The Rescue Read online

  For sixty seconds an onboard camera would do a visual search of wherever it wound up, a wide-band radio would listen for message traffic, and a high-gain transmitter would try to relay the data back through the anomaly to their ship. After sixty seconds, the magnets would switch on again, and the satellite would—they hoped—pop back through the field into normal space.

  “What makes you think it’ll do that?” Raedawn asked when David described the plan to her. She’d put the shuttle on autopilot and come back into the cargo bay to watch them assemble the reconnaissance probe. “What’s to keep it from just sitting there?”

  David stopped wiring the bulky magnets together. He hadn’t considered that. He had assumed that when you opened a hole in space, whatever was occupying that space at the time would fall through the hole. It had worked that way in his lab, but it didn’t necessarily have to happen that way in reverse, did it?

  “Good point,” he said. “Maybe we should put a rocket engine on it.”

  “To thrust it where?” Boris asked. “Better to tie rope to it and pull it back.”

  “Nuts to that,” Raedawn said. “I don’t want to get that close to it. Like as not, the satellite will pull us in instead of the other way around.”

  “How about a rocket and a rope?” David asked. Both Raedawn and Boris looked at him as if he had spoken Chinese, but he forged ahead. “We’ve got plenty of missiles. We can deactivate the warhead on one and use it for a tug. The rocket can pull the satellite back out of the field, and we can stand off far enough to be safe if it doesn’t work.”

  “Have you ever tried to pull something with a rocket?” Raedawn asked. “It shoots their stability all to hell.”

  “So? As long as it keeps pulling on the rope, who cares which direction it goes? Once it’s back into our universe, we can go after it in the shuttle.”

  “I guess that’s true enough.” She went into the airlock and came back with a 200-meter EVA tether in a belt reel. It was thin as string, but its spun kevlon fiber could hold a fully suited astronaut against five gees of thrust, and rocket exhaust wouldn’t touch it. She clipped the belt attachment onto the satellite, then got a Draco launcher and an Arrowhead missile from the weapons stockpile. The missile was a solid-fueled rocket designed for surface-to-surface use, normally launched through a shoulder-mounted tube, but the Draco could be programmed for booby-trap mode as well. In that mode it would lie in wait until something crossed in front of it, then launch its missile point-blank at the target, or it could be fired remotely with a radio signal.

  Raedawn threaded the EVA tether through the back of the launcher and tied it around the rocket’s body just above the fins, then slid the rocket into the tube, careful to leave the warhead deactivated. The Draco’s computer beeped a warning at her, but she okayed it and put the weapon on standby.

  “All right,” she said to David. “It’s ready to go. We can activate it remotely whenever we need it.”

  He checked the probe one more time. It had power. The magnets had power. The sensor that would switch on the instruments after the magnetic effects were over had power. The data recorder had power. “We’re go here,” he said.

  Raedawn went forward to the controls again and checked their course. “We’re already a quarter million klicks away from Mars. That ought to be far enough for a test.”

  “Good,” David said. “Let’s drop this thing overboard and do a little fishing on the dark side.”

  7

  David wasn’t sure the anomaly would open for their probe. He was counting on a repeat of his experience in the lab, but it was by no means guaranteed to work a second time. Intense magnetic fields didn’t normally punch a hole through the fabric of space, after all. Now that the anomaly that had swallowed Earth was shrinking, space could be less fragile than before.

  Or not. They started with low power at first, just in case. It wouldn’t do to create a full-blown planet-eater this close to Mars. The red planet didn’t have enough magnetic field to spin a compass needle, but nobody knew how much it took to draw an already-active hole into an alternate dimension.

  The rocket launcher drifted at the end of its tether, the cable spiraling out to it in long, slack loops. The probe spun slowly, once every ten seconds or so. David had given it that spin when he tossed it out the airlock. This way its camera and antenna would sweep out at least five full panoramas of wherever the probe wound up. With any luck the cable’s drag would make the axis of rotation precess so they would get a complete spherical view.

  The three explorers were in the shuttle’s control cabin, watching the telescope image of the probe while David sent the command to power up the magnets. Raedawn had moved the ship about ten kilometers away, but she still waited with her fingers near the engine controls, ready to get them out of there if something went wrong.

  “Magnets at ten percent,” David said, trying to watch the power gauge and the telescope image at the same time. With the darkness of space as a backdrop, it was going to be hard to see when the field formed.

  He gave it thirty seconds before he increased the power.

  “Twenty percent.”

  Still nothing.

  “Thirty.”

  Was that a little patch of fog around one of the magnets? He couldn’t tell, and after that momentary glimpse he didn’t see it again.

  “Forty percent.”

