“We’re hailing,” he said. “No answer.” He paused for a second, then announced, “Estimated about three times our size.” He sounded stunned. Carefully, he said, “The comp estimates it’s decelerating from above the speed of light.”
She couldn’t help herself. “That’s impossible,” she snapped. “Your eyes are tricking you. Check it again.”
He hit some more buttons, and the numbers on the screen twisted themselves into an extrapolation graph. Whatever it was, the oncoming ship was still moving faster than Aster’s Hope—and it was still decelerating.
For a second, she put her hands over her face, squeezed the heels of her palms against her temples. Her pulse felt like she was going into adrenaline overload. But this was what she’d been trained for. Abruptly, she dropped her arms and looked at the screens again. The blip was still coming, but the graph hadn’t changed.
From above the speed of light. Even though the best Asterin scientists had always said that was impossible.
Oh, well, she muttered to herself. One more law of nature down the tubes. Easy come, easy go.
“Why don’t they contact us?” she asked. “If we’re aware of them, they must know we’re here.”
“Don’t need to,” Gracias replied through his concentration. “Been scanning us since they hit space-normal speed. The comp reports scanner probes everywhere. Strong enough to take your blood pressure.” Then he stiffened, sat up straighter, spat a curse. “Probes are trying to break into the comp.”
Temple gripped the arms of her seat. This was his department; she was helpless. “Can they do it? Can you stop them?”
“Encryption’s holding them out.” He studied his readouts, flicked his eyes past the screens. “Won’t last. Take com.”
Without waiting for an answer, he keyed his console to hers and got out of his seat. Quickly, he went to the other main console in the room, the comp repro board.
Feeling clumsy now as she never did when she was working with tools or hardware, she accepted com and began trying to monitor the readouts. But the numbers swam, and the prompts didn’t seem to make sense. Operating in emergency mode, the comp kept asking her to ask it questions; but she couldn’t think of any for it. Instead, she asked Gracias, “What’re you doing?”
His hands stabbed up and down the console. He was still sweating. “Changing the encryption,” he said. “Whole series of changes. Putting them on a loop.” When he was done, he took a minute to double-check his repro. Then he gave a grunt of satisfaction and came back to his com seat. While he keyed his controls away from Temple, he said, “This way, the comp can’t be broken by knowing the present code. Have to know what code’s coming up next. That loop changes often enough to keep us safe for a while.”
She permitted herself a sigh of relief—and a soft snarl of anger at the oncoming ship. She didn’t like feeling helpless. “If those bastards can’t break the comp, do you think they’ll try to contact us?”
He shrugged, glanced at his board. “Channels are open. They talk, we’ll hear.” For a second, he chewed his lower lip. Then he leaned back in his seat and swung around to face her. His eyes were dark with fear.
“Don’t like this,” he said distinctly. “Don’t like it at all. A faster-than-light ship coming straight for us. Straight for Aster. And they don’t talk. Instead, they try to break the comp.”
She knew his fear. She was afraid herself. But when he looked like he needed her, she put her own feelings aside. “Would you say,” she said, drawling so she would sound sardonic and calm, “that we’re being approached by somebody hostile?”
He nodded dumbly.
“Well, we’re safe enough. Maybe the speed of light isn’t unbreakable, but a c-vector shield is. So what we have to worry about is Aster. If that ship gets past us, we’ll never catch up with it. How far away is it now?”
Gracias turned back to his console, called up some numbers. “Five minutes.” His face didn’t show it, but she could hear in his voice that he was grateful for her show of steadiness.
“I don’t think we should wait to see what happens,” she said. “We should send a message home now.”
“Right.” He went to work immediately, composing data on the screens, calling up the scant history of Aster’s Hope’s contact with the approaching ship. “Continuous broadcast,” he murmured as he piped information to the transmitters. “Constant update. Let Aster know everything we can.”
