KAMAKURA
David Weber
Legends grow in the telling . . . usually.
Figures of legend become larger-than-life, bigger than anyone could
possibly have been in real life . . . usually.
People truly willing to die for love don’t really exist . . . usually.
Usually.
TRAPPIST-2 System
Cistercia Planetary Orbit
January 2347 CE/03 Ad Astra
“Final test sequence complete, Flight Control. Green board.”
“Understood, Jonah,” Commander Edwin Dupree responded from his station in the starship Victoria’s control center. He scanned his displays, solely out of ingrained habit and professionalism, not need. The Whale—officially Lander Alpha—moved rapidly across the planet in its lower orbit, 30,000 kilometers below Victoria’s 35,000-kilometer geostationary perch, and his displays showed no other traffic anywhere near its flight path. Well, of course there wasn’t! There wasn’t any other traffic in the entire star system. The tugs which had eased Whale into its present orbit the day before had redocked with Victoria shortly after the insertion maneuver, and as yet, there was nowhere for any of her personnel or cargo shuttles to go.
That was why Whale was where she was.
“Looks good for insertion on the next orbital pass, Ed,” Lieutenant Commander Joan Walker said. Her personal callsign (coupled with the fact that Alpha was a good fifty percent larger than any of Victoria’s other landers) had made Whale’s unofficial name inevitable when she was assigned as its pilot, and she and Dupree had known one another since they were kids playing micrograv tag on the Sagittarius L5 Hab. “I’m starting the clock.”
“Don’t break anything this time!” Dupree said sternly.
“That’s not fair!” He could hear the laugh in Walker’s voice. “The last time wasn’t my fault! For that matter, I haven’t so much as dented a ship in over a hundred and sixty years!”
“Sure, and you snoozed for all but six of them, didn’t you?” Dupree objected.
“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it.”
“Seriously, Joanie.” Dupree’s voice softened. “Do good, okay?”
“You got it, Flight,” Walker replied as her lander swept toward the Cistercian terminator. “See you.”
The lander crossed the terminator and, simultaneously, Victoria’s sensor horizon, and Dupree leaned back in his chair in Primary Flight Control’s microgravity as he gazed pensively down at the continent the colonists had provisionally christened Molesme. It struck them as reasonable, given that the planet was officially designated TRAPPIST-2a, and Robert of Molesme had founded the Cistercian order of Trappist monks. It might not stick, of course, but Captain Nikolina Perić, Victoria’s current skipper, was adamantly opposed to sticking “Continent Alpha” on it as a temporary label because “Alpha” showed an appalling lack of imagination and she was afraid it would stay stuck out of force of habit. Whatever they called it, it was beautiful, banded with clouds, sprawled across the planetary equator, spined with snowcapped mountains, traced with broad rivers that threaded through the vibrant green of vegetation that used something functionally indistinguishable from chlorophyll, all floating on the dark sapphire of deep, blue oceans.
There wasn’t a trace of human habitation down there, which might not have been too surprising for a planet thirty light-years from the Solar System. Except that there was supposed to be. The automated terraforming ship Prometheus had departed for TRAPPIST-2 twenty years before Victoria. It was well over twice Victoria’s size, and the drones and robotic cultivators and construction equipment aboard its massive landers and heavy lift shuttles should have prepared four colony sites to receive Victoria’s ten thousand passengers.
The pre-mission planning had counted heavily on having footholds with prebuilt shelters, crop-yielding farms, and fenced pastureland. There might even have been time to decant the first of the frozen ova of cattle and sheep cryogenically stored aboard the colony ship. Each of the lead ship’s primary landers had also been built around a compact fusion reactor. They’d been intended to land near bodies of water, and the same drones and robots would have constructed the electrolysis plants to produce the necessary hydrogen to assure the new arrivals of ample power when they settled into their new homes. For that matter, each of the massive landers themselves would have served as its own “town-in-a-box,” surrounded by those farms and pastures, until the colony’s increased population demanded additional housing.
All of that was supposed to be waiting down there.
It wasn’t.
They would never know why, but Prometheus had never arrived. None of the prepared footholds they’d planned upon had been created.
Fortunately, the TRAPPIST-2 Colony Foundation’s planners had known they couldn’t stake the colony’s survival on the assumption Prometheus would complete the trip or that its automated systems would function flawlessly when it arrived. Assuming they did function properly, they would be more efficient—as well as far more expendable, in the event of natural disaster—than humans could be, but they were machines, machines broke, and even the best computer glitched occasionally. So the planners had compromised by including a single volunteer human crewman in cryostasis, to be awakened and intervene if anything went wrong with Prometheus’ sophisticated AIs. Despite that, they’d recognized that—as had obviously happened—that might not be enough. Which was why Whale was so much larger yet carried only fifty still-hibernating passengers, as opposed to the twenty-five hundred who would ride each of the other landers to the planetary surface. Although she was smaller than Prometheus’ landers had been, she was still just over a kilometer and a half in length, three-quarters of a kilometer wide, and the same 250 meters “thick” as her smaller sisters, which gave her over twice their cubic volume.
Of course, part of that extra volume went into the four additional main engines (and their fuel tanks) installed in Whale’s flattened “base.” The base, which was intended to function as a “crumple zone,” if it was needed upon landing, was part of the design which allowed Whale to use atmospheric braking on entry. (It wasn’t really fair to call it “reentry,” since Whale had never before been in anyone’s atmosphere.) Despite that, she needed the additional engine power, and she also carried a larger fuel reserve per engine than the other landers. As the “first-in,” she was more likely than the other landers to be forced to maneuver to ensure an optimum landing. They’d done all they could to map her planned LZ’s terrain with orbital observation and the air-breathing drones Victoria had inserted, but surprises were still possible. And since Whale represented the “suspenders” of the colony planner’s terraforming belt-and-suspenders, they’d taken no chances with the massive lander’s ability to put down precisely where she intended to.
And that was because of the other things in Whale’s additional volume. She had less robotic support than Prometheus’ heavy landers would have had, but she and her fifty passengers—well, fifty-one, counting Lieutenant Commander Walker—had everything they needed to produce anything one of those landers should have produced. The decision to include those humans in the payload was one reason she was less amply equipped with robotics, but that, too, represented a fallback on the planners’ part. If Prometheus had arrived and its drones had proved unequal to the task for some reason, they’d wanted “feet on the ground” from the beginning—human eyes and brains to compensate for whatever might have stumped the AIs.
