The Unbounded, page 18
“No.” Io stood straighter. “We have a grievance.”
Good luck, Zahar thought as the doctor came out of the radiation lab.
“Doctor,” Euro said formally, “We request to be allowed to get off at Atikameq.”
Zahar froze. Get off? Not visit?
“Euro,” Dr. Tenshi said, unconcerned, “there just isn’t time for a dock visit.”
“No, doctor,” Euro was flustered, so Io took over.
“We don’t want to go to Luminesse.”
“We don’t want to see the people suffering,” Euro explained in a hush.
“Oh,” the doctor said, understanding. “Well, I’m sorry. Thayne isn’t stopping at Atikameq. We’re going straight to the a-rings.”
“What?” Zahar and the twins all said at once.
“Didn’t you know?” The doctor looked back and forth between them. How could we know? Nothing is posted on the Cheetah itinerary. “That’s why we took extra food from Harbor. Luminesse is past the terminal point. Every day could make a difference.”
Zahar’s mind raced. All her plans were ruined if they didn’t go to Atik. She wouldn’t be able to leave the Cheetah.
“We could go in a shuttle,” Euro suggested.
“Euro, Io, Thayne will never allow it. And you need to stay with me.”
“You can come too. Or come back after Luminesse,” Io pleaded.
“Io, it will be fine. You don’t have to go down to Luminesse station or even look.”
“We would know, though,” Io started tearing up, but the doctor was immune to such things, even if sincere.
“You two are being illogical. Whatever is happening there is happening, whether we witness it or not.”
“We could be stuck there!” Zahar objected.
“Zahar! Don’t make things worse. You’re scaring them. Captain Thayne wouldn’t take us anywhere with no way to get out. That’s the whole point of bringing the gravity ball.”
“But—”
“We—”
“Please!” Doctor Tenshi sat down, exasperated. “Try to be brave. Maybe there will be a way for you to help people. Now go.” She shooed the dejected twins out.
“Besides,” she said to Zahar, “the sooner we get there and get that gravity ball off the ship, the better.”
But Zahar didn’t answer. She turned back to the rats to hide her face. I won’t be able to get off. Scenarios ran through her head: complain to Thayne. Futile. Lodge a formal protest with the Council. No time, even if my message got through. Escape on a shuttle. Too much security, thanks to Alesta Eve. How long if I go to Luminesse? Months, maybe forever. The rats were looking up at her, still and worried. I might never see my family again. I hate this ship!
8-Questions Eve
Zahar was tired, frustrated and upset, and didn’t feel like sitting alone in her cabin fretting. Now was the time she needed her family. She missed them so much. Just a regular family. Two parents, two younger brothers, two younger sisters, and two podpups. And aunts and uncles and cousins of course. She wondered how her busy parents were doing without her help. At least she’d get some packets now that they were back at Atikameq. She bit her lip, forcing herself not to cry. She had really been counting on getting away.
It was too late at night to visit the twins, so she distracted herself by cleaning up her junk drawer, eating the last of the chocolate she had stashed there. Then she remembered the junk news she’d received from the shuttle pilot.
She spent some time dumping the crazier stuff. She found lots of music that she’d have to go through later and pay for what she liked.
“Mysterious Disturbance in K-Belt” was a new subject with many items. A couple of them were just copies of ordinary news packets.
15-Names: Monitors mapping the Harbor k-belt system today noticed odd paths of activity in two places. Navigational updates are being prepared, even though there is currently no incoming ship traffic.
. . . they’re alien ships, spying on us . . .
. . . they’re ships coming to rescue us . . .
. . . it’s just to distract us . . .
. . . it’s just a natural perturbation . . .
. . . two perturbations at the same time? . . .
18-Names: Harbor Inbound Authority monitors have been double-checking for activity along the Atikameq incoming route, even though it’s rare for a ship to drop into normal space outside the k-belt and no jumps are expected. However, an additional area of disturbance was discovered. The patterns of all three disturbances are similar, as if planet-sized objects were moving through the k-belt.
. . . we’re surrounded . . .
. . . the disturbances will cause new comets . . .
. . . there’s nothing there . . .
3-Might: Monitors have calculated that the disturbances indicate that bodies massing almost 1g are moving through the k-belt. Harbor station telescopes cannot detect any objects.
Zahar glanced at the date of the first report, 15-Names. That was . . . six days after Thayne and Melawn had pushed all those alien buttons and turned on the gravity ball.
She studied the charts. One comment did catch her eye. “Harbor Mystery Objects Chart Extrapolation.” She opened it up. Someone had attempted to calculate the trajectories that the three objects would follow. She did a double take. The three paths would intersect at the orbit of Hb4. But the person hadn’t run the planet positions back. Zahar did, and the point where the objects would meet was exactly where OSRI was on the day they pushed the buttons.
Why didn’t the news mention that? She searched for more news reports, but they ended on 12 Knowledge, the day before she’d collected the junk news. Zahar searched through the Cheetah packets and didn’t find anything. Who is censoring our news?
