The master alarm barely preceded the first peal from the shuttle’s backup gyroscope. As she was shutting that down, the characteristic buzzer of the number one hydraulics line started chattering. Station Control wasn’t far behind.
“Gotcha Pleiades, we’re onto it.… It looks like … no …”
Voices shouted in the background. Meanwhile, Pleiades’ accelerometers began singing their unique, groaning melody.
Teresa protested—We can’t be accelerating! But her inner sense said differently. Logic would have her shut off the sensors—which were obviously giving false readings. Instead she switched on the shuttle’s main recorder.
Amber lights blazed. She acted quickly to close a critical OMS pressurization line. Then, as if she didn’t already have enough troubles, Teresa’s peripheral vision started blurring! She could still see down a tunnel. But the zone narrowed even as she shouted—“No. Dumpit, no!”
Colors rippled across the cabin, turning the cockpit’s planned intricacy into a schizophrenic’s fingerpainting. Teresa shook her head sharply, hoping to drive out the new affliction. “Control, Pleiades. Am experiencing—”
“Terry!” A shout from behind her. “I’m coming. Hold on …”
“Pleiades, Control. We’re … having trouble—”
A shrill squeal interrupted over the open link from Erehwon; it made her wince in dread recognition.
“Mark, check the boom!” Teresa cried over her shoulder as she peered through a narrowing isthmus at the computer panel by her right knee. The thing was so obsolete it couldn’t even take voice commands reliably. So more by rote than sight she flipped a toggle over to MANUAL OVERRIDE.
“Pleiades, we’re going blind—”
“Same here!” she snapped. “I’ve got acceleration too, just like you. Tell me something I don’t know!”
The voice fought through gathering static. “We’re also getting anomalous increase in tether tension …”
Teresa felt a chill. “Mark! I said check the boom!”
“I’m trying!” He shouted from the ceiling port. “It … looks fine, Terry. The boom’s okay—”
“… extremely high anomalous electric currents in the tether …”
Two amber blurs switched over to red. “Put your helmet on and get ready to jettison the transitway,” Teresa told her copilot as more alarms whistled melodies she had never before heard outside a simulator. Teresa felt rather than saw Mark slip into his seat as she pushed aside a switch guard and punched the red button beneath. Instantly they heard a distant crump as explosive charges tore away the plastic tunnel recently attached to their airlock.
“Transitway jettisoned,” Mark confirmed. “Terry, what the hell’s going—”
“Get ready to blow the boom itself,” she told him. By touch, Teresa punched buttons on the digital autopilot, engaging the shuttle’s smaller reaction-control motors. “DAP on manual. RCS engaged. When we break off, we’ll hang for a minute before dropping. But I think—”
Teresa paused suddenly as one of the red smudges turned amber. “—I think—”
Another switched from crimson to yellow-gold. And another. Then an amber light went green.
As quickly as it had arrived, the frightening rainbow began melting away! She blinked twice, three times. Starting in the middle, the visual blurriness evaporated. Acuity returned as warning lights and musical alarms subsided one by one.
“Pleiades …” Station Control sounded breathless. Buzzers were shutting down over there, as well. “Pleiades, we seem to be returning—”
“Same here,” she interrupted. “But what about the tether tension!”
“Pleiades, tether tension … is slackening.” Control’s tone was relieved. “Must have been transient, whatever the hell it was. There may be some backlash though …”
Mark and Teresa looked at each other. She felt stretched, pummeled, abused. Was it really over? As more amber lights winked out, they inventoried damage. Miraculously, Pleiades seemed unharmed.
Except, of course, for the million-dollar transit tube she’d just jettisoned. The passengers weren’t going to appreciate being ferried like so many beachballs, in personal survival enclosures. But their resentment couldn’t match that of the bean-counters in Washington, if no justification were at hand.
