Omega

On the fourth day of the hunt Kellie suggested they terminate.

“You’re sure there’s nothing there?” said Jack.

“Absolutely. There are a few rocks but that’s it. Nothing remotely resembling the dingus.” She waited for instructions.

“Okay.” Jack’s attitude suggested the hell with it. “Let’s go back to Lookout.”

Kellie directed them to belt down and began angling the Jenkins onto its new course. It was going to be a long turn and they’d be living with gee forces for the better part of a day. Consequently, she wasn’t particularly happy. “If I’d used my head,” she told Digger, “I’d have arranged things differently. We could have been on a more efficient course at the end of the pattern. But I assumed we were going to find something.”

“So did I,” he said. “If you’re right, though, that the hedgehogs are lures, they won’t be everywhere. Only close to clouds that are threatening something their makers are interested in.”

Jack sent off a message to Hutch, information copies to the al Jahani: “No hedgehog at Lookout. Returning to orbit.”

While they made the long swing, they decided to watch a sim together, and Kellie, at their request, brought up a haunted house thriller. Digger didn’t have much taste for horror, but he went along. “Scares me though,” he told them, making a joke of it, as if the idea were ridiculous, but in fact it did. He took no pleasure watching a vampire operate, and there’d been times even here, in the belly of a starship, maybe especially here, when he’d gone back through a dimly lit corridor to his quarters after that kind of experience and heard footsteps padding behind him.

The problem with the superluminal was that, even though it was an embodiment of modern technology, a statement that the universe is governed by reason, a virtual guarantee that demons and vampires do not exist, it was still quite small. Almost claustrophobic. A few passageways and a handful of rooms, with a tendency toward shadows and echoes. It was a place you couldn’t get away from. If something stalked you through the ship’s narrow corridors, there would be nowhere to run.

His problem, he knew, was that he suffered from an overabundance of imagination. Always had. It was the quality that had drawn him into extraterrestrial assignments. Digger was no coward. He felt he’d proved it by going down on Lookout and sticking his head up. He’d worked on a site in the middle of the Angolan flare-up, had stayed there when everybody else ran. On another occasion he’d gotten a couple of missionaries away from rebels in Zampara, in northern Africa, by a mixture of audacity, good sense, and good luck. But he didn’t like haunted houses.

The plot always seemed to be the same: A group of adolescents looking for an unusual place to hold a party decide to use the abandoned mansion in which there reportedly had been several ghastly murders during the past half century. (It wasn’t a place to which Digger would have gone.)

There was always a storm, rain beating against the windows, and doors opening and closing of their own volition. And periodically, victims getting cornered by whatever happened to be loose in the attic.

He tried to think about other things. But the creaking doors, the wild musical score, and the tree branches scraping against the side of the house kept breaking through. Jack laughed through much of the performance, and energetically warned the actors to look out, it’s in the closet.

Midway through, strange noises come from upstairs. Shrieks. Groans. Unearthly cries. Two of the boys decide, incredibly, they will investigate. Only in the sims, Digger thinks. But he wants them to stay together. The boy in the lead is tall, good-looking, with a kind of wistful i

The door opens, apparently unaided, and Digger sees a shadowy figure seated in an armchair facing a window, illuminated only by the flickering lightning. The second boy, prudently, is dropping behind.

Stay together. Digger shakes his head, telling himself it’s all nonsense. No sensible kids would do anything like this. And if they did, they’d certainly stick close to each other.

And he found himself thinking about the hedgehog. They’d overlooked the obvious.

“WHAT WOULD IT be doing way out there?” asked Jack.

Digger has used a cursor to indicate where he thought the object could be found. “We assumed the cloud and the hedgehog were a unit. Where one goes, the other follows. But here, we’ve got a cloud that has thrown a right turn.

“The cloud’s been turning and slowing down for a long time. Maybe over a year. But there’s no reason to assume the hedgehog wouldn’t keep going.”

“Original course and velocity?” said Jack.

“Probably.”

“Why would it do that?” asked Wi

“Why any of this? I don’t know. But I bet if we check it out, we’ll find it where the cloud would have been if it hadn’t decided to go for a walk.”

