and the other with a loggable version of the same message she was hearing over the ship’s speakers. Like gunfire she hit keys on the main console to cancel the alarm. Then she keyed a mike. “Howard, this is Bug Two.” No response. For the first time she looked up at the station itself. “Howard, this is Bug Two,” she repeated, even as her eyes began to take in what she saw. A few hundred meters, perhaps farther, from Howard was a small, obviously military craft only about a dozen times the size of her Bug. A docking hatch on Howard, the one opening into the mud room, was open, apparently forced. Two suited figures were approaching the military ship from that direction. The implication was clear. They’d restarted enough of the station’s systems for her crippled craft to think that Howard was alive again. She tried her message twice more, but didn’t expect a response. She was only delaying the inevitable. With a short curse she’d heard her father use only a few times she lifted the cover that protected a large red button from accidental activation and pressed it. An automated distress call started. “It will mean paperwork,” she muttered. Natalia hated paperwork.
Ensign Parker was just starting up a last griddle full of piroges to go with the lambburgers and gravy and reconstituted vegetable purée he’d planned for dinner when the alarm sounded. “What now?” he asked himself. It wasn’t in his nature to complain about the oddities that duty on a small craft tossed him, but the last few hours had him on edge. He recognized the alarm as a medium priority klaxon and so settled himself in the command seat before paying more than cursory attention to the console. He keyed commands to cancel the noise. Winters and Cathcart were due back on board any moment. Crew first. “Winters.” It was a question as much as it was a salutation.
“Winters, aye.”
“Status.”
“Cycling inner airlock door now.” Winters and Cathcart were on board. “Is there a problem?”
“Stand by.” Parker took a closer look at the console. A distress call had been received—hell, was still being received. “How long before you two can be ready for maneuvering?” There was a pause. The response came over the intercom instead of the command channel.
“We can handle one g now. Anything more we’ll need a few minutes to ditch the EVA gear.”
“Stand by for maneuvering.” Parker’s voice betrayed no emotion and he offered no explanation. Winters and Cathcart braced themselves for one-g acceleration and waited in the lock.
“A distress call,” Parker said to himself, a wry grin on his face. “Of course there’s a distress call in an empty system with a dead station and no EM noise we didn’t make ourselves.” He adjusted the comm settings and keyed a mike. “His Imperial Majesty’s Ship Kestrel responding to unidentified ship in distress. Please identify yourself and verify that IFF is active.” There was a pause.
“This is Bug Two out of Howard Station.” The voice was thickly accented, but understandable, and very recognizably female. “I have no IFF transponder.”
“Civilians,” Parker spat the word. He resisted the urge to lecture and instead asked, “What’s your emergency?”
“I am adrift, with insufficient food, water, fuel and power reserves approximately two kilometers above Howard. Most of my craft’s systems have been disabled and I lack the skill to pilot to a rendezvous and docking even if they were not.” The reply’s honesty was brutal.
“Stand by.” Parker activated Kestrel’s targeting systems in search mode. Within seconds the holographic combat display lit up and showed Kestrel, Howard and a small target in the location described. “We’re on our way.” On the intercom, “Guys, I can give you five minutes. Dump the EVA gear and get up here. We’ve got company.” Parker took the time to hurry back to the galley and turn off the griddle. No point in burning dinner. He beat Cathcart back to the command station by a minute or so. Winters made it in just under the time limit. Cathcart vacated the comm station in favor of Winters and brought him up to speed as Parker began maneuvering Kestrel the short distance to the disabled utility vehicle.
“Why doesn’t it have an IFF transponder?” Winters asked.
“I’m more concerned with why she’s in a ship, apparently on her own, that she can’t fly,” Cathcart countered. “And what’s she doing out there at all? That little thing probably doesn’t have more than a head and a food warmer in it. How’s she been feeding herself?”