  There were only two chairs in the shuttle’s control cabin. Boris was hovering over David’s and Raedawn’s shoulders so he could see the monitors, his feet braced against the door frame behind them. Now he pointed at the telescope image and said, “There. On the upper right magnet.”

  Sure enough, an unmistakable tendril of darkness drifted across a silvery patch of duct tape. David waited to see if it would expand to engulf the whole probe, but all that happened was that the other magnets each developed their own separate shrouds.

  “Going to fifty percent,” he said, pushing the control icon upward to the halfway point.

  That did the trick. The black cloud suddenly billowed out and engulfed the entire probe, and tendrils reached outward into space, spitting lightning from their ends. One raced up the tether toward the rocket.

  “Oh no you don’t!” David muttered, nudging the field strength back downward. At forty-five percent the anomaly stabilized, but it didn’t shrink even when he lowered the power back to forty. Either the commands weren’t penetrating the fog anymore, or the field was self-reinforcing once it formed.

  He sent the command for the magnets to switch off entirely. They should do that automatically anyway in another few seconds, but a little redundancy couldn’t hurt under the circumstances. Once the magnets shut down, the camera and radio would power up and start collecting data.

  He looked over at Raedawn, then up at Boris. Both of them were grinning. So was he. It was working! At that moment he actually did feel a little like a mad scientist. He had just punched a hole in space and shoved a camera through it. In a few seconds he would learn what was on the other side.

  Or maybe in a minute. The transmitter signal apparently wasn’t making it through the intense electromagnetic disturbance the field produced.

  He watched the clock, his finger hovering over the control to reactivate the magnets. At sixty seconds he pushed the button, even though he knew it wasn’t going to work. If the probe’s signal couldn’t reach the ship, the ship’s signal wouldn’t reach the probe.

  That left the timer. They could tell when it switched on: the dark field crackled with more lightning and swirled a little wider, but another half a minute passed and the probe didn’t reappear.

  “Looks like you were right,” he said to Raedawn. “Go ahead and launch the rocket.”

  She sent the firing command and there was a bright flash as the Arrowhead roared out of the Draco tube, trailing its line behind it. Then the line pulled tight, and the rocket veered away, tumbled around and shot off at a tangent, tumbled again and came straight for the shuttle. Raedawn held her gro
und, and sure enough, the rocket swerved away again, jumping this way and that like a fish on a line.

  It was an impressive sight, but it wasn’t pulling the probe out of the anomaly. The propellant charge finally burned out, and the rocket continued a slow tumbling orbit at the end of its tether, but the probe stayed put.

  “Time for plan C,” said Boris.

  “We don’t have a plan C,” David reminded him.

  “Da, but I think I have idea. Raedawn, if you do timing right, you can match velocity with missile as it swings past. I will wait in airlock to catch it. I wrap cable around handhold, and mass of shuttle pulls probe out of muck.”

  “I’m not taking us that close. Not to the muck or the missile.”

  “Missile is deactivated. Muck has been stable for two, three minutes now. If we drift past with engines off, we make no difference to it.”

  She bit her lower lip and looked at the telescope image again. David followed her glance. Boris was right; the field hadn’t changed since the probe’s magnets had turned on. The fact that they were working told him something—the passage through the anomaly hadn’t fused everything into an unrecognizable lump—but he would really like to get the camera back and see what it had observed on the other side.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Raedawn looked up at him, still biting her lip. “I don’t like this one bit.”

  She turned to Boris. “You going out the airlock like that?”

  “Of course not!” Boris leaped through the door into the cargo section, then shrugged into one of the emergency one-size-fits-all suits hanging beside the airlock. David helped him into it and checked his seals. He watched Boris climb into the pressure chamber, then closed the door after him. There was a whoosh of air, then a thump as Boris opened the outer door.

  His voice came through the intercom in the control board. “I am in position.”

  “So are we,” Raedawn replied.

  She kept her eye on the monitors, calculating the intercept vector in her head but flying mostly by the same instinct that lets a child throw a snowball at a moving car. The burned-out missile made two more orbits as they approached it, and each time Raedawn corrected with minor bursts of the attitude jets, but as it swung around for another pass she shut down the engines entirely.

  “Okay, it should come right up on us in about fifteen seconds,” she said.

  “Ready here.”

  They didn’t need the telescope image anymore. The space-time anomaly crackled and spit only two hundred meters away, and the expended rocket was clearly visible on its bright white tether as it arced out from behind it.

  “Hah, there it is. Come here, come here.” They could hear Boris’s breath come short and fast. Apparently the sight from the airlock wasn’t as mundane as he made it sound. “I think it will fall short,” he said. “Move inward.”

  “No. I’m not firing the engines this close to that thing.”

  “I will not be able to reach it!”

  “Stretch, Russkie. Hook your cable to the handgrip and jump.