Temple nodded her approval, then gaped in astonishment as the screens broke up into electronic garbage. A sound like frying circuitry spat from all the speakers at once—from the hailing channels as well as from intraship. She almost let out a shout of surprise; but training and recognition bit it back. She knew what that was.
“Jammer,” Gracias said. “We’re being jammed.”
“From this distance?” she demanded. “From this distance? That kind of signal should take”—she checked her readout—“three and some fraction minutes to get here. How do they do that?”
He didn’t reply for a few seconds; he was busy restoring order to the screens. Then he said, “They’ve got faster-than-light drive. Scanners make ours look like toys. Why not better radio?”
“Or maybe,” she put in harshly, “they started broadcasting their jammer as soon as they picked us up.” In spite of her determination to be calm, she was breathing hard, sucking uncertainty and anger through her teeth. “Can you break through?”
He tried, then shook his head. “Too thick.”
“Damn! Gracias, what’re we going to do? If we can’t warn Aster, then it’s up to us. If that ship is hostile, we’ve got to fight it somehow.”
“Not built for it,” he commented. “Aster’s Hope. About as maneuverable as a rock.”
She knew. Everything about the ship had been planned with defense rather than offense in mind. She was intended, first, to survive; second, not to give anything away about her homeworld prematurely. In fact as well as in appearance, she wasn’t meant as a weapon of war. And one reason for this was that the mission planners had never once considered the idea of encountering an alien (never mind hostile) ship this close to home.
She found herself wishing for different armament, more speed, and a whole lot less mass. But that couldn’t be helped now. “We need to get their attention somehow,” she said. “Make them cope with us before they go on.” An idea struck her. “What’ve the scanners got on them?”
“Still not much. Size. Velocity.” Then, as if by intuition, he seemed to know what she had in mind. “Shields, of course. Look like ordinary force-disruption fields.”
She almost smiled. “You’re kidding. No c-vector?”
“Nope.”
“Then maybe—” She thought furiously. “Maybe there’s something we can do. If we can slow them down—maybe do them some damage—and they can’t hurt us at all—maybe they won’t go on to Aster.
“Gracias, are we on a collision course with that thing?”
He glanced at her. “Not quite. Going to miss by a kilometer.”
As if she were in command of Aster’s Hope, she said, “Put us in the way.”
A grin flashed through his concentration. “Yes, sir, Temple, ma’am, sir. Good idea.”
At once, he started keying instructions into his com board.
While he set up the comp to adjust Aster’s Hope’s course—and then to adjust it continuously to keep the ship as squarely as possible in the oncoming vessel’s path—Temple secured herself in her momentum restraints. Less than three minutes, she thought. Three minutes to impact. For a moment, she thought Gracias was moving too slowly. But before she could say anything, he took his hands off the board and started snapping his own restraints. “Twenty seconds,” he said.
She braced herself. “Are we going to feel it?”
“Inertial shift? Of course.”
“No, idiot. Are we going to feel the impact?”
He shrugged. “If we hit. Nobody’s ever hit a c-vector shield that hard wit
h something that big.”
Then Temple’s stomach turned on its side, and the whole auxcomp-com felt like it was starting into a spin.
The course adjustment was over almost immediately: at the speeds Aster’s Hope and the alien were traveling, one kilometer was a subtle shift.
Less than two and a half minutes. If we hit. She couldn’t sit there and wait for it in silence. “Are the scanners doing any better? We ought to be able to count their teeth from this range.”
“Checking,” he said. With a few buttons, he called a new display up onto the main screen—
—and stared at it without saying anything. His mouth hung open; his whole face was black with astonishment.
“Gracias?” She looked at the screen for herself. With a mental effort, she tightened down the screws on her brain, forced herself to see the pattern in the numbers. Then she lost control of her voice: it went up like a yell. “Gracias?”
“Don’t believe it,” he murmured. “No. Don’t believe it.”
