Moon Flower (43 page)

“C-field J vector?”

“Seven-seven-zero.”

“Ramp at max?”

“Check.”

“Injector phases?”

“Two-five; four-four; and, ah... zero-one-three.”

As Shearer listened, the chilling awareness crystalized that the future before him had reduced to just two extremes. Either he would very likely die within the next few minutes if Yannis failed and
Marduk
fired its laser; or he would see again all the things he had remembered and dreamed of since leaving Cyrene.

Strange though it had to be at a moment like this, he thought of Jerri and all they had talked about and planned. He wondered where she was and what she was doing right now. Was she still at Linzava, and what was happening there? Or would she have moved somewhere that would be safer? He thought about the hills and forests of Yocala, Revo with its lake on one side and the sea on the other, the color and life of the town, and its people leading lives of kindness, trust, honesty, and integrity. Never had he been more mindful of how much it all contrasted to the things they had returned to. He found that he was easy in his mind that it had all come to this. It simplified all the heart-wrenching and soul-searching. If the alternative of returning to Cyrene was not to be, then he would be content to accept the other. Earth, he now realized, was not an option that he could live with. A number in one of the displays he was watching changed below a critical value.

“Thirty seconds,” he said, alerting the operator.

The operator checked and called to Lang. “Rising imminent. Due in twenty-eight seconds.”

“Roger. F-main and boost, ready to fire?” Yannis had the alignment view copied to his console.

“Ready.”

“Fields loaded for immediate cut-in?”

“Check.”

Yannis took a final glance over his screens. At the same time he managed to muster a faint grin. “I’ve never heard of anyone flying an H ship by the seat their pants before.”

“Please concentrate on the objective, Colonel,” Callen pleaded dryly from one side.

“Twelve seconds.”

The view on the screen switched to another camera, resetting to one side the image of Earth’s curve with the freighter hanging in the foreground, which then began the slow crawl back toward the center.

Five seconds.... Four...”

“
Marduk
sighted!”

Lang’s voice came in. “Trim attitude left point six, up point three.”

Yannis tensed over the console, his eyes judging the angle and distance, fingers rapidly entering last-moment corrections. “Let her come.... That’s it.... Just a little more, baby....”

The surveillance operator checked a screen again. “Mr. Borland. Something’s changed here.”

Borland moved to investigate.
Ranger
was still docked at the satellite, but a freighter that had been standing off to one side had changed its position and was now in front of it. Borland frowned. The control staff from the satellite had all been taken off. And why should they want to move the freighter anyway?

“Is something wrong?” the general asked from the visiting military group.

“I’m not sure.”

“Radar alert. The intervening object is beginning to accelerate this way.”

Borland stared in confusion for several seconds, and then it clicked. They were going to try and use it as a ram. A good try, he complimented inwardly.

“Intercept ETA?” he queried.

“Thirty-seven minutes,” a voice responded after a short pause.

Desperation, the mother of invention, Borland thought to himself. He turned to address a different sector of the Opcon room. “Ordnance. Retarget intermediary object and lock on.”

“Target accelerating rapidly,” the surveillance operator interjected. “Revised ETA thirty-four minutes.”

“Reset trigger arming code to five,” Borland intoned. “Unlock safety override and stand by.” This would be a better demonstration than they bargained for. And he could still send in the assault ships without having to take out DSX-14, with all the attendant inconveniences.

“Trigger arming reset. Safety unlocked.”

“
Target has disappeared
!”

“What?...”

The surveillance operator turned a baffled face. “We’ve lost contact. There’s no reading on anything.”

Yannis stared fixedly at the screen, silently measuring the time like a musician listening to an internal beat. Since the satellite wasn’t connected to the freighter by a Heim link, there was no way of communicating with it now. Reentry into 3-space would be after a pre-timed delay, which to be on the safe side he had set to occur at a point some distance short of the target.

