator speakers hissed the subliminal, forlorn audio signature of limitless space. «Look, Captain,» Erin Kenner said. The congregation of ships, large and small, was sorting itself out into two long files curving off into the distance on either side of Rimfire's assigned orbit. The communicator came to life. «Rimfire, Xanthos Central. Captain Roberts, you will bring your ship to the assigned position to enter orbit and to receive a salute from units of the fleet.» «Damn,» Julie Roberts said. She looked at Erin Kenner and shook her head. «Well, Lieutenant, there goes our plan to have dinner planetside.» Erin used power to augment the gravitation of the planet, let Rimfire fall slowly. In the engineering spaces the largest blink generator ever constructed was doing its eerie thing, drawing a combination of radiative, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces from the nearest star. Under Erin's skillful control the ship rotated neatly around a ninety degree turn, adjusted speed, cut back power. «Nicely done, Erin,» Julie Roberts said. «I'm going to be sorry to lose you.» «I'll miss this part of it,» Erin said. «I'll never be able to play with so big and expensive a toy again.» Ahead and to the sides the evenly positioned ships of the X&A fleet glowed like giant fireflies as all external lights were turned on at the same instant. For hundreds of miles in front of Rimfire space flares filled the empty blackness with pyrotechnic display. «All hands, all hands,» Julie Roberts said, after turning on the in-ship communicators, «check your nearest viewer. I do believe that we're being welcomed home.» Rimfire's swim through space seemed to those in the ships who were greeting her to be slow, although the velocity of the entire armada was high enough to balance the planet's gravitational pull against the effect of the first law of motion. Signal lights blinked out the ancient visual code of welcome. Fleet Admiral Flying Bird, a Healer from Old Earth and commander of the space arm of the Department of Exploration and Alien Search, spoke briefly to the officers and crew of Rimfire. His voice echoed throughout the giant ship. Men and women who wanted nothing more at the moment than to get off the ship winked at each other as if to shrug off the admiral's sincere praise. «Ah, shucks, Admiral,» Erin Kenner said, «t'weren't nothin'.» All Rimfire had done was to circumnavigate the galaxy. Just under six years ago she'd blinked away from Xanthos toward the periphery, leaving behind the last, scattered stars and entering the black void of intergalactic space. As she did the exploration crawl, traveling only instrument-scan distances in any one jump of her powerful generator, she left behind her a string of blink beacons that would allow others to do in weeks what had taken her years to accomplish, to circle the Milky Way Galaxy around the rim of the disc's horizontal plane. She had been built to do the job, and she had done it well. In one expedition she had accelerated galactic exploration enormously, for now a ship could follow her beacons to a position opposite any given point in the galactic disk and begin exploratory penetration at a point which would have taken years to reach if it had been necessary to pick a laborious path between the stars. Rimfire's long and lonely voyage was important because of the nature of the blink drive. Even in the crowded heart of the galaxy, distances were measured in light-years and parsecs. There was, of course, more space than matter, but a blinking ship had to avoid all material objects during its period of semi-nonexistence while blinking. In the two known instances where a blinking ship had made contact with another object while in a state of transition a process of molecular breakdown had welded the two objects into one solidity. Therefore, when traveling in unexplored space, a ship was limited to blinks only as great as the distance that could be surveyed by her instruments and predetermined to be free of stars, planets, asteroids, or particularly dense clouds of space dust. After Rimfire's voyage, a ship could travel outside the galactic plane and reach a point on the other side of the galaxy faster than she could travel in a more or less straight line between the stars. The distances were greater via the out-galaxy routes, but a blinking ship covered a jump of a thousand parsecs as quickly as one measuring half an astronomical unit. Captain Julie Roberts was right in guessing that the ceremonies would be time consuming. By the time Rimfire had been saluted, orated to, honored, and boarded by an assortment of brass including the elected president of the United Planets, Erin Kenner had been