“Let me try.” Perry bent over the controls and pressed a button. “Rick, you there anywhere? Calling Octavia. Rick Harding.” They waited, listening to the silence. “Rick, this is Adarryl Perry. Hellooo.”
“Rick’s the onboard pilot, right?” asked Virgil.
“Yeah. He’s the guy you’d want if you ever got in trouble out here. We’ll have to give it a while, I guess.”
He tried again with the same result. And called Ventnor again. “We’re on-site. We’ve got the cannon, but no sign yet of the station. I’ll get back to you as soon as we locate it.” He signed off. “Thwanna, let me know when they respond.” He got up, stared out at the sky for a few moments, and started for the passenger cabin.
Virgil smiled and rose easily out of his chair. “Love this low-gravity stuff.” He followed Perry into the passenger cabin, where the captain told everyone about the cannon.
“But we haven’t found the station yet?” Betsy said.
“That’s correct.”
“Well, I guess we just have to be patient.”
“I’ll let you know when we get something more.” Perry knew that conditions near the black hole were seriously abnormal, but somebody should have been able to get back to him. It was possible that they still didn’t have a good angle to the station. Black holes had a long history of screwing up radio transmissions and sightings. For example, sometimes you got echoes of your own radio transmissions. And the last time he was out here, Perry had seen his own ship on the far side of the black hole.
Sitting in the pilot training program years before on Dellaconda calculating distances in light-years was considerably different from experiencing them, from actually crossing the sky. The reality was, of course, that he really experiencing them. The subspace thrust technology the used was, as far as he could understand, pure magic. The universe, he’d come to realize, evaded human understanding. And probably always would. Humans might know the rules, have a grip on physical law, and even make the math work, but the senses that had evolved on Earth would never grasp the realities.
Thwanna continued transmitting the same message every two minutes: Larry Corbin. She was also scanning the area and increasing her reach as they drew closer to the black hole.
They to be there.
The station would have appeared as a cluster of lights. But there was nothing other than occasional groups of stars. As Perry watched, an asteroid passed. It wasn’t much more than a blur in the window but it was unnerving. “Close,” he told Thwanna.
“If we have any more like that, give me some advance warning.” The sky was full of rocks orbiting the black hole. Some simply slid down in a gradual path toward the fireworks scattered across the darkness. One riding almost with the was bucking the tide. It had probably just rolled into the neighborhood and was trying to use its velocity to get clear. But it was losing the battle. “Thwanna,” he said, “we still have nothing?”
“How about the shuttle?”
They were sitting buckled in their seats eating turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce and coleslaw. “Are we going to go into orbit at some point?” asked Mark.
“No,” said Perry, “it’s too unstable out there. Stay belted in unless you have to go somewhere. There shouldn’t be any surprises, but let’s just play it safe for a while.”
“You don’t think,” said Betsy, “that this thing might have periodic eruptions, do you? Maybe that’s what happened to the station.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a black hole erupting or becoming unstable. Thwanna, you know of anything like that ever happening?”
Mark looked uncomfortable.
“There’s no need to worry,” Perry said. “Thwanna tracks everything.”
They all took a moment to concentrate on their lunch. Then Virgil asked whether Perry thought humans would ever be able to do a manned flight through a wormhole.
“That’s a good question. I’ll have a better idea after we find out what kind of shape the probes were in after they got recovered, provided that actually happened.”
They finished their meals. Mark suggested they watch a movie. Maybe the Edgar Martin comedy they’d been saving.
Perry returned to the bridge. “Still nothing?” he asked Thwanna.
she said.
At that time, Edgar Martin was just launching a career that would leave its mark across the Confederacy. He played himself, as a writer for a stiff-necked comedian. He and a small group of friends spent most of their time trying to gain the attention of people who could boost their careers or who looked like potential sexual partners. But they consistently compromised themselves with false claims. Luke Hogart, for example, a guy who was always making a mess of one of his assorted public relations jobs, loved to portray himself as a onetime firefighter. When he did, he inevitably, toward the end of the show, found himself facing a desperate situation, someone trapped on a ledge, perhaps, or, as on one classic occasion, a woman who had fallen into a cage at the zoo and was pleading for help as a gorilla closed in. Hogart, of course, stands and watches, later claiming that he tried to get into the cage but it was locked. Fortunately, the woman is not injured. But she does get annoyed.
Perry always enjoyed Martin, so he joined his passengers. It had been running about three minutes, just time enough for Edgar to begin telling a lovely young woman at a party that he’d had an unusual career as an artist when the lights blinked and the AI’s voice came through the speaker:
Perry nodded. “Be right there.” He got up and went back onto the bridge.
Somebody shut Edgar Martin down.
They were approaching the cannon. It was on the display screen again, but clearer this time. Thwanna said.
Perry sat down and activated the radio. , he thought, . “Rick, this is Adarryl Perry aboard the . Please answer up. Are you there anywhere?” He switched over and got static. Then: “Octavia, can you hear me?”
Behind him the door opened and closed. He cut down the volume of the static and looked back at Mark. “We have a problem?” Mark asked.
“No. I think Thwanna just wanted to give us a look at the cannon.”
“Oh,” Mark said. “Holy cats. Yeah. That thing’s .”
“It is pretty big.”
“There’s still no sign of them?”
“No. But we’re in a loud area. Maybe they’re just not getting the signal. Or we’re not getting theirs.”
“You don’t give up easy, do you?”
He pointed at the copilot’s seat. “Mark, relax. We’re going to move in closer, and we’ll be braking.”