A Voice in the Night

WAITING AT THE ALTAR

The Copperhead was floating through the fogs of transdimensional space, somewhere between Fomalhaut and Serenity Station, which is to say it was well off the more traveled routes. Priscilla Hutchins was half-asleep in the pilot’s seat. The captain, Jake Loomis, had gone back to the passenger cabin, where he might have drifted off also, or was maybe playing chess with Benny, the AI. Soft music drifted through the ship. The Three Kings doing “Heartbreak.”

Hutch was vaguely aware of the humming and beeping of the electronics, and the quiet flow of air through the vents. Then suddenly she wasn’t. The lights had gone out. And the ship bounced hard, as if it had been dropped into a storm-tossed sea. The displays were off and the warning klaxon sounded. Power down.

“System failure,” said Benny, using the slightly modified tone that suggested he’d also suffered a cutback.

Emergency lights blinked on and cast an eerie glow across the bridge. The ship rocked and slowed and accelerated and rocked again. Then, within seconds, all sense of motion stopped. “Are we back in normal space, Benny?” she asked.

“I can’t confirm, but that seems to be the case.”

Jake’s voice came loud and subtly amused from the cabin: “Hutch, what happened?”

She knew exactly what had happened. This was one more test on her qualification flight. There was no danger to the Copperhead. Nobody was at risk other than herself.

“Engines have shut down,” said Benny.

“Power outage,” she told Jake.

The navigational display flickered back to life. Stars blinked on. The captain appeared at the hatch. “You okay, Hutch?”

“I’m fine.” The misty transdimensional universe that provided shortcuts across the cosmos had vanished, replaced by the vast sweep of the Milky Way. “We’re back outside.” That would have been automatic. During a power failure, the drive unit was designed to return the vehicle to normal space. Otherwise, the ship risked being lost forever with no chance of rescue. “Benny, is there an imminent threat?”

“Negative, Hutch. Ship is secure.”

“Very good.” She turned to Jake, who was buckling down beside her. He was middle-aged, low-key, competent. His voice never showed emotion. Forbearance sometimes. Tolerance. But that was all. “You want me to send out a distress call?”

“Where would you send it, Hutch?”

“Serenity is closest.” It would of course be a hyperspace transmission. The station would know within a few hours that they were in trouble.

“Good. No. Don’t send. Let’s assume you’ve done that. What’s next?”

There wasn’t actually that much else to do. She asked Benny for details on the damage, and was told where the problems lay and what needed to be done before restarting the engines. The electronics had gone out because the main feeding line had ruptured. She went down into the cargo hold, opened the access hatch, and explained to Jake how she would have managed the repairs. He asked a few questions, seemed satisfied with her replies, and they started back topside.

They were just emerging from the connecting shaft when Benny came back on the circuit. “Hutch, we’re receiving a radio signal. Artificial.”

She looked at Jake. And smiled.

“No,” he said. “It’s not part of the exercise.”

That was hard to believe. But even though the ground rules allowed him to make stuff up, he was not permitted to lie about whether a given occurrence was a drill. “What’s it say, Benny?”

“I have not been able to make a determination. The signal, I suspect, is greatly weakened.”

It made no sense. There wouldn’t be anybody out here. They were light-years from everything.

While Hutch hesitated, Jake took over. “Benny, can you get a fix on the source?”

“Within limits, yes.”

“So where’s it coming from?”

“The nearest star in that direction, Captain, is Capua. But Capua is more than two hundred light-years. Moreover, I believe the transmission is a broadcast signal. Not directional.”

“Okay,” said Jake. “What do you make of it, Hutch?”

“No way an artificial radio signal’s going to travel two hundred light-years. If it’s not directional.”

“Therefore—?”

“It’s a distress call. Somebody actually did what we’ve been rehearsing. Broke down and got thrown out into normal space.”

“So what do we do?”

“If the signal’s so deteriorated that we can’t read it—”

“—Yes?—”

“They’ve been out here a while, and are probably beyond help.”

