Star Song and Other Stories Part 21

I flicked off the intercom. "Operation Reverse Columbus?" Bilko asked, c.o.c.king an eyebrow.

I shook my head as the pre-music C-sharp vibrated through the hull. "He thinks he's being cute," I said. "Just ignore him." The pre-tone ended; and as the strains of Schumann's Manfred Overture began the stars vanished, and I settled in for the short ride ahead.

A ride which turned out to be a lot shorter than I'd expected. Barely two

notes.

into the piece, with the music still going, the stars abruptly reappeared.

"Jimmy!" I snarled his name like a curse as I grabbed for my restraints. Of all times to break his concentration and lose our flapblack- And then my eyes flicked to the viewport... and my hands froze on the release.

Flas.h.i.+ng past from just beneath us, no more than twenty kilometers away, was the Freedom's Peace.

And it was definitely cooking along. Even as I caught my breath it shot away from us toward the stars, its circle of six drive nozzles blazing furiously from the stern and dimming with distance- And then, without warning, it suddenly flared into a brilliant blaze of light.

My first, horrified thought was that the colony had exploded right in front of us. My second, confused thought was that an explosion normally didn't have

six.

neatly arranged nexus points... and as the six blazing circles receded in the direction the Freedom's Peace had been going, I finally realized what had happened. Not the how or the why, but at least the what.

On that, at least, I was ahead of Bilko. "What the h.e.l.l?" he gasped.

"The music's still going," I snapped, belatedly hitting my restraint release and scrambling to my feet. "As soon as it got far enough ahead of us, we got wrapped again and caught up with it."

"We what? But-?"

"But why are we unwrapping when we get close?" I ducked my head and peered out the viewport, just in time to see us do our strange little microjump and catch up with the asteroid again. "Good question. Let me get Jimmy shut down and we'll try to figure it out."

I sprinted back to his cabin, cursing the unknown bureaucrat or planning commission hotshot who'd come up with the idea of locking out the musicmaster's intercom whenever the music was playing. If these insane little wrap/unwraps were damaging my transport- I reached the cabin and threw myself inside. Leaning back on his couch with his eyes closed and the ma.s.sive headphones engulfing his head, Jimmy probably never realized anything was wrong until I slapped the cutoff switch.

At which point his reaction more than made up for it. He jolted upright like someone had applied electrodes to selected parts of his body, his eyes snapping wide open. "What-?" he gasped, ripping off his headphones.

"We've got trouble," I told him briefly, jabbing the intercom switch.

"Rhonda?"

"Here," she said. "Why have we stopped?"

"It wasn't our idea," I said. "We lost our flapblack."

"About six times in a row," Bilko put in tensely from the flight deck. "As soon as we get close enough to the Freedom's Peace, we lose them."

"What's going on?" a voice demanded from behind me.

I turned around. Kulasawa was standing in the open doorway, her gaze hard on me.

"You heard everything we know so far," I told her. "We've lost our flapblack wrap six times now trying to get close to the Freedom's Peace."

Her gaze s.h.i.+fted to Jimmy, hardening to the consistency of reinforced concrete.

"It wasn't me," he protested quickly. "I didn't do anything."

"You're the musicmaster, aren't you?" she demanded.

"It's not Jimmy's fault," I put in. "It's something having to do with the Freedom's Peace itself."

The glare turned back to me. "Such as?"

"Maybe it's the ma.s.s," Jimmy spoke up, apparently still too young and inexperienced to know when to keep his mouth shut and pretend to be furniture.

"That's why flapblacks can't get too close in to planets-"

"This is an asteroid, musicmaster," Kulasawa cut him off icily. "Not a planet."

"Yes, but-"

"It's not the ma.s.s," Kulasawa said, dismissing the suggestion with a curl of her lip. "What else?"

"It could be their drive," Rhonda suggested over the intercom. "Maybe the radiation from an ion-capture drive that big is scaring them away."

"Or else killing them," Bilko said quietly.

It was a strange, even eerie thought, but one which I think had already occurred to all of us. We knew nothing about how flapblacks lived or died, or even whether they died at all. What we did know is that we traveled with them, and the thought that we might have been even indirectly responsible for killing a half dozen of them was an unpleasant one for all of us.

Or at least, most of us. "Regardless of the reason, we know the result,"

Kulasawa said briskly. "How do we proceed, Captain?"

"Actually, the situation isn't much different from what we were expecting anyway," I said, trying to push the image of dying flapblacks from my mind.

"Except that it's going to be easier than we thought to get close to the Freedom's Peace. We should have gotten a good reading on their vector while we were tailgating them that way, so all we have to do now is boost our speed to match them and then get a flapblack to wrap us and get us close again."

"Even if it means killing another one of them?" Jimmy asked.

"What if it does?" Kulasawa said impatiently. "The Universe is full of the things."

"Besides which, we don't know it's hurting them," I added.

And immediately wished I hadn't. The expression on Jimmy's face was already somewhere between stricken and loathing; the look he now shot toward me was the sort you might give someone who'd just announced he enjoyed ripping the heads off small birds.

"Then let's get to it," Kulasawa said into the suddenly awkward silence.

"We've wasted enough time out here already. You in the engine room: how long to bring us up to speed?"

"Depends on how much acceleration you want to put up with," Rhonda said, her tone a little chilly. Apparently, she wasn't happy with my comment, either.

"At one g, we're talking an hour or so."

"You ran two gs lifting off Angorki," Kulasawa said.

