CHAPTER EIGHT
Sixteen days later, Aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
24 March 2134 (thirty-six days after Incident Seventeen,
74 light-years from Destination)
Sam looked around at his cabin—the dark-red composite chairs and sofa, the imitation wood-grain coffee table and desk—and compared it to the compact austerity of the captain’s cabin on USS Puebla. He’d thought that was luxurious, and it was by a destroyer’s standards. He’d actually had his own private zero-gee shower, the only one on the boat. Here his bathroom was nearly as big as his first cabin on Puebla, when he’d just been its tactical officer. He’d considered that luxurious as well, because as a department head he hadn’t had to share it with another officer.
He shook his head. Not for the first time he felt out of place here, and that was no way for a captain to feel on his own ship, He activated his desk holovid recorder and settled back in his padded swivel chair.
“Hey, Cass. I doubt you’ll ever see this so I feel a little stupid even making it. It’s sort of a personal log addressed to you, mostly because I need someone to talk to about all this, someone whose morale won’t crumble if they find out their captain has doubts and fears, and even regrets. Talking to myself seems more like a symptom than therapy, so I’m talking to you instead. There’s no way to transmit it from here, but if I get back—or if Cam Ranh Bay gets back without me—it’ll be there for you.
“Well, we’re almost six weeks out and we’re farther from Cottohazz space than anyone has ever been: almost three thousand light-years. One jump a day for the first three weeks and one jump every other day for the last two. Whatever is steering us has us headed roughly toward the galactic core and we’ve just crossed the great rift between the Orion Spur and the Sagittarius Arm. No one’s explored in this direction because you have to go through so much empty space to get anywhere interesting.”
He smiled.
“Interesting. What’s that old curse? Well, wherever it’s taking us, it’s on the outer edge of the Sagittarius Arm. We’re only about seventy light years from the end of the road. How’s that for a change in perspective? Only seventy light-years. How long did people look across distances like that and think of them as uncrossable voids? Tomorrow we’ll take the plunge, jump right into the Destination system, come out about twenty-five million kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic. We’ll start broadcasting to the locals and monitoring every data stream our sensors can capture—try to find some common basis for communication.
“This wasn’t my original intention. At first, we worked out a plan where we’d jump to a range of one light-month and spend a couple weeks there gathering data before we made the final jump. Everyone, including me, wanted that extra time to study them up close before committing, but I ended up scrapping it. If we jump in from that close they’d pick up the signature of the jump, and they’d already know where we came out, so they’d be able to connect those two points and draw a line right back to the Cottohazz. They may already know where we’re from, but if they don’t I won’t give it to them on a platter.
“Instead we’ll jump from here. I doubt anyone can detect a jump signature from this far out, but even if they can it will take seventy years for the light to get to them. Seventy years. That’s as much breathing space as I can give you and still have a half charge on our power ring in case of trouble.
Sam paused to take a sip of coffee and stare at the walls of his cabin. He had the smart walls set to show the exterior view. He found himself doing that more and more, even though with no nearby star the vastness and loneliness of the view was nearly overpowering.
“I find myself staring at the stars a lot, Cass, wondering. As long as there have been people, I guess we’ve looked at the stars and wondered if something alive, something intelligent was out there. Then we found the Cottohazz—or they found us—and the if was answered. But just those other five species, and we’ve gone a long time, looked a long way, without finding anyone else. Now we found one more—or they found us—and they must be pretty intent on meeting us.
“I’ll tell you what I can’t tell anyone else here, Cass. I have a terrible feeling about what we’re likely to find. If they could communicate with our jump drive, why not just communicate with us? Why snatch a ship full of people and drag it across the rift to another spiral arm of the galaxy if all they wanted to do was chat?”
His schedule reminder vibrated softly inside his head, at the base of his skull.
“Well, Cass, I’ve got to go. I’m due at captain’s mast. We’ve been having discipline problems, more and more the farther out we get, and we’ve got a really bad one on the docket today. People are frightened and they’re losing hope. It’s my job to give them that hope. I’m trying, Cass, but I’ll tell you, I’m kinda running on empty.”