It reappeared suddenly out of nowhere, enlarging with frightening speed to blot out all else as it came hurtling at them with the momentum it had built up in Heim space. None of the petrified faces fixed on the screen had time to utter a sound....

And the interior of the control center lit up with new light flooding though the windows on the unshuttered side, away from the sun. The spectacle flared for several seconds, and then died, leaving just a cloud of debris dispersing rapidly into space. It was said afterward that the explosion was seen from Burma to Pakistan.

“Let’s go,” Callen said to the awed company around the room.

Ten minutes later, the
Ranger
detached from DSX-14 and headed for deep space. After little over an hour later, it engaged Heim drive and blipped out of the normally perceived solar system....

While behind it, high over the surface of Earth, pieces of debris, materials, and particulates from
Marduk
and the freighter from Cyrene that had vaporized with it drifted down in an expanding cloud that on its lower fringes was already beginning to mix with the upper atmosphere.

CHAPTER FORTY

Revo base had undergone a transformation in the two months that had gone by since their return. With the gates open again, and passage in and out unrestricted, the semblance to a prison camp or military installation had largely disappeared. Many of the once-departed Terrans had reappeared, some of them on a part-time basis while they continued to reside or involve themselves in other business elsewhere. The skies were turning grayer and Ra Alpha was receding, and the backlog of outstanding work on the buildings and structures was being cleared to prepare for the approaching cold season. All the same, a lot more flowers and plants were in evidence to brighten the place up.

The
Tacoma
had long since departed, taking Gloria Bufort and her briefly lived court back to what whatever bickering and infighting between Interworld and Milicorp awaited them, but truth was that nobody on Cyrene really cared all that much. The administration that arrived with the
Ranger
on its first visit had succumbed to the planet’s pervasive influence and were keeping things going on a genial caretaker basis until some kind of a policy was decided on how future relationships were to be managed. Even if Interworld decided to pull out, with the diversity of interests on Earth and the dynamic expansion of interstellar activities generally, it was unthinkable that some kind of contact wouldn’t continue, even if no more than as occasional visits to satisfy scientific and cultural curiosity. In fact, most of the Terrans who would be making their homes there were agreed that something like that would suit them just fine.

In the meantime, the new A-wave laboratory on the east side next to the flight operations zone, comprehensively equipped and with all the facilities of the base to draw on, surpassed anything that Wade could have dreamed of at Linzava. A new model of adtenna was already producing unequivocal results, and the staff included a coterie of Cyrenean students and technicians, who, although not fully up to the intricacies of quantum mechanics yet, were unequaled in eagerness and desire to learn. Shearer, Uberg, and Elena took care of most of the work there these days. Wade himself spent more time at places like Doriden and Linzava pursuing his prime interest of helping the Cyreneans achieve a smooth and trouble-free technological transition. At the base, around the city, and in all the other locations where they had established a presence, the Terrans were already highly revered by the population on account of the things they knew and what they could
do
. Many Cyreneans commented that the Terran authorities at the base seemed to have changed its ways lately from what had been seen in the early days. The Terrans told them it was because they were turning into Cyreneans. And in a kind of way, it was true.

Shearer thought that Jerri looked something like a lady from English Georgian times but without the skirt bustle, when she arrived at the edge of the flight landing area. She was dressed in formal Cyrenean style, with a long saronglike garment hanging elegantly almost to the ankles, a light purple cloak, and an ornate hat with a flower and feathers. One of the Cyrenean lab staff had fashioned a collar for Nim to match the clasp of the cloak. Shearer had outdone himself by taking to Cyrenean trousers and boots, though with the trousers less baggy than the native norm, a satiny yellow shirt with a floppy collar and maroon neckerchief, and a long brown coat with golden buttons and braid that he had bought when a traveling trader stopped by the base one day.

“Come on, you’re the last,” he said as she took his arm. “They say there’s a woman behind every successful man. And it’s true. We’re always waiting.”

“The obligatory last-minute loose button. It’s a law of nature. There’s always something.”

