Sundowner Page 5

  “My only,” Nicole couldn’t help commenting, sotto voce.

  “ ...Wanderer mission and that she may well have been behind the assassination attempt on the President—doesn’t mean he didn’t believe it. The Executive Branch has cut Cobri, Associates, very little slack this term. So much so that Cobri opposition to your appointment would be a sure guarantee of its approval.”

  “Then who—?” Another insight, so obvious that Nicole chided herself for taking so long to realize it. “The Hal?” she asked quietly.

  “Very back-channel. Very unofficial and off-the-record. A favor, one government to another. Both sides have gone to great pains to keep this private little codicil buried. And, professionally, you along with it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The only surety is that they’ve gone to the greatest of trouble to keep you out of the interstellar service.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “Could it have something to do with your being Shavrin’s adopted daughter?”

  “I suppose.” Shavrin commanded the Hal expedition that made First Contact between her species and humanity; Nicole—on her first deep-space mission for NASA, with her spacecraft blasted to so much derelict junk by a marauding raider Wolfpack—had been her opposite number. The whole experience had been scary enough at the time, but the passage of years hadn’t softened the impact. Quite the opposite. Now, looking back, Nicole still couldn’t believe where she found the gumption or sheer dumb luck to do what she’d done in that first critical encounter.

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “General, I’ve been living next door to the Hal at Edwards ever since they arrived. I probably spend more time with them than I do my own kind. Hell, there are moments when I find myself wondering which species is my own kind.”

  That brought her up short, and Canfield too from the looks of things; it was a thought—a realization—she’d never voiced, never before admitted. Yet, when spoken aloud, one that was immediately recognized by them both as true. She spoke the language as well as a human could; indeed, when she was with the Hal, she thought in their tongue, no longer needing to transliterate their speech into English and back again. She favored their style of dress, their sense of fashion suiting her far more than what passed lately for Terrestrial haute couture. And was as comfortable with their customs, and cuisine, as with her own.

  At Edwards, that didn’t seem at all strange. The differences between species didn’t appear so marked, because they were all pilots and astronauts, a fraternity that transcended lesser cultural details. The laws of physics, of aero- and thermo- and spatiodynamics, applied equally to Hal and human; the same benefits, the same costs. More than once, these past years, the Hal had stood by Nicole at the funeral of a fellow test pilot. And General Sallinger and his staff had joined her and the Hal in singing the spirit of one of their own to rest, who’d fallen from the sky.

  Only on the outside, apart from the moments and the people, did she see how strange that must look.

  “For all of that, though, I’ve barely scratched the surface,” she said quietly. “The Hal at Edwards are specialized folks in a specialized environment.” She laughed ruefully. “I mean, try asking your average aeroplane driver about socio-anthropological tribal customs, or governmental policy—except where they directly relate—and see how far you get.”

  “Point taken. You’re smiling?”

  “Just a thought. Am I being coddled for my own protection or in some way held hostage? I’m not learning anything special for humanity that isn’t being duplicated in universities and cultural exchanges across the globe, and I doubt I’m teaching the Hal anything revelatory. I suppose I could ask Shavrin directly, I have the right of access.”

  “Where do you fit in her hierarchy?”

  “Pretty near top of the family pyramid, I think. Although every time I’ve tried to press the Hal—including Kymri, in my letters—on precisely what that means, they get infuriatingly oblique. Very much like the Chinese. Lots of explanation, precious little enlightenment.”

  “Have you asked Ben Ciari?” Ciari was a United States Marshal, who’d served as Law Officer on Nicole’s Wanderer flight. Shavrin’s own mission had been intended from the start to make contact with humanity, only her ship, Range Guide, had suffered a catastrophic event in the early stages of its journey. Nicole had never been able to determine whether the explosion had been a true accident or sabotage, but the consequences had been devastating. Fully a third of Shavrin’s crew were killed, including the Speaker, a Hal who’d been genetically engineered to communicate with any Terran they came across. Among the Hal, Speakers were phenomenally rare, treasured as diplomats and mediators; Shavrin had just the one aboard.