“And, Priscilla—” He always used her given name when he wanted to make a point. “Are we going to make that assumption?”

She straightened her shoulders. “No, sir.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“Benny,” said Hutch, “is the signal still coming in?”

“Yes, it is, Hutch.”

“Any chance if we sit tight you’d be able to get a clear enough reading to tell us what it says?”

“Negative. It’s seriously degenerated.”

Jake cleared his throat. “Why would you bother anyhow?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are the possibilities?”

“It’s probably a distress call.”

“That’s one possibility. What else might it be?”

She thought about it. “We just happened to be in front of it.”

“Good. So what do we do?”

“Find the source.”

“I believe,” said Benny, “I’ve been able to read enough to make a determination.”

“What have you got?”

“I can make out what appears to be Code Six.”

“Code Six,” said Jake. Help. “We haven’t used that one in a few years.”

To find the source of the signal, they had to get another angle. “Benny,” she said, “start engines. Prep for a jump. We want a seventy-degree angle on the transmission. Set for 30 million miles.”

“Starting engines, Hutch.”

The drive unit would require about forty minutes before they could actually do the transdimensional insertion. So she sat back to wait. “You ever run into anything like this before?” she asked Jake.

“Once,” he said. “But it was an automated vehicle. No life-and-death issue. I’ve never seen one where there was actually someone involved. Which is probably the case here.”

She brought up the signal. It was seriously corrupted. She couldn’t make anything out, but she had learned to trust the AI’s. “I wouldn’t want to get stuck out here,” she said.

“No, Hutch, me neither.”

There had been a few ships that had vanished over the years. Vehicles that simply went out somewhere and were never heard from again. It was, she supposed, inevitable. If you were going to travel to seriously remote places, you took your chances.

Jump technology was notoriously inexact. They emerged less than halfway to their intended destination.

“Are we still reading the transmission?” asked Hutch.

“Give me a minute.”

Meanwhile, Benny relayed a chart to the navigation display. He marked their initial position, and drew a line from it indicating the direction from which the transmission had come. He showed their current location and informed them that they weren’t receiving the transmission anymore.

“So either,” said Hutch, “we’ve gotten lost or it’s an intermittent signal.”

“Probably an intermittent signal,” said Jake. He brought some coffee back from the dispenser. “You want some?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Sorry it’s taking so long,” said Benny. “It’s difficult to sort everything.”

“It’s okay, Benny. No hurry.”

It took about two days, but, in Jake’s words, they got lucky. “We’ve got something. It appears to be a shuttle.”

“They’re probably long dead,” said Hutch.

“That’s correct.” Jake’s voice was flat. “Maybe somebody got to them. Let’s hope.”

She wondered momentarily if the signal was a plant. Part of the exercise. If they were testing her judgment. “Benny,” she said, “do we have a record of any lost ships nine years ago?”

“The Forscher,” he said. “It was last reported at Talios in the spring of ’86. Carrying an exobiologist and an actor. Started home and was never heard from again.”

An actor? Hutch’s heart rate began to pick up. “Jake, that would be Dave Simmons.” The ultimate action-hero vid star turned explorer. Simmons had turned out to be even bigger than the characters he portrayed. He’d financed scientific missions, founded schools in remote places, once famously challenged the African dictator Kali Anka to have it out man to man. Anka had declined and been driven from the country a year later.

“The exobiologist was Paul Trelawney,” said Benny. Trelawney had won the Cassimir Award in ’85. “And of course there would also have been a pilot.”

The ship had sent a movement report when it left Talios. A long search had yielded nothing. “So something happened on the way back,” said Hutch, “and they jumped out.” If they’d sent no hypercomm call, used only a standard radio, their chances of being found would have been virtually nil. There was simply too much ground to cover. But if they’d sent a hypercomm transmission, no one had received it.

It was hard to imagine the tall, lantern-jawed Simmons dead. The guy had been the epitome of the leading man, in charge, indestructible, always one step ahead of events. One entertainment commentator had remarked that his loss had “reminded us all of our mortality.”