Shearer took Nim’s leash in his other hand, and they began walking out toward the waiting aircraft. It was the same VTOL personnel transporter that Gloria Bufort and her entourage had used on the evening of their reception by Vattorix the day after the
Tacoma
’s arrival. Very fitting, too, Shearer thought to himself. A clunky sambot flyer like the ones the peasantry had traveled in wouldn’t have suited this occasion at all.

Nick had opened his physician’s practice up at Ulla, and already he had a list of patients, a fine reputation that was spreading across northern Yocala, and a couple of trainee Cyrenean nurses. He and Sakari were getting married today. It was the first instance of a Terran-Cyrenean match to be formalized, as far as anybody knew, and had become the major social event to be talked about for miles around. Just about the whole of the town of Ulla seemed to have taken upon itself to organize the celebrations and invite itself, and two boatloads of well-wishers had arrived via the sea route from Revo. Vattorix felt that such a symbolic union of the two cultures warranted some official recognition too. At first he had intended sending a representative with regrets that the pressures of his duties prevented him from being able to attend personally. Then Chev had pointed out that the Terrans could have him there and back in a day, and used the phone that he had acquired and never grew tired of showing off to get their ready agreement. Vattorix had promptly assented, and the VTOL’s first stop would be at his residence across the lake to collect him.

Shearer unclipped the leash as they approached the open door of the aircraft, letting Nim bound ahead and up into the cabin. Colonel Yannis stood waiting to close the door. “Glad you decided to come,” he said to Jerri as Shearer lent her a hand up and then followed.

“When did a woman ever miss a wedding?”

Yannis grinned, secured the door, and made his way forward, while Shearer and Jerri buckled themselves into the last two empty seats, alongside Uberg and Elena. Wade was already at Ulla, having arrived the previous day from somewhere in his travels. Yannis seemed to be back in his element, piloting again. With places like Linzava effectively becoming outposts of the base, and the demands for regular traffic increasing, he and the other pilots were always busy. The Cyreneans were awed by Terran feats of navigation. Chev liked to astound his friends by showing them their location on his phone’s map display, pinpointed live from the satellite grid.

Two others who would be making their own way were Callen and Jeff. With sulfurous altercations and demands still singeing the stuff of Heim space along the communications link back to Milicorp, they had decided it would be both considerate and discreet, at least for a while, to leave no one with any need to lie when saying they had disappeared from the base. They were up at Linzava, coordinating its development as an offshoot enterprise, and had only a few miles to travel down the valley. Jeff had been administering the refitting of the workshops and was negotiating for another of Wolaxal’s steam engines to be built there. After further deliberation — and perhaps, for all anyone knew, with the help of a little stimulated intuition — it had been decided to let the Cyreneans set their own pace and not reinstate the fission module. Callen was said to cut a good figure on a horse, and to be enjoying the life.

The engines started and idled for a few seconds, and then the note rose rapidly and steadied. Moments later, the craft started to rise. Outside, the buildings of the base shrank and fell away.

Elena leaned across to lay a hand on Jerri’s shoulder. “What did you decide to get them in the end?” she asked.

“A window planter in a wrought-metal frame. Jeff has a blacksmith friend somewhere along the Geevar, who made it. He picked it up for us, but he sent us some pics. It’s really beautiful.”

“It sounds very nice,” Elena agreed.

“Appropriate for a wedding,” Uberg put in. “An old Yocalan tradition says that every home should have some moon flowers inside. They bring luck and good fortune, you know.”

The craft rose and turned, and the familiar expanse of Revokanta lake and its hills came into view ahead. Unlike the blue of the first time they crossed it to Vattorix’s residence, the water was gray with reflected overcast, and the hills already shedding leaves and taking on a stark look in anticipation of the coming winter. Jerri slid a hand onto Shearer’s arm and leaned closer to look past him through the window.

“It all feels so different from the last time,” she said. “We were fugitives then. Now I feel as if I’m going home.” She fell quiet. A look of sadness seemed to come over her as she gazed out.