Deep Freeze

CHAPTER SIX

Lieutenant Angela Bardeen pinned the twin suns first on one of Joshua Webster's shoulders and then the other. Finished, she stepped back and gave him a snappy salute. They were alone in Josh's office. The newly opened letter confirming his promotion lay on his desk.

"Very becoming, sir," Angela said.

Josh stepped forward, lifted her from her feet in an embrace, and kissed her.

"I would have expected more reserve in a senior officer," she teased.

"Tonight we celebrate," he said. "We'll have dinner at that place you like so well."

She pouted. "You always said it was too expensive."

"We'll blow my first month's pay increase."

She placed her palm on his forehead. "Well, you're not feverish."

He spanked her playfully on the rounded rump. The light slap was simultaneous with a thundering explosion that knocked the wall pictures askew and caused a suspended model of an X&A battle cruiser to sway on its hanging.

"What the devil?" Josh yelped.

Angela was on the communicator immediately. She listened for a few moments. "Some clown buzzed headquarters at supersonic speed."

"Well, they'll have his balls," Josh said. "They did identify him, of course."

Angela frowned. "I'm afraid not."

"You're kidding me."

"Sorry, no."

"Someone busts through the busiest air lanes in the galaxy at speed, rattles the windows of X&A headquarters, and he wasn't identified? What the hell, was he invisible?"

Admiral Julie Roberts and the X&A brass had substantially the same question. Captain Josh Webster was directed to find the answer.

"Captain," said the shift supervisor at Port Xanthos Control, "it was almost as if the sonofabitch was invisible."

"He couldn't have been going that fast," Josh said, "not and keep his hull intact."

"It wasn't that he was going all that fast," the supervisor said. "We had him on screen for a few seconds, long enough to measure his velocity. The speed isn't what bothers me. Any ship with a halfway decent flux drive could manage the speed. The question is, how did he drive into and out of the atmosphere at that rate without ablating his hull." He turned to a table, lifted a holoflat, handed it to Josh. "The automatic equipment snapped thirty or forty exposures. This is typical."

The glowing blur of a fireball was centered in the picture. "Computer enhancement?" Josh asked.

The supervisor handed him another holoflat. The central image was fuzzy and shapeless, nothing more than a concentration of light.

"What's your guess?" Josh asked.

"Sir, I don't know. It would be comforting if I could say it was a meteor.

But this thing seemed to materialize out of thin air. Tracking started less than fifty miles to the east at an altitude of a hundred and fifty thousand feet. The track arced down to pass headquarters at two thousand feet and then went vertical."

"Sit down, Captain," Admiral Julie Roberts said. Josh nodded, obeyed.

The admiral looked at him expectantly. "Well?" she asked.

"There seemed to be a tendency to brush off the incident as anunexplained anomaly," Josh said.

"That just won't do, Captain," Julie said sharply.

Josh spread his hands. "Something was there, obviously, something with mass to create a sonic boom and make an image on the detector screens. Any vessel with a fairly modern flux drive could match the speed, but at the expense of burning away so much insulation that it would break up."

"Josh, the whole place is buzzing," the admiral said. "You wouldn't believe some of the speculation that is going on."

"I can imagine," Josh said.

"We're sitting at the bottom of the most tightly controlled air and approach space in the U.P.," Julie said. "The volume of traffic dictates not just one extra-atmospheric layer of control but three. At peak times there's often a hold of hours on a ship wanting to land on Xanthos, and with three layers of approach control in near space a rock the size of your fist couldn't get through into atmosphere undetected."

"Something did," Josh said grimly.

