Heaven Chronicles

knowledge that they must always pull together or they would not survive.…

The captain's voice drew him back. His eyes fixed on her where she hung before the viewscreen, her hair floating softly, free from gravity, her shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He stared, the present an overlay on the past. The clean, colored warmth of the control room drove out a dreary poverty that made Morningside's plainness suddenly seem frivolous.

Morningside … could he ever have come to see its people as clearly as he had seen the Ringers? How long did it take to feel at ease with a people who offended your sense of propriety in every way imaginable? Whose behavior slipped through your attempts to categorize it the way water slipped between your fingers.… Four kilosecs ago he had come to the upper level to get himself some food. He had found the captain and Welkin already in the dining hall and Bird Alyn playing her guitar. They had all been singing; as though in four thousand seconds they were not going to commit an act of piracy or face one more trial whose outcome meant freedom and life for all of them.…

Together we find courage.
Our song will never cease.…

Or perhaps, he had realized suddenly, they sang because they were much too aware and afraid of that fact. Not what you sing, or how, Welkin had said, but how it makes you feel. Suddenly aware of his own part in that coming trial, he had been drawn across the room to join them by something stronger than curiosity … only to have Betha Torgussen's face close and lose its warmth as she saw him; only to have her rise from the table, braking the pattern of song, and abruptly leave the room.

“… I can't believe this reading, Pappy. They should be frying down there, but they're not. There's no magnetosphere, no trapped radiation field.… Do you know anything about this, Abdhiamal?” The captain glanced over her shoulder at him, not quite meeting his eyes.

He looked past her at the screen. “This is Heaven, after all. Captain. Discus's radiation fields are strong enough, but they don't reach much higher than the rings. That was one of the things that brought us to this system—the rocks and snowballs around Discus are accessible as they never were around Old Jupiter.” He caught her eyes. “You don't seem very concerned about whether we were fryin'?”

“We make good shielding on Morningside, or we'd have fried long ago.” She broke away, as she always did, now; looked up at Bird Alyn hanging near the ceiling above her head. “Bird Alyn, find the local talk frequency for me.” Her voice was calm.

Bird Alyn nodded, braced against the ceiling, and swooped down to the panel to catch up an earjack.

“Where's Shadow Jack?” Welkin asked.

Bird Alyn stared at the panel, said something inaudibly.

“What?”

“… don't know … said … didn't think he could face …” She shrugged. The room filled with static as she switched on the receiver. The static slurred abruptly into words. The words sharpened as Bird Alyn locked them in. “Here …”

“What are they broadcasting?”

“They're talkin' to a ship, I think; a tanker. I heard ‘hydrogen.’”

“Good—then let's rudely interrupt them.” The captain reached for the broadcast button. “You're sure they'll know who we are, Abdhiamal?”

“I'm sure. Even the Ringers have had time to spread word of what happened to that ship by now. And if their propaganda is as extreme as it usually is, they'll expect you to be a butcher. They'll—respect your threat.”

“All right.” She wet her lips, pushed the button. “Snows-of-Salvation, Snows-of-Salvation, come in please …”

The speaker shrilled irritation; Bird Alyn jerked the earjack away from her head.

“Who is that? Get the hell off this freq! There's a mixed-load dockin' in progress here! Do you—”

The captain's hand on the button cut him off. “Tell them to hold off, we have something more important to say to you.”

“Who is this?”

“This is …” She hesitated. “… the ship your Navy attacked two megaseconds ago … the ship from Outside.” She released the button.

No answer came.

“You've impressed them.” Wadie smiled, humorlessly.

A different voice came through, a voice that was strangely familiar to him, ordering the unseen tanker into a holding orbit. Welkin reached across the comm panel, by Bird Alyn's shoulder, and a new segment of the screen erupted into a blizzard of static now. “We're receiving wideband.” He input a sequence on the console; abruptly the screen showed a squeezed triple image. He ordered in a correction, and a single black-and-white picture re-formed. They saw a pinched face squinting from behind wire-rimmed spectacles: a middle-aged man in a heavy, quilted jacket and a thick knit cap. “We're transmitting compatible now, too,” Welkin said. The captain nodded, seeming to take the old man's skill for granted.

“What is it you want here?” The familiar voice matched a familiar face, harsh with anger or fear. With anger … Djem Nakamore was too stubborn and dogmatic to acknowledge anything else. Wadie pushed out of his line of sight as Nakamore glared at Betha Torgussen.

Her face hardened, staring Nakamore down. “We want one thousand tons of processed hydrogen, sent out on the trajectory I give you to our ship. If you fail to do this, I'll destroy your distillery, and you'll all die.” The hardness seemed to come easily; Wadie felt surprised.

He watched their expressions change, the two strangers in the background showing real fear. Nakamore stiffened upright, drifting off-center on the screen.

“You won't destroy us. Even the Demarchy would want you dead if you did that.”

“We're not from your system; you're nothing to us. The Demarchy is nothing. I hope you all go to hell together for what you've done to us; but Snows-of-Salvation will get there first unless you obey my orders.”

“… they meant it …” a blurred voice said in the background. Nakamore turned away abruptly, cutting off sound. He spoke to the others, their eyes still flickering to the screen, faces tense, their breath frosting in the cold air as they spoke. Nakamore turned back to the panel, out of sight below him, and punched the sound on. “We don't have a thousand tons of hydrogen on hand. We never have that much, and we just sent out a big shipment.”

Wadie shook his head. “They'd never let the supply get that low. The output is nearly three thousand tons per megasec, and they have at least four times that as backlog in case the distillery goes off-line for repairs.”

The captain twisted to look at him, cutting off sound in return. “You're that familiar with their operation?”

He nodded. “I told you—I spent almost fifty million seconds down there. I saw that distillery put together and saw it go into operation. I know what it can do. And I know that man …” He remembered Djem Nakamore's face, the bald head reddened by the light from a primitive methane-burning stove; remembered the amused face of Djem's visiting half-brother, Raul. He heard the hiss as water sweated from the ceiling to drop and steam on the stove's greasy surface, as he waited while Djem pondered his next painfully predictable move that would lose him his hundredth, or his thousandth, game of chess to Wadie Abdhiamal. Stubborn, didactic, and unimaginative … honest, forthright, and dedicated to his duty. No match, as Djem had told him, often enough and without resentment, for Wadie's own quick and devious mind—yet too stubborn not to go on trying to win. Wadie adjusted the earflaps of his heavy hat, put out a hand to move his queen. Checkmate.… “I know that man. Push him; he's not—devious enough to know whether you're bluffin'. And he'll do anything to keep that distillery intact.” He realized suddenly that it could have been Raul instead who faced them now and was glad, for all their sakes, that it was not. He looked away as he spoke, avoiding the bright image on the screen and Betha Torgussen's eyes.

The captain frowned slightly, then turned back to Nakamore on the screen. “I don't accept that. You have twenty-five thousand seconds to give us the hydrogen or be destroyed.”

“That's impossible! … It would take at least a hundred thousand seconds.”