  Soon after Nicole and the other three Wanderer survivors—Ciari, and civilian mission specialists Andrei Mihailovitch Zhimyanov and Hana Murai—had come aboard, Range Guide was intercepted by the same raiders who’d attacked Wanderer. In Shavrin’s eyes, that made finding a replacement for her Speaker imperative. She already knew she had no candidates among her own crew, so she surreptitiously had the four Terrans tested. Ciari was deemed most compatible, and was infected with the genetic virus necessary to give him a Speaker’s knowledge and abilities.

  It worked, too well for Nicole’s taste. By the time they’d won free of the raiders’ base—destroying the asteroid in the process, an experience which at long last had finally stopped giving Nicole nightmares—he was more Hal than human. Even though the process was successfully reversed, he was left with sufficient residual knowledge and awareness to make him the ideal liaison between the first Terran Embassy to s’N’dare and the Hal themselves. He’d been there ever since.

  In the early days, he and Nicole had corresponded regularly. Actually, he did most of the communicating, goading her to improve her command of the Hal language, spoken and written. They’d had a flashfire romance aboard Wanderer. It might have turned into something more lasting, given time and opportunity, but their careers took them farther and farther apart—Much like, Nicole realized, Canfield and my dad. He never came home and she never got the chance to go to s’N’dare after him. She hadn’t heard from him in a longer while than from Kymri, and was a bit chastened to discover that she wasn’t bothered anywhere near as much. Somewhere along the line, the Hal had eclipsed him in her affections, Ciari becoming almost like a ghost.

  “No,” she said flatly, unwilling to voice anything more. And then, because she was thinking about letters and her old crew, Nicole suddenly asked, “Hana and Mikhail are both interstellar-rated, aren’t they?”

  Canfield nodded.

  “Have they gotten starship berths?”

  Slowly the General shook her head.

  “So,” Nicole mused. She adjusted her course slightly to correct her approach to San Diego Harbor, keeping a weather eye on a hulking commercial vessel a half-dozen klicks off her port beam, heading in roughly the same direction. “Be interesting to discover if the same restriction applies to them?”

  “It would indeed. I’ll see what I can learn. To be honest, I hadn’t thought of checking that.”

  “Course, if it does, the next question is why? What’s so special about the three of us that the Hal want to keep us locked in this solar system? And if we find out—what then?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  The water is a fascination to her, and the life she finds stranded in tiny pools amid the sand flats deliciously sates her hunger. Catching them is a whole new game in and of itself; their bodies are impossibly wriggly and their slick, smooth skin proves a formidable challenge to hold on to. She tries the water, too, finding it salty, like fresh blood, but nowhere near as palatable; a good drink makes her violently ill.

  As always, the Swiftstar took her breath away.

  Nicole hovered in midair in one of Sutherland’s flight bays, gazing down along the magnificently sleek form of her hyper-space plane. Where the original Rockwell Space Shuttle had been
an aerodynamic box with wings, roughly the size of an old DC-9 commercial airliner, the Swiftstar was all smooth curves and easily three times the size. The bulk didn’t register at first, because of the way the design elements blended artfully, almost elegantly, together. That was her Halyan’t’a hallmark, a dynamic form crafted as much for aesthetics as practicality. Her handling fulfilled the promise of her looks; the Swift was a dream to fly, surpassing expectations throughout every test regime.

  The plane was a fully “Fly by Light” system, controlled as much by her on-board computers as by her pilots; indeed, in many respects they were far more essential to the plane’s survival. The Swift could fly without Nicole, but Nicole was helpless without them. The spacecraft was too big, there was too much to do, to depend on purely mechanical linkages.

  Where in the old days, wire cables ran from the flight deck to the control surfaces, the Swiftstar was laced through with fiberoptic lines, carrying those commands along strings of light.