According to the scanners, the oncoming ship was crammed to the walls with computers and weaponry, equipment in every size and shape, mechanical and electrical energy of all kinds—and not one single living organism.
“There’s nothing—” She tried to say it, but at first she couldn’t. Her throat shut down, and she couldn’t unlock it. She had to force a swallow past the rigid muscles. “There’s nothing alive in that ship.”
Abruptly, Aster’s Hope went into a course shift that felt like it was going to pull Temple’s heart out of her chest. The alien was taking evasive action, and Aster’s Hope was compensating.
One minute.
“That’s crazy.” She was almost shouting. “It comes in faster than light and starts decelerating right at us and jams our transmissions and shifts course to try to keep us from running into it—and there’s nobody alive on board? Who do we talk to if we want to surrender?”
“Take it easy,” Gracias said. “One thing at a time. Artificial intelligence is feasible. Ship thinks for itself, maybe. Or on automatic. Exploration probe might—”
Another course shift cut him off. A violent inertial kick—too violent. Her head was jerked to the left. Alarms went off like klaxons. Aster’s Hope was trying to bring herself back toward collision with the other ship, trying—
The screens flashed loud warnings, danger signs as familiar to her as her name. Three of the ship’s thrusters were overheating critically. One was tearing itself to pieces under the shift stress. Aster’s Hope wasn’t made for this.
Temple was the ship’s nician: she couldn’t let Aster’s Hope be damaged. “Break off!” she shouted through the squall of the alarms. “We can’t do it!”
Gracias slapped a hand at his board, canceled the collision course.
G-stress receded. Lights on Temple’s board told her about thrusters damaged, doors jammed because they’d shifted on their mounts, a locker in the meditech section sprung, a handful of cryogenic capsules gone on backup. But the alarms were cut off almost instantly.
For a second, the collision warnings went into a howl. Then they stopped. The sudden silence felt louder than the alarms.
Gracias punched visual up onto the screens. He got a picture in time to see the other ship go by in a blur of metal too fast for the eye to track. From a range the scanners measured in mere hundreds of meters, the alien looked the size of a fortress—squat, squarish, enormous.
As it passed, it jabbed a bright red shaft of force at Aster’s Hope from point-blank range.
All the screens in the auxcompcom went dark.
“God!” Gracias gasped. “Scanners burned out?”
That was Temple’s province. She was still reeling from the shock, the knowledge that Aster’s Hope had been fired upon; but her hands had been trained until they had a life of their own and knew what to do. Hardly more than a heartbeat after she understood what Gracias said, she sent in a diagnostic on the scanner circuits. The answer trailed across the screen in front of her.
“No damage,” she reported.
“Then what?” He sounded flustered, groping for comprehension.
“Did you get any scan on that beam?” she returned. “Enough to analyze?” Then she explained, “Right angles to the speed of light isn’t the same direction for every force. Maybe the c-vector sent this one off into some kind of wraparound field.”
That was what he needed. “Right.” His hands went to work on his board again.
Almost immediately, he had an answer. “Ion beam. Would’ve reduced us to subatomic particles without the shield. But only visual’s lost. Scanners still functioning. Have visual back in a second.”
“Good.” She double-checked her own readouts, made sure that Aster’s Hope’s attempts to maneuver with the alien hadn’t done any urgent harm. At the same time, she reassured herself that the force of the ion beam hadn’t been felt inside the shield. Then she pulled her attention back to the screens and Gracias.
“What’s our friend doing now?”
He grunted, nodded up at the main screen. The comp was plotting another graph, showing the other ship’s course in relation to Aster’s Hope.
She blinked at it. That was impossible. Impossible for a ship that size moving that fast to turn that hard.
But of course, she thought with an odd sensation of craziness, there isn’t anything living aboard to feel g-stress.
“Well.” She swallowed at the way her voice shook. “At least we got their attention.”
Gracias tried to laugh, but it came out like a snarl. “Good for us. Now what?”