In about—Dupree glanced at the chronometer—eighty-seven minutes, Whale would begin her de-orbiting burn, and after that it would be up to Walker to put all of that on the ground on the broad, rich savannah beside the river she’d insisted on dubbing Billabong. Perić had been dubious, at first, but she’d finally conceded that as the individual piloting the first colony lander, it was a reasonable prerogative for Walker to claim. Always with the proviso that the other people who would someday live on TRAPPIST-2a got a voice in renaming it if they decided to.
Dupree chuckled at the thought. Adam Walker hadn’t set foot outside Australia until his family’s immigration to Mars when he was twenty-five years old, specifically to get him qualified for the TRAPPIST expedition, and his birthplace was a running joke between him and Joan, who’d been born and raised in the L5 habitats.
Dupree was looking forward to Adam’s reaction when Joan decanted him from cryostasis and—with that patented innocent expression she did so well—told him she’d made sure Cistercia would enshrine Aussie slang by naming a 5,000-kilometer-long river for an isolated, seasonal pond on what used to be a creekbed.
A tone sounded in Joan Walker’s earphones as Whale’s AI warned her it was about time, and she closed the diary entry she’d been working on.
In many ways, she was just a passenger. Whale would undoubtedly land herself just fine without human intervention, but it was more of that belt-and-suspenders philosophy. If something went wrong with the central AI—and its standalone backup—it was unlikely a mere human could avert catastrophe, but “unlikely” wasn’t the same thing as “no chance in hell.” Not that she’d minded drawing the short straw. In fact, she’d fought hard for this assignment from the beginning, because Adam had been slated to head the Lander Alpha crew in light of the twenty years he’d spent on a working Australian cattle ranch. Her own childhood had gifted her with minimal experience at the bottom of a gravity well, but she was damn well the best pilot assigned to Victoria, and she’d made that stand up.
She did wish the two of them had been awake together for her final crew shift aboard Victoria, but like all of his crew, Adam had been loaded aboard in his cryostasis pod, along with the rest of the cargo. That was why she’d been keeping her diary for the last year or so, to share the excitement of arrival—and the bitter disappointment of the non-arrival of Prometheus—with him when he woke up.
Now she adjusted position, right hand resting lightly on the hands-on-throttle-and-stick joystick while the time display ticked steadily downward, and she smiled.
I’m not one bit nervous, she told herself. Not one. Shut up, stomach!
“She should start her de-orbit burn in about forty seconds, sir,” Chief Ottweiler said, and Dupree nodded.
The main engines’ de-orbit burn would slow Whale to align her on the desired entry path, then the maneuvering thrusters would adjust her attitude before she hit air nose-first, behind her ablative heat shield. It was a throwback to the design of humanity’s very first reentry vehicles, predating even the original shuttle, because, despite her enormous engine power, something five times as long (and eighteen times as wide) as an old wet-navy aircraft carrier was simply too massive to brake any other way.
“Three minutes to direct signal reacquisition,” Ottweiler added, and Dupree nodded again. The pair of relay satellites deployed equidistantly around the planet from Victoria gave them continuous communications with Whale, but Dupree was old school. He wanted a direct transmission path whenever he could get one, just in case they lost a satellite at exactly the wrong moment. He’d had that happen, once, and the results had been . . . not good.
Not that anything’s going wrong this time, he thought very, very firmly.
The countdown clock reached thirty seconds . . . and the universe went insane.
Joan Walker’s eyes flared wide as the attitude thrusters fired early. On her main display, the reentry profile tracked on undisturbed—perfect. But she felt the vibration, and Whale’s maneuvering thrusters were as powerful as Victoria’s shuttles’ main engines. They had to be, given her bulk, and the starscape beyond Walker’s canopy high atop the lander’s hull rolled crazily as it rotated around its axis. She twisted the joystick to override whatever the hell had gone wrong, but nothing happened. Whale should have reverted to manual control the instant she hit the “ENABLE” button, but it didn’t. In fact, the entire stick refused to move at all!
She wrenched at it in disbelief, fingers flying through alternate sequences on the HOTAS buttons, trying to find a way in as Whale rolled fully inverted . . . and then the main thrusters lit off.
Not with the incremental thrust that had been programmed. It was a full-power burn, and not just by the pair of engines she’d selected, either. Five and a half gravities of totally unexpected acceleration slammed her back in her tilted couch, and horror filled her as she realized exactly how Whale’s attitude had changed. The thundering engines weren’t simply killing orbital speed; they were driving her vertically downward, straight toward catastrophic atmospheric entry!
That was impossible. All of this was impossible, but that impossibility was about to kill her—and Adam and everyone else aboard Whale! Unless—
She tightened her abdominal muscles, fighting the gray-out, and her left hand fought its way across her flight console against five and a half times its normal weight. It reached the button she’d never expected to use, and she punched it, but nothing happened, and she swore savagely inside her mind. That should have overridden the AI, kicked it completely out of the system and killed the main thrusters whatever the computers were telling them.
It hadn’t.
She closed her eyes, her hand continuing to move, until it found a second button. It pressed, and she sobbed in gratitude as the attitude control AI powered down and the maneuvering thrusters, at least, stopped firing. A green light indicated manual control had been enabled, the joystick came alive in her hand, and she felt a fierce flare of relief. She might not be able to shut down the main engines, but she could at least control Whale’s attitude while they fired!
She rolled the ship frantically, fighting to bring it back to its proper attitude. For a moment, she thought she had it. But then the green light blinked out again and the thrusters went dead. The joystick still moved in her hand, but it had no effect at all.
She glared at the blandly lying plot. It showed her on exactly the correct entry trajectory, despite how sharply she’d diverged from it. At least she’d managed to shift her attitude away from that suicidal dive into atmosphere, but that might not be a whole lot better, if she couldn’t regain control of the engines. Instead of driving straight down into atmosphere, she was driving straight up, away from the atmosphere on a heading that took her directly away from Victoria—and rescue—as well.
