Chindi

“Hutch.” Bill sounded unhappy. “There’s a danger. If the chindi has collected any loose rock—”

“Bill?”

“Yes, Hutch?”

“I’ll be outside. I won’t fall off.”

She pulled on grip shoes and a set of air tanks and activated the suit. Throughout the process she continued to talk to Tor. But her voice kept going high, and she had to fight down occasional spasms of rage. All your fault, dummy.

“Hutch,” said Bill, “range is 40 million kilometers. Sensors have acquired it. It will pass us in about eight minutes.”

She let herself into the airlock, closed the hatch, and depressurized.

“Hutch, I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“Don’t worry, Bill.”

Alyx’s voice: “Be careful, Hutch.”

“I will. Bill, open the hatch.” The system hadn’t responded when she touched the press pad. Now it cycled up into the overhead. She stepped outside and gazed at the stars. The Twins weren’t visible, of course. Even their sun was lost out there somewhere.

She stood quietly until Bill interrupted her thoughts. “Hutch,” he said, “chindi range is 4.1 million kilometers. It is fifty seconds away.”

She set the chronometer built into her sleeve. “Where will it pass?”

“Approximately three hundred kilometers off the port side.”

“Get pictures as it goes by.”

“They won’t be very clear. It’s moving too fast.”

“Do the best you can.” She retreated to the portside sensor array, where Tor had thrown his coin into the night. The weight of the sky pressed on her.

“There’s a configuration of four stars in a line two degrees off the stern. The second star is the class-B, the sun in the Gemini system. The chindi will be coming almost directly out of it. Maybe a little to the far side as you look at it.”

“Okay. Thanks.” She raised the telescope.

“Don’t expect to see anything.”

“I know.”

“I mean, even if we were only a hundred meters away, you wouldn’t see anything.”

“Shut up, Bill.”

“I will. But I hope you don’t get pinged while you’re out there. They’ll saddle me with making out the reports.”

She held on to the array, her feet planted on the hull, straining toward the four stars. “I’m outside, Tor,” she said, quietly. “You’re only a few seconds away now. I wish you could talk to me. I wish I could make this easier for you.”

The scopes lined up to try for pictures. A shadow crossed the stars. Not the chindi. This was moving too slowly and in the wrong direction. She didn’t get a good look, simply felt its passage. A piece of the oort cloud. A rock. Possibly a cloud of dust.

“I love you, Tor,” she said. And she imagined she heard a voice on the link, a distant whisper. Then it was gone, and she was left staring out at the stars.

Chapter 32

If you listen closely, you can hear Betelgeuse.

COMPOSED AND SUNG BY PENELOPE PROPP, 2214

TIME TO GIVE up.

She walked across the hull and climbed back in through the airlock. Nick asked if she was all right, and Alyx was waiting for her when she came up the ramp out of cargo.

Tor had stood casually at the exact spot where she’d been and had lobbed his dollar at the universe.

She thought about the coin, and the array of scopes turning to try to pick up the chindi, and the shadowy object that had passed nearby. And the sketch depicting her as a young goddess gazing down on Icepack.

And always there would be Hutchins in the on-deck circle. A Philly. (Was that the way they would have said it? Was the female version a filly?) Much more realistic, that version of herself. Closer to the real Hutchins. Hutchins with a smile, vulnerable, looking a little at sea about what to do with the four bats. No, hardly wielding them. Supporting. Hanging on for dear life as she had always hung on when things got tough.

Nick looked at her encouragingly as they filed onto the bridge. We’ll get through it. She tried to look as if she was in command of her own emotions, and called up Bill. “Did we get the pictures?”

“First one coming on-screen now.”

It was blurred.

“I’ve had to do some enhancement.”

The chindi took shape. It seemed elongated, stretched to the rear, longer and sleeker than she remembered.

“There has been no reply from its command structure,” he added u

“Okay, Bill.”

“But I would call your attention to something.” He magnified the image, focusing on the area around the exit hatch.

There was a figure. Smeared, but unquestionably Tor! He was standing with his hand raised.

Waving.

Letting her know he’d been listening.

Someone squeezed her shoulder. Hutch fought back tears and eased into her chair. It was impossible to make out the face, to be sure even that it was a male. But she knew the yellow pullover shirt and the frumpy brown slacks.

Tor’s clock showed that he had seventeen minutes left. Plus six hours on the tanks.

Her mind kept returning to Tor tossing the dollar off the hull, to the batting circle, and to something else. The object that had drifted by while she was outside.

“Just a rock,” Bill said when she told him about it.

A comet waiting to be born.

Swing four bats so one seems lighter.

My God. There was a way. But she didn’t have enough time.

“What’s wrong, Hutch?” Nick was getting her a glass of water. Did she look that beaten down?

Greenwater.

Linear momentum is never lost during a hyperspace transit.

And the conversation with Tor.

“The momentum of the coin is preserved. It gets transferred to the Memphis. So the ship is traveling that much faster when it makes the jump back into standard space.”

“By a dollar.”

“Yes.”

“How much does that come to?”

She wiped her eyes and looked again at the clock. The power cell was all but dead. He was on his tanks. She calculated what they would have to do. What would be needed. It would take a half day. No less than that. No way it could be less.

She put herself in his place, riding into the night, waiting for the air to run out. She didn’t think she’d put up with that. More likely, she’d turn off the suit. Get it over with.

“We might have been able to do it,” she whispered to Bill. Her voice shook.

“Do what?” he asked gently.

She didn’t reply, but Bill knew what she was saying. He appeared beside her, wearing a dark jacket and tie.

“The Greenwater Effect,” she said.

He gazed steadily at her.

“I needed to think of it sooner.” The bridge was blurry. “We can’t get it done in six hours.”

“What’s the Greenwater Effect?” asked Nick.

But Bill was holding something back. “What?” she asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“He has more than six hours.”

“How do you mean?” He was wrong. She was sure of it. She’d done the calculation herself. Set the clock herself.

“Hutch, the chindi has been moving at a quarter light speed. Think about it.”

Nick was staring at her with a quizzical expression, asking her to explain.

Relativity! In terms of traveling through space, the superluminals are slow. Hutch wasn’t accustomed to thinking in relativistic terms.

“Yes,” she said. Time was ru

“That’s correct, Hutch.”

“How much time do we have?”

“The temporal differential at their velocity is roughly 3 percent.”

“Forty-five minutes a day. Three days to accelerate. So make that maybe twenty minutes each. He’d been out here…”

“It comes to about four more hours, Hutch.”

“You knew this all along.”

“Yes.”

“And you weren’t going to tell me.”

“I saw no reason to. It would only have caused additional pain.”

“All right. Tell me if this works.”