A fresh wave of dizziness overcame her, and she shut her eyes, but that only made it worse, made it feel as if her head were spinning.
She opened her eyes and stared straight up at the blank, black video screen. Calmly now. Take a deep breath. Another. Easy. Easy. She unclenched her fists and lowered her hands, folded them on her stomach. Easy. Easy. Her face was sweaty, and she wiped it with the back of her hand. She ran her hand through her hair. She could tell it was a mass of sweaty tangles, but there was not much she could do about that just now.
Calmly. Calmly. Nothing could hurt her in here. That was the whole idea of the permod, after all. A box for keeping a person alive and well.
She was all right. Everything was fine.
A pill. A knockout pill. She could take it, and sleep, and not be afraid. She reached for the tiny padded door marked with a red cross—but then she stopped herself. No. Not yet. Maybe not at all. She was off on a journey into the unknown, after all. She was bound to face a lot of things more terrifying than brief and safe confinement in a box.
She would have to face those dangers, not sleep through them. No. No pills.
The Guardian watched over its patch of space, straining to extend us radar senses just a bit more, see just a little farther into the darkness of space. The task was made no easier by the fact that all its fellow Guardians were doing the same, or by the fact that space seemed filled with the strange debris being flung out by the planet it protected. There seemed to be more and more and more of it.
Where was it all coming from? What did it all mean? Was it perhaps some strange new danger? Perhaps some scheme of the Adversary’s? The spawn of some malfunctioning rogue Breeder that had landed on the planet and begun breeding on its own, without the Sphere’s wishing it? The Guardian struggled against its own rising fear, knowing full well that its judgment could be impaired by such panicky emotion.
But no counterweight, no calm and soothing word of command came from on high to reassure the Guardian. No one told it what to do. How could it serve properly without instruction?
Surely action, any action, was better than inaction at such a time. There! There was a target. It was not a threat at present, but space was full of targets that maneuvered, shifted their orbits, re-aimed themselves. This one could do that! It might be a covert infiltration ship, filled with the agents of the Adversary.
Attack. The Guardian realized it must attack. It reoriented its radars, focusing its main beam down on the target. It shifted its course, made ready for the kill.
Joanne Beadle got up from her console and stretched. At some unnoticed moment of the night, the ops center had turned quiet, shifting from a mood of taut urgency to something more akin to quiet expectancy. Joanne looked about the large, semi-darkened room. There were empty consoles now, people slipping off for naps, operators getting friends to cover while they made a stop at the head or grabbed a hurried bite to eat.
Joanne Beadle had wide-set grey eyes and dark brown hair that set off her pale skin. She was a careful, owlish sort of person, slow and thoughtful, but ready to move fast once she was sure she was ready. She prided herself on being able to learn fast and remember it all— and she had needed to be able to do both things for this job. The spaceport director had chosen her as Bernhardt’s on-site technical adviser during his visit, and stuck her with that job the moment Bernhardt arrived at the spaceport. She was supposed to be able to answer all his questions about the operation, the Charonians, the Moonpoint Ring, and the SCOREs. It was a lot of studying on short notice. She had been holding her own so far, but it was nice to get a moment’s peace.
Joanne looked behind her. Dr. Wolf Bernhardt slept on a dumpy couch in the corner, his body twisted into a posture that could not be comfortable, his face looking drawn and exhausted, even in sleep. There was some ancient quote from somewhere about this sort of moment—something about the last moment of night, just before morning, where everything seemed to have stopped for good and all. It all felt changeless, as if this was going to be forever. A little dark, a little quiet, a never-ending stream of cargo ships lifting off Earth— some getting to NaPurHab, some being destroyed.
The business of getting the cargo convoys to NaPurHab had settled down from panicky improvisation to a steady, grinding battle of endurance. The Charonians had nearly all the advantages, of course, and once the cargo ships were launched, there was not a great deal the control operators could do.
But here and there were holes in the patrol patterns, craft that could be shifted to other courses and so moved out of danger. There were chances to fool the Charonian radar. More often of course, they could only mark down another ship as destroyed and determine if it was necessary—or possible—to launch a replacement cargo.
Joanne stretched again, took a few steps back and forth to get the kinks out, and sat back down. Nothing changing, everything the same…
—The alarm went off and Joanne jerked to attention. She reached out and shut off the audio alert out of sheer reflex with one hand while she called up display details with the other.
She stared at the display for fully a half a minute before she understood it—and then wished she didn’t. Something cold gripped at her insides. Sakalov. The old man, the nice old man who had never hurt anyone. He was in that carrier.
Bernhardt. She had to wake Bernhardt. For a tiny, fleeting moment, she toyed with the idea of leaving him alone. There was no logical reason to wake him. There was nothing he could do, and the knowledge would bring him no benefit. Would he really want to witness the death of his old friend, the man he had sent out—the man he had killed? Yes, he would be angry at her for not alerting him— but he would not live the rest of his life with the memory of watching his friend die.
Then it dawned on her that Wolf Bernhardt had remained here for the sole purpose of watching his friends die, if need be. He was here to face the consequences of his actions.
She went over to him, reached out with a hesitant arm and shook his shoulder. “Sir. Sir. CORE 326 is targeting Cargo Craft 43— Sakalov’s permod is—”
Bernhardt’s eyes snapped open, and he was on his feet, at the display controls, punching at the touchpads to display full data on CORE 326. He stared at the screen, his face expressionless, so calm and thoughtful that he might as well be reading over the budget projections for the next quarter. He stabbed down a finger and switched the commlink over to another setting.
“Countermeasures,” a man’s voice answered from somewhere.
“Countermeasures, this is Bernhardt,” Bernhardt said, his voice betraying nothing. “Give me status on CC43. CORE 326 is targeting it, and CC43 is carrying a passenger. Where is our response?”
“We are responding now, sir. There is a full set of countermeasure modules on board CC43. We are deploying them now. But CC43 is now over two hundred thousand kilometers from Earth. The speed-of-light delay…”
“Well, dammit, see that there are no other kinds of delay!” Wolf snapped. It was the first crack in his armor, his first display of emotion.
“Ah, ah, yes sir. But it takes some time for the countermeasures to deploy. We should see deployment start in about fifteen seconds.”