Nothing lay on her current heading but interstellar space. But at least she’d bought a little time.
“Flight, we have a problem,” she heard her acceleration-hoarse voice say with far greater calm than she felt. “Whale is declaring an emergency. Multiple control system fails. I can’t get into the system. Request immediate remote override.”
Her earphones were silent.
“Flight, this is Jonah! I need a remote override! Do you copy?”
“What the hell?!” Chief Ottweiler blurted.
Commander Dupree’s head snapped around, and the chief pointed at one of his displays.
“She’s way the hell off profile, sir! Look at that!”
Dupree looked, and his blood ran cold as he saw Whale accelerating fiercely away from the planet.
“Jonah!” he barked into his mic. “Jonah, advise your condition!”
“Nothing, sir,” Ottweiler said tautly.
“Jonah!” Dupree repeated. “Joanie, talk to me!”
Silence answered.
“Enable remote access!” he barked at Ottweiler. “We need to get in there.”
“Can’t, sir.” Dupree twisted around, glaring at the chief over his shoulder, and Ottweiler shrugged. “Already tried, sir,” he said heavily. “She’s comm-silent. Down on all her links, even the telemetry.”
Joan Walker fought desperately to hang onto awareness, but the merciless acceleration went on and on, and despite her G-suit, despite all clenched muscles could do, despite all her endless hours of flight training and experience, it drove the blood steadily away from her brain. That unremitting fist of acceleration drove her down, down the beckoning slope, and she slid into unconsciousness.
“What the hell could have gone wrong?” Nikolina Perić’s voice was harsh, and Edwin Dupree looked at her. Both of them knew the question was rhetorical—at the moment, at least—because the captain knew everything Dupree knew.
They floated side by side in Flight Control, watching the radar plot, as Whale continued her headlong charge into the endless depths.
Watching was all they could do.
Victoria’s tugs could have matched Whale’s acceleration, but until she exhausted her fuel, her head start would have continued to open the gap no matter what they did. None of them had the acceleration advantage—or fuel—to overtake her, decelerate, and then return to Victoria, and none of the shuttles possessed even the tugs’ fuel capacity. Which meant nothing in Victoria’s equipment list could possibly reach and recover the lander.
If her trajectory had brought her closer to Victoria, if any of the tugs had been online, or even on standby, they might have reached her before she passed the point of no return. But it hadn’t, and they couldn’t, and so fifty-one of Edwin Dupree’s personal friends had been sentenced to death, and all he could do was watch the execution.
“I doubt we’ll ever know what happened,” he said bleakly, after a moment. “The telemetry feeds were all green, right up to the instant they just stopped. Same thing with Joanie’s—Commander Walker’s—comm. No signs of trouble at all. Everything was perfect! And then this.”
He twitched his head at the plot, holding the back of a flight couch to stabilize himself.
“Whatever it was, I think it must have taken out the entire flight deck,” he continued, his tone bleaker than ever as he acknowledged the death of one of those friends. “How the hell she got onto that heading in the first place is more than I can guess, but if Joanie was alive, she could have at least killed the main engines. And we couldn’t remote in, either, so it had to be something catastrophic. Something nasty enough—violent enough—to send Whale’s flight computers crazy, take out her comm systems completely . . . and kill Joanie, too.”
“But what could do that?” Perić demanded. “You and I both know our landers’ design forward and backward, Ed. There’s nothing in it that could do all that without blowing up two-thirds of the entire lander!”
“I know that!” Dupree managed at the last second to not snap his response. He drew a deep breath, instead, and shook his head. “Trust me, we’re going to model everything we can think of that might have accounted for it. Ottweiler’s already started on that, in fact. But I think you’re right. Nothing in the design could’ve done it.”
“So you’re saying it was some freak external factor?”
“At the moment, I think that’s more likely than anything else,” Dupree agreed. “But I don’t plan on making any assumptions. We’re going all the way down to the base computer codes and every single control system aboard that lander. Hell, if it had rivets, we’d be looking at them! But even if we can’t isolate a design fault, that won’t prove there isn’t one. And we can’t afford to lose any more landers.”
Perić nodded somberly. With Whale gone, they were reduced to the minimal terraforming capability built into the other landers, and the entire colony’s margin for survival had just been pared dangerously thin.
“If you can’t isolate a cause, what then?” she asked. “We’ve got to put the others down eventually, Ed.”
“Agreed,” he sighed. He watched the death beacon of the lander still accelerating away from them. Waiting.
“There,” he said softly, as the icon suddenly stopped accelerating. “Fuel exhaustion.” He drew a deep breath and turned away as Whale coasted onward, onward, into the endless deeps.
“If we can’t isolate a cause, then the only solution I see is redundancy,” he told the captain after a moment. “They’re all designed to land under computer control. The human flight crew’s basically an afterthought . . . which obviously didn’t work this time.” His mouth tightened, then he shook his head. “So I think we have to rework the other landers. We’ve got the volume aboard them and the resources aboard Victoria to build an entire secondary, human-crewed flight deck with standalone computers that don’t rely on the central AIs. I think that’s what we’ll have to do.”
“That’s going to delay us,” Perić observed.
“Well, we weren’t supposed to land any of the others until Joanie and Adam had had ten years to get the central hub up and running,” he said bitterly. “I suppose that leaves us with a little time in hand.”
TRAPPIST-2 Star System
Lander Whale
April 2347 CE/03 Ad Astra
“Left flank! Watch your left, Joanie!”
The voice crackled in her earphones, and she flung herself prone in the deep snow barely in time. Livid tracers were a solid, unbroken bar overhead, like a pre-space movie’s death ray, and the cacophony of a mini-gun chainsawed on its heels. She rolled up on her right shoulder and hip, craning her neck to look back along the line of fire, and saw the automated ground mount she’d missed on the way in. It was a good thing it had been programmed to wait until she was fully into its field of fire before opening up. And thank goodness for the handy hollow she’d tumbled into! At the moment, the weapon couldn’t depress far enough to reach her, but if Adam hadn’t warned her . . .