She looked back at the first report, six days after the button pushing. Thayne had pushed those buttons on the alien control panel and turned on the gravity ball. Actually, it had started moving! And they stopped it. Is it possible? They called one gravity ball. Could they have accidentally called others? Or something else? Were alien objects sitting out in the k-belt?
She scanned through the rest of the junk news. They had a lot of crazy theories, but nothing about extra gravity balls. They aren’t crazy enough. One thing was alarming people though. More disturbances could lead to an infall of comets, endangering everyone.
Nothing else makes sense. Ignoring potential problems, even if they were someone else’s problems, was not one of Zahar’s weaknesses. We need data. Melawn.
Two minutes later, Zahar was knocking on Melawn’s cabin door. He answered in his sleeping clothes, holding his prayer book, obviously a hint, but she braved right past him down the stairs. He stared after her.
“You have to look at something.”
“Now?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m here.” She played the real news without saying anything about her suspicions.
“This is back on Harbor,” he said, trying to follow. “Why . . .”
“Just watch.”At the end, she put up the chart of data showing the three perturbations.
Melawn stared at it, half asleep. Then a little frown flitted across his face. “You think . . . you’re thinking we have something to do with this?”
“Yes. Look at the date.”
“You think our experiments with the gravity ball somehow caused this?”
“I think pressing those alien buttons called more than just the one gravity ball.”
He stared at her, stunned. “More . . .”
“What else could explain it?”
“Zahar, that’s crazy. There aren’t gravity balls sitting around in the k-belt.”
“How do you know?”
“We’d have seen them.”
“How? They are small and non-reflective.”
He frowned again, but she could see his data hunting brain had been challenged and now he was actually thinking about it. He sat down, put down his prayer book, pulled out a pad, and did some quick calculations. “Maybe not. Not if we weren’t looking for them.”
“How long to get a signal from the control panel out to the k-belt?”
“Well, that one’s on the other side, maybe twenty hours. Six or seven hours for this side.”
Melawn looked back over the charts. “The closer ones started first,” he muttered. He shook his head. “I’m not thinking straight. These are still moving. We sent the off signal and the gravity ball stopped.”
“Did we send a signal that would stop them all? Didn’t Nkiroo say something about using the semi-circle off button, not the master switch? What if he turned a bunch on and only turned the one off?”
Melawn scowled and rubbed his eyes, obviously tired. Zahar leaned over and pulled up the last chart, the one that had sent her to his cabin in the middle of the night, the chart showing the three paths intersecting at OSRI on the day they pressed the buttons.
“It must be something else . . .”
“Twenty pages of reports from monitors and astronomers can’t figure it out. Apparently, none of them have access to your classified gravity-ball-calling-button data.”
“No. No one has it.” Melawn stared at the screen for a long time. “More gravity balls. That’s how the aliens have them in their ships. They don’t make them. They just go pick them up. That’s why the technology is different.”
“What about Harbor? Three gravity balls are going to come flying into the system! And who knows how many little rocks they’ll perturb and send in-system?”
“God in Heaven.” Melawn stood up and started pacing around. “They’ll figure it out. Jamez will figure it out. And he knows how to turn the gravity balls off.”
“If Jamez even knows about it.”
“Why wouldn’t he? It’s in the news.”
“News that only came to us in the junk download I got from your shuttle pilot! This news never came to the Cheetah. How do we know it went to Jamez?”
“It will eventually. When it’s bigger news. Then he can just turn them off.”
“The longer it takes, the more trouble it might cause. Can’t we send a ship to warn them? We can’t just do nothing!”
Melawn nodded. “Okay. I’ll talk to Thayne.”
8-Questions
Drumheller in orbit near Redrock
After days of useless searching and tedious door fixing in Arc 7, Jarvie was tired and cold and missing the pups and wishing he could head back early.
But it beats being out here by myself, even if Terina is down the steps. He would sometimes have flashes of the long lonely hours he’d spent on the Drumheller when he’d first come aboard. Then he’d be homesick for the Pearl and all the warmth and fun he had had there. It had hardly been more than two weeks since the Pearl had made the scary jump back to their space. Did they make it? He bit his lip. Just knowing if Quay was okay would make him feel better.
Things had been so hectic, and now, after the big adventure was over and they were home, there was not a moment to rest, not a day to even reflect on what would probably end up being the most significant part of his life. Done at 15. He tested the door. It’s downhill from here. Nothing exciting will ever hap–
“That’s weird,” he heard the muffled voice of Terina from inside the cabin.
Jarvie, ready for any excuse, tromped down the stairs to look. “What?”
Terina was on her back on the deck under the panel with one of her detectors, scanning the joint in the desk. “I see evidence of defunct microbots, but nothing else.”
“Oh, I lost a bunch, but I don’t know how they could have gotten in here.”
“How old were they?” she asked.
“Ancient.”
She crawled out and scowled at him.
“Oh, I mean, maybe 50 years old.”
“Fifty! Well, these are more like 500 years old.”
“How can you tell?”
“Even if they’re not on, they have a signature bar.”
“Well then, some other clueless person lost them.”
“Sometimes, rarely, people set microbot guards around especially sensitive cabin logs. That meant only they could get to them.”
“But if they stopped charging the bots . . .”
