Source: Intermezzo To Homecoming

Clu stops at the edge of the circle. The marble is harsh lit through the dome, showing patterns focused and straightforward inlaid in different colors and textures. Across the light, in a chair alone by the vast windows, Marie sits, gesturing and whispering. She looks up, holds her hands oddly, probably suspending whatever is in progress, and gestures Clu forward. Clu's footsteps are loud in the echoic room, and she is reminded of Webley's.

Except that this room is almost barren, leaving only its spectacular view over the field and its buildings.

She stops and waits in silence until Marie says "Yes, I'll be in touch. Please contact me." Then she makes a dissolution gesture, and smiles up at Clu. "Well, it's good to see you!" She stands and embraces Clu, a little awkwardly because of her stature. She holds Clu back and inspects her. "I see you look recovered. No more glasses? Well, that's good. And the Zadar, how are things going?"

"Fine, Marie, fine. Thanks for your help."

"So, are you ready to work? We have flight tests in a month on the beta prototype. But let's go sit down," she takes Clu's arm and leads her to a gathering a chairs by the window, a quarter of the way around the penthouse. A spindly assistant, soft grey fleshed with underslung glassy eyes, dressed in an elaborately spiky robe, appears silently, places a tray of ja and sweets, and withdraws without a word.

"So, tell me all about the Zadar. Have you flight tested?"

Clu laughs and pours herself a beaker of steaming ja. "You mustn't follow the subscriptions. I've found reveres at every one of my tests. For some reason, they think it's interesting."

Marie pours and ladles sugar into the ja. She sips and smiles. "True enough it's interesting. If you check it out, you'll find there's probably a half million subscribers to your topic. There's a critical mass effect at work, sure, but don't forget you've got a very powerful story."

Clu frowns and rolls the beaker neck between her fingers. She pulls herself from her abstraction. "... but what can I do for you?"

Marie sits back and crosses her legs, beaker held loosely in a hand whose arm rests on the back of the divan. "I need you to fly for me," she replies.

"I don't know if I can."

Marie's head cants and her eyes look momentarily alien. "Because?"

"I'm working on the Zadar, and I'm getting ready to make a pitch to the Recovery League to train me for Cocteau. I'm not sure I can give you what you want."

"I want you to manage the flight program. But I can put time in that for you to do what you need to outside the project."

Clu feels the sudden tug of how she could make the project her own, bring it under her way of doing things - it races through her mind like leaves blown from a tree, while her eyes rove across the sky and the distant air traffic. "Marie, you gave me my first job. You trusted me, and you helped me when I was hurt. I need the money.... but it's been too long, I've been flying and going to concerts and buying food. Right now, everything's hard back home. Everything." She hates her voice for coming so close to breaking.

Marie leans forward. "I know. But you can't do what you want without resources. Tell me, how much money do you have left? A thousand? Less?" Clu thinks of Ivo not asking for the rent, even two weeks overdue. But Marie continues, remorselessly."I've helped before, and I can help again. But I need you to help me now. The investors were impressed by your handling of the Hermes, including the accident, and they want you. I need your commitment to at least help me restart the project to keep them on. And, Clu, without Hermes, I don't know if Field is going to make it."

Clu rubs her face for a moment, and then realizes the gesture reminds her of Lan. She stares aghast at her hands and recovers her composure. But she senses a contradiction. If the Hermes is needed to save Field, how much help can Marie be when the time comes?

But even so, she replies, "Field pays my docking fees."

"We'll take the Zadar into company dock tomorrow. Do we have a deal?" She thrusts out her hand in that oddly Promethean gesture of commitment.

"All right," Clu replies.

The Caravelle Port Tower leans out into space, a clean spire of stainless steel, lined with glass on one surface. On its uppermost floor arrays of sensors reach out into the void beyond the shell and pour secure packets into the ubiquitous networks. In a distant apartment, a young, hard-shelled sipheral drops a bowl of gemlike ice tidbits, and his tentacles lash furiously, invoking an alternate channel while he continues to monitor fifteen traffic strands with the rest of his appendages. His diminutive wife peers out of the pocket on his shoulder, curious. He lifts her out and places her on the table as an aid to concentration.

"I don't know, sir," he reports. "They scheduled a slot, and seemed to be keeping to it. There's no obvious malfunction, but something is wrong."

In an aircraft over Gia, the port city of Caravelle, the traffic coordinator, a lanky blond human, tugs at a strand of hair as he invokes the emergency protocol, to the distraction of his seat-mate.

At Caravelle, emergency vessels stream from the rim of the port. All over Prometheus, coordinators and subcoordinators stop eating or step from the shower, or pause at the door of their homes as they take up the burden of rescheduling the incoming traffic and monitoring the emergency effort for possible conflicts.