Her left hand rose cautiously, careful to stay below the mini-gun’s searching fire, and tapped a button on the side of her visor. A sighting caret appeared, and she turned her head until it lay precisely on the gun mount. Then she tapped the button again, a tone sounded, and she hugged the ground as the overhead drone tasked to her tactical computer confirmed its targeting. A fraction of a second later, the KEW came sizzling down from above. It struck the mount center of mass, and its own energy—plus the satisfying secondaries as several thousand rounds of ammunition exploded—turned the weapon into flying pieces of scrap.
She was close enough two or three of those pieces thudded down on her. Fortunately, they were very small ones, and she shook her head. That one had made her ears ring even inside her helmet!
“Well?” Adam demanded, a laugh in his voice. “You gonna just lie around all day, or should we get on with the mission?”
“Easy for you to say!” she shot back, rising cautiously to a knee and pulling her rifle back into the ready position against the tension of its powered sling. “You’re the one sitting back there in overwatch while I take all the lumps!”
“Of course I am. I leave all that sweaty grunt work to you. Now, about that mission. If you check your profile, you’ll—”
Bong.
The chime echoed through her, and her face tightened as the snowy landscape grayed into transparency. One hand flexed, almost reaching for the override, but she made it stop. She wasn’t really sure why. It wasn’t like she had anything else to do. But—
But if—when—you fall down this rabbit hole, you’ll never crawl back out of it, and it’s not time for that. Not yet.
Her nostrils flared and she finished the sign-out procedure. The ghostly snowbanks disappeared entirely, and she reached up to strip off the virtual reality headset and opened her eyes.
Nothing had changed.
She floated in what would have been the colony’s rec room if Whale had ever made it to Cistercia’s surface. Because the planners had recognized the need to make communal relaxation available early on, the rec room and adjoining kitchenette had been spared the “pack-stuff-everywhere-until-the-bulkheads-bulge-and-we’ll-unload-it-when-we-need-it” which had turned the majority of the lander’s compartments into tightly crammed closets. She’d had to tug a few crates out of her way—she’d piled them in the passageway outside the main vehicle bay—but that hadn’t been much of a problem in microgravity. And moving them had given her access to the VR systems.
Operation Arctic Avalanche had been one of her and Adam’s favorite modules, long before they ever boarded Victoria. She had literally years of their previous adventures—in half a dozen modules, not just Arctic Avalanche—in memory.
They were available for replay whenever she wanted them. And she wanted them a lot.
God, how she wanted them!
She smiled wanly at the thought, racked the headset, sent herself floating through the rec room door, and began pulling herself along the endless spinal corridor toward the flight deck. She didn’t hurry. There wasn’t much point. In fact, there wasn’t any point. There wasn’t any point to anything, and she found herself wondering how long it would take her to admit that.
Never was much quit in you, Joanie, Adam’s voice said in the back of her mind, and she snorted harshly.
No, there wasn’t. But this time there was no winning scenario, even for her. She knew that, yet she hadn’t accepted it yet, because on the day she did that, she would quit and that was . . . well, it was unacceptable. A violation of her personal code, everything she’d ever believed in. You didn’t quit. You kept moving forward, you kept fighting, you kept trying until the dark came down, because if you didn’t you were a coward. If you didn’t, you let the other people who lived in that habitat with you down. Because if you quit, why shouldn’t everyone else?
But this time . . .
She reached the hatch, floated across to her flight couch, and strapped in to keep herself from drifting away. Technically, she should have suited up. The vast lander’s internal spaces were protected by automated pressure doors, but the overhead canopy was the only thing between the flight deck and vacuum, and the last thing Whale could afford—once upon a time, anyway—was to lose her sole crewwoman to explosive decompression. She’d come to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter if that happened now, though, and shorts and a T-shirt were a hell of a lot more comfortable.
Her lips quirked and she flipped the end of her sable braid around behind her. Her hair was growing longer, and she was loath to cut it. Adam had always loved her hair long, but that was a problem for any pilot, and they’d had to compromise on something that would fit whenever she helmeted up.
That was another thing that was no longer an issue.
“Record diary,” she said, and waited for the chime that indicated a live mike.
“Day . . . Fifty-seven,” she said then, glancing at the calendar display. “Nothing new. I guess I’m only making entries to have something to do. Sooner or later, I’ll have to admit that, but I can’t quite seem to do it yet.”
She paused, then bit her lip.
“I think I’ve decided I need to stay out of the personnel section. I was there again this morning. I spent twenty minutes outside Adam’s pod, talking to him. There wasn’t any point in it, except that it made me feel closer to him somehow. But I’m afraid. If I go down there often enough, the temptation to wake him up is likely to—no, it will—get the better of me, and I can’t do that to him. If we had the facilities to put him back into cryostasis if that was what he chose, maybe I could? No.” She shook her head, reaching back to capture her braid and nibbling on its end. “No, I couldn’t. Because he’d try to insist that I take his pod if that was possible. It isn’t, of course.
“Since it isn’t, I think he might actually want to be awake, to spend the time we have left together . . . to keep me from being alone.” She drew a deep breath and shook her head again. “But then he’d have to watch me dying. And he’d have to know we were both dying, out here with our friends, no way out. None of the kids we planned on. No future. Just . . . nothing. This way, he never has to know. That’s the last gift I can give him. He never has to know.”
She blinked burning eyes and cleared her throat.
“Halt recording,” she said harshly, and the chime sounded again.
Who the hell am I leaving this for? she asked herself again. Some alien civilization, fifteen thousand years from now, when Whale drifts into their star system? No one from Earth—or Cistercia—is ever going to play it back, that’s for frigging sure!
She closed her eyes again, pinching the bridge of her nose.
Two months. Almost two months—so far—since that horrendous moment.
She’d recovered consciousness in microgravity and immediately started checking statuses, fuel balances, all those things pilots worried about. And nothing she’d found had been good.
Whale’s communications module wasn’t working anymore . . . which made sense, once she maneuvered one of the external maintenance drones into position. The entire module had been designed to be jettisoned in an emergency, along with Whale’s black box and complete communications log, and apparently it had been.