“Exactly, no more guard. But I don’t see what these bots were guarding.”
“Let’s look from on top,” he suggested.
“Can’t hurt.”
Terina had already scanned the top, but now, together, they activated all the pop-ups, removed them, and checked inside. “Nothing,” she sighed.
Jarvie did not want to go back to the door. “Let’s take it apart.”
“That would be overdoing it for hiding a cabin log.”
“Maybe, but we might find some more old microbots. We could collect them.”
She looked dubious, but let Jarvie and the bot team disassemble the top. Carefully, she scanned again. “There, more microbots.”
Jarvie got out his tools and started picking up the microbots, carefully setting them in the gel of the micro box. Some were especially small. Terina got out the big magnifying glass and took a close look at them. “Can we charge them?” Jarvie asked.
“These don’t match my charger,” Terina said.“There’s more than one kind here. This one doesn’t even scan. It’s smaller too.”
“Can you find more?” Jarvie asked. He’d feel a little better about losing so many if he could collect a few extra.
Terina handed the scanner to him. Slowly, he ran it across the top of the panel. “There,” he said, pointing down the furthest of the pop-up slots. Terina climbed up on the desk, shining a light down the narrow slot.
“There is something down there.”
“Bots?”
“No. Yes! No!” She sat up, excited. “Bots and something else. We need an extractor.” She looked at the robot manager. It came over, couldn’t bend over the desk in its configuration, so it dispatched an investigator. Terina pointed to show the manager what she was after. “Carefully!”
The investigator morphed into a long extractor, and after several tense moments pulled out a small flat card, smaller even than the one Terina had pulled from her pad to show Jarvie.
She gasped and took it. “It’s old. Oh, this is a good one!”
“Get the microbots, please,” Jarvie told the extractor, setting down his box, while Terina put the card in her universal reader.
Slipping on her recorder, she breathlessly summarized the operation, then made a safety backup of the card. She glanced at the hiding place and made a second backup, handing the first one to Jarvie.
“Hunch?” he asked.
“No hunch. This is big. Old and well hidden.”
“Can we look at it?”
“Oh, yes. Finders’ privilege.”
Terina slipped the backup into her big pad. They settled down on the deck to watch. A white background came up with a simple text headline.
For a second after he read it, Jarvie almost laughed. Then some feeling, something like when Oatah was rearranging the future, draped over him. He looked at Terina. The color had drained out of her face. She read the headline in a whisper. “I Have Seen the Builders.”
18 UNEXPECTED INPUT
8-Questions
Cheetah at Atikameq a-rings
Lanezi tried to clear his mind for the jump. He’d given up last night, frustrated by having to leave Atikameq with no packets from Katie. The whole crew was unhappy and confused about their continued packet silence. Thayne had given them plausible reasons at Harbor, but now Lanezi was growing suspicious again.
Supposedly reluctant to speak ill of the Council, Thayne hesitantly explained that the Atikameq Council wanted them to come into station instead of proceeding directly to the a-rings. They would not accept Thayne’s higher orders, so Atikameq was withholding packets.
“That’s illegal,” Caspia said. But Zahar, the former monitor, commented that it wasn’t illegal if someone on the Cheetah command crew had been issued an arrest warrant.
“Ridiculous,” Melawn had said. “What would we be arrested for? It’s just confusion, orders lost. Who knows what’s been happening since we left?”
Melawn was right. It had been over 15 months, nearly a year, since Harbor’s a-rings had gone down. But it didn’t help morale any that no one had news from loved ones and they would be gone for months again. They all sent out messages, trusting in the system that they would be delivered eventually.
Lanezi was also understandably bothered by the destination itself. The last few nights, he had been troubled by flashbacks of those final fatal moments of his exit from Luminesse, of the last words of his shipmates and the desperate instructions of the Luminesse monitor, knowing their station was doomed.
“Something’s happening at the rings,” Evan said, worry in his voice. Evan was just to Lanezi’s left, with Thayne on the far left and Nkiroo on his right. The others were safely in their jump chairs with full cocoons. Lanezi studied the screen. They were only 90 minutes away, calculating to come in at speed to join the others. Nkiroo had sent their intention directly to Atikameq Outbound Authority and the ships. They would know to leave space for them whether they were officially jumping or not.
“New outbound order maybe?” Nkiroo suggested, as the ships appeared to be moving around. But there was no way to know, as they were not receiving the jump instructions or the ship tracker feed. Lanezi didn’t like it. What they were doing could be dangerous.
“They should have started,” Nkiroo complained. “We’ll have to recalculate if they don’t start soon.”
Lanezi frowned. Their fuel was good, even if they had to slow down and then speed up, but it was a waste.
“Is there any way to pick up the monitor’s instructions?” Thayne asked.
“I can’t think of any,” Nkiroo answered. “They must be sending them on private channels.”
They had a clear view when they got within 50 minutes travel time. The ships, instead of remaining in a line, had spread themselves out, across the entrance to the rings.
“I don’t understand,” Nkiroo muttered.
Evan was piloting the run-in so Lanezi could rest for the jump. “Hmmm,” he said quietly.
