In fifty-two years, the majestic view hadn’t changed. Simon was very determined about that. Buildings, forests, fields, drainage ditches, and roads now spread out over the virgin land in the valleys behind Randtown, but there was no industry, none of the factories and business units that normally barnacled the outskirts of human settlements. The inhabitants could import what they liked down the long toll highway that was still their only physical link to the rest of the human race—it wasn’t economical to build a railroad beside it, and there was nowhere for an airport. Simon wasn’t out to change the majority Commonwealth culture, he just wanted to keep the worst aspects out of his little part. So the farms were organic, the town’s principal income came from tourism, its energy was geothermal and solar; combustion engines were illegal; recycling was a minor religion, and sewage was treated in secure bioreactors to prevent the slightest chance that any foreign human-derived chemical could ever pollute the precious pure water of Lake Trine’ba.
As environments went, Mark had gone from one extreme to the other.
Virtual vision showed him a ghostly image of the Second Chance slowly maneuvering itself into its assembly platform dock high above Anshun. He was struck by its condition, how unworn it was. After such a voyage there should surely be some signs of stress, a few meteor impacts, scorch marks—just something to prove how far it had been and what it had seen. But it looked as new and clean as the day it departed.
He stopped at one of the stalls behind the promenade and bought a tuna, shrimp, talarot, sweetcorn, and mayo salad sandwich for lunch, along with some vegetarian sushi and a small something for dessert. It was Sasmi who sold it to him; she’d arrived in town a few months ago for the start of the snowboarding season. Judging from her raven hair and flattish face, Mark had thought her heritage was Oriental, until she told him her ancestors were actually Finnish. A sweet girl who had dived headfirst into everything Randtown offered: the friends, parties, sports. Who always found the time to talk to Mark, not that he was singled out, she just had an irrepressibly sunny nature.
Today even she was caught up in the drama of the starship’s return. They swapped: “Have you heard?” and “Did you see the bit where…” as he watched her assembling his bap. He walked away back down the promenade, her parting smile lingering in his mind. There had never been so much temptation in his life before. It was an undisputed quality of Randtown; everybody here was so busy cramming their life full of events that mostly seemed to be parties and meeting other people, yet with all that they were never hurried. He had taken months to learn how to slow down and chill out after Augusta’s lean, focused routine of work and family, where enjoyment was centered solely around entertainment. His only fear about living here now was that he would give in one day, some of the girls were just divine.
Olivia was still on her break when Mark got back to the garage. He’d only just sat down and started on his triple chip chocolate and quorknut muffin when CST released the real bombshell. Two people had been left behind. The news was only just breaking because the company had been informing and counseling the families. Mark had enough trouble coping with that, never mind that one of them was actually Dudley Bose. For a while he was furious with the rest of Second Chance ’s crew for abandoning them out there, such a thing was surely the ultimate betrayal. Just thinking about that much distance made him shiver. Then Captain Wilson Kime made a real-time statement. He was dressed in his full dark uniform, hair clipped neat and short, staring unflinchingly into the camera, knowing how many people would be staring back. All of them with one question on their lips. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait for them?
“It is with the most profound regret that I find myself ending our historic voyage with this saddest possible news,” Wilson said. His deep solemn voice was so sincere Mark immediately switched to feeling sorry for him and the terrible weight of command. “I was forced to make the decision which every captain fears the most, to risk the lives of every person on board, or to leave our friends and colleagues behind. This mission was launched with the express commitment of bringing back vital information on Dyson Alpha, and the remarkable barrier surrounding this star. While the safety of my crew is paramount to me personally as well as enshrined in my duty, I could not overlook our ultimate objective. We found ourselves in a situation that placed the entire ship in grave danger. Faced with these circumstances, I had no choice other than to leave. It is a choice that I will have to face down every day for the rest of my life, always asking myself if we’d just stayed that fraction longer would they have got back in contact? But those few extra moments could equally have brought us calamity. Then we might never have brought back the information we have. The Commonwealth might not have been warned that the barrier is down, and the aliens it contained do not appear to be friendly. It is that information which I considered more important than the lives of our comrades. I know that if the tragic situation had been reversed, and I was out there lost in the alien station, that I would have wanted my shipmates to carry the essential knowledge home no matter what the personal cost. All of us undertook this voyage knowing there would be danger involved. None of us hoped it would be so profound. Thank you for your time.”
Mark slumped back in his seat, and pushed out a long breath. Given those circumstances, he supposed he would have done exactly the same thing. It was still a pretty frightening decision, though. And the captain thought the aliens were dangerous. That wasn’t good, not good at all.
The news company started playing images of the Watchtower. Mark followed the astronauts as they slid through the dark tunnels of the station. There seemed to be miles of the eerie passageways knotted together. The harsh breathing of the contact team members reverberated around the showroom office; Mark felt himself being there as gloved hands stretched out at the edges of the image, grabbing frayed sections of the tunnel wall to haul himself along. Then he was slow-motion somersaulting into an empty chamber. Conduits on the wall had split open, allowing optical fibers to drift out like some kind of slender aquatic plant. He followed them along to a box containing circuit cubes, resembling fogged glass. Excited voices called out. The gauntlets tried to tease one of the cubes out, but it started crumbling at the touch. Another, calmer voice instructed them to cut the whole box free of its mountings.
Mark shook himself. He wanted to go through the Watchtower inch by inch, examining its dark mysteries for himself. One night this week he’d take the time and lie on his bed, running a TSI of the exploration.
The news company switched to Senator Thompson Burnelli who was standing in front of Washington’s imposing Senate Hall. A broad semicircle of reporters was gathered around him, while he was flanked by two aides.
“Obviously I am disappointed by certain aspects of the flight,” Burnelli said. “Although I would like to take this moment to express my sympathy to the families of both Dudley Bose and Emmanuelle Verbeke for the shock they received today. In relation to that, I do think there are some very serious questions raised by the way the Second Chance left the area so abruptly. I believe a lot more effort should have been made to ascertain the nature of the Dyson aliens. As to the supposed threat: nothing actually fired on our ship, a few robot devices were getting close, that’s all. We don’t know they were missiles. Kime could have taken a second, a third, even a fourth look; kept on trying until we got some real information. The Second Chance was equipped with FTL, they could leap out clean and free from any genuine danger.”
“What’s going to happen now?” a reporter asked.