She hadn’t ordered it to jettison, and it wasn’t supposed to be possible for that to happen without orders, except in the event of catastrophic structural failure. She didn’t know when it had happened, either, which meant she had no idea what its velocity might have been when it separated from the lander. The one thing she did know was that it had to have been before the engines shut down from fuel exhaustion. She’d used the external cameras and the other remotes to do the most intensive search she could contrive—Whale’s radars had died, along with everything else—in hope of recovering it and regaining communication with Victoria. Unfortunately, it was nowhere in the reach of the remotes’ sensors, which meant it must have been left behind while Whale continued building delta-V. Of course, even if she’d been able to recover it and somehow repair it, there wasn’t anything the starship could have done for her.
But at least she could have shared what had happened . . . and, more importantly, her suspicions about how it had happened.
It hadn’t been an accident.
She hadn’t wanted to admit that, even to herself, but it hadn’t been an accident at all. Why someone would have wanted to do anything so . . . premeditatedly horrific was beyond her, but it couldn’t have happened by accident. Someone had deliberately set out to destroy Whale, her terraforming capability, and everyone aboard her in a spectacular “accident” before she reached Cistercia’s surface. It was the only way it could have happened, and what she’d discovered in the ship’s computer net only confirmed how carefully it had been planned.
Both primary AI nets were simply . . . gone. The computers were still there, but they’d done a complete reformat, killing every program beyond the basic operating system. There was no way that could have happened without somebody ordering the AIs to suicide. And if she’d needed any other evidence, the backup software copies had been purged, as well, leaving nothing she could reload. She suspected that had been a security feature to keep anyone from identifying the saboteurs or figuring out what they’d been after if their tampering had been detected before Whale was deployed. Or even afterward, for that matter. It wasn’t something they were likely to have worried about happening after the cataclysm they’d arranged, but if the tugs had still been in company with Whale—if there’d been enough of them, close enough—they could have used their own engines to compensate for her rogue acceleration. The odds against their being close enough, in large enough numbers, and reacting rapidly enough had probably been enormous, but it could have happened, in which case the computers would have been subjected to the most intense forensic analysis imaginable.
Whatever the saboteurs’ thinking had been, there was no way she could recover the main system. She still had the secondaries, but each of those was a special function net—none of them had ever been intended to run the entire lander. She’d managed to keep all of them up and running, which meant that things like life support were still online, but she’d had to monitor them all manually until she’d been able to cobble up a replacement supervisory program she actually trusted.
At least it had given her something to do.
Her inventories had given her something else to do for a while, too.
She might have lost the main transmitter, but after a couple of weeks’ reprogramming and rerouting she’d managed to get her docking systems back. So she could have transmitted, actually. Unfortunately, the system was designed solely as a homing beacon and to communicate with tugs within a few thousand kilometers of the ship. It was omnidirectional, with a very limited range, and no one on Victoria would pick up anything it transmitted unless she had a clear transmission path to Whale, the ship had her big dish trained in exactly the right direction at exactly the right moment . . . and Walker was luckier than hell.
Given her luck to date, that wasn’t going to happen.
In other news, the main thrusters hadn’t consumed quite all their fuel in that ferocious burn. They’d emptied the main tanks, but the emergency reserve was still there. They gave her about six minutes’ thrust at full power, and her manual control of them seemed solid—now. But Whale had accelerated for over twenty minutes before the tanks emptied, which had generated far too much velocity to kill in only six minutes.
She’d been tempted to fire up the engines, anyway, under manual control, on the theory that if Victoria was still tracking her it would at least suggest to them that someone was still alive aboard the lander. But she hadn’t. Partly that was because she was a pilot, trained to never waste fuel on pointless gestures and to always maintain a reserve. Mostly it was that she didn’t see any way—or reason—Victoria could still be tracking her. She was headed away from TRAPPIST-2 at just over 64 KPS—230,400 KPH—which was well above system escape velocity. She’d already traveled 255,000,000 kilometers from Cistercia, farther than the distance from Earth orbit to the belter habitats in the Solar System’s asteroid belt. For that matter, in another eighteen days, she’d cross the orbit of TRAPPIST-2e, a gas giant about twelve percent smaller than Jupiter. Even something Whale’s size was a tiny radar target at those sorts of distances. Besides, Victoria was no longer in position to track the lander even optically. Cistercia was two Earth-months farther along its orbit, and Whale had departed Cistercia-orbit on a sharply divergent vector. By now, the central star had cut off direct transmission paths between them.
And by the time that was no longer a problem, she’d be much too far out for anyone to notice any changes in her velocity.
Besides, she’d probably be dead.
Not because of starvation. Whale had been equipped with one year’s rations for fifty people, as a backup until her planetary farms came online. She had not been equipped with a hydroponics section, since building a planetary greenhouse would have been trivial out of her resources, even under the most adverse of circumstances, so what she had on board was all Walker was going to get. Still, enough food to feed fifty people for a year was enough to feed one person for half a century.
Air was another issue, but there was quite a lot of that trapped in Whale’s passages and compartments, as well. Nowhere near as much as someone might have assumed, perhaps, since those passages and compartments were so tightly packed with cargo, but a lot, and the scrubbers could pull the carbon dioxide out of it. There was no way to generate more oxygen, but the environmental computers estimated that there was enough oxygen on board, both trapped in Whale’s spaces and in high pressure storage, to keep a single human going for twenty years or so. The last few months might not be especially pleasant, but that wasn’t going to be a problem, either.
Because the killer was power. Whale had never been intended for long-term deployment in space. She was equipped to operate there for up to several weeks, if necessary, while landing sites were studied and chosen, but not indefinitely. She didn’t have the deployable solar panels other craft might have had, and her power budget had been planned around getting the onboard, city-sized fusion reactor at her core up and running out of planetary resources within no more than several weeks or, at most, a few months, after landing.
That reactor would have worked fine down on the Cistercian surface; without its designed support structure, it was useless in space, so the designers had provided a much smaller fusion plant to meet the lander’s needs until she could switch over. Whale’s maneuvering thrusters used hydrogen and liquid oxygen, unlike the main engines’ hypergolic fuel, in no small part to serve as the fuel source for that reactor and the initial feed for the planetary plant until the electrolysis installation came online. It was a piece of tested, utterly reliable tech—power plants just like it had been in use for well over a century before Victoria was built—and Whale’s remaining hydrogen could feed it for well over a century. Unfortunately, its designers had saved weight and mass by engineering it for only five years’ continuous operation before its bottle components required replacement. That had certainly seemed like more than enough endurance when the lander was designed, but Walker didn’t have any replacement components, and that meant she was going to run out of power—and light, and heat, and environmental systems—long before she ran out of food or breathable air.
