Like buoy-tenders, who played chess with ghost-threads out of the dark and read antique books.
Last of the coffee fizz. He keyed up the French lessons. Comment allez-vous, mademoiselle?
And listened and sketched, a Teach Yourself Art course, correspondence school, that wanted him to draw eggs and put faces on them: he multitasked. He filled his screen with eggs and turned them into people he knew, some he liked, some he didn't, while he muttered French. It was the way to stay sane and happy out here, while BettyBdanced her way along the prescribed—
Alarm blipped. Usually the racket was the buoy noting an arrival, but this being an ecliptic buoy, it didn't get action itself, just relayed from the network, time-bound, just part of the fabric of knowledge—a freighter arrived at zenith. Somebody left at nadir.
Arrival, it said. Arrival within its range and coming—
God, coming fast. He scrambled to bring systems up and listen to Number 17. Number 17, so far as a robot could be, was in a state of panic, sending out a warning. Collision, collision, collision.
There was an object out there. Something Number 17 had heard, as it waited to hear—but Number 17 didn't expecttrouble anymore. Peacetime ships didn't switch off their squeal. Long-range scan on the remote buoys didn't operate, wasn't switched on these days—power-saving measure, saving the corporations maintenance and upkeep. Whatever it picked up was close. Damned close.
Maintenance keys. Maintenance could test it. He keyed, a long, long way from it receiving: turn on, wake up longscan, Number 17, Number 17.
He relayed Number 17's warning on, system-wide, hear and relay, hear and relay. He sent into the cyberstream:
SANDMAN: Collision alert from Number 17. Heads up.
But it was a web of time-stretch. A long time for the nearest authority to hear his warning. Double that to answer.
Number 17 sent an image, at least part of one. Then stopped sending.
Wasn't talking now. Wasn't talking, wasn't talking.
Hours until Beta Station even noticed. Until Pell noticed. Until the whole buoy network accounted that Number 17 wasn't transmitting, and that that section of the system chart had frozen. Stopped.
The image was shadowy. Near-black on black.
"Damn." An Outsider didn't talk much, didn't use voice, just the key-taps that filled the digital edges of the vast communications web. And he keyed.
SANDMAN: Number 17 stopped transmitting. Nature of object. . . SANDMAN: . . . Unknown. Vectors from impact unknown. . .
SANDMAN: . . . Impact one hour fifteen minutes before my location. The informational wavefront, that was. The instant of space-time with 17's warning had rolled past him and headed past Frog-Prince and Unicorn and the rest, before it could possibly reach Beta. They lived in a spacetime of subsequent events that widened like ripples in a tank, until scatter randomized the information into a universal noise.
And BettyBwas hurtling toward Number 17, and suddenly wasn't going anywhere useful. She might get the order to go look-see, in which case braking wasn't a good idea. She might get the order to return, but he doubted it would come for hours. Decision-making took time in boardrooms. Decision-making had to happen hell and away faster out here, with what might be pieces loose.
He shifted colors on the image, near-black for green. Nearer black for blue. Black stayed black. Ball with an inward or outward dimple and a whole bunch of planar surfaces. He didn't like what he saw. He transmitted his raw effort as he built it. Cigar-shape. Gray scale down one side of the image, magnification in the top line. Scan showed a flock of tiny blips in the same location. Scan was foxed. Totally.
"God."
SANDMAN: Transmitting image. Big mother.
A keystroke switched modes. A button-click rotated the colorized image. Not a ball. Cigar-shape head-on. Cigar-shape with deflecting planes all over it.
SANDMAN: It's an inert. An old inert missile, inbound. It's blown Buoy 17. . . SANDMAN: . . . Trying to determineV. Don't know class or mass. Cylindrical. SANDMAN: . . . Buoy gone silent. May have lost antenna. May have lost orientation. . . SANDMAN: . . . May have been destroyed. Warn traffic of possible buoy fragments. . . SANDMAN: . . . originating at buoy at 1924h, fragments including. . . SANDMAN: . . . high-mass power plant and fuel.
Best he could do. The wavefront hadn't near reached Beta. And the buoy that could have given him longscan wasn't talking—or no longer existed. The visual out here in the dark, where the sun was a star among other stars, gave him a few scattered flashes of gray that might be buoy fragments. He went on capturing images.
BettyBwent hurtling on toward the impact-point. Whatever was out there might have clipped the buoy, or might have plowed through the low-mass girder-structures like a bullet through a snowball, sending solid pieces of the buoy flying in all directions, themselves dangerous to small craft. The inert, the bullet coming their way, was high-v and high-mass, a solid chunk of metal that might have been traveling for fifty years and more, an iron slug fired by a long-lost warship in a decades-ago war. Didn't need a warhead. Inerts tended to be far longer than wide because the fire mechanism in the old carriers stored them in bundles and fired them in swarms, but no matter how it was oriented when it hit, it was a killer—and if it tumbled, it was that much harder to predict, cutting that much wider a path of destruction. Mass and velocity were its destructive power. An arrow out of a crossbow that, at starship speeds, could take out another ship, wreck a space station, cheap and sure, nothing fragile about it.
After the war, they'd swept the lanes-Pell system had been a battle zone. Ordnance had flown every which way. They'd worked for years. And the last decade-they'd thought they had the lanes clear.
Clearly not. He had a small scattering of flashes. He thought they might be debris out of the buoy, maybe the power plant, or one of the several big dishes. He ran calculations, trying to figure what was coming, where the pieces were going, and he could use help-God, he could use help. He transmitted what he had. He kept transmitting.
FROGPRINCE: Sandman, I copy. Are you all right?
SANDMAN: FrogPrince, spread it out. I need some help here. . . UNICORN: Is this a joke, Sandman?
SANDMAN: I'm sending raw feed, all the data I've got. Help. Mayday. LOVER18: Sandman, what's up?
SANDMAN: Unicorn, this is serious.
DUTCHMAN: I copy, Sandman. My numbers man is on it.