DOOMED
(About seventy years earlier)
2
A swarm of uniformed police met Clermont on the tarmac. “If you will come with us,” one of the cops said. Her nametag read Petty. Over the whoosh of her breather mask, she sounded tense. “With the governor’s compliments.”
It did not strike Blake as a request, and he waited to see how Dana would play this. Captain’s prerogative, and all that.
Dana McElwain brushed off the hand that had presumed to urge her forward. “What’s this about, Officer?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Petty said. “You’ll have to ask the governor.”
“Who is waiting,” another cop said, gesturing to the first parked cruiser in a long row.
Petty glared at the man.
“Are we under arrest?” Blake asked.
“No, sir,” Petty answered, “but I was told that the matter is time sensitive.”
That much Blake could guess from the urgent recall from the Belt and their diversion halfway around the world from Clermont’s home spaceport. But the message Dana had shared with him, authenticated but short on details, came from the university. Why the cops?
He waited again for Dana’s cue.
“All right,” she said.
He joined Dana in the backseat of a police cruiser, while Clermont’s lone passenger was directed to the next car in the row. With lightbars strobing and sirens wailing, both vehicles sped from the spaceport. Out the rear window, craning his neck, Blake glimpsed the other cruisers redeploying around Clermont. The cop cars looked tiny beside the ship.
Westbound toward the New Houston dome, bumps in the road twice sent them airborne. Cursing under her breath, Petty slowed down just a bit.
The sky, pink and all but cloudless, revealed nothing. Phobos in full phase hung low over the horizon.
With a soft trill the cruiser finished pressurizing, and Dana slipped off her breather. Mask straps had matted her hair, short and ash blond, to her head. Her eyes blazed, and even more than usual she reminded Blake of a coiled spring.
“Any thoughts?” she asked him.
They had speculated about the recall throughout the flight home, any distraction being welcome at two gees. All their conjecturing had accomplished nothing, but to judge from the uniforms left to guard Clermont, the ship was involved.
In every way but one Clermont was ordinary.
“Something to do with the DED,” Blake decided, enunciating each letter of the acronym.
Ordinarily he pronounced it “dead,” if only to pull Jumoke’s chain, but she rode in the trailing cruiser. And inside a careening cop car, he wasn’t about to call anything dead.
“My guess, too,” Dana said. “What hasn’t the good Dr. Boro shared with us?”
“I wish I knew.” Blake got the datasheet from a pocket of his flight suit, half expecting Petty or her partner to commandeer the device, or that the cruiser would jam his comm link.
Neither happened.
Blake pulled up a news summary; the headlines looked commonplace enough. His message queue likewise had no insights to offer.
At home this would be the dark of night. He left Rikki a voice message that Clermont had landed, he’d be in the capital for a while, and he’d call her later. It wasn’t as though he knew anything, so why wake—and worry—her?
He lingered over Rikki’s holo. With delicate features on a perfect oval face, her eyes hazel and slightly slanted, she was exotically beautiful. Her gaze was poised and intelligent. Flowing black hair framed that gorgeous face. And that dazzling smile….
“Newlyweds.” Dana rolled her eyes.
He laughed. If he wasn’t supposed to still feel this way after four years, too bad. “More or less,” he told Dana, before folding and pocketing the datasheet.
The red-and-pink plain gave way to startling splashes of blue, green, yellow, and orange: gengineered lichens patiently breaking stone into soil. Next came long, low greenhouses filled with crops of corn, wheat, and soy. Beyond a kidney-shaped lake, the wind roiling its surface, the road widened to two lanes each way. Traffic began to build, robotrucks from the farms and passenger vehicles alike hastily pulling off the road at the cruisers’ approach. Blake began to distinguish individual buildings inside the Capital dome.
Half off the road, the two cruisers bounced past the orderly queue at the dome’s main vehicular air lock. They sped straight for City Center with sirens wailing. Cars and trucks scattered at their charge.
With brakes squealing, they pulled up outside Crimson House, the governor’s office and residence. “You’re wanted inside,” Petty said, throwing open her door. Without her breather, she had a sallow face with unfortunate bushy black eyebrows.
He and Dana got out. Two meters away, the second cop car was emptying.
“What the hell did you do, Boro?” Blake demanded.
The three from Clermont were all Earth expats, but Jumoke Boro was half Tutsi and stood as tall as many Martians. She had a Brit accent Blake found delightful.
Ordinarily.
“What do you mean?” Jumoke asked, looking bewildered.
Dana glowered. “Apart from the DED, Clermont is as mundane as ships come. If not the DED, why the sudden government interest in her?”
“I don’t know,” Jumoke said. “Look, this wasn’t our first flight. I see no reason for the DED to interest anyone now.”
Petty cleared her throat. “Come with me, please.”
“I don’t know,” Jumoke repeated.
Petty led them up broad stairs to the Crimson House’s public entrance, past the Security checkpoint, and down a long, noisy corridor. No one paid them any attention, not even after they went through a second checkpoint into the residence wing.
Maybe Jumoke doesn’t know, Blake thought. If the DED were the cause of their summons, would they have been allowed to bicker about it in public?
At the end of the hallway, Petty shepherded them onto a restricted express elevator. The four of them filled the elevator car.
The elevator doors opened with a soft chime. “Come this way,” Petty said, pointing.
“Look,” Jumoke said, “I can’t conceive of a dark-energy emergency, but suppose one is possible. We wouldn’t have been summoned as we were, ‘With maximum dispatch.’ We would have been ordered home using the standard drive.”
“Taking weeks to get home,” she didn’t bother to add.
Because while fusion drives could