Adam’s cryostasis pod had its own power supply, one that was good for well over a century, but the dedicated supply was built into each pod, and it was only a trickle charge, anyway. Even if she’d been able—and prepared—to rip all fifty pods apart, killing their occupants to steal all their power for herself, she’d add less than a year to her power budget. And she couldn’t do that.
She couldn’t kill them any earlier than they had to die. It didn’t make any sense, but in her situation, common sense wasn’t an especially useful commodity. Besides, she’d already decided how she was going to die when the time came, and they were her family. She wanted them around her when she did.
She drew a deep breath and called up the gaming programs on her primary display. She played a lot of those, just as she watched a lot of the stored entertainment programming. At her current rate, she estimated that she would work her way through the entire library in about five years or so. Neither the games nor the entertainment vids were as satisfying as the VR, of course, but that was the point. The VR was too addictive. The inputs through her neural feeds simulated reality too perfectly, made it far too easy for her to lose herself in it. In fact, VR addiction was a significant user problem, and Victoria’s systems—and Whale’s—incorporated standard, legally required software to prevent people from plugging in and forgetting to plug back out. And to shut the simulation down, whatever they wanted, if it detected health issues on their part. The safeties were pretty good and hacking around them was good for a lot of jail time, back in the Solar System. Walker doubted anyone would mind too much that she’d hacked around them, under the circumstances, but she didn’t want to lose herself in them too soon.
I guess that’s the only challenge I really have left, she thought as she called up her most recent Emperor save.
The game was a sophisticated “city manager” program designed to build interstellar empires, which was more than a little ironic, given her current circumstances. It was well designed and challenging, though. She could lose herself in it for hours, which was rather the point of the exercise.
Adam’s always said I’m a stubborn bitch, and by God, I’m going to prove him right. I am not giving in, I am not going into the dark, one instant before I choose to. Maybe this is the Birkenhead Drill, but if it is, I’m going out on my terms, and the rest of the goddamn universe can stuff it!
TRAPPIST-2 Star System
Lander Whale
March 2348 CE/04 Ad Astra
“Record diary.”
Her voice sounded harsh, grating, to her own ear. Probably because she hadn’t used it in so long. She’d stopped making diary entries six months ago. But it was time.
The chime sounded, and she cleared her throat.
“Day Four hundred and twelve,” she said then. “This will be my final entry.”
She paused, looking out through the canopy at the hateful beauty of the stars. She and her friends could have a worse shroud, she supposed, if only it wasn’t so damned lonely. If only there was someone, somewhere, who would remember them. Who could have noted their passing, known where they’d fallen?
“I’ve been . . . spinning my wheels for the last several weeks. I guess I’ve made my point. I didn’t just curl up and die as soon as this happened. But I’m tired. I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of knowing I’ll never see Adam again. Tired of fighting. I’m just . . . tired.”
She had to pause, clear her throat again, harshly. Then she drew a deep breath.
“I’m going to end this while I can still do it on my terms. Know it was my own choice. If anyone ever finds this, my name was Joan Frances Callahan Walker. I was a pilot. It was all I ever wanted to be, and I was married to Adam Truscott Walker, the finest man I ever knew. He and I traveled thirty light-years together on the greatest leap the human race ever attempted, and even knowing what happened, how it ended for us, I’d do it all again with him. Do it in a heartbeat.”
She blinked burning eyes, looked down and caressed the golden ring on her left hand.
“Be kind to our bones.”
She drew another deep, deep breath.
“Halt recording.”
The chime sounded again, and she floated there, looking around the confines of what had been her world for so long.
She hadn’t told her diary everything. She hadn’t told it that the real reason she’d decided to end it was that her sanity was cracking at last. She woke weeping wildly from nightmares she couldn’t recall. She caught herself talking to people who weren’t there. She was forgetting meals in the dreary sameness of her unending, lonely days. She no longer worked out in the micrograv gym. She wasn’t showering anymore. She’d always been a physically fastidious person—people grew up that way in the habs—but not anymore.
She was . . . disintegrating, and she refused to end that way. Not crouched in a corner, mumbling to herself, laughing at things that were no longer there and gnawing the fantasies of a mind that no longer remembered who it was. She was a pilot. She was Joan Walker, callsign “Jonah,” and she would not lose that at the very end.
So she’d prepared Whale to power down. Not immediately. Not until the medical monitors detected the cessation of her own heartbeat.
She’d programmed the VR carefully. The software was designed to operate nonplayer avatars for gamers who’d been unable to join the rest of their party for a given session, and the longer someone played the game, the better the computer learned who they were, learned to model their spontaneous responses. It was almost as good as having the missing individual there, and she and Adam had gamed in Arctic Avalanche and its associated modules for years. The computers knew them both so well.
And so she’d written her own module, Kamekura. The Aboriginal word meant “wait till I come,” or “wait for me.” Adam had taught it to her. It was their word, one they used just between the two of them when one of them had to run on ahead of the other, and she would use it that way one more time . . . because that module was where she would die in his arms.
The VR would welcome her, enfold her. She would nestle down into it, like a sleepy child into a blanket, and the neural feeds would override her physical body’s sensations. She estimated that she might live as long as a week before dehydration killed her, but that could seem like months—even years—in the VR, and she would have all of that time with Adam. The VR was open ended, within the parameters she’d established, so she didn’t know where it would take them, what they would experience before the end. But wherever they went, she would have him again, and she would have peace, and she would embrace both like lovers.
She sighed and unstrapped from the flight couch. A toe push sent her toward the hatch, and she realized she was smiling, looking forward to it. It was so good to finally see an end, and—
Ping!
Joan Walker jerked as if she’d just touched a live wire. She grabbed the hatch frame, halting her progress, turning in place. It couldn’t—
Ping!
The tone sounded again, and one hand flew up to cover her mouth as a green light blinked on the control panel. That was impossible!
Ping!
She hurled herself back toward her command chair as the light on the docking panel stopped blinking and burned a steady, unwavering green.