“Jeez. What if we’d gone ahead and blown the boom?” Mark muttered. “Better put that squib on safety, Terry.” He nodded toward the primed trigger, flashing dangerously between their seats.
“Hold on a sec.” Teresa’s eyes roved the cockpit, seeking … anything. Any clue to the mysterious episode. She tapped her throat mike. “Control, Pleiades. Confirm your estimate that backlash will be minimal. We don’t want to face—”
That was when her gaze lighted on the inertial guidance display, showing where in space their ring laser gyroscope thought they were. She read it like a newspaper headline. The numbers were bizarre and rapidly changing in ways Teresa didn’t like at all!
Eye flicks took in the corresponding readouts of the star tracker and satellite navigation systems. They were in total conflict, and none of them agreed with what the seat of her pants was telling her.
“Control! I’m disengaging, under emergency protocols.”
“Wait Pleiades! There’s no need. You may increase our backlash!”
“I’ll take that chance. Meanwhile, better check your own inertial units. Have you got a gravitometer?”
“Affirmative. But what …?”
“Check it! Pleiades out.”
Then, to Mark, “You blow the boom, I’ll handle the DAP. Jettison on count of three. One!”
Randall had his hands on the panel, still he remonstrated. “You sure? We’ll catch hell …”
“Two!” She gripped the control stick.
“Terry—”
Intuition tickled. She felt it—whatever it was—returning with a vengeance.
“Blow it, Mark!”
Before she even felt the vibration of the charges, Teresa activated her vernier jets in translational mode, doing as any good pilot would in a crisis—guiding her ship away from anything more substantial than a thought or a cloud.
“What the hell is going on up here? Have you both lost your minds?”
A sharp voice from behind them. Without turning she snapped, “Colonel Spivey, strap in and shut up!”
Her harried, professional tone worked better than any curse or threat. Spivey might be obnoxious, but he was no fool. She sensed his quick departure and swept him from her mind as reaction jets wrestled the orbiter’s reluctant mass slowly away from the station’s tangle of cranes and storage tanks. On the back of Teresa’s neck all the tiny hairs shivered.
“Pleiades, you’re right. The phenomenon is periodic. Anomalous tension is returning. Gravitometer’s gone crazy … tides of unprecedented—”
A second voice interrupted, cutting off the controller. “Pleiades, this is Station Commander Perez. Prepare to receive emergency telemetry.”
“Affirmative.” Teresa swallowed, knowing what this meant. She felt Mark lean past her to make sure the ship’s datasuck boxes were operating at top speed. In that mode they recorded every nuance for one purpose only, so endangered spacers could obey rule number one of their trade …
Let the next guy know what killed you.
The station commander was dumping his operational status into Pleiades in real time—a dire measure for the chief of a secret military station. That made Teresa all the more anxious to get away fast.
She ignored navigational aids, checking orientation by instinct and estimate. Teresa groaned on realizing that two main thrusters were aimed at Nearpoint’s cryo tanks, risking a titanic explosion if she fired them. That left only tiny verniers to nudge the heavy shuttle. She switched to a roll maneuver, cursing the slowness of the turn.
“Oh, shit! Mark, is that guy still in the cargo bay?”
The creepy nausea was returning, she could tell as she fought the sluggish spacecraft. Nearby, Mark l
aughed suddenly and a bit shrilly. “He’s still there. Helmet pressed to the window. Guy’s mad, Terry.”
“Stop calling me Terry!” she snapped, turning to get a fix on Nearpoint again. If the tanks were clear now …
Teresa stared. They weren’t there anymore!
Nothing was there. Tanks, habitats, cranes … everything was gone!
Alarms resumed their blared warnings. With her instruments turning amber and red again, Teresa decided Erehwon was none of her business now. She punched buttons labeled X-TRANSLATIONAL and HIGH, then squeezed the stick to trigger a full-throated hypergolic roar, sending Pleiades where she figured the station and tether weren’t.