Tractor supervisor Shar Milano flies hell-bent for leather from the port rim into the darkness. In moments her eyes adjust and the window ahead is crusted with stars. Behind her, copilot Hermann Plaray tests the grapples and runs test sequences.

One of the stars begins to blink, and the windows target it as the incoming liner. "I have the strobes visually at 1x, " Milano announces to Plaray and the fifty other rescue vessels. She pulls up a window and uses it as a lens on the liner. "Definitely a multiaxis tumbler," she remarks ruefully. The turnover alarm chimes, and she spins the tractor for deceleration switching to stern view.

"What a pain in the ass this is," Plaray remarks. "Probably had some minor mal, and just couldn't work his own way out of it."

"Come on, Herm, are you telling me you'd rather sit around simming?"

"I'd rather nobody out here had any trouble."

She turns her attention to strategic planning. "Okay folks. Peregrine, Romas, Bent-To-The-Wind, and Peter's Revenge, let's go, prepare to coordinate period and move in on my mark. Second shell stand by."

Acknowledgements arrive quickly. Already, the target is a largely observable mass under magnification, and several strobes visually. Milano sets the predictors running to detangle the precessions, distributing the calculations between all of the rescue vessels. In a minute, the solution alert chimes. Plaray grins, "At least it's not venting. That'd box up the whole thing, wouldn't it?"

Milano gestures her glove over her shoulder, out of control range, where he can see the acknowledgement. She is watching the burn schedules accumulate, and eyes the resulting tracks to confirm no conflicts. "So, are you up for doing some pulling?"

"We're getting in order back here."

She splits the window to see front and rear. Prometheus is invisible in the distance, and even the reticle showing its angular extent is small. The burn schedules are complete, and the drivers have acknowledged. Now the oncoming target is a rolling spindle of colored alloy, glowing with lights and luminous areas marking the field generator rings. Everything is in place - now, for a little while, the drivers just ride, and watch. There are no obvious signs of malfunction or damage. But sensors show very limited indications of life. "How about an interior field transient failure?" someone offers. "Wouldn't they all be dead?" someone else responds. "Not if it was a soft failure," Plaray offers. "I've heard of that happening. Never actually saw one."

"Okay, everybody, coming up on englobement. Stay ready for phase two."

The tiny vessels systems each automatically invoke their engines and thrusters. The entire array suddenly takes on the complex motion of the target, and then the target seems stationary as the stars whirl around them. Milano applies a filter to the window to remove the stars. She checks the actual plots against the intention, and it looks good. "Looks like the sims are paying off," she remarks. Plaray mutters something indistinct. Phase two is his problem, and he is trying to finish getting ready.

The time hack comes down and the main engines on every vessel fire, pushing them swiftly to a half mile distance. "Insertion," Milano orders. Plaray fires the probe and their little tractor shudders with the recoil. "We're in," he announces. "Testing. Clean, ready." She watches the others' status click over to readiness. "Okay, give it to the probes," she calls.

As one, the tractors pull back. The motion has to be carefully controlled, since the angular momentum, unmanaged, could tangle theuir trajectories beyond repair. "Let's get tight, people." And though the events are invisible, she can see the automation on the probes synchronizing with the tractor systems, and there is a faint cloud of thruster residue as they begin their work.

Gradually, the carefully timed thruster fire slows the rotation to nothing, just before the tiny store of propellant on the probes is bled to nothing. A short final blast shifts the course of the vessel so that it will miss Prometheus. Then the slow, tedious work of bringing it to relative rest begins.

The helpless liner is the James Cook, registry Bougain, Aurigae Minor. The initial examination is carried out by the Port Caravelle authorities in a reserved area fifty miles above Prometheus. Tractors, led by Milano, scan every inch of the external surface, and use both passive and active sensors to penetrate some distance within. Though the fold systems are on standby, they remain dangerously capable, with the drive radiators faintly luminous on a variety of bands. Despite the best attempts, no contact can be made with anyone inside, and no one inside makes any attempt to signal or emerge.

In the Port restaurants and intoxication establishments, the disabled vessel is the talk of the pilots. Milano glances over at Britt Stannard, her date, while Hermann Plaray ventures, "I'd say a plague ship."

Milano glares at him. "Hermann," she intones warningly. He shrugs. "I'm not saying anything which hasn't been discussed before. Even the reveres are starting to post on it."

Stannard sips his drink, a strong distillation that elicits a sudden exhalation. "Well, it's about the only thing that explains them getting out of fold."

"That's right," Plaray, replies. "Life support's fine - we've even put sealed probes through for the air sampling. Won't know about organisms for a week, but poisons show up right away."

"Heard anything from, where'd they come from, Misraki Station?" Stannard asks.