"That was for ten minutes," I reminded her. "Not thirty."

"You're all young and healthy," she countered. "If I can handle it, so can you.

Two gs, Captain. Get us moving."

It took Rhonda ten minutes to bring the engines up from standby, roughly the same amount of time it took Bilko and me to double-check the Freedom's Peace's vector and make sure the Sergei Rock was configured for high acceleration.

After that came our half hour of two gs, unpleasant but certainly nothing any of us couldn't take.

More unpleasant was the subtle but definite chill I could feel all around me.

Orders were scrupulously obeyed and reports properly given, but all of it in crisp, formal tones and without the casual give-and-take that was the normal order of the day. I was used to frosty air between Jimmy and me, but for Rhonda and Bilko to have joined in struck me as totally unfair.

And yes, I blamed all of them. Maybe my comment had sounded insensitive; but d.a.m.n it all, we didn't have any evidence that were killing or even hurting the flapblacks by pus.h.i.+ng them close to the Freedom's Peace. My personal theory was that there was something about the asteroid that was simply distracting them enough to lose their wrap, and I tried to tell the others that.

But it didn't seem to make any difference. In their minds, I'd sold out to Kulasawa, and I'd now shown that nothing was going to keep me from getting hold of that money. Not even if it meant slaughtering flapblacks right and left.

The acceleration process seemed to take forever, but at last we had the Sergei Rock up to speed and it was time to go.

Theoretically, we didn't need to use the flapblacks at all, since the Freedom's Peace was close enough that boosting our speed a little more would enable us to catch up with it. But that would have meant more acceleration, more delay, and pus.h.i.+ng the engines more than we already had, so I told Jimmy to set us up with another program. He wasn't at all happy about it, but I was long past caring about Jimmy's happiness. If Bilko and Rhonda had opinions on the subject, they were smart enough to keep quiet about them.The music started, sparking a wrap/unwrap that was again too fast for human eyes to see, and once again we were flying above and behind the Freedom's Peace.

Even twenty kilometers away and only glimpsed for an instant, the colony had looked impressive. Now, with us steadily approaching it, the thing was flat-out awesome. It was one thing to read the numbers; it was something else entirely to actually see a huge asteroid driving its way through deep s.p.a.ce.

It looked just like the handful of publicity shots that had survived the War of Reclamation: a craggy-surfaced, vaguely ovoid asteroid, roughly eighteen kilometers long and maybe twelve across at its widest point, lit only by the faint sheen of reflected starlight. The glare from the drive washed out any details of the engines themselves, but it was obvious that they were ma.s.sive.

Slightly brighter spots here and there across the surface indicated the presence of antenna or sensor arrays and a couple of rectangles that looked like access hatchways.

"It's rotating," Bilko breathed from beside me. Apparently, he was so dazzled by the view that he'd forgotten we weren't on speaking terms. "Look-you can see that drive nozzle array turning around."

"Using rotation to create artificial gravity," I agreed. "They didn't have false-grav back then."

"I'm going to take a spectrum off the hull," he decided, keying his board and swiveling around his viewer. "A Doppler will give us better numbers on the rotation than-yow!"

I jerked against my restraints. "What?" I snapped.

"Something just flicked across the stars," he said tightly, punching keys on the spectrometer.

"Relax," Rhonda's voice came over the intercom. "It was probably a flapblack."

"Yeah, but it didn't wrap," Bilko said. "I've never heard of a flapblack coming in but not wrapping."

"Maybe they can't wrap this close to the Freedom's Peace," I said. "Like I suggested earlier-"

I broke off at the look on Bilko's face. "What is it?"

"It reads like a flapblack, all right," he said, his voice low and rigidly under control. "Only it's not a kind we've ever seen before. This one's spectrum was in the infrared."

I stared at him. "You're joking."

"Check it yourself," he said, keying the a.n.a.lysis over to my display. "The spectrum's definitely below the standard flapblack red-let's call it an InRed."

I looked at the numbers, and d.a.m.ned if he wasn't right. "OK," I said. "So we've found a new breed. So we get into the history books."

"You're missing the point," he said grimly. "We have a new breed of flapblacks, all right: a breed that chases other flapblacks away."

There was a soft whistle from the intercom. "I don't like the sound of that,"

Rhonda said.

"Me, neither," Bilko said. "Maybe we ought to forget the whole thing and get out of here."I gazed out the viewport at the rapidly approaching asteroid below. "But it doesn't make sense," I told them. "For starters, if it's a predator or whatever-"

"If they're predators, plural," Bilko interrupted me. "Another InRed just went past."

"Fine; if they're predators," I amended, "then why haven't we seen them before?

More to the point, what are they doing hanging around the Freedom's Peace in the middle of nowhere?"

If Bilko had an answer, he never got to give it. Without warning, there was the faint flicker of a laser from the asteroid and our comm speaker crackled.

"Approaching transport, this is the Freedom's Peace," a female voice said.

"Please identify yourself."

Bilko and I exchanged startled glances. Then I dove for the comm switch.

"This, uh, is Captain Jake Smith of the star transport Sergei Rock. We, uh... who is this?"

"My name is Suzenne Enderly," the woman said. "Are you in need of a.s.sistance?"

"We were just about to ask you that question," Kulasawa said, stepping through the hatchway behind me onto the flight deck. "This is Scholar Andrula Kulasawa, in charge of this mission."

"And what mission would that be?"

"The mission to see you, of course," Kulasawa said. "We would like permission to come aboard."