Julie placed delicate fingers alongside her chin and stared moodily out of a window. The galaxy was big. Although man had been in space for thousands of years, it was still largely unexplored. And beyond the scattered rim stars at the edge of the Milky Way the bleak void of extragalactic space began. On the colossal scale of the universe man's little galaxy was an insignificance. Man himself? He was a frail creature, made of ephemeral stuff. He blustered himself outward from his small worlds, going armed and apprehensive, for although he was alone there was daunting evidence that others had gone before him. She had seen the Dead Worlds plying their eternal orbits in the hard, radiative glare of the core mass. She had read the Miaree manuscript, the chilling account of the death of two races; and she had come into contact with Erin Kenner's world. Intelligent species had come and gone in the home galaxy and one could only guess about the billions of possibilities offered in other areas of the cosmos. And to all races known to man had come death. Devastation.

Genocide.

The far-ranging ships of the Department of Exploration and Alien Search went armed. Man knew his own nature. Long ago he had loosed the nuclear thunderbolts on Old Earth; and in the Zede War he had shattered worlds. When he ventured into the nothingness of unexplored space he looked over his shoulder, for there was always, embedded in his mind, the dread of meeting something like himself, or something like the beings who had not only eradicated biological life from the Dead Worlds but had cooled the inner fires of the planets.

"Well, Josh," she said, finally, "was it an alien probe?"

Josh shrugged. "Makes you think, doesn't it, sir?"

"I don't think we'll be able to say definitely what it was, not with the data we have."

"I'm afraid not," Josh said.

She turned to him, smiled. "But it's not your job to investigate unexplained flying objects, Captain."

"Still, if there's anything I can do—"

"There is," she said, standing, reaching for a Service blue envelope that measured eight by ten inches. She walked around the desk and handed it to Josh, who had risen with her.

"Your new command, Captain," she said.

Josh grinned boyishly. He lifted the flap of the envelope and pulled the contents partially out, exposing the thick, blue silk paper of a ship's commission. His fingers trembled as he read the name, Erin Kenner.

"Admiral," he said, "I'm speechless." The Erin Kenner was X&A's newest, a cruiser-explorer of the new Discoverer class. She was only the fourth of her type to come out of the yards on Eban's Forge. Named, as were her predecessors, for independent space explorers, she had the muscle and the reserves to go anywhere in the galaxy. She, and others in her class, were miniature Rimfires, equipped with state of the art detectors, armed with enough firepower to meet any known or imagined threat.

"A crew has been assigned," Julie said. "You may choose your ownofficers."

"Admiral, thank you," he said, extending his hand.

"Thanks are unnecessary," Julie said stiffly. "Your selection was based on merit." She smiled. "I envy you, Josh. There are times, sitting here at this damned desk, when I wish I were your age with twin suns on my shoulders, a good ship around me, and all of space before me."

"I'd gladly sail under your command, Admiral," Josh said.

"Go on," she said, "get the hell out of here."

"Yes, sir."

She walked with him to the door. "When you read your orders, you'll see that they leave you quite a bit of latitude."

He looked at her, waiting.

"Yes, I do envy you. You can choose to blink in any direction, into any one of millions of unexamined systems, but if you choose to take the Erin Kenner to a certain point on Rimfire's route and strike off into the interior, you'll be serving two purposes."

She was giving him not only permission to search for the two ships that had carried four members of his family into the unknown, she was indicating that she thought it was desirable.

"I'm grateful, Admiral," he said.

"Well, Josh, I can accept the unexplained disappearance of a gentleman amateur at space navigation, but when a man like your brother David goes unreported after blinking off into the same area I think it's time to try to find out why."

"Yes, sir, I feel the same way."

"To warn you to be careful would be insulting to your standing," she said.

"I don't mind at all," he said with a grin, "and you can be assured, Admiral, that I'll be very damned careful."

Josh did a little dance around his office, brandishing the ship's commission paper. Angela stood, arms crossed, her face serious, watching him.

"Why the sad face?" he asked.

"When will you leave?"

"That's not the right question."

"What do you mean?"

"The question is, when do we leave?"

Her face relaxed into a beaming smile. "We?"

"If you think you can hack a couple of years in space, Lieutenant."

"I can."

He winked. "Well, then, why aren't you packed?"

"Give me five minutes."

"There's one thing, Angela."

She was immediately apprehensive.

