Eight minutes. The bridge was disturbingly silent. As a precaution, Mosasa had ordered all the nonbridge crew to the cabins which doubled as escape pods, just in case.
Of course, if it came to that, the people on the bridge were screwed, along with Bill, trapped in the cargo hold by his massive environment suit.
Mosasa came in, completing the bridge crew. Just the four of them, Parvi, Tsoravitch, Wahid, Mosasa. Rotating in the central holo glowed a schematic description of their route. Eight light-years to the closest colony and a habitable planet.
Six minutes and the door to the bridge slid shut with a pneumatic hiss. Parvi watched the display as her readout on the ship’s systems showed each compartment isolating itself. In a few moments each segment of the ship with people inside was on an isolated life-support system.
“Bill’s given the computer models the all clear,” Wahid said.
Three minutes, and Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch. “Give the bridge feed to the rest of the ship.”
Tsoravitch nodded, tapping a few controls, releasing a small snap of static across the PA system. Parvi did the final checks on the power plants to the tach-drive and heard her voice echo around her when she said, “Drive is hot. The systems are on-line and within acceptable ranges.”
Wahid tapped a few controls and the schematic on the main holo stopped its subtle rotation and began to glow slightly more solid. “Target fixed. Course window opens in one hundred seconds.”
Tsoravitch nodded and stared at her own readouts. “No problematic mass concentrations within five AU.” Sweat beaded on her forehead. Parvi wished Kugara was at her station.
Parvi asked the rote question, “Okay to fire the tach-drive?”
This time, the question didn’t seem so rote.
“Yes,” Mosasa said mechanically.
Wahid announced, “Sixty seconds to window.”
“Our tach-drive is on auto,” Parvi announced.
Wahid’s voice sounded distressingly calm. “Twenty seconds to window. Fifteen seconds to last-chance abort.”
There was little calm in Tsoravitch’s voice. There was a little vibrato in her voice when she said, “Mass sensors still clear.”
“Ten seconds. Five to commit,” Wahid said. “The drive is committed. Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”
For the first time in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Relic
Nothing moves a State quicker than fear, and nothing a
State fears so much as change.
What governs men is the fear of truth.
In the month since the egg landed, a small village of temporary buildings had sprung up around the egg. Most of the buildings had been moved from one of Robert Sheldon’s mobile logging camps.