“We’ll find out in a few minutes, guys. Cath, get down to docking control. I’ll need you to nudge us in. I don’t want to try from here. That little thing’ll split in two if we don’t do this just right.” Parker’s concern was valid. Kestrel was built to dock with a larger vessel. She could take a certain amount of physical abuse in the process. Mating up to a smaller, obviously frail civilian craft was within her design intent, but just barely. Cathcart would take control of Kestrel’s docking thrusters from the backup command station just to port of the main forward docking collar. He’d have a much better view, one not filtered through monitors, and the control systems at that station were more specialized, having been designed specifically for use in touchy approach situations.
Natalia sat in her EVA suit—the captain of the approaching ship had warned that docking might damage her Bug—and watched as Kestrel made its approach. Its maneuvering thrusters, the little ones used for docking only, were winking and blinking at her. She could see the strong face of a young military officer through a clearsteel viewport to one side of the approaching docking ring. She braced herself as the two ships mated. The jar was perceptible, but not dangerous. This was confirmed by the absence of alarm klaxons. Through the viewport in her own inner airlock door she saw Kestrel’s outer docking port open, then her own Bug’s outer hatch did the same. She confirmed that there was pressure in the lock, opened her own inner hatch, grabbed a satchel with the few oddments she intended to take with her and abandoned Bug Two.
“She’s in the lock now. Outer hatch has cycled shut. You want me to undock?” Cathcart was already moving to do so when Parker replied.
“Negative. Stand by for maneuvering, low-g. Cath, I want to align our thrusters with Howard, with that craft still docked. How much stress do you think it can take?”
Parker hadn’t shared his plan, but Cathcart saw it immediately. “You want to take home a souvenir?” His grin came through loud and clear in his voice.
“Maybe. At least I want to have options. I’m thinking a five meter per second nudge towards the station will put this hunk of scrap back there in ten days. You wanna check my math?” Cathcart chuckled. Parker had tutored him in some of his higher mathematics courses.
“I can handle that maneuver from here, if you want. I’d rather not damage the docking collar.”
“Go ahead. I’ll notify our guest,” Parker replied. “Give me thirty seconds before you start.”
“Thirty seconds, aye.”
Parker keyed the intercom button to the forward lock chamber. “Miss . . . I don’t know your name.”
“Volonskaya. And it is Doctor, not Miss.” The response wasn’t unfriendly, just cool.
“Yeah, well, Miss . . . Doc, you need to hold onto something for a bit. Low-g maneuvering coming up. It won’t be too jarring or last very long. We just need to get turned around.”
“Spacibe, Captain.”
“Ensign.”
“You are not the captain?”
“I command, but I am an ensign, since we’re being correct with titles.” Parker was using his recruiting advertisement voice. “Or you can call me Matt.”
Kestrel began a slow rotation on two axes. “Natalia, Matt. And I apologize for my manners. It has been a difficult time, yes?” The coolness was gone, replaced with, if not warmth, at least something approaching it. Kestrel’s rotation stopped and she nudged forward at low-g. Then the docking collar released Bug Two, Kestrel backed away on docking thrusters only and coasted for a bit while crew and passenger settled in.
The Entity did not experience the plodding march of time. Duration was simply an awareness of the interval betwee
n changes in its reality. It healed and then grew in power enfolded around the point-mass at the core of Howard’s gravitic reactor for some thirty-two uneventful centuries. Three thousand two hundred years during which Howard itself decayed.
Seals hardened, cracked, split. Metals corroded, suffered galvanic damage, crystallized. The dead crew at first decomposed under the auspices of the few bacteria that survived transition into the Entity’s space. When the seals failed and Howard’s atmosphere was lost, they mummified.
The nature of the orbiting point-masses was such that they would not decay, but their existence was nevertheless finite. It was their demise that defined the interval that the Entity was next aware of. Between two quanta of time, they both collapsed and with them the reactor’s energy output collapsed as well. With its source of power gone the conduit generator, part of what had held Howard trapped in this very foreign space, shut down and Howard began to rotate back to its original space and time axes.
There was no substantial duration to this sequence of events, but because the Entity was essentially anchored in a reality where the time axis was at 90° to Howard’s, it lagged a fractional moment and that gave it time to understand what was happening. Its proximity to the still extant central point-mass, however, prevented it from