The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

Best he could do. The wavefront hadn't near reached Beta. And the buoy that could have given him longscan wasn't talking—or no longer existed. The visual out here in the dark, where the sun was a star among other stars, gave him a few scattered flashes of gray that might be buoy fragments. He went on capturing images.

BettyBwent hurtling on toward the impact-point. Whatever was out there might have clipped the buoy, or might have plowed through the low-mass girder-structures like a bullet through a snowball, sending solid pieces of the buoy flying in all directions, themselves dangerous to small craft. The inert, the bullet coming their way, was high-v and high-mass, a solid chunk of metal that might have been traveling for fifty years and more, an iron slug fired by a long-lost warship in a decades-ago war. Didn't need a warhead. Inerts tended to be far longer than wide because the fire mechanism in the old carriers stored them in bundles and fired them in swarms, but no matter how it was oriented when it hit, it was a killer—and if it tumbled, it was that much harder to predict, cutting that much wider a path of destruction. Mass and velocity were its destructive power. An arrow out of a crossbow that, at starship speeds, could take out another ship, wreck a space station, cheap and sure, nothing fragile about it.

After the war, they'd swept the lanes-Pell system had been a battle zone. Ordnance had flown every which way. They'd worked for years. And the last decade-they'd thought they had the lanes clear.

Clearly not. He had a small scattering of flashes. He thought they might be debris out of the buoy, maybe the power plant, or one of the several big dishes. He ran calculations, trying to figure what was coming, where the pieces were going, and he could use help-God, he could use help. He transmitted what he had. He kept transmitting.

FROGPRINCE: Sandman, I copy. Are you all right?

SANDMAN: FrogPrince, spread it out. I need some help here. . . UNICORN: Is this a joke, Sandman?

SANDMAN: I'm sending raw feed, all the data I've got. Help. Mayday. LOVER18: Sandman, what's up?

SANDMAN: Unicorn, this is serious.

DUTCHMAN: I copy, Sandman. My numbers man is on it.

Didn't even know Dutchman had a partner. A miner's numbers man was damned welcome on the case. Desperately welcome.

Meanwhile Sandman had his onboard encyclopedia. He had his histories. He hunted, paged, ferreted, trying to find a concrete answer on the mass of the antique inerts—which was only part of the equation. Velocity and vector depended on the ship that, somewhere out there, fifty and more years ago, had fired what might be one, or a dozen inerts. There could be a whole swarm inbound, a decades-old broadside that wouldn't decay, or slow, or stop, forever, until it found a rock to hit or a ship full of people, or a space station, or a planet.

Pell usually had one or another of the big merchanters in. Sandman searched his news files, trying to figure. The big ships had guns. Guns could deal with an inert, at least deflecting it— ifthey had an armed ship in the system. A big ship could chase it down, even grab it and decelerate it. He fed numbers into what was becoming a jumbled thread of inputs, speculations, calculations. Hell of it was—there was one thing that would shift an inert's course. One thing that lay at the heart of a star system, one thing that anchored planets, that anchored moons and stations: that gravity well that led straight to the system's nuclear heart—the sun itself. A star collected the thickest population of planets, and people, and vulnerable real estate to the same place as it collected stray missiles. And no question, the old inert was infalling toward the sun, increasing in v as it went, a man-made comet with a comet-sized punch, that could crack planetary crust, once it gathered all the v the sun's pull could give it.

T_REX: Sandman, possible that thing's even knocked about the Oort Cloud. T_REX: Perturbed out of orbit.

UNICORN: Perturbing us.

LOVER18: I've got a trajectory on that buoy debris chunk. . .

LOVER18: . . . No danger to us.

Alarm went off. BettyBfired her automated avoidance system. Sandman hooked a foot and both arms and clung to the counter, stylus punching a hole in his hand as his spare styluses hit the bulkhead. The bedding bunched up in the end of the hammock. It was usually a short burst. It wasn't. Sandman clung and watched the camera display, as something occluded the stars for a long few seconds.

"Hell!" he said aloud, alone in the dark. Desperately, watching a juggernaut go by him. "Hell!" One human mote like a grain of dust.

Then he saw stars. It was past him. What had hit the buoy was past him and now—now, damn, he and the buoy were two points on a straight line: he had the vector; and he had the camera and with that, God, yes, he could calculate the velocity.

He calculated. He transmitted both, drawing a simple straight line in the universe, calamity or deliverance reduced to its simplest form.

He extended the line toward the sun.

Calamity. Plane of the ecliptic, with Pell Station and its heavy traffic on the same side of the sun as Beta. The straight line extended, bending at the last, velocity accelerating, faster, faster, faster onto the slope of a star's deep well.

DUTCHMAN: That doesn't look good, Sandman.

UNICORN: :(

DUTCHMAN: Missing Pell. Maybe not missing me. . .

DUTCHMAN: . . . Braking. Stand by,

UNICORN: Dutchman, take care.

LOVER18: Letting those damn things loose in the first place. . . T_REX: Not liking your calculations, Sandman.

LOVER18: . . . What were they thinking?

FROGPRINCE: I'm awake. Sandman, Dutchman, you all right out there?

DUTCHMAN: I can see it. . .

UNICORN: Dutchman, be all right.

DUTCHMAN: I'm all right. . .

DUTCHMAN: . . . it's going past now. It's huge.

HAWK29: What's going on?

LOVER18: Read your damn transcript, Hawkboy.

CRAZYCHARLIE: Lurking and ru