There was a faint tug of gravity as the maneuvering thrusters turned them out and away from the torus.
"My compliments, Ellen," Ian said softly.
She looked back at him and smiled. "It was Shelley, as well. She had come across a description of the unit in the library banks some weeks back. She pointed it out to me and we both had a good laugh wondering what it would be like if we ever came across them. The moment I saw Carrie I knew what we had hit into, and realized that I had to play along and wait for a chance to escape."
"Just how far did you play along?" Stasz asked leeringly. "Yeah, the doc told me about what them girls did to each other back there."
Ellen fell strangely silent.
"You seemed to enjoy yourself," Richard said, directing his comment to Shelley. "I swear you loved every minute of teasing poor old Ian and me."
She smiled knowingly and without comment looked back to the board.
"Did they torture you at all?" Stasz asked, already imagining all sorts of exquisite possibilities.
" Ahh, what torture," Richard said softly.
"Just think about this for torture," Ellen said suddenly, with a malicious gleam in her eye. "I was thinking of letting it ride for another couple of days, but then I found out what they had planned for you two so I took the extra risk and tried the breakout at once. It seems they found the old way of taking sperm samples to be rather repug nant. So, my dear doctor, their medical people came up with a suggestion that Diana approved of right after they had their first specimen-gathering session for you."
"Oh, I can just imagine what delights they had planned," Richard said smoothly, "though to beat that first session would have been darn near impossible. Ian, my old com rade, you should have been there to see it. Why, it was a true delight. You really missed something while you were asleep. And then these damn women here came and dragged us away before you had a chance."
Ian gave the two girls a look of reproach.
"You could have let me have one session," Ian replied, "before liberating us."
"Maybe we should have, you ungrateful slug," Ellen responded, her face aglow with a malevolent smile, "but my dear sister Shelley talked me out of waiting. You see, my fine chauvinistic friends, the medical team suggested to Diana that a simple operation could cut off the part of your body that they needed; it could have been rigged to a bio support unit to produce all the sperm they'd ever need. They just did that little show for you to get a sample, so they could check out if you were viable and worth the effort.
"If the operation had worked, they planned the same for you, my dear Ian."
Not another word was said as the three men went aft to drink.
Chapter 10
Colonial Unit 13
First Completion Date: 2023
Primary Function: Cosmos Society. Organization of pro- space activists. One of the first units to demonstrate the feasibility of the O'Neill Cylinder design.
Overall Design: Single cylinder, 1400 meters by 350 me ters.
Propulsion: Matter/Antimatter.
Course: SETI Anomaly One. Galactic Core.
Political/Social Orientation: Multinational Japanese, Russian, English. Cited by Beaulieu as "a colonial unit of exceptional promise, showing the possibilities of international harmony through peaceful coopera tion in space." With the coming of the Holocaust the citizens of 13 voted to evacuate rather than be turned against each other by their less-civilized ancestors below.
"Jesus, what the hell is this!"
The jump-down from light speed was complete, but Ian was ignoring Stasz's shouted questions because he was still nauseated from the transition.
"Get on the board, Ian."
Convinced for the moment that dinner wasn't going to come rushing back up, Ian pushed forward to hover be hind Stasz's shoulder.
"I'm getting a lot of debris," Shelley called from the Co's position. "I've locked onto a beacon two thousand klicks ahead, declination five degrees off. But there are no significant mass readings."
"Ian, look at this!" Shelley dialed the CRT up to a higher magnification.
A human body was at screen-center slowly tumbling through space.
"I'm picking up more, Ian, dozens of them. Do you want to look?"
He shook his head and turned away.
Within minutes Stasz was maneuvering the Discovery through a nightmarish jumble of debris-the twisted rem nants of what had once been a vessel of several hundred thousand tons. On a number of occasions hard maneu vering was required to avoid torn hunks of metal and, in one case, a mummified fragment that had once been hu man.
"As near as I can estimate," Stasz reported, "a thin cloud of debris is traveling outward from Delta Sag at a velocity of just over 230 miles per second."
Delta Sag was straight ahead of them and outshining all the other stars in the heavens. Another half hour's run would have jumped them within twenty A.U. of the star. But the signal beacon had caused them to stop and jump down into a floating funeral.
Ian scanned the trajectory backplot and passed it over to Stasz.
Stasz punched in the data and within seconds had a response. "Approximately fifty-two years, six months outward bound from Delta Sag," Stasz reported, "assum ing constant velocity."
"I have the beacon source on visual," Shelley an nounced.
The five of them huddled around the primary screen as the image came up. It was a nondescript hulk of in terstellar flotsam slowly tumbling end over end.
"Approximately a hundred meters long by fifty wide," Stasz reported. "It looks like the reactor core. It's still hot, I'm picking up some trace readings."
Even as Stasz spoke, the Discovery lurched slightly as it weaved past a large fragment that its shields could not vaporize. Stasz guided the vessel back onto an intercept course and before the hour was over he was fine-tuning the final approach that would bring them up alongside the reactor unit.
"This is a waste, Ian," Ellen said, "whatever colony unit this was, it's been blasted beyond recognition."
The others murmured their agreement. They were flying formation with a drifting junk-yard-torn metal, shredded shielding, shards of glass, and mummified bodies.
"I need to find out more," Ian replied coldly. "We started out aimless, but with each step farther out, the path seemed to point us into this direction, and to that star." He pointed at Delta. "Now, damn it, we're only a fraction of a light-year out from it and we find this. I've got to know why. Was this an accident or was it something else?"
"You mean Smith's colony?" Richard asked.
"Isn't it obvious?"
"By my hairy butt," Stasz shouted. "There's someone aboard that hulk!"
They crowded forward to see where he was pointing.
"There, in that window, I saw a light flashing. Look, it will roll into view again in another couple of seconds. There, there it is!"
As the window came into view, a strobe flashed once, then again and again in rapid succession, and in the flashing light Ian thought he saw a figure waving.
After half a dozen passes they were convinced that there was somebody alive in there. But how to get at him?
Twelve hours later they were still debating the ques tion.
"Look," Stasz repeated yet again, as if they were ig norant children. "First, there's no docking port."
"But there does seem to be an airlock."
"We're not sure its functional," Stasz replied. "Second, there's only one person in here who's had experience with an EVA propulsion device, and that's me. And if you think I'm going out into that floating junkyard, you're crazy. Remember, comrades, if I buy it, who the hell is going to fly you back home?"
None of them liked to be reminded of that. Stasz was all they had, and as such, he was treated with special care when it came to dockings and explorations.