“So what are you going to do?” asked Jake.

“We make a report and then head for Palomus, right? We can’t do anything for the Forscher, or whoever’s in the shuttle, not after all these years, so we just give the Patrol what we have and continue the mission.”

He nodded. “That’s by the book.”

She read disapproval in his eyes. Maybe another test of her judgment. “Jake, there’s no possibility here of anyone’s life being endangered. So we let the Patrol know and get back to what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“On the other hand,” he said—

“On the other hand, what?”

“We’re close. And our mission isn’t under time constraints. We can go have a look, and send back additional details.”

“Do we really want to do that?” Hutch was thinking about the shape the captain and his passengers would be in after nine years.

He straightened and looked down at her. “There’s a code, Priscilla. We owe it to them.”

“Okay.”

“We don’t leave people adrift out here if we can help it. It doesn’t matter what the book says. We go over to the shuttle and stand by until the Patrol comes.”

“Finding it was nothing short of a miracle,” said Hutch.

“There is more to it than that, Priscilla,” said Benny. “I was able to track it by fixing its position at several points over the few days during which it had been intermittently transmitting. That had given us direction and velocity. The rest had required some luck, but certainly not a miracle.”

Jake looked amused.

The shuttle was a Voltar II, an earlier model of the vehicle that rested inside the Copperhead’s own launch bay. It was adrift in a place where even the stars seemed dim.

“It explains why they had to use a radio,” said Hutch.

Jake nodded. “They had to abandon ship.”

It looked undamaged. Its registry number, VC112, brightened when the Copperhead’s navigation lights fell on it. It was, of course, silent now. Its ports were dark, although there was still enough power to cause a flicker in the fore and aft warning lamps as they drew near. Hutch turned her forward lights on the vehicle.

The pilot’s seat was occupied.

Jake climbed out of his harness and opened the storage bin. He took out a set of air tanks and the backpack that contained the Flickinger generator and a jetpack. Then he looked at her.

She had an obligation to go with him. It shouldn’t have been a problem. She’d done EVA’s in training. But she wasn’t excited about what they were going to find in the shuttle’s cabin. “I’m coming,” she said.

Flickinger fields had long since replaced the cumbersome pressure suits. The generator provided an electronic shield against the vacuum. A passerby, had there been one, would have seen nothing like the astronauts of an earlier era. Rather there were only two people wearing green and white uniforms. With jetpacks.

They crossed to the shuttle and looked in through the ports. Only one body was visible. It was in the pilot’s seat. It appeared in much better condition than Hutch would have expected after nine years. “The environment,” Jake explained. “In a case like this, you don’t get all the microbes and whatever else is involved in decomposition. A corpse is more likely to look a bit mummified.”

He opened the hatch, climbed into the airlock, and made room for her. She noticed he’d brought a laser. “Just in case,” he said. “You’re going aboard a vehicle that has very little power. You wouldn’t want to get trapped in the airlock.” He touched the control pad and the outer hatch closed. The lock should then have begun to fill with air. But nothing happened.

“See what I mean?” He used the laser to cut a hole in the inner hatch. There was air pressure inside, and it quickly equalized. Then the hatch opened and they floated into the cabin.

They turned on their wrist lamps. Jake went up front to identify the corpse. Hutch took a deep breath, told herself it was no problem, and joined him. She recognized the body immediately.

It was Simmons.

Hutch stared. Somehow, even now, he was sprawled beneath the restraints in that easy charge-the-hill manner she knew so well. Goodbye, Dave, she thought. Growing up, she’d loved the guy. “What do you think happened?”

“We’ll have to wait for somebody to find the Forscher to be sure,” he said. “But whatever the breakdown was, it probably killed Kobayashi and Trelawney.” Fudoki Kobayashi had been the pilot. Jake shook his head. “Terrible way to die.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t end it,” said Hutch. “He could have walked out of the airlock.”