Ping!
It was a docking beacon! A live docking beacon! The signal was incredibly faint, but she couldn’t possibly be receiving Victoria’s beacon at this range! Her receivers were nowhere near sensitive enough! So, it couldn’t be Victoria . . . could it?
Ping!
She punched keys, querying the computers, and then an ID came up and her jaw dropped.
No, it couldn’t be Victoria, she thought around a queer, ringing silence in her brain. And it wasn’t.
It was Prometheus.
Joan Walker floated in the microgravity, gazing at the image displayed before her. She was freshly showered, dressed in a crisp, clean T-shirt and shorts, nursing a bulb of coffee in both hands, and her eyes were still dark with echoes of disbelief.
Whale’s exterior cameras weren’t much, compared to Victoria’s, but they had the resolution of a good pre-space planetary observatory’s reflector telescope. They were quite good enough to confirm what she was looking at, although details were scant. Reflected sunlight this far from the primary was dim, to say the least, and the range was preposterously long, but the ship she was looking at was almost ten kilometers long. That was big enough for the cameras to see, despite the preposterous range at which she’d picked up the beacon signal.
She shouldn’t have, not on her short-ranged docking systems. That signal must have been boosted, which made no sense. But then neither did finding the missing terraforming ship in a cometary orbit around TRAPPIST-2.
Her own experience, the discovery of what had happened to Whale’s primary AI, had already suggested that the same insane saboteurs might have gotten to Prometheus’ core programming, as well. It would explain a lot, and it certainly fitted the murderous bastards’ modus operandi. Computers didn’t care what they did; they only “cared” about what they were told to. If you could get to them, ordering them to kill themselves was a lot easier than convincing humans to suicide. And if you hid your sabotage carefully enough—and, she thought grimly, if the people you targeted couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing in the first place—no one would ever realize they’d been set up until the ambush tripped.
Yet if that was what happened to Prometheus, how had she made it to TRAPPIST-2 at all? And once she’d gotten here, what had put her into such an eccentric orbit? And why was her beacon so damned loud?
Joan Walker couldn’t answer those questions, but she knew as she sat there that she was looking at both a desperately needed addition to the colony’s infrastructure . . . and her own potential salvation.
Whale and Prometheus were closing on one another. Or, rather, they were closing on a point in space both of them would pass somewhere in the next thirteen months. They weren’t on remotely “convergent” courses. Whale was moving faster and cutting the cord of Prometheus’ orbit, closing with it on an oblique angle. If they maintained their current headings and velocities, the lander would cut across Prometheus’ path well before the terraforming ship got there and then continue onward into the interstellar depths.
Without her comm module, Walker couldn’t actually communicate with Prometheus from this range. For that matter, the range was still too great for her own docking transmitters to reach Prometheus, unless she figured out how to boost their signal strength the same way Prometheus’ had been boosted. And there was no way for her to tell if anything besides that beacon was still alive over there. Prometheus might be a lifeless hulk, trekking endlessly through space, completely dead but for the plaintive voice crying out over Walker’s receivers.
But if she wasn’t . . . if her systems were still live, and if Whale could come close enough to trigger her automated docking protocols . . .
Her tugs were bigger and more powerful than the tugs attached to Victoria, because they’d been designed for harder, longer use with Prometheus’ larger landers and multiuse cargo shuttles. They had more fuel capacity, more thrust, and Prometheus carried more of them. So if she could just get close enough, call for the tugs, they could capture Whale, brake her velocity, tow her in and dock her to Prometheus’ midships cargo bays. Once Whale’s umbilicals plugged in, Walker would have wired access to Prometheus’ computer nets. She could take command of the ship, and she was confident Prometheus had ample fuel reserves to break out of her lonely orbit and return her—and Whale—and Adam—to Cistercia.
But only if she could get close enough, and that was what the computers were considering at this very moment.
She already knew it would be tight. Her tracking data was less than perfect, but she’d been able to rough out Prometheus’ orbital mechanics. Her path took her far enough in-system to pass within comm range of Cistercia, but she must have been just beyond detection range for the beacon when Victoria arrived. Her entire orbital period was right on fifty years, and she’d dive back through the inner system again in another thirty or so. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t pass within her beacon’s transmission range of Cistercia on her next pass. Fifty years after that would be a different matter, but by then the colonists would have been in-system for a good eighty years. Walker suspected they would either have succeeded in making Cistercia their own and no longer need Prometheus’ resources so desperately . . . or else the lack of those resources would mean there was no one left for Prometheus to help.
So what it really came down to was whether or not Joan Walker could get aboard Prometheus and deliver her to Cistercia in time to make a difference. And that was—
The computer chimed.
She turned to bring up its analysis, and her heart leapt as she saw the projected flight path, passing just close enough to Prometheus.
Then she saw the fuel figures.
“Record diary.”
Her voice was level, stronger than it had been in weeks, and her green eyes were clear. They were also dark, and they burned as she looked out through the canopy.
“Adam,” she said then, “I wish, with all my heart, that I didn’t have to do this to you, love, but I do. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.
“You’ll find all the notes about what went wrong, how this all happened, in my files. I didn’t think there was any way out, but then Prometheus turned up. And it turned out there is a way out . . . maybe.
“Just not for me.”
She paused and inhaled deeply.
“I’ve run the numbers over and over. I’ve modeled it a dozen times. It keeps coming out the same. I can get Whale close enough, but it’ll take every drop of fuel the main engines have left, and it’s going to use up a lot of the maneuvering thrusters’ fuel, as well. In fact, I can’t do it without them.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose, thinking about that. Whale’s attitude thrusters were insanely powerful by the standards of normal spacecraft design. They could give her another two gravities of decel . . . but she had only twelve minutes’ fuel for them.
“It’ll take a six-minute burn on main engines and another nine and a half on the thrusters, according to my numbers, and even then, it’ll be close. God, it’ll be so close, sweetheart, and the only margin for adjustments if my flight plan gets anything wrong are the last two minutes on her maneuvering thrusters. I can’t plot the intercept well enough to know how much of that time she’ll need, but it looks like she may need all of it. Even if I make the main burn today, I can’t know how much she’ll need on final until we get there. And if I wait that long and it turns out she needs all her fuel, it won’t be there. I’ll have burned the margin keeping her reactor online.”