Mark called out pressures and flow rates. Teresa counted seconds as the blurriness encroached again. “Move, you dumpit bitch. Move!” She cursed the massive, awkward orbiter.
“I found the station.” Mark announced. “Jesus. Look at that.”
Through a narrowing tunnel Teresa glanced at the radar screen. She gasped. The bottom assembly was more than five kilometers below them and receding fast. The tether had stretched suddenly, like a child’s rubber toy. “Damn!” she heard Mark Randall cry. Then Teresa had difficulty hearing or seeing anything at all.
This time the squidgy feeling went from her eyes straight back through her central sinus. The blaring of new alarms mixed with strange noises originating within her own skull. One alert crooned the dour song of a cooling system gone berserk. Unable to see which portion, Teresa flicked switches by touch, disabling all the exchange loops. She had Mark close down the fuel cells as well. If the situation didn’t improve before they ran out of battery juice, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
“All three APUs are inoperable!” Mark shouted through a roar of crazy noise.
“Forget ’em. Leave ’em turned off.”
“All of them?”
“I said all! The bug’s in the hydraulic lines, not the APUs. All long fluid lines are affected.”
“How do we close the cargo bay doors without hydraulics?” he protested through rising static that nearly drowned his words. “We won’t … able to … during reentry!”
“Leave that to me,” she shouted back. “Close all lines except rear hypergolics, and pray they hold!”
Teresa thought she heard his acknowledgment, and a clicking that might have been those switches being closed. Or it could have been just another weird sensory distortion.
Without hydraulics they couldn’t gimbal the main maneuvering rockets. She’d have to make do with RCS jets, flying blind in a chiarascuro of distortion and shadow. By touch Teresa disengaged the autopilot completely. She fired the small jets in matched pairs, relying on vibration alone to verify a response. It was true seat-of-the-pants flying, with no way to confirm she was moving Pleiades farther from that dangerously overstretched tether, or perhaps right toward it.…
Sound became smell. Roiling images scratched her skin. Amid cacophonous static Teresa thought she actually heard Jason, calling her name. But the voice blew away in the noisome gale before she could tell whether it was real or phantom—one of countless chimeras clamoring from all sides.
For all she knew, she was permanently blind. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the battle to save her ship.
Vision finally did clear, at last, with the same astonishing speed as it had been lost. A narrow tunnel snapped into focus, expanding rapidly till only the periphery sparkled with those eerie shades. Screaming alarms began shutting down.
The transition left her stunned, staring unbelievingly at the once-familiar cabin. The chronometer said less than ten minutes had passed. It felt like hours.
“Um,” she commented with a dry throat. Once again, Pleiades had the nerve to start acting as if nothing had happened. Red lights turned amber; amber became green. Teresa herself wasn’t about to recover so quickly, for sure.
Mark sneezed with terrific force. “Where—where’s Erehwon? Where’s the tether?” A few minutes thrust couldn’t have taken them far. But the approach and rendezvous display showed nothing at all. Teresa switched to a higher scale.
Nothing. The station was nowhere.
Mark whispered. “What happened to it?”
Teresa changed radar settings, expanding scale again and ordering a full-spectrum doppler scan. This time, at last, a scattering of blips appeared. Her mouth suddenly tasted ashen.
“There’s … pieces of it.”
A cluster of large objects had entered much higher orbit, rising rapidly as Pleiades receded in her own ellipse. One transmitted an emergency beacon, identifying it as part of the station’s central complex.
“We better do a circularization burn,” Mark said, “to have a chance of rescuing anybody.”
Teresa blinked once more. I should’ve thought of that.
“Check … check all the tank and line pressures first,” she said, still staring at the mess that had been the core of Reagan Station. Something had rent the tethers … and all the spars connecting the modules, for good measure. That force might return anytime, but they owed it to their fellow spacers to try to save those left alive.
“Pressures look fine,” Mark reported. “Give me a minute to compute a burn. It’ll be messy.”
