Raising her voice, Dana said, “You always were far too smug to like, Professor. Yet I say, good luck with whatever thing you are presently trying to achieve.”
Maddox wondered if this uncharacteristic flowery speech was an effect of the stimulants Doctor Rich had taken.
Dana glanced around the table. “This is the plan,” she said. “We will set the scout on autopilot. It will approach the sentinel. Likely, we will see some interesting form of destruction.”
“What kind of silly plan is that?” Keith asked, snapping his fingers. “Phtt, so ends our expedition?”
“I said put the scout on autopilot,” Dana said. “All of us will leave before Geronimo is destroyed.”
“Where are we going to be?” Keith asked. “Floating in space watching the bloody fireworks?”
Doctor Rich raised her eyebrows. “You’re sharper than you look, Ensign.”
“What?” Keith shouted. “You’re serious?”
“As I said, it is a harebrained scheme. Professor Ludendorff claimed it would work, given the right adjustments on our part. That’s what I’ve been working on for the last fifteen hours. I’ve been trying to remember what sequence he said will succeed.”
“Your plan calls for us to spacewalk off Geronimo and send the scout to its doom against the sentinel?” Maddox asked.
Doctor Rich didn’t seem to hear the question. She stared at a bulkhead. Maddox wondered if she’d fallen into a trance.
Suddenly, she began to speak in a soft voice. “We had a death on our expedition. A crewmember named Hassan died while we were in the alien star system. We gave him all the trappings of a Muslim burial—the man had been a renegade of the Wahhabi sect. Then we set him adrift in the system as if we were at sea on Earth. The sentinel hurried to investigate. It even launched a small vessel, which scooped up our dead friend. The shuttle returned to the sentinel.”
“With the body?” asked Maddox.
“The professor thought so,” Dana said.
“Do you, or he, have any thoughts as to why it did that?” Maddox asked.
“Ludendorff had many ideas,” Dana said. “The one he finally fixated upon was the sentinel wishing to dissect the individual for study.”
“Why did the professor pick that idea in particular?” Maddox asked.
“I wondered the same thing,” Dana said. “Why not as reasonably believe the sentinel tried to save one of its own species? Suppose the computer, or whatever the aliens used in lieu of one, finally malfunctioned. It tried to save the corpse, believing that it was really trying to save one of its own, bringing it to the ship for resuscitation. The starship is old. One would suspect failing systems. The marvel is that the vessel runs at all.”
Keith shifted in his seat. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but if the sentinel is picking us up to run tests, I think it will have a way to subdue those it catches.”
“Very good, Ensign,” Dana said. “I pointed out the same thing to the professor. He assured me he would figure something out when the time came.”
“Did he tell you what the something was?” Maddox asked.
“No.”
Maddox grew uncomfortable. “What’s your plan for our defeating this possible subduing agent?”
Dana fixed her bloodshot eyes on him. “I did a lot of pondering. I finally realized the solution.” She pointed at him. “You’re going to defeat the subduing agent, Captain Maddox. You have guns and a fighting crew. As I said, I’m also hoping that after six thousand years something over there has fallen apart. If not, the subduing agent will likely defeat us.”
“If your hope is true,” Maddox said, “—that the ancient starship has fallen apart—it may not be much help to us against the New Men.”
“First things first,” Dana said. “We’re not on the starship yet. Now you know my plan for getting us aboard. Are you willing to attempt it?”
Maddox sat back. She was right. It was a crazy plan. “One thing bothers me,” he said. “Back on Earth, Brigadier O’Hara spoke about needing people with the right brain patterns. She said the professor had spoken about it.”
“I don’t recall that,” Dana said.
“Then why did the brigadier and the Lord High Admiral say that?” Maddox asked. “Cook had me gather the people I did due to those supposed patterns.”
“I have no idea,” Dana said. “Maybe it was subterfuge on their part, something to throw off the enemy if they learned of it.”
Maddox doubted that. It would have to remain a mystery for now. “I’m willing to attempt your plan, Doctor, or the professor’s plan as you say. What about the rest of you.”
One by one, the others agreed that any attempt was better than none.
“Then we’d better hurry,” said Dana. “The sentinel will be here soon enough.”
-32-
Captain Maddox floated outside the scout, staring in grim anticipation. The plan had sounded saner sitting in the wardroom. Out here, doubts began to assail him.
The entire venture had been a desperate gamble from the beginning. The operation showed the Star Watch’s—humanity’s—weakness against the genetic marvels, the so-called New Men.
He kept wondering what group had fled the Oikumene to travel into the Beyond to create better men and women. If Star Watch knew the answer, it might help unravel the mystery. It might reveal a weakness in the supermen. What had Per Lomax told him? The New Men came as gods in judgment of old-style humanity.
Growing progressively sleepier, Maddox blinked in an effort to remain awake. If the enemy were gods, he had to become a godslayer. This lunatic plan of acting as corpses had to work.
Ever so slowly, Maddox turned his head. The others drifted nearby in their vacc-suits. Dana had explained it. She would override the robo-doctor, injecting them with a hibernating drug, simulating death. Each of them wore a medikit around their waist. When something attempted to peel off his spacesuit, the medikit would inject the wearer with stimulants.
Maddox’s final hibernating injection would come soon. He had taken stage one aboard the Geronimo. Afterward, he had carted the comatose people into the outer bay. Opening the hatch, Maddox let decompression eject the crew in a tumbling mass. With a thruster-pack, he glided into the void after them. He’d gathered the sleeping crew, bringing them to a central area.
Now, Maddox watched Geronimo drifting away. The red giant blazed its fierce starlight, casting the system in a red nimbus.
Under the computer’s guidance, the scout came alive. Its thruster port glowed orange and then red. A moment later, blue exhaust poured out for several seconds. That shoved the Patrol scout toward the ancient vessel.
Maddox watched sleepily, imagining that Geronimo went to investigate the prize. Ah, what was this? His eyes blinked rapidly. Another light flared into existence, one farther away. The dot of light grew, and so did a pinpoint object.
In time, a chill swept through Maddox. He saw it then: the ancient sentinel. It was coming, growing in size.
A hoarse chuckle reverberated inside his helmet. The annihilator came to investigate the foreign objects. What would the alien starship do to the scout and then to them as corpses?
A purple beam slashed through the void. The tip touched Geronimo. In a flash of destruction, the scout exploded as metal rained in all directions. Water, coolants, bedding material, electronics and computer pieces all flashed into the void as tiny hot objects. Like that, their workhorse, their home these past months, was gone.
Did the scout travel far enough away from us? Are we safe from the blast radius?
Maddox tried to turn his head to see what had happened to the others. The muscles in his neck refused his mental commands. The medikit must have already given him the stage two injection. His eyelids were becoming too heavy to keep open.