Milano purses her lips. "Not me, but Hermann, I think our NDA is getting an awful lot of holes shot in it, am I right?"

Plaray shrugs and leans back to take a drag from his smoke. The bluish coils swirl upward toward the sourceless light, and the voices around them seem to sweep up to cover their conversation.

After supervising the redock of the Zadar a quarter arc away from its old home, Clu throws herself into the redesign effort. It seems like an endless tunnel of work interpersed with martial arts and tactical studies. Gradually, she is learning to be dangerous.

The afternoon her instructor is carried from the floor, she knows she is getting somewhere.

Hikaru Lantee enjoys his usual mid-week time on the range with Marshal Uoruli, a reddish biped with a low slung head and bony angular arms. Uoruli is a stunning shot, her wide set eyes offering improved stereo, at least as long as the two competitors, as agreed, relied only on natural equipment. She draws and fires a blazing clot of flechettes downrange, where, just on the edge of visibility, a tenth of a mile away, they accurately destroy the target with a intense blast and a distant, later sound.

"Your excision is that the sponsors of the sponsors are manipulating the membership process to obtain information," she summarizes.

"I'm not sure what they're trying to obtain. I'm trying to find that out. I have fifteen agents culling material, but it's going to take a while to see if there's any correlation." He draws, aims, fires. A sharp crack and a second shockwave as the projectile passes the mach. Two, three follow. The shaped charges detonate just before impact and the target vaporizes in the combination of forces.

"Perhaps accuracy would be more competitive..."

Lantee cocks his head and drops out his mag. "Needle rounds?"

Uoruli thrusts her two elbows to the side - agreement. She loads and steps forward. Three brief hissing sounds followed by the mach wave slap. She leans forward and focuses her lenses. "Achslll... seventy percent. Much terrible." She swivels her head toward him. "Associate me a little more closely with this. I'll detach you from Furley. I may have some contacts in sponsorship rings that will be useful if this points anywhere."

"Have you heard about the plague ship?" Stannard asks Clu. Beyond the canopy, the clouds are complex and rising towers of convection. She banks and dives into the crevasse between them.

"No, what's that?"

"A liner came in disabled. A friend of mine works on the tractor teams. Word's out on the reveres now that the exam people found a very very nasty bug in there. Wait, now, a little up trim - feel the laminar flow breakoff?"

"Yeah."

"Now up the revs a little and feel it come back."

"Got it."

"This isn't too safe in the convection we've got here, so let's go back to default stability."

"So what happened with this plague? Does that happen often? The ships, I mean?"

"Maybe once every few years. The ports are good about screening, because their liability if something gets in is just amazing. Okay, let's go back up. How do you like the refresher?"

"Depends on how I'm doing."

"I'll renew your certification for the year," he replies. He smiles, but she can only hear it in his voice - she is watching the edges of the cloud valleys, as she rises toward them.

Pamelon brings the limosine to a stop beside the dock. The weather is poor and rainy under torn grey clouds. Tanneau sits in the back, chin on hand, looking out through the drops on the window at the heaving sea beyond. At the end of the dock, a blocky ship rides uneasily against the pilings and buffers.

"We're here, sir."

Tanneau raises a slightly dismissive but acknowledging hand, continuing to look out the window in a state of abstraction.

A steam bus pulls up behind them.

Tanneau shifts and becomes alert. "Vin, you wait here."

"Yes, sir."

The door admits a brief blast of wind and rain and then Pamelon is alone in the smell of polish and carpet, with the sound of drops and the wind muffled.

In the rain, Tanneau turns up his collar and walks toward the bus. The wind slaps his face, retreats. The door on the side opens and he leans in. A few words are exchanged, and then he steps back as, one by one, young men and women emerge into the weather, bundled in waxcoats and hoods, carrying duffels and battered cases. In a crumpled line they walk toward the end of the dock. Tanneau watches them, the wind at his back, the rain like tears on his seamed features.

He returns to the car. They drive into the rain past the bus.

The machine tool hums into a silence even more profound for the shrieking which preceeded it. Lan's gloved hand reaches out and plucks the cylindrical bar from the lathe. He smiles at it, though it is slightly imperfect in its finish.

At the drill press, he fastens the bar vertically under the bit. He presses the switch, and a slight whirring begins, and though there is an undercurrent suggesting the parts within are not fitting perfectly, when the bit comes down, Lan's eyes behind the goggles light with pleasure, because the chips move smoothly up the bit to pile on the table. He reverses the drill and withdraws the bit.

The cylinder is now a tube - a perfect gun barrel. Or, at least, good enough.

He turns to the waiting group. "It works. Let's get started." He walks to the table, where the sketches are displayed for guidance.