their hulls.
Ahead was the plated wall that separated the hangar from vacuum. Diana jumped at the sound of groaning metal. The wall jerked loose in its grooves, and air started hissing out.
Di’s hair whipped in the breeze, a straw-colored storm about her head and shoulders. “No, JASON!” she shouted. “I won’t say anything—I promise!” Foolish woman. Didn’t she know I could tell when she was lying?
A thin stripe of deadly black appeared at the bottom of the hangar’s outer wall. Di screamed something, but the rising roar drowned her words. I swung a spotlight onto the lander
The view of the starbow was magnificent. At our nearlight speed, stars ahead had blue-shifted beyond normal visibility. Likewise, those behind had red-shifted into darkness. But encircling us was a thin prismatic band of glowing points, a glorious rainbow of stars—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.
I fired
My remote cameras inside
The feed from my remote cameras flared brightly for an instant as the lander roared out into the sleet of hydrogen ions, and then the picture died. The communications link had given out before Diana’s body had. A pity. It would have been an interesting death to watch.
TWO
MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM
STARCOLOGY DATE: MONDAY 6 OCTOBER 2177
EARTH DATE: SUNDAY 18 APRIL 2179
DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 739 ^
DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2.229 Ў
“Aaron, we have an emergency. Wake up. Wake up
It was an autonomic response for me, completed before I could even think of halting it. In retrospect, I’m hard-pressed to say which of my algorithms initiated my locator program first. Aaron’s job, although he hadn’t had a lot to do so far, was supervising Starcology
Next to Aaron lay Kirsten Hoogenraad, M.D., eyes closed but wide awake. Something had been interfering with her sleep of late. Perhaps it was simply that she was unused to sharing a bed, at least for the purpose of getting rest. In any event, she jumped at the sound of my voice and, propping herself up on one elbow, shook Aaron’s shoulder. Normally, I bring up the lights slowly when someone is waking, but this was no time for gentleness. I snapped the overhead panels to full illumination.
Aaron’s EEG shuddered into consciousness, whatever dream he had been having dissolving as wave fronts cascaded together. I spoke again. “We have an emergency, Aaron. Get out of bed quickly.”
“JASON?” He rubbed yellow crystals from his eyes. Implanted on the inside of his left wrist was my medical sensor, which doubled as a watch. He squinted at its glowing digital display. “You mystic! Do you know what time it is?”
“The lander
There was no point in telling him to hurry. His heart was beating somewhat erratically and his EEG made clear that he was still fighting to wake up. An inefficient boot-up procedure if you ask me.
“Please call an elevator,” said Aaron, his voice dry and husky. That’s what he gets for sleeping with his mouth open.
“I already have one waiting,” I said. Kirsten was ready to go, pulling the belt of her blue velour robe tight at her waist. The action accentuated the lines of her figure.
I slid both the bedchamber and main apartment doors aside, the hisses of their mechanisms rising and falling quickly. Kirsten darted down the corridor and entered the waiting lift, quite unnecessarily putting her hand on the rubber molding along the edge of the open door as if to keep it from closing. Aaron thundered along the hallway and joined her.
The car began its fifty-four-level drop. The elevator itself operated silently, running on pink antigrav motors in a vacuum shaft. But I always whistled a descending tone through my speakers when the cylindrical cabs were going down and an ascending tone when they were going up. It had started as a joke: I’d expected someone to realize that the damned things should have been silent. So far, seventy-three million elevator rides to my credit, no one had noticed.
Aaron looked up at my paired cameras, mounted above the elevator door. “How did it happen?”
“The ship was appropriated,” I said, “for reasons unknown.”
“Appropriated? By whom?”
No easy way to say this. It was too bad Kirsten had to be there. “Diana.”
“Diana?
“I’ve been trying since the moment she left, but there’s too much interference from our ramfield.” The elevator popped open, revealing one arm of the U-shaped hangar-deck control room. Aaron and Kirsten rounded the corner into the crosspiece of the U. Clustered around the instrumentation consoles were the dozen others I had summoned, mostly clad in pajamas and robes. Seated at the center of the group were tiny Gennady Gorlov, the mayor of Starcology
Aaron peered out the observation window that ran along the inner walls of the control room, overlooking three sides of the hangar. His eyes fixed on the still-open space door. “Distance to
“Fifty klicks,” said Chang in his staccato delivery. The engineer vacated the chair in front of the main console, its cushioned seat rising ten centimeters with a pneumatic hiss. He gestured with his lower left hand, not quite as beefy as its upper counterpart, for Aaron to take his place.
Aaron did so, then stabbed a finger at the central viewscreen, a glowing rectangle cutting the observation window into two long curving panes. “External!”
I produced a holographic rendering of Starcology