“I suspect he kept hoping somebody would come. He’d sent out a distress call.”

“I guess so. But he must have known nobody would hear it for a long time.”

“Maybe. Still, he was an actor. Maybe he didn’t really understand how big it is out here. He gets here in a few days. You kind of lose the feel for the size of everything. Or maybe he didn’t know it wasn’t a hypercomm. Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter now.”

Maybe, she thought, he just wasn’t inclined to give up.

Something had become stuck to one of the storage cabinets in the rear of the vehicle. It looked like a notebook. Hutch removed it, opened it, touched the keypad. Nothing happened. “I think it needs charging.”

“We’ll take it back with us.”

“What do we do about Simmons?”

“Leave him where he is. Let the pros take care of it.” He took a last look around. Shook his head. “Nothing more for us to do here.”

They crossed back to the Copperhead, and Jake called the Patrol to let them know what he’d found. They thanked us and said they already had a unit underway.

“Good,” said Jake.

“You’ll stay on the scene, right? Give us a signal to track?”

“We’ll be here. Copperhead out.”

Hutch connected the notebook to a power source. And began paging through.

“What’s it say?” asked Jake.

She frowned at it, scrolled through to the last entries: Whoever reads this: Get to Talios III by the last week of November. And, the last line: Guess we bombed.

Jake leaned down, closer to the screen. “What’s he talking about?”

Hutch started paging back. “Give me a minute. It sounds as if they were running an experiment of some kind.”

“Whatever,” said Jake. “It’s irrelevant now. That November is long gone.”

It didn’t take long to find what they were talking about. Simmons had been enjoying a quiet hour, reading the comic novel Last Man Out, which was not at all the kind of book she’d have expected in his case. The voices of Trelawney and Kobayashi were just barely audible on the bridge. Then, in Simmons’ words, everything came apart. There was a loud bang, screams, and darkness.

“Probably a power surge,” Jake said. “It would have knocked everything offline. Including the AI.”

When Simmons got to Trelawney and Kobayashi, they were both dead on the bridge. Electrocuted. The backup lights had come on, and fortunately the system had maintained life support. But other than that—

The hypercomm system either didn’t come back online or Simmons didn’t know how to operate it manually. Normally, all that’s necessary is to give an instruction to the AI, but the AI was down. Simmons decided his best chance was to use the shuttle radio, and send out a distress call in case anybody was nearby. So he got into the shuttle and launched.

He’d planned to return to the ship after sending the code six. As if things could not have gotten worse, the launch doors closed behind him and wouldn’t reopen.

It was hopeless. The last pages were filled with messages left for his two ex-wives, for his kids, and for friends and colleagues. There was no sign of self-pity. Frustration, yes. But if he was frightened, he didn’t leave any of it on the record. Incredibly, he remained the action hero so many had come to admire. Except this time it didn’t end happily.

Get to Talios by the last week of November.

Guess we bombed.

Benny broke into her thoughts: “I think,” he said, “There’s more in the notebook. About November.”

“What’s that?” Hutch asked.

“In the Talios system, they encountered an interstellar vehicle.”

“Too bad it wasn’t around when they broke down,” said Jake.

“You misunderstand me, Captain. It doesn’t seem to have been one of ours.”

Jake and Hutch sat quietly while Benny explained. “They were walking around on the fourth planet admiring the scenery when their AI alerted them that they weren’t alone. She told them there was a spacecraft in the area that did not fit any known configuration. And that it was approaching.”

“My God,” said Jake.

“Do you want me to put the pertinent sections onscreen?”

“Yes,” he said. “Please.”

The vehicle had been considerably larger than the Forscher. It was enormous. Probably two miles long, its hull black and smooth. They could see illuminated ports, including an area that had to be the bridge. We ran for the shuttle, Simmons wrote. Ten minutes after we got back inside the ship they were on the radio. Strange-sounding voices. Not human. Nothing like us. We said hello to them, and I’ll admit I used the friendliest tone I could come up with. They answered. One of them did. Don’t know what it said. Though it wasn’t hard to guess.