She paused again, pinching the bridge of her nose harder, as if the pain could make what she had to say next hurt less.
“That means I can’t wait, love. I can’t wait for you. I have to go on ahead. So I’m going to make the main burn and load the rest of the profile into the stand-alone flight computer. And then I’m going to power down everything but the essential core systems. Without the housekeeping demand, Whale’s batteries are more than enough to carry that much load . . . without burning off her fuel.”
The actual expenditure of hydrogen to keep the reactor online for an extra year would have cost only about eleven seconds, yet those eleven seconds might be the difference between success and failure. They might not, too, but she couldn’t know that, and she hadn’t come this far, she hadn’t paid this price, to fail. She would buy every instant of deceleration she could leave Whale and Adam with her own death . . . and count it a bargain well made.
She only prayed, if it turned out there was a greater margin than that in hand, that Adam could forgive her.
“I don’t know what you’ll find aboard Prometheus. I don’t even know if the ship is still alive, so maybe you won’t be listening to this after all. And if she is alive, I don’t know how badly her systems may have been damaged, assuming the same sick bastards that sabotaged us sabotaged her, too. So I’ve put together a hierarchy of computer packages. If everything goes perfectly, Prometheus’ remotes will retrieve you and the others and wake you up. Assuming I can’t manage that, I’ll try to program her to head for Cistercia. Assuming I can’t manage that, you’ll just have to ride the cargo racks until she gets close enough for Victoria to pick up her beacon. I’ve got a couple of ideas to piggyback signals through Prometheus’ landers’ communications modules. I think I can get into those through the docking interface, even if the rest of the ship is down or the central computers won’t let me in. I’m not sure about that, but if I can manage that much, I should be able to boost her beacon’s strength enough to at least triple the range at which Victoria’s likely to hear it.
“It’s the best I can do, sweetheart.” Her eyes burned hotter, and she wiped them fiercely. “I wish I could do more. And I wish—” Her voice wavered, and she had to clear her throat. “And I wish I could know whether or not it worked. But I can’t. This is the only gift I have left to give you, and it comes with every gram of my heart and more joy than I ever imagined, because I get one last chance to give you that. You are the finest man I have ever known. I’ve treasured every second of our lives together, and if I have to die, then this is exactly what I would have chosen to die doing. Remember me, but don’t cling. I want you to live. I want you to live in every sense of the word and build the home you and I were supposed to build together. And know this: My only regret about the choice I’ve made—the only regret I have, I swear to you—is that I won’t have the chance to tell you this in person. So, don’t weep. Be glad for me. Be glad I had the chance to save the person I love most in the entire universe.
“Goodbye, sweetheart. I love you.”
She sat a moment longer, a single tear trickling down her cheek, then closed her eyes.
“Halt recording.”
TRAPPIST-2 Star System
Lander Whale
April 2348 CE/04 Ad Astra
It was so quiet, she thought as she swam through the rec room hatch.
So very quiet.
And soon it would be quieter still. If she listened very carefully, she could hear the soft hum of the enviro systems, circulating air. That would stop soon enough.
She’d done all she could. She’d emptied the main engines’ fuel reserve, burned off all but those precious last hundred and fifty seconds on the maneuver thrusters, and it looked like they’d hit the necessary profile. Or close to it. Close enough, at least . . . probably.
If she hadn’t, there was nothing more she could do about it, and she’d been through Whale’s stored flight profile and her command programs for Prometheus again and again. She’d checked every detail over and over, until she’d realized she was obsessing. Not too surprisingly, probably, but there was no point to it. They were the best she could write, and they’d either do the job—assuming they got the chance—or they wouldn’t. Whale would cross close enough, have enough fuel reserve to adjust until the tugs could capture and dock her, or she wouldn’t . . . and this would all have been for nothing.
Either way, she’d never know, and she was a little surprised by how little that bothered her. To have come within months of possible survival, and then to see it trickle through her fingers—to walk away from it, rather than fight to the last ditch for it . . . Surely that should have done something, filled her with bitterness, shouldn’t it?
Yet it hadn’t.
Oh, there were regrets in plenty. Regrets that she would never stand on Cistercia with Adam. That she would never bear the children they’d both wanted so badly. That the universe would go on without her, leaving a Joanie-shaped hole in Adam’s life. Yet that was such a tiny regret beside the unspeakable gift of the chance—at least the chance—to save him and all their friends.
How many people could say their deaths had bought a triumph like that? Know that whatever else happened, the lives they’d lived—the deaths they’d died—had mattered?
And it isn’t as if any of us would’ve made it without Prometheus, either, she thought. I would have died anyway. I was ready for that. And I guess I still am, especially since this way, dying may actually make a difference. Not just for Adam, either. Maybe for the entire colony. I guess a woman could have a worse epitaph.
She drifted to the chair at the VR station. It was designed for use in gravity, assuming Whale had ever made it to the planetary surface, and she folded herself onto it, then snapped the seatbelt. People sometimes moved in response to events in VR, and the last thing she wanted was for some involuntary movement to send her drifting away from the interface and unplugging the headset.
She looked around one last time, considering—again—adding some further note for Adam. And deciding—again—against it. It was going to be hard enough for him to listen to what she’d already recorded, but at least he’d know she’d lived over three weeks from the time she recorded it. She didn’t want him to picture her going straight into death from the last word she ever said to him.
The lines of “High Flight,” her favorite poem—written by John Gillespie Magee before humanity ever stepped foot off Earth—ran through her mind as she slipped into the headset and brought the VR online.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling
mirth of sun-split clouds—
and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of—
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I’ve chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God.
It was why she’d become a pilot in the first place, that poem, the things it expressed. And here, at the very end, that was where she was—in that “untrespassed sanctity of space,” putting her hand out to God, asking Him for one last boon for the people she loved. It was not simply the completion of her life but its culmination.
She’d been given that, too.
And now it was time to go.
The VR interface blinked at her, and she inhaled deeply.
“I’m coming, sweetheart,” she whispered. “I’m coming.”
The interface blinked again, not recognizing the voice input, and she closed her eyes.
“Run Kamekura,” she said softly.