  She’d spent the better part of the past hour making her examination of the plane’s exterior, the traditional pilot’s “walkaround” inspection. In gravity, with aircraft this big, that was confined to the bottom of the vehicle: the engines, the wings, the wheel assemblies. More for reassurance than anything else; the days were long gone when the flight crew could check to make sure the mechanics had done their work properly. She had to trust that the people assigned to her knew their job. The difference in zero was that she wasn’t restricted to the deck, and so her survey had taken her over the upper half of the plane as well. It was a giddy feeling, swimming through the air, and Nicole never tired of it. That was always one of the harder adjustments to make when she returned to the World, losing that ability to fly.

  She’d actually know the plane’s status for sure once the Chief Line Mechanic presented the results of his far more comprehensive diagnostics exam, and after Nicole ran a comparative series of her own from the flight deck. There was always a possibility of error; the trick was to make it as small as possible. This wasn’t a foolproof system by any means; it seemed, no matter how hard everyone tried, that once every generation or so there had to be a catastrophic accident to remind people how complicated these machines were, how dangerous and unforgiving was the environment they worked in, how awful the cost of a mistake. The launch pad fire that had claimed the lives of the Apollo 1 astronauts just past the dawn of the Space Age, the Challenger disaster two decades later, the loss of the starship Hermes a month before Nicole’s graduation from the Air Force Academy. That last had cut both ways: one of her professors had been killed among the crew, and another had been court-martialed for contributory negligence. He’d been project officer on the C3 software—Command, Control, and Communications—and had certified the material fully tested to NASA specifications when it wasn’t. The result was a cataclysmic systems crash that reduced the Hermes to sparkling dust during her first transition to warp.

  “She is an impressive piece of work,” Ramsey Sheridan called, using his hand-held thruster pack to propel him up from below the nose, pivoting as he came close for a better view of the Swift. He expertly bled his velocity away to almost nothing, so it took only the touch of Nicole’s hand on his shoulder to bring him to a full stop. Like Nicole, Sheridan was in shirtsleeves—the casual day uniform of slacks, shirt, and military sweater in Space Command blue-black, with Colonel’s eagles on each epaulet and command pilot wings on the patch over his left breast—because the Curtains were down, massive steel shutters that could be cycled out from the primary “walls” to seal off sections of the flight bay, enabling a breathable atmosphere to be established and thereby create a far more comfortable place to work.

  “And then some,” Nicole agreed.

  Sheridan was just closing out his tour as a test pilot at Edwards when Nicole arrived five years ago. Afterward, he’d moved on to command a line squadron for a year, then Air Force War College, passing up a high-visibility Pentagon appointment for a chance to fly suborbital ScramJets; a little over six months back, sporting a pair of bright shiny silver eagles, he’d won the slot of Operations Commander aboard Sutherland, the primary Earth-orbit space station. Scuttlebutt had him being groomed as the station’s Commander, with an eye to moving him farther out, to join Judith Canfield’s staff on the Moon, all of which Nicole thought would be a good thing.

  He certainly looked the part of a rakehell pilot, his classic Tuscan features—Hell, she thought, the man has a profile straight off an Imperial Roman coin—providing an incongruous but somehow fitting contrast to his quintessentially WASP name and background. Sheridan was a top-notch pilot, who’d forced himself to learn to deal with the paperwork that comes with rank and responsibility, but whose primary forte was dealing with people. Nicole had never seen the person or situation he couldn’t handle. And with the growing internationalization of NASA’s facilities—both on the ground and here in space—that had become an essential talent. Especially when the term “people” embraced those not born anywhere near the Earth.

  “Enjoy your tour?” he asked.

  Nicole tried a smile, but ended up having to stifle a yawn instead. She stretched her eyes wide, then rubbed her face with her hands to flush some animation into her sleep-stiff features.

  “Well, young Captain, your weekend on the waters certainly seems to have left you tanned and rested.”