Kellie’s dark eyes touched him. Go to it, big boy.

“Why not take a look?” he asked. “It’s not as if we have to be anywhere tomorrow.”

THEY FOUND IT precisely where Digger had predicted. It was moving along at a few notches under standard omega velocity. As if the great cloud still trailed behind.

LIBRARY ENTRY

The discovery of escort vehicles with the omegas reveals just how little research has been done over the past thirty years on this critical subject. What other surprises are coming? And how many more lives will be sacrificed to bureaucratic inertia?

— The London Times

March 23

chapter 13

On board the Heffernan, near Alpha Pictoris, 99 light-years from Earth.

Friday, April 4.

THE PICTORIS HEDGEHOG made it six for six. They all have one.

It was twenty-eight thousand kilometers in front of the cloud. Its diameter was the standard six and a half kilometers. “Report’s away,” Emma said.

Sky didn’t like going anywhere near the damned thing. But they’d asked for volunteers, told him they’d probably be okay, but to be careful, don’t take any u

Ordinarily Sky loved what he did for a living. He enjoyed cruising past ringed giants, lobbing probes into black holes, delivering people and supplies to the ultimate out-of-the-way places. But he didn’t like the clouds. And he didn’t like the hedgehogs. They were things that didn’t belong.

They were far enough away from Pictoris that the only decent illumination on the object was coming from their probe.

“Its magnetic field matches the signature of the other objects,” said Bill.

“Ajax is ready to go,” said Emma.

There was no known entry hatch anywhere, so Drafts would have chosen a spot at random. Which is what the Heffernan would do.

Emma and Sky were looking forward to celebrating their sixteenth a

It was true, of course. Everything was fresh and young then. They hadn’t yet learned to take each other for granted. When he was tempted to do so now, he reminded himself that the life he had wouldn’t be forever, and if he couldn’t go back to the Grand Hotel when his romance with Emma was still new, when the entire world was young and all things seemed possible, it was equally true that he’d remember the hedgehog, and how they’d stood on the bridge together, watching it come close, a piece of hardware put together by God knew what, for purposes no one could imagine. A bomb. But it was still a moment that he savored, because he knew that, like the Grand Hotel, he would one day give much to be able to return.

Sixteenth a

“Relativity.” She laughed.

“Recommend Ajax launch,” said Bill.

“Okay, Bill. Keep in mind that we want it to snuggle up very gently. Just kiss it, right?”

“Just a smooch,” said Bill. He appeared beside them, wearing a radiation suit and a hard hat. Protection against explosions. His idea of a joke.

“Okay,” Sky said. “Launch Ajax.”

Warning lamps blinked. The usual slight tremor ran through the ship. “Ajax away. Time to intersection: thirty-three minutes.”

“Okay, Bill. Let’s leave town.”

THEY ACCELERATED OUT. Sky directed the AI to maintain jump capability, which required firing the main engines throughout the sequence to build and hold sufficient charge in the Hazeltines.

It was the first time in all these years that he’d been in this kind of situation, not knowing well in advance whether he’d have to jump.

“Out of curiosity—” she said.

“Yes?”

“On the jump, can you override Bill? If you had to?” The jump engines couldn’t be used until they were charged. That usually required twenty-eight minutes off the main engines. Any attempt to do a jump prior to that risked initiating an antimatter explosion, and consequently would be refused by the AI.

“We could do a manual start if something happened to Bill.”

“You know,” she said, “I suspect that’s what the hedgehog is loaded with, too.”

“Antimatter?”

“Yes. That would explain the magnetic field.”

“In what way?” asked Sky.

“Containment envelope. It’s probably what happened to Drafts. He did something that impaired its integrity.”

Sky shook his head. Who’d have expected anything like that out here?

EMMA WAS AN astrophysicist. When he’d warned her that marrying someone who took a superluminal out for months at a time might not be a smart move for her, she’d said okay, that she’d really wanted a tall blond guy anyhow, good-bye. And he’d tried to recover ground, said he wasn’t entirely serious, didn’t want to lose her, just wanted to be sure she knew what she was getting into.