"The Erin Kenner is a small, tight ship. We'll be a part of a rather closely confined and varied group of people. You are familiar, I assume, with the rule of service decorum regarding male-female relationships aboard ship. On a big craft, where the crew numbers in the dozens or into three figures, there's a certain latitude. On a small ship one's personal life impacts more intimately on others. To avoid complications one sleeps in one's own bed."

She smiled. "Surely there will be times when—"

"You will not try to seduce the captain into improper behavior, wench."

"Well, I can stand it if you can," she said.

He took her into his arms, looked down at her face. "There is a solution to what would become, I fear, a matter of some frustration."

"Yes?"

"If a ship's captain and one of his officers are man and wife, their bed can be the same."

"That's a proposal?"

"Yes."

"And what if, in the future, our orders put us on different ships?"

"We'll face that when it comes," he said. "Will you marry me?"

"Oh, hell, I guess so," she said teasingly. "I hate sleeping alone."

As he was kissing her, a vivid image of his younger sister was so real in his mind that he opened his eyes, startled, wanting to reassure himself that it was Angela and not Sheba in his arms.

The Erin Kenner lay in her cradle, long and sleek, one hundred fifty feet of gleaming, silvery metal. One had to look closely to see the seams of air locks, of weapons bays and sensor ports. At her bow, high, twin viewports were open, protective covers rolled back into their slots in the hull. Like opposed eyes, the viewports gave the ship a pixieish personality. In space the ports would seldom be opened. The Erin Kenner's eyes would be electronic and optic, for the fragile men and women who would be enclosed in her durametal hull needed the protection of her density against the cold and the radiations of open space.

The crew were lined up at attention along the length of the ship when Josh and Angela stepped down from an aircar to the brassy blare of a service band. Two junior officers, selected by Josh after a search of personnel records, had already joined the ship. One of them called the men to attention. Josh answered his salute and, with First Mate Angela Webster at his side, walked slowly past for a formal inspection. The second mate and the navigator were male. Of the ten-man crew five were female.

Josh had examined the service records of each member, and he was pleased. The admiral had assigned only top personnel to the new ship.

"No speeches," he said, when the second mate bellowed out an order to the crew to stand at rest.

"None of us here is on his first cruise. You can expect from me that the Erin Kenner will be run by the book. I expect from you that you'll do your duties as efficiently as your records show that you have performed them in the past."

He looked up and down the row of young faces. "I know that you're curious about where we'll be blinking. We'll be following Rimfire's extragalactic routes in a counter rotation direction to a point which the navigator will be happy to show you on the charts, and then we'll be laying new blink routes into the interior. Not incidentally, we will be trying to locate two private exploration vessels which have gone unreported in the area. First, however, while we get acquainted with Miss Erin Kenner and she with us, we'll have a little pleasure cruise a few parsecs toward the core. As you know, it's standard procedure to keep a ship's shakedown cruise on well traveled blink routes. Our destination will be one of the new wilderness planets in the Diomedes Sector. From there we will return to Eban's Forge for final provisioning and any needed repairs or alterations before going extragalactic."

For two days Josh directed his officers and crew in dry runs of ship's operation. Only when he was certain that each man knew his station and his duty did he activate the flux drive. The Erin Kenner lifted smoothly from her construction cradle. She wafted upward through atmosphere, accelerating, and then the black of space claimed her. There, in her element, with the latest model of blink generator humming smoothly, she lay poised while captain and crew ran dozens of final checks.

On an order from Josh the navigator engaged the drive. The ship blinked out of existence to materialize light-years away near a beacon marking the lanes toward the galactic core. For some time the routes were well traveled. As the mass of the core brightened on the optic viewers, as the big emptiness that was space became relatively more crowded, the blink beacons were closer together, the blink lanes less traveled. The last few jumps, before the Erin Kenner fluxed down to a newly constructed spaceport on the wilderness world where Sheba Webster's holofilm company was at work, were marked by temporary exploration beacons that had not yet been replaced by permanent fixtures.