  “Burned and brain-fried is more accurate.”

  “True, but why belabor the obvious?”

  She gave him a look. “Taking no prisoners this morning, Colonel?”

  “Prerogative of rank.” Problem was, his bantering tone was belied by a steady, assessing gaze. “I gather you had something of an adventure in San Diego.”

  “I won at poker, if that’s what you mean,” she replied, knowing full well it wasn’t.

  “That, too.”

  She shrugged dismissively and told him, “It was nothing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It was dark, Ramsey,” she said quietly, “and I was exhausted. Probably more than a little looped in the bargain. I didn’t see who decked me.” Which was true, but she hadn’t needed sight to identify her assailant. “It could have been an accident. Whoever it was may have panicked after I went in the water. But I came out okay. No harm was done.”

  Now it was his turn to shrug, as he faced away from her, looking down the length of the spaceplane, as though he could see through the very fabric of the station itself to the Earth, five hundred miles below.

  “Your call, Captain,” his tone making clear that while he understood and respected her position, he also thought she was wrong. “I note from the log that you had Ch’ghan fly the ascent phase from Edwards.”

  “He’s my Hal counterpart,” she said, “as knowledgeable about the Swift and as well rated as I am. Besides, boss, another night’s sleep and I’ll be fine.”

  Nicole heard a hailing beep in her ear and adjusted her headset to improve the reception.

  “Sundowner Command,” that was her personal call sign, “this is Sutherland Flight Operations, over.”

  Another aspect she liked about space, they still used living controllers; on the surface, most of the routine communications were handled by computers. The artificial voder voices were pleasant enough—some were even being programmed with a semblance of personality—but she preferred the real thing.

  “Sutherland,” she replied into the tiny boom mike, “Sundowner Command, reading you five-by, over.”

  “If you’ve completed your inspection, Sundowner, please exit the flight bay. We’re preparing to commence vehicle fueling. Over.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Say again, Sutherland... ?”

  “Acknowledged, Sutherland,” Sheridan broke in. “We’re on our way.”

  “What gives, Ramsey,” she demanded as he indicated the main hatch. “I thought the flight wasn’t scheduled for another couple of days, at least.”

  The Swift’s primary fuel was hydrogen, loaded in liquid for
m at close to absolute zero. It was also extraordinarily volatile. As their thrusters pushed Nicole and Sheridan towards the exit, a trio of figures in full armored pressure suits, solid enough to survive all but the most tremendous of explosions, lumbered into view, anchored both by MagnaSoles on their boots and LifeLine tethers. Once the bay was fully cleared of unprotected personnel, the atmosphere would be evacuated to establish a full vacuum. The Curtains stayed closed and sealed, to confine the effects of any mishap and thereby minimize the risks to the flight bay and station as a whole.

  “Circumstances have changed,” was his taciturn reply.

  Nicole watched the start of the fueling process from an observation blister, then pushed away as a blast shield slid shut across it. Behind her, a Video Wall was subdivided into a score of monitor windows, some showing data displays, most a multiplicity of images of the Swiftstar. A more comprehensive view, in fact, than she’d had from her vantage point in the bay itself or from the blister.

  Nicole’s crew was present, her Hal co-pilot Ch’ghan, and two systems specialists, Simon Tyrrel and Dan Fahey, respectively responsible for flight dynamics and engines. Plus one new arrival, another Hal, a face and form she recognized from the waterfront.

  “What’s this,” she demanded of Ramsey.

  “Flight Officer Raqella has been assigned to your crew as an observer.”

  “The Hell you say!”

  “The decision was made by Higher Authorities, Captain,” he said in a formal tone edged with warning frost. He wasn’t happy, either, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. “Hal and human. And is not subject to appeal.”

  “Terriffic.”

  “You have a problem with that, Nicole?”

  She met his gaze. “No,” she said. Then, after a slight but deliberate space to make her protest plain, “Sir.”