The plan is to hang around Ophiuchi for another day or so, on the off chance the moonriders will come back. I’m not entirely sure that’s such a good idea since we have nothing with which to defend ourselves. But Valya suggested it, and of course Amy was all for it. Amy’s for everything. I’m pretty sure Eric had reservations, but he kept them to himself. I think it’s crazy.
Since we now know the moonriders are a potential threat, it’s the courageous thing to do. Right and noble and all that. Still, that doesn’t make it a good idea. The odd thing is I’d bet Valya, left to her own devices, would also not stick around. But nobody wants to look bad. Probably, if the Salvator were carrying four males, or four women, it would be sayonara, baby, we’re out of here.
— Friday, April 10
chapter 23
Solitude is only a good idea if you have the right people along to share it.
— Gregory MacAllister, “The World in the Sky”
Neither Eric nor Amy wanted to leave. “This is where the action is,” Amy said, after they’d watched a grim-faced Peter Arnold tell them to get well clear of 36 Ophiuchi. Put as much distance as you can between yourselves and the moonriders. Don’t talk to them. Don’t answer if they say hello. “How do we ever find out about them if we run?”
Valya put an arm around her shoulder. “No choice, glyka mou. We have to do what they tell us.”
When he was able to speak to MacAllister alone, Eric explained that the Academy was protecting Amy. “If she wasn’t on board,” he said, “nobody would really care about you and me.” He tried to make it into a joke, but MacAllister could see he believed it. The three adults were expendable.
That sort of perspective would never have occurred to MacAllister. And he readily dismissed it. Of course the Academy didn’t want to take any chances with Amy, but they also knew he was on board.
Valya kept her feelings to herself. She simply shrugged when the message ended and told them to buckle down. “Vega’s next,” she said. “We’ve backtracked a bit, so the jump will take longer than it would have from Origins.” A bit under two days, she added. Minutes later they were accelerating away from the asteroid.
Seventeen years.
How did these creatures think? Were they going to come back to watch the fireworks?
MacAllister disliked bullies. And people who were cruel to animals. Here were these malevolent sons of bitches, with all that technology, and they were like kids stomping on an anthill. Pathetic. He wondered whether they were related to the idiots who’d devised the omega clouds.
Whatever, he wasn’t unhappy to get away. The prospect of sitting around waiting for the moonriders to come back was not appealing. Who knew what they might be crazy enough to do? Still, with Valya on the scene, he tried to look dismayed that they were leaving. It was safe because he knew Valya, like a good captain, would listen seriously to the protests of her passengers but follow her instructions.
“What’s particularly annoying,” Eric said, “is that we came so close. If we’d stayed here the first time, we might have been able to wave them down. Say hello. Or tell them to go to hell. Something.”
Go to hell, MacAllister thought, would have made a great opening in a dialogue with another species. That would look inspirational in the schoolbooks. He immediately began thinking of other moving first lines. Stick it in your ear, you nitwits.
Get your sorry asses on the next train out of town.
Sorry, boys, but we don’t cotton to strangers here.
He sighed. Imagined himself as a sheriff in the long ago, standing quietly in the dusk with a six-gun on his hip, watching three horsemen slink away.
ERIC WAS GENUINELY frustrated. All his life he’d been watching other people come back on the Academy’s ships after scoring triumphs. We found an ancient city here. And a new type of bioform there. We rescued the Goompahs. We did this and we did that. And there’d always been a world of acclaim waiting. Eric had led the cheers. Now first contact with a technological species was, finally, within reach, the golden apple, the ultimate prize, and he was being pushed aside.
He thought about getting on the circuit to Hutch and demanding she change the directive. But he knew she would not. She wouldn’t risk the girl under any circumstances.
At this moment, they were scrambling at the Academy to staff another mission and get it out here. Somebody else, a bunch of overweight academics who had spent their lives in classrooms, would get the assignment, and they’d be the ones to say hello. And they’d come back afterward and everyone would shake their hands.
And once again, it would be left to Eric to ladle on the praise.
VEGA IS LOCATED in the Lyra constellation, twenty-five light-years from Earth. It’s a main sequence blue-white dwarf star, roughly three times Sol’s diameter, and almost sixty times as luminous. It’s much younger, only 350 million years old. But because of its size, and the rate at which it’s burning hydrogen, it will exhaust its supply in another 650 million years.
It has a pair of Jovians in distant orbits, both more remote than Pluto. There are several terrestrial worlds, including one in the biozone, which is seven times farther out than Sol’s, but it harbors no life.
Vega was a popular stop on the Blue Tour because of the presence of Romulus and Remus, a pair of terrestrials of almost identical dimensions, both with atmospheres, locked in a tight gravitational embrace. Technically, they, too, were in the biozone, but they barely qualified, out on the farther edge, where the winter never really went away.
Also lifeless, they were nevertheless beautiful worlds, only 160,000 kilometers apart, half the distance between Earth and the moon. Both had oceans and continents. Snow covered most of the land; the oceans were a concoction of ice and water, prevented by tidal action from freezing completely. The system had an ethereal, crystal quality, like a cosmic Christmas ornament.
The tour ships, in their souvenir shops, carried graphic displays, vids, and models of the system. It easily outsold everything else on the shelves.
Valya waited until she was close enough to get the full effect before putting the twin worlds on the displays. They were a compelling sight. Predictably, Amy squealed with delight, and MacAllister admitted she had a point.
“You know,” Eric said, “having Amy along has really added something to the trip.”
MacAllister smiled wearily. “Indeed it has.”
THEY WENT INTO orbit around Romulus. “The planets in this system,” Valya said, “are quite young. Like their sun. They’re still undergoing the formation process.”
“What does that actually entail?” asked MacAllister.
“Mostly, they get plunked by a lot of debris, Mac. There are no giants close in to clear out the rocks and pebbles, so it’ll go on for a long time.”
MacAllister saw one or two streaks in the atmosphere below.
“Anybody want to go down and look?” she asked.
That brought another burst of enthusiasm from Amy. Eric said yes, of course he would go.
“How about you, Mac?”
“You say there’s nothing alive down there?”
“Nope. Nothing at all. Not so much as a microbe.”
He wondered about earthquakes and volcanoes. The worlds were so close to each other, he suspected there were all kinds of disruptions. He was more cautious since his experience at Maleiva III. But he couldn’t back off again. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”
Valya reviewed e-suit procedures, and they all put on the harnesses. They did a checkout routine, went below, and climbed into the lander.
Minutes later the launch doors rolled back and they looked out at the night sky. It was studded with stars and dominated by the two planets, both half in daylight. “You want to say the word, Mac?” she asked.