The Quiet Pools

Christopher shrugged out of her embrace. “It still adds up to Let’s Help Chris Adjust,” he said bitterly, pausing at the door. “And I’m just not sure that I’m the one who’s wrong.”

Mikhail Dryke hated traveling almost as much as he hated being trapped for days on end in his office suite in the green-glassed administrative warren at Prainha. The former was pure impatience; the latter, the natural resistance of a hands-on field investigator who had been promoted too many times.

The last promotion had left Dryke chief security officer, Diaspora Project, Allied Transcon. His first accomplishment in the new post had been to locate and hijack a triumvirate of lieutenants who could handle the administrative end without him. His second had been to acclimate the Diaspora Project Director, Hiroko Sasaki, to the idea that he would be absent from Prainha more than he would be present.

Sasaki had not needed much convincing. It was trouble that took Dryke away, and Allied Transcon and the Diaspora were facing a full menu of trouble these days. The Homeworld hit on the Houston center was part of a panorama of problems that ranged from labor sabotage at the Kasigau Launch Center to an endless parade of would-be stowaways attempting to make their way onto the starship Memphis.

Named, like its predecessor, for a great city of antiquity, the second of the Project’s five great generation starships was nearing completion in high orbit for a planned 2095 departure. A third larger than Ur, which had sailed eleven years earlier, Memphis was a small city in space, and a world of problems unto itself. Dryke gladly left the protection of Memphis in the hands of Matthew Reid, who was based at Takara, the satland building the ship for Allied Transcon.

But any problems earthbound belonged to Dryke, and this morning Jeremiah and Homeworld were at the top of the list. He had caught the flash alert from Sentinel in his flyer and immediately rerouted from the tower to the field. Jeremiah’s message came through while he was waiting out prep on his Saab Celestron; ten minutes later, he was in the air.

Prainha to Houston was one of those especially annoying intermediate hops—barely six thousand kilometers—that took longer to complete than a trip covering twice the distance. The apogee of the arc traced by Dryke’s pop screamer was well within the stratosphere; the max velocity was a plodding 4,000 kph; the e.t. nearly two hours.

Only the skylink kept the time from being a total waste. The analysis of the spill came in shortly after take- off: dioxin, methylene chloride, benzothiazole, PCBs, chloroaniline. By the time the Texas coast crystallized through the hanging haze, Dryke had collected reports from Munich, Tokyo, and Kasigau, and an excuse from Washington. The Trojan horse’s final act had been to wipe itself from the system, and DIANNA operators were still trying to reconstruct where it had gotten in and how it had done what it did.

Nobody knows anything, Dryke grumbled to himself as the Saab flashed across the center boundary and floated in, nose high, over the end of the runway. An old story. Getting very old. Jeremiah finds us with our backs turned, hits us, and then slips away clean. Very clean. The son of a bitch.

Spinning wheels touched rushing pavement, and Dryke swung the skylink console back out of the way. Six times they’ve hit us. Six times I’ve had to pick through the mess they left. The red dye in the water in the Munich offices. The data center fire in Kasigau. The launch laser that blew up at Prainha. Never anyone killed. No victims except Allied Transcon. No enemies for the friends of the Earth.

The Saab rolled to an open slot in the bunkerlike hangar, and a blue corpsec flyer scooted up alongside. At the controls was the local chiefsec, a bird-necked, mild-tempered man named Jim Francis. I don’t like always being one step behind, Dryke thought gruffly as he climbed down from the cabin. I don’t like being outsmarted. How do they do it? Who the hell are they?

It was unlikely that any answers awaited him at the disabled gate, but Dryke was obliged to go through the motions. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said with a nod.

“Sorry you had to make the trip,” Francis said. “We’ve got the tanker sealed, and we’re about ready to lift it out of there. But there’s roughly thirty-five hundred gallons of a very nasty soup soaking into the ground, and that’s going to be a whole hell of a lot harder to deal with.”

Dryke nodded gravely. “Let’s take a look.”

Running parallel to the highway it had largely replaced, the Harris County tramway was a concrete ribbon on stilts, a fifth as wide as the fifty-seat silver and blue cars which skimmed atop it. From below, it looked fragile, the cars precariously balanced like eggs on a knife-edge. But inside, the ride was stable and smooth, even as the slope-nosed tram car left the main track to Galveston and slowed sharply for the T-spur to Allied Transcon.

Christopher McCutcheon took advantage of the slower speed and his seat on the right side of the tram car to peer out the window at the odd congregation by the main gate, a quarter mile away. He was not the only one to do so. The half-filled cabin grew noticeably quieter for the forty seconds or so that the gate was in view.

They saw two bright yellow mobile cranes standing outside the barbican, their long booms making an X in silhouette against the sky. Two red Flight Services trucks sat at odd angles on the side slopes; Christopher thought one might be a foamer, but he wasn’t sure. A pale blue HazMat van blocked the middle of the bridge, and most of the figures walking among the vehicles seemed to be wearing full-body environmental suits.

“Looks like somebody missed the runway,” he said conversationally to the round-faced woman in the adjoining seat.

“Didn’t you hear the news?” she asked indignantly. “It was those Homeworld people. They tried to blow up the shuttle. What’s wrong with them? Don’t they realize what they’re doing?”

It was then that Christopher noted the binoculars dangling from the woman’s neck. Forewarned, he limited his reply to a sympathetic smile; there was no such thing as a brief conversation with a starhead. He’d learned that lesson very early in his three-month tenure with the Project.

When the tram car came to a stop a few moments later, Christopher watched to see where the woman went. As he expected, she passed by the escalators to the ground level and the base entrance and continued down the platform toward the observation area. By the time Christopher reached the bottom, she had joined the other starheads at the plex, peering out toward the field where a barrel-bodied ESA Pelican sat being readied for launch to orbit.

Not too surprisingly, the line at the staff gate pass-through had stalled, since—always vigilant after the fact —corpsec was not only checking for employee IDs but checking everyone’s ID through the verifier. While he waited, Christopher found himself thinking about the woman on the tram.

There was something simultaneously delightful and pathetic about the starheads. They knew the launch schedule for the center’s one LTO runway better than most Allied staff, knew the difference between a Pelican and its near-twin Martin Rendezvous, knew the nine satlands and the governor of the Mars colony and the latest news and gossip from Ur. They came to the ob deck at Johnson Field as a solemn pilgrimage and then turned into wishful, wistful children, noses pressed to the window on a rainy day.

Christopher had no doubt that the woman and everyone else on the ob platform that morning owned a selection option for Memphis. Those who were old enough had probably owned one for Ur as well, that prized certificate which had been so proudly hung on so many walls when there was no Homeworld to prick at the conscience. Back when being a pioneer candidate conferred status, when even those with no intention of leaving wanted to be able to say, “I could have gone if I wanted to.”

Things were different now. It had been years since Christopher had seen an option certificate on display, and mentioning Allied Transcon, Memphis, or the pioneers among strangers had become a good way to invite a passionate harangue. But nothing had changed for the starheads, except that Ur was already gone. One down, four to go.

Christopher had every reason to doubt that the woman or any of her peers would be selected for Memphis or any of the ships to follow. Anyone that set on leaving Earth would have done so already if they had any skills to offer. There were 200,000 people living off-planet—Technica and Aurora Sanctuary, Takara and Horizon, the Mars colony and Heinlein City on Mare Serenitatis. The starheads were obsessed with dreams they could never fulfill, and so came to touch with their eyes the only piece of that dream they could reach.

Or was it that they viewed the satlands, the Moon, even Mars as shabby substitutes for the only goal that