'How about jumping back?' George suggested.
'Can't.'
'Try it.'
'There's no point.'
'Try it. What's to lose?'
The black football was growing. Carson said, 'Not good.' In the passenger cabin, someone laughed. Janet.
'I'll try to reinsert when we get closer,' Hutch said. 'Give the engines a chance to breathe. But don't expect anything.'
Maggie whimpered.
Carson, strain finally locking his voice somewhat, asked, 'How fast will we be going when we hit?'
Hutch was tempted to dodge the question. Throw back some facile response like fast enough. But they deserved better. 'Almost fifty thousand.'
What was the damned thing? She decided they weren't quite dead-on after all. They would hit a glancing shot. Not that it mattered.
'Goddammit, Hutch,' said George, 'we ought to be able to do something.'
'Tell me what.' Hutch had become deadly calm.
No way out. The object was vast and dark and overwhelming. An impossible thing, a disk without light, a world without rock.
'No moons,' said Carson.
'What?'
'It has no moons.'
'Hardly seems to matter,' someone said; Hutch wasn't sure who.
Four minutes.
A terrible silence took the ship as her passengers settled into their own thoughts. Janet looked subdued and frightened, but managed a resigned smile; Maggie, tougher than Hutch would have expected, caught her looking, wiped her eyes and nodded, seeming to say, not your fault. George's glance turned inward and Hutch was glad she hadn't waited. And Carson: he wore the expression of someone who had absorbed a prank, and was taking it all quite philosophically. 'Bad luck,' he told her. And, after a long pause: 'It happens.'
'Did we get a message off?' Janet asked.
'Working on it.'
'How big is it?' asked Maggie. 'This thing?'
Hutch checked her board. 'Forty-three hundred kilometers across. Half again as wide as the Moon.'
It crowded out the stars.
Hutch saw a blip on her status board. 'It's putting out a signal,' she said.
'Same one they got at the Tindle?' asked Maggie, breathless.
'I think so. It's fifteen-ten. That's the right frequency. Computer's doing a match now.'
'That's a pretty fair piece of navigation,' said Carson. 'We hit it right on the button.' They laughed. And in that moment Hutch loved them all.
'Transmission's away. They'll get a full set of pictures. And it is the same signal.'
'What now?'
'Time to try the jump. On a count of ten.' She set up, and shook her head at the energy level for the Hazeltines, which was around six percent of minimum requirements. 'Okay.' She hit the «Go» button.
The engines whined.
And shuddered.
Whined again.
She shut it down. 'That's it.'
They were beginning to see features in the thing. Ribs. The void became a surface: blue-black, polished like plastene, or an ocean. 'You know what's crazy about this?' said Carson. 'We're still not getting gravity readings. What is this thing? Anything that big has to have a gravity field.'
'Detectors have a glitch,' said George.
Under a minute. Hutch stopped watching the clocks. In the cabin, she heard the sound of a restraint opening. 'Stay belted down.'
'Why? Why bother?' It was Janet.
'Just do it. It's the way a well-run ship does things.' She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her training screamed at her to hit the retros. But she only shut down the screens, locking out the terrifying perspective.
She closed her eyes. 'Damn,' she said, not quite able to stop the tears. She felt oddly secure in the sealed bridge, as if the lone plunge had somehow been arrested She loved the soft leather texture of the pilot's chair, the green radiance of the gauges, the electronic murmur of Wink's systems.
'Hutch?' Carson's voice was calm.
'Yes?'
'You're a hell of a woman.'
In the dark behind her eyelids, she smiled.
18
On board NCA Winckelmann. Thursday, March 24; 1103 hours
Hutch listened to the familiar sounds of the bridge. To Carson's tense breathing, to whispers from the passenger cabin, prayers maybe, wishes, things undone.
She felt terrified and helpless and humiliated, but for all that, she did not want it to be over—God, she did not want it to be over—
She squeezed her eyes shut. Squeezed the rest of the world down to her heartbeat and the soft curve of the chair. And the countdown that some inner voice maintained—
Three. Two..
A hammerblow struck the hull.
The ship shuddered. Alarms exploded. The electrostatic hum of power in the bulkheads changed subtly, deepened as it sometimes did when the vehicle was responding to crisis. Carson shouted something unintelligible.
But she was still alive.
They had problems. The navigation board was on fire; black smoke poured into the air. Warning lamps blazed across the banks of consoles. Two of the monitors died. Computer voices spilled from the commlinks. Deep within the ship, systems sighed and shut down.
But oblivion did not come.
She looked at the gauges and could not believe what she saw. Their altitude was a hundred forty kilometers. And rising.
Rising.
She silenced the klaxons and stared at her status board. The power plant was going unstable. She shut it down, and switched to auxiliary.
Then she let out her breath.
'What happened?' asked Carson in a tentative voice.
'Damned if I know. Everybody okay?'
They were rattled. But okay.
'Is it over?' Janet asked.
Someone began to laugh.
In the passenger cabin, a cheer broke out.
'We seem to have gone through it,' Hutch said. 'Don't know how—'
