“What was that, Mother? Did you say something?”
Teresa realized she’d spoken aloud to an open mike. She glanced outside, where distant, spacesuit-clad figures crawled over a latticework of girders and fibrous pylons. They were too far away to make out individual faces.
“Uh, sorry,” she said. “I was just…”
A second voice cut in. “She’s just cluckin’ to make sure her chicks are okay. Right, Mommy?”
That voice she knew. Traditional it might be, for a work party on EVA to call the watch pilot “Papa.” Or in her case, “Mother.” But only Mark Randall had the nerve to call her “Mommy” over an open channel.
“Can it, Randall.” Colonel Glenn Spivey this time, stepping in to curtail idle chatter. “Is anything the matter, Captain Tikhana?”
“Um… no, Colonel.”
“Very well, then. Thank you for continuing to monitor us, quietly.”
Teresa punched her thigh. Damn the man! Spivey’s version of politeness would spoil fresh-picked apples. She twisted her cheek-mike away so the next stray word wouldn’t draw that awful man’s attention.
I’m not myself, she knew. Extraneous talk on open channel just wasn’t her style. But then, neither were espionage or treason.
She glanced toward her left knee. The tiny recorder she’d placed there was tucked well out of sight, tapping the shuttle’s main computer via a fiber barely thick enough to see. It had been almost too easy. The instruments required were already aboard Pleiades. It was just a matter of modifying their settings slightly, so narrow windows of data could be snooped by her little data store.
It helped that this was a construction mission. For hours at a stretch, she would be left alone while Randall and Spivey and the others were outside, supervising the robots that were erecting Erehwon II. Defense wanted the new edifice put in place quickly, which involved using those undamaged portions of Reagan Station, plus parts cobbled from spares and rushed up on heavy boosters.
That was an advantage of “national security” as a priority. The calamity wouldn’t be allowed to paralyze all space activity, as happened after the Challenger disaster or that horrible Lamberton fiasco. On the other hand, other programs were being stripped for this. Civilian space was going to suffer for a long time to come.
Out in the blackness, Teresa watched figures systematically dismantle a giant cargo lifter — opening the great rocket like an unfolding flower. Space Jacks, like butchers in an oldtime abattoir, bragged they could find a use for “everything but the squeal.” It was a far cry from back when NASA had first tried to assemble an entire working space station, unbelievably, out of nothing but tiny capsules and gridwork, every bit hauled to orbit inside shuttles.
Unhappy over the hurried pace, this construction squad had unanimously chosen her to be Mother, to watch over them from Pleiades’ control deck. Management dared not buck the drivers’ and spinners’ unions when it came to crew safety, so Teresa had escaped the talk-show circuit, after all.
The irony was, for the first time in her career she found herself preoccupied in other ways. She did her job, of course. Because the other ’nauts were counting on her, she meticulously took telemetry readings, making doubly sure her “chicks” were all right. Still, Teresa kept turning around to glance through the rear window at the Earth. It wasn’t the planet’s beauty that distracted her, but a nervous sense of expectation.
The NASA psychologist had warned there were always difficulties, first time up again after a trouble mission. But that wasn’t it. Teresa knew it was important to get back in the saddle. She had confidence in her skills.
No, her gaze kept drifting Earthward because that was where she’d seen the first symptoms. Those weird optical effects the psychers had largely dismissed as stress hallucinations, but which had given her an instant’s warning last time.
Stop being so nervous, she told herself. If Manella’s right, it can’t happen again. He thinks Erehwon was torn apart when some stupid malf released a micro black hole up at Farpoint lab. Whatever Frankenstein device they were playing with must have blown its energy all at once.
By that reasoning it was a single exploding singularity that had, by some unknown means, carried the first men — or what was left of them — to the stars.
For the fortieth time, she tried to figure out how they might have done it. How could anybody build and conceal a black hole, for heaven’s sake — even a micro black hole — in space without word getting out? The smallest hole with a temperature low enough to be contained would need the mass of a midget mountain. You don’t go hauling that kind of material into low earth orbit without someone noticing. No, the thing would have been built by cavitronics — that new science of quantum absurdities, of forces nobody had even heard of forty years ago, which let foolish men create space-warped sinkholes out of the raw stuff of vacuum itself.
Cavitronics. In spite of reading popular accounts, Teresa knew next to nothing about the field. Who did?
Well, Jason, apparently. She had thought him incapable of ever lying to her. Which showed just how little she knew about people after all.
What amazed Teresa most was that Spivey and his co-conspirators could actually hide such a massive thing up here, in Earth’s crowded exosphere. True, Farpoint had been isolated. Getting there required two consecutive twenty-kilometer elevator rides.
Still, how does one hide a gigaton object in Low Earth Orbit? Even compressed to a pinpoint, its presence would have perturbed the trajectory of the whole complex. She’d have been able to tell every time she piloted a mission to Erehwon, from subtle differences in her readings. No. Manella had to be wrong!
Then she remembered how those DOD men in powder blue uniforms had sequestered the recordings, as soon as Pleiades returned from that horribly extended mission. Teresa had assumed it was for accident analysis. But somehow the data never were made public.
She mentally catalogued ways a pilot could really tell the mass of the upper tip, assuming all shuttles docked far below. The list was shockingly small.
What if… she pondered. What if, each trip to Erehwon, the shuttle’s operating parameters were adjusted, its inertial guidance units altered beforehand?
It wouldn’t take much, she decided. Worse than dishonest, it would be horribly unprincipled to lie to a pilot about her navigation systems, to purposely make them give false readings.
But it could be done. After all, she’d only see what she expected to see.
The thought was appalling. This wasn’t the sort of thing one took to the union steward!
Over the next hour Teresa answered calls from the work party, computed some corrections for them, and shepherded one woman and her robot back on course from a five-degree deviation. She double-checked the modification and watched till the astronaut and her cargo were back on station. Meanwhile though, her head churned with arguments both for and against the scenario.
“They simply couldn’t have gotten away with it!” she cried out at one point.
“Beg pardon, Mama?”
It was Mark again, calling from the site where he was unreeling great spools of ultra-strong spectra fiber.
“Pleiades here. Um, never mind.”
“I distinctly heard you say—”
“I’m — practicing for the Space Day talent show. We’re doing Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“Cheery play. Remind me to lose my ticket.”
Teresa sighed. At least Spivey hadn’t cut in. He must have been preoccupied.
“They couldn’t have gotten away with it,” she muttered again after turning her mike completely off. “Even if they could have finagled Pleiades to give false readings…”
She stopped, suddenly too paranoid to continue aloud.