“We could try to run,” she offered. “Put as much distance as possible between us and them.”
He shook his head. “Won’t work. They’re faster.”
“Besides which,” she growled, “we’ve left a particle trail even we could follow all the way back to Aster. That and the incessant radio gabble— If that mechanical behemoth wants to find our homeworld, we might as well transmit a map.”
He pulled back from his board, swung his seat to face her again. His expression troubled her. His eyes seemed dull, almost glazed, as if under pressure his intelligence were slowly losing its edge. “Got a choice?” he asked.
The thought that he might fail Aster’s Hope made panic beat in her forehead; but she forced it down. “Sure,” she snapped, trying to send him a spark of her own anger. “We can fight.”
His eyes didn’t focus on her. “Got laser cannon,” he said. “Hydrogen torpedoes. Ship like that”—he nodded at the screen—“won’t have shields we can hurt. How can we fight?”
“You said they’re ordinary force-disruption fields. We can break through that. Any sustained pounding can break through. That’s why they didn’t build Aster’s Hope until they could do better.”
He still didn’t quite look at her. Enunciating carefully, he said, “I don’t believe that ship has shields we can hurt.”
Temple pounded the edge of her console. “Damn it, Gracias! We’ve got to try! We can’t just sit here until they get bored and decide to go do something terrible to our homeworld. If you aren’t interested—” Abruptly, she leaned back in her seat, took a deep breath, and held it to steady herself. Then she said quietly, “Key com over to me. I’ll do it myself.”
For a minute longer, he remained the way he was, his gaze staring disfocused past her chin. Slowly, he nodded. Moving sluggishly, he turned back to his console.
But instead of keying com over to Temple, he told the comp to begin decelerating Aster’s Hope. Losing inertia so the ship could maneuver better.
Softly, she let a sigh of relief through her teeth.
While Aster’s Hope braked, pulling Temple against her momentum restraints, and the unliving alien ship continued its impossible turn, she unlocked the weaponry controls on her console. A string of lights began to indicate the status of every piece of combat equipment Aster’s Hope carried.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought to herself. She’d never i
magined it like this. When/if the Asterin mission encountered some unexpected form of life, another spacegoing vessel, a planetary intelligence, the whole situation should’ve been different. A hard-nosed distrust was to be expected: a fear of the unknown; a desire to protect the homeworld; communications problems; wise caution. But not unprovoked assault. Not an immediate pitched battle out in the middle of nowhere, with Aster itself at issue.
Not an alien ship full of nothing but machinery? Was that the crucial point?
All right: what purpose could a ship like that serve? Exploration probe? Then it wouldn’t be hostile. A defense mechanism for a theoretically secure sector of space which Aster’s Hope had somehow violated? But they were at least fifty light-years from the nearest neighbor to Aster’s star; and it was difficult to imagine an intelligence so paranoid that its conception of “territorial space” reached out this far. Some kind of automated weapon? But Aster didn’t have any enemies.
None of it made any sense. And as she tried to sort it out, her confusion grew worse. It started her sliding into panic.
Fortunately, Gracias chose that moment to ask gruffly, “Ready? It’s hauling up on us fast. Be in range in a minute.”
She made an effort to control her breathing, shake the knots of panic out of her mind. “Plot an evasive course,” she said, “and key it to my board.” Her weapons program had to know where Aster’s Hope was going in order to use its armament effectively.
“Why?” he asked. “Don’t need evasion. Shield’ll protect us.”
“To keep them guessing.” Her tension was plain in her voice. “And show them we can hit them on the run. Do it.”
She thought he was moving too slowly. But faster than she could’ve done it he had a plot up on the main screen, showing the alien’s incoming course and the shifts Aster’s Hope was about to make.
She tried to wipe the sweat from her palms on her bare legs; but it didn’t do much good. Snarling at the way her hands felt, she poised them over the weapons com.