“You know,” said Jake, “there should be a complete record of this on the Forscher. Pictures, the radio transmissions, everything. We’re going to have to find the ship.”

“That won’t be easy out here,” said Hutch.

She kept her eyes on the screen, reading Simmons’ narrative. During the course of the first day, the AI’s learned to communicate with each other. Greetings went back and forth. The alien vessel was an explorer from a distant place. Trelawney, apparently beside himself with exhilaration, pointed out to the aliens that Forscher also meant ‘explorer.’

They got a quick reply: “There is little to do out here other than explore.”

The aliens had a sense of humor. And another question came from them: “Would you allow us to visit your home world?”

Nobody on board the Forscher thought that would be a good idea. There was no way to know their intentions. Above our grade level, Simmons commented. They didn’t dare reveal Earth’s location.

The visitors replied: “We understand.”

When Trelawney asked where they were from, they also showed reluctance, and would say only that they’d crossed the galaxy. “We have come a great distance.”

And the biologist gave the same response. “We understand.”

They talked for several days. Simmons and Trelawney both visited the alien vehicle. Apparently, Kobayashi passed on the opportunity. Several of the aliens came aboard the Forscher, after the pilot had arranged a trigger that would overload and blow the drive unit if a problem developed.

“He doesn’t say what they looked like,” said Hutch.

Jake shrugged. “The AI probably has all kinds of pictures. I wonder,” he continued, “if that’s what created the problem going home? Rigging the ship to explode, just in case? When he disconnected, Kobayashi may have overlooked something.”

“Could you do that to us?” asked Hutch. “Rig us to explode?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard.”

After a week of exchanges, it ended. The aliens were moving on. “But,” Trelawney told the aliens, “we should arrange to meet again. Maybe, given some time, we can get permission to invite you to come to the home system. Though, to be honest, I think that may be unlikely. I suspect there would be political issues. But we have people who would very much like to meet you.”

Simmons quoted one of the aliens: “We would like that.”

But how to do it?

Kobayashi pointed out that two of the planets in the Talios system, the fifth and sixth, would line up in the ‘near future.’ “When they do,” he suggested, “perhaps we could arrange to be here with those who would like to take this a step farther.”

Jake was getting frustrated. “Damn it,” he said. “Are they talking about a few weeks or what?”

“Talios is pretty far out,” said Hutch. “Apparently the Forscher never reported the incident. Or if they did, it was kept quiet.”

Benny broke in: “Simmons says that they decided to say nothing until they got home. They had time to do that and come back, though he does not say how much time. But he and Trelawney agreed that a hypercomm report would only generate a rejection. That the politicians would want to keep clear of a meeting. Trelawney wanted to be there to provide support for the idea.”

“Well,” said Hutch, “it doesn’t matter now. It’s nine years ago. The aliens are long gone. And everybody’s dead on this side.”

Jake looked up from the screen. “So what do we do, Captain Hutchins?”

“File a report, hope they can find the Forscher, and get on with our own mission.”

“You’re not interested in going the rest of the way out to Talios?”

“You said we should stay here until the Patrol shows up.”

“We will. But they’ll be here in a couple of days.”

We didn’t have much information on Talios. There’d only been one research mission. It was a class G dwarf, about the same size as Sol, but younger by two billion years. There were eleven planets in the system. Talios III had life forms. And that was pretty much the extent of the available information.

Talios V and VI were where?

After they arrived in system, they needed several days to track them down. Talios V was small with no atmosphere, half a billion miles from the sun, completing an orbit every twelve years. VI was a gas giant with an entourage of forty-some moons and a set of rings. “Orbital period thirty-one years,” said Benny. “They were lined up three and a half years ago.”

“So we’re a little late for the wedding,” said Hutch.

Jake’s eyes closed. “Unfortunately, the groom never showed up at all.”

