PROLOGUE
Assilois apVain lounged in his workstation in the dimly lit control room, keeping an eye on the bank of screens that nearly surrounded him. His screens, and those at four other workstations, glowing with real-time images that ranged the spectrum from gamma to radio, provided the room’s only illumination. A few of the screens showed pictures easily intelligible to any human eye. Most of them showed shifting schematics, writhing eddies, images in unreal colors, or moving graphs. A few showed rippling, particolored curtains.
Only two of the sites in the normally crowded control center were occupied. Everyone else, other than the few people needed to maintain the systems, was at the holiday gala hosted by Dr. Nikholas Morgan. As administrative chief of the exploratory mission to Society 437, Morgan was the de facto head of state. His word was law on Society 437—or so he believed. The 846 scientists and technicians at Central, the main scientific station on Waygone—which is what everybody but Morgan called the planet—had other ideas about who was in charge. The hundred-odd scientists and technicians of the off-site exploratory mission counted themselves lucky that they were posted to Aquarius or Frosty stations and didn’t have to put up with Chief Morgan.
But two months had passed since Confederation Day, and there hadn’t been any holidays or other excuses to break the tedium of work, so Morgan arbitrarily declared a “holiday,” complete with mandatory attendance at the “gala.” Division chiefs with field studies and experiments in progress grumbled or howled in agony at Morgan’s fiat, but they brought all of their staffs back to Central. Dr. Morgan controlled mission resources; scientists who displeased him found their resources reallocated to someone else.
Suddenly apVain sat upright and stared intently at a corner of one of the screens he was monitoring.
“Do we have a supply run coming in?” he asked. When he didn’t get an answer, he shot a glance at Suzrain Hirsute, the climatologist at the other workstation. He saw the shimmer of a privacy barrier around Hirsute and so activated the intercom inside Hirsute’s workstation and repeated his question.
“Not that I know of,” Hirsute replied absently. “Why?” He didn’t look up from the atmospheric data he was monitoring.
“Someone just dropped into orbit, that’s why.” ApVain sounded annoyed. He peered quizzically at the blip on his radar scope. “When we set up here, I told Chief Morgan one of the satellites needed to be oriented outward. If we had an all-spectrum satellite looking outward, we would have seen this ship days ago.” A surveillance technician, apVain was responsible for geological data via satellite gathering sensors.
Nearly all of the satellites in orbit around Society 437 were focused on a section of the planet’s surface. Only one of the satellite-borne radars scanned from horizon to horizon, and just then it showed an unexpected blip in orbit.
“Hmm? What’d you say?” Hirsute asked as he continued to monitor the atmospheric data.
“Someone just dropped into orbit.”
Hirsute looked at apVain and blinked rapidly. “No one’s due for two months. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” apVain snapped. “Look.” He pointed an accusing finger at the scope.
The climatologist levered himself out of his chair and joined apVain to look over his shoulder at the radar scope. Clearly visible just above the horizon was a blip against the black of space.
“Are you sure that’s not one of the other satellites?” Hirsute asked.
ApVain tapped the screen. “It’s at a higher altitude than our satellites. And it’s too big. It’s a starship, not a satellite.”
“Who is it?”
ApVain shook his head and reached for his comm unit. He was going to give Morgan a piece of his mind for not alerting him to the arrival of an unscheduled ship.
“What was that?” Hirsute asked.
“What was what?” ApVain looked back at the scope.
“There was a blip, right here.” Hirsute touched the screen. Numbers were vanishing from the screen where he pointed. “It suddenly appeared, moved a short distance, then vanished.”
“Impossible,” apVain said. Hirsute was pointing well below the altitude of the satellites. But as apVain looked, a blip appeared and vanished in a different spot, much closer to Central Station. “What the—” ApVain leaned forward, as though getting closer to the screen would give him more data. He made quick mental calculations from the numbers that had flashed next to the blip. “If that continues on the same course, it’ll land near here in half an hour.” He shook his head. “But it can’t be. There’s nothing that appears and vanishes on radar like that.”
“Could it be the thing I saw?”
ApVain shook his head. “Too far away—nothing moves that fast in atmosphere.” His fingers started tapping out Chief Morgan’s code on his comm unit, then apVain stopped and stared at the scope again. A smaller blip dropped out of and curved away from the orbiting starship. He put the comm unit down and tapped keys on the radar control board. New numbers scrolled across the screen.
“That starship just dropped a shuttle on course to land at Aquarius Station. Why would a starship drop someone on Aquarius instead of coming to Central first?”
Hirsute thought about it for a moment. He swallowed and croaked, “Pirates. Only pirates would go to an outstation instead of landing at the main settlement.”
“Oh hell.” ApVain snatched up his comm unit and frantically tapped out Chief Morgan’s code.
Before he finished, another blip appeared, far too close to be the same object headed for Aquarius Station.
“It’s landing here!”
“But they haven’t signaled us.”
ApVain scrabbled at his console controls. He brought up the visual from the surveillance camera outside the control center just as something struck it and the picture dissolved into static. Frantic, he fumbled with his comm unit and tapped in the numbers again. “Chief,” he said when his call was answered, “I think we’ve got trouble. Looks like there’s a starship in orbit; a shuttle is headed toward Aquarius and someone just landed here.” His jaw clenched as he listened to Morgan’s reply. “I’m not playing some kind of practical joke,” he snapped. “They just came in out of nowhere. No signals, no nothing. Someone is here. They might be pirates.”
Suddenly the starship in orbit just disappeared from the screen and the satellites registered a huge explosion.
As apVain was explaining that the starship appeared to have been destroyed, the door to the control center slammed open and the two men jerked their attention to it. Hirsute’s scream was cut short, becoming a gurgle as he collapsed.
Copyright © 2002 by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