“That’s okay. We’ll use up our reserves. Kennedy and Kourou are probably already scrambling launchers—” She stopped, ears perked to a strange tapping sound. Another symptom? But no, it came from behind her. She swiveled angrily. If that damned Spivey had come back …
A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the spacesuited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex screen.
“Hmph,” she commented. “Our guest doesn’t look as pissed off as before.” In fact, the expression behind the steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. “He must have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be in the atmos …”
She stopped suddenly. “Jason!”
“What?” Mark looked up from the computer.
“Where’s the upper tip? Where’s Farpoint!”
Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its highest scale on autofrequency scan—taking in the blackness far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that streaked past the outer edge of the screen.
“Sweet Gaia … look at the doppler!” Randall stared. “It’s moving at … at …” He didn’t finish. Teresa could read the screen as well as he.
The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.
Jason, Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope with what she’d seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally spoke, it was simply to say, “Six … thousand kilometers … per second.”
It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could have, done this to her!
“Kakashkiya,” she sighed.
“He’s leaving me … at two percent of the goddamn speed of light …”
• It was Ate, first-born daughter of Zeus, who used the golden apple to tempt three vain goddesses, setting the stage for tragedy. Moreover, it was Ate who made Paris fall for Helen, and Agamemnon for Breises. Ate filled the Trojans’ hearts with a love of horses, whose streaming manes laid grace upon the plains of Ilium. To Ulysses she gave a passion for new things.
For these and other innovations, Ate became known as Mother of Infatuation. For these she was also called Sower of Discord.
Did she realize her invention would eventually lead to Hecuba’s anguish atop the broken walls of Troy? Some say she spread dissension only at her father’s bidding … that Zeus himself connived to bring about that dreadful war “… so its load of death might free the groaning land from the weight of so many men.”
Still, when he saw the bloody outcome, Zeus mourned. Gods who had supported Troy joined those backing Hellas, and all agreed to lay the blame on Ate.
Banished to Earth, she brought alo
ng her invention, and its effects would prove as far-reaching as that earlier boon—the gift of Prometheus. Indeed, what could Reason ever accomplish for mankind by itself, without Passion to drive it on?
Infatuation spread, for well and ill. Life, once simple, became vivid, challenging, confusing. Hearts raced. Veins sang with recklessness. Wild gambles paid off fantastically, or tumbled into memorable fiascos.
There came to Earth a thing called “love.”
Infatuation forever changed the world. That is why some came to call it the “Meadow of Ate.”
• CORE
The last tremors had ended, but it still took several minutes for the technicians to crawl out from under their desks. Through cascading hazes of limestone dust they peered about, making sure the quake was really over. Some cast awed glances toward the nexus console, where Alex Lustig had remained throughout the unexpected temblors.
One unspoken thought circulated among them—that any bloke who could make the Earth rattle was surely one to reckon with.
Inside, Alex wasn’t quite as calm as he seemed. In truth, exhaustion and sheer astonishment were what had kept him at his station while others dove for cover, far more than bravado or showy courage. This sudden power to cause earthquakes was a completely unexpected side effect of their project, and of trivial importance next to the news he now saw before him.
Unfortunately, they had found exactly what they were looking for.
The cutaway hologram told the story. Where only one purple dot had been depicted before—looping a deeply buried orbit about the planet’s center—now a second object could be seen circling even lower still. What had been only dire suspicion was now reified and horrible.
“It’s down there, all right,” George Hutton’s chief physicist reported, lifting his hard hat to smooth back sparse white hair. Stan Goldman’s hands trembled. “We’ll need data from other listening posts to pin it down precisely.”
“Can you estimate its mass?” Hutton asked. The Maori tycoon sat on the other side of the console, wearing a scowl that would have made the warriors of Te Heuheu proud. During the quakes he, too, had spurned shelter. But the techs only expected that of him.