off watch, had eaten, slept, showered, watched a few hours of programming from Xanthos to catch up on what had been going on in the inhabited areas of the galaxy, and was pulling another watch on the navigation bridge. The ship was at orbital secure, her drive systems down, the big blink generator humming quietly at a power setting sufficient to keep the flux drive active and to provide electrical power and three-quarters New Earth Standard Gravity. The brass had departed. The ship's shuttles were dropping away and flashing down planetside, each of them packed to the maximum with the lucky ones who had drawn first liberty. Erin leaned back in the command chair, her long legs propped up. Maintenance hadn't touched up the paint on the console in recent months. Two worn spots in the U.P. issue gray showed that Erin wasn't the only one who assumed a casual posture while on post. She was dressed in X&A shipboard duty wear which consisted of neatly cut blue shorts, comfortable white overshirt, and flesh-tone hose. On her ash-blonde hair perched the little go-to-hell spacer's cap. Her badges of rank and station were embossed on the cap and on the shoulders of her shirt, Navigator First Class, Lieutenant of the X&A Space Arm. Over her right breast was her blue and gold nameplate. Over the left the logo of Rimfire. She was a small woman, five-feet-four-inches in height, one-hundred-and-twenty pounds. She was just over thirty years old. She'd spent the last twelve years of her life in the service, four of them at the Space Academy on Xanthos, the last six standing watches on the navigation bridge of the Rimfire. She had developed the faraway gaze of the deep spacer, but the tiny squint lines at the corners of her large, almond-shaped, sea-green eyes were becoming. Other than that her skin was flawless. Her nose, she felt, was just a little too cute to be dignified. Her lips were wide and full. She looked up as a tall, mature man came through the security door onto the bridge. Her feet dropped to the floor. «As you were,» the newcomer said. «How's it going, Erin?» «Slow,» she said. «That eager to leave us?» She shrugged. «Yes and no,» she said truthfully. «I haven't seen my father in six years.» «As I remember it you're from Terra II.» «New Earth,» she corrected automatically, for Earthers felt that the formal name of their planet was a bit stilted. Lieutenant Commander Jack Burnish knew very well that Erin was a New Earth girl. He knew quite a lot about her, for until she had learned quite by accident that he had a wife and family on Delos III, she had held nothing back from him. «Commander?» she asked formally, breaking the silence. «Is there something I can do for you?» «Erin—» He moved closer. There was a pained look in his eyes. For a moment she remembered, and felt that soft, sliding, melting feeling in the pit of her stomach. She shook her head, tossing her short, ashen hair. «Erin, I—» «If you have no business here, Commander, I am on watch, you know.» Her voice was cold, service standard. «I loved you,» Burnish said. She looked at him evenly for long moments, her face set in serious lines, before she smiled and said softly, «Bullshit.» «I hope you find what you're looking for back on Terra II,» he said. She opened her mouth to correct him, but remained silent. For two years she had thought that she'd found the universe in Jack Burnish's arms. She'd always been a sucker for older men, although she would have fought any head-shrinker who tried to hang a father complex on her. She was by no means a promiscuous girl. There'd been a boy at the Academy, and then Jack, and after she'd found the holo-tape from Jack's wife and children there'd been two others, quite discreetly, aboard Rimfire. The ship had been a long, long way from home, with years stretching ahead before she made the last left turn and headed back into the starred regions of the Milky Way Galaxy and that little grouping of suns and worlds that made up the U.P. Sector. Jack's deception had left her empty and very, very lonely. With the others she was simply trying, unsuccessfully, to fill the void inside her with shared passion. For the last three years of Rimfire's voyage she had kept to her own bed. She had learned that without love the act of coupling was almost comically sweaty, strenuous, undignified, quickly finished, and in the aftermath somewhat damaging to one's self esteem. At the end of her last watch aboard Rimfire she put on a full dress uniform, tucked the last few items of her personal gear into her bag, and went to knock on Julie Roberts' door. The captain was in gown and slippers. «I'll be leaving on the next shuttle, ma'am,» Erin said. Julie rose, gave