“Benny, when will V and VI line up again?” asked Hutch. “Not that it matters.”

They waited while he examined the data and did the calculations. “Thirteen years and a couple of months.”

“It’s a pity,” said Jake.

“You didn’t expect them to wait around, did you?”

“I’m not sure what I want.” It was the first time she’d seen him look uncertain. “Still— Well, let’s go take a look at Talios III.”

The planet floated serenely on the navigation display, but it was hard to believe it harbored life. It did have large blue oceans. White clouds drifted through the skies, and there was snow at the poles. But the continents, the land masses, looked utterly desolate. No fleck of green appeared anywhere. Nothing moved across its bleak flat plains.

“According to the data base,” said Benny, “life got started here less than 500 million years ago.”

“So it’s still in the oceans,” said Jake.

“That may be correct, Captain. In any case, you would not be able to detect its presence.”

“Too small?”

“Unicellular. It will be a long time before there’s anything down there that would be visible to the naked eye.”

Jake magnified the images. Large brown patches of land. River valleys. Mountain chains cutting across continents. All empty. “Hard to believe. What’ve we looked at now, hundreds of worlds with liquid water and stable suns? And just a handful have life.”

“A century ago,” said Hutch, “they thought that almost any biozone world was likely to produce living things.” She was thinking that this was why the meeting at this world had been so important. With life so rare, and advanced civilizations virtually nonexistent—

So close.

There was nothing more to look at. From Hutch’s perspective, they’d wasted time coming here. But she wasn’t going to argue the point with the guy who held her license in his hand. “Jake,” she said, “do you want to enter orbit?”

“Yes,” he said.

“How long do we plan to stay?”

“Not long.”

“Okay. What’s next?”

“Use your imagination, Hutch.”

She laughed and raised her hands in confusion. “I’m not sure what you’re saying, Jake.”

“Think about the situation. Look at it from the perspective of the aliens.”

She wanted to point out that aliens would probably not think like people. But she let it go. “How do you mean?”

“If you were in their place, and you’d come back here for a rendezvous with representatives from another technological species, something everybody knows is rare, you’d expect them to show up, right?”

“Yes. I would.”

“What would you do if they didn’t?”

She was thinking of the jilted bride. “They’d never see me again.”

He laughed. “Assume for a minute you’re rational.”

“I’m fairly rational.”

“All right then. Let’s say unemotional. The failure to show up could not have been personal. Maybe the other side is afraid. Or maybe something happened to delay them. What do you do?”

She exhaled. “I’d leave a note.”

“Now answer your own question: What next?”

“Benny,” she said. “Commence search for artificial satellite.”

“Excellent.” Jake looked pleased. “You’re going to be good at this yet, Hutch.”

The satellite found them. “Greetings,” it said. “We are sorry we missed you.”

Jake took over. “We are, too.”

“We hope there was no difficulty.”

“The people you talked to were lost in an accident. On the way home.”

“That saddens us. Please accept our—” It used an unfamiliar word.

“—Our condolences,” said Jake. “We would say ‘condolences’ in our language. Thank you.”

“We wish we could do more.”

“Are you perhaps still in the area? Is another meeting possible?”

“Unfortunately not at this time. We are long gone, and will probably not return in the near future.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“We also have regrets. We waited as long as we could. But there were limitations.”

“I understand. Perhaps, one day we will meet again.”

“I’m sure we will. Meantime, know that you have new friends. Farewell.”

They waited a few moments. Hutch looked at the planetary images, at the clouds, at the oceans. Listened to the silence. “Do we want to take the satellite on board?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Leave it where it is. Take it home and they’ll just put it in the Smithsonian. This is where it belongs. Where, maybe, they’ll eventually hear our response.” He pointed at the control panel. “Meanwhile, Captain Hutchins, you have a report to file. And some deliveries to make.”

“Jake,” she said, “Simmons was wrong. He didn’t bomb. He went outside in the shuttle. That made all the difference.”

“I know.”

“I wish he’d known—”