“Hmmmm. Beat us with the stick and tempt us with the carrot. Not too subtle. And neither are the orders.” Gerald read out loud from the second printout. “ ‘In light of this new and important information, you are ordered to break off contact with the CORE, return to near-Earth space and prepare to rendezvous with NaPurHab.’ ”
“Well, what do you think?” Dianne asked.
“I think it’s been a long time since Bernhardt gave us a direct order,” Gerald replied.
“That’s because it’s been a longer time since we obeyed a direct order. Maybe that’s a hint that he really wants us to do it this time.”
“Sounds like you think we ought to comply,” Gerald said.
Dianne propped herself up on her elbows and looked to Gerald, nodding thoughtfully. “Sounds like I do,” she agreed.
“There’s one other thing,” Gerald said. “One I don’t like much. Maybe we should send back a request that they send us some people.”
“People?” Dianne asked.
“Experts,” Gerald said. “We’ve got some good techs on board here—but if we ever do go for the Lone World, I’d like some of the real experts with us.”
“How would they get here?”
“On the cargo flights to NaPurHab. We’d collect them the same time as the cargo.”
“Do you have any idea how risky a flight that is?”
Gerald nodded, his eyes on the floor. “Yes I do,” he said. “But if there is a Breeding Binge on the way, the risks in staying home aren’t much lower. We may never get another chance for new personnel again. And a few of the people who tracked down this Lone World might make all the difference later on.”
“What’s your latest estimate on how bad a Breeding Binge could be?” Dianne asked.
“If Earth manages to kill off the first wave and the Charonians give up after that, maybe about as bad as a small nuclear war. If the Charonians don’t give up, maybe the collapse of civilization,” Gerald said. “Maybe a mass extinction.”
Dianne did not speak for a moment. There was nothing that could be said to that. But Gerald might be right about having some of those experts on board. If Earth fell, and the Terra Nova had to fight on alone, Dianne would want all the expertise she could get.
“All right,” she said. “Send in that request, and sign both our names to it. Then start passing boost orders. Start to secure for main-engine firing, and compute the standard spread of possible course options. Calculate minimum time, minimum fuel, and intermediates, and bring me the results in six hours. Eight hours until boost.”
Gerald nodded. He stood there a moment, as if he were trying to think of something to say himself. But he left it to a simple “Yes ma’am.”
He turned and left, closing the hatch behind him.
Captain Dianne Steiger shut her eyes and rolled over on her side. Sleep. If the ship was going to get under way in a few hours, she needed to get some sleep. She really ought to get off the couch and get into bed.
But underneath her calm, underneath her exhaustion, there was something more.
There in the fear, mixed in with the horror of the news, with the terrible thought of a Breeding Binge, there was a thrill of excitement as well.
At last, she thought. At last.
The call to arms had come.
Fourteen
Garbage In
“If you look into the background of how the Abduction happened, it is at least possible it could have been avoided altogether, if a senior scientist had been willing to listen to a subordinate.”
The Sunstar was high in the east as Sianna stepped into Bernhardt’s office. Normally, Sianna was not that aware of the sun’s position when she was in an office, but then most offices had opaque walls.
Wolf Bernhardt’s New York office was not anywhere near as far aboveground as the MRI main level was below, but it seemed that way. It was in a twenty-third-century monstrosity of a NeoGoth tower on Columbus Avenue, about twenty-five blocks south of Columbia. The office itself was huge, a big, sparsely furnished space. The floor was gleaming hardwood, and the walls plain white. Bernhardt’s desk, easily the size of Sianna’s whole office, was an immaculate slab of polished white wood.
There were no pictures on the wall, no shelves, no decoration. It was a room perfect for a man given over to neatness. But insofar as Sianna was interested, the key fact was that the door into the room was on the north side of the room, and the south wall, behind Bernhardt’s desk, was a single huge pane of non-reflective glass, affording a completely unobstructed view that took in the whole Manhattan skyline from a hundred meters up. The spires and towers of the city gleamed in the morning light, framed by a perfect blue sky beyond.
Every fear Sianna had ever had of enclosed spaces vanished, at least for the moment, to be replaced instantly by acute agoraphobia, before she settled down. It was all right. It was all right. Just a spectacular view. Nothing to be afraid of. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped through the door into the room. At first her eyes were fixed on the emptiness, and the glorious city beyond, where a wall was supposed to be. But then she tore her eyes away and looked around the room.
Wally and Sakalov were already there, sitting in two of the visitor’s chairs. Wally had a pocket computer out, and seemed ready to read something off the screen. But of course, it would have been more remarkable if he didn’t have some sort of hardware with him. Sakalov had a notepack as well, the sort that was mostly used to show flat images.
A tray full of coffee things, pastries and fruit and breads, sat on Bernhardt’s desk, and all three men had been helping themselves. That in and of itself was incredible.
For a man like that to be in this celebratory a mood was amazing. For Wolf Bernhardt to put out coffee and danish, exposing his immaculate office to the risk of crumbs and coffee spills, was right up there with the Pope leading a conga line. But be that as it may, all three men were quite plainly happy and relaxed, leaning back in their chairs.
She realized that she had her arms folded up tight in front of her chest. She forced her arms to her sides.
“Ah, Miss Colette,” Bernhardt said, his voice buoyant and expansive. He did not take his feet down off the desk, let alone stand up to greet her. Instead, he kept his comfortable position and waved her toward the chair closest to the window. “You’re just in time. Mr. Sturgis and Dr. Sakalov were just expounding a bit on your idea about the Earth being held in a sort of stasis orbit for those missing thirty-seven minutes. Sit, sit. Have some coffee.”
Sianna forced herself to move toward the desk and the coffee things, certain that everyone in the room was watching her every move and could tell just how self-conscious she was. Moving with what she hoped was studied casualness, she took a cup and poured for herself. She took her cup and saucer, crossed to her chair, and sat down, swiveling around in the chair to partially hide her face from Bernhardt without being rude. She hoped.
She looked toward Wally and tried to look as if she were paying attention to what he was saying, instead of being scared to death of Bernhardt and a trifle over-aware of the invisible glass wall and the sheer drop-off behind it, a mere two meters behind her back.
“—of course, most wormhole links are instantaneous,” Wally was saying. “That only makes sense if you were trying for fast transportation. But you don’t have to make wormholes that way. Suppose you, ah, were after something else, like a holding tank, say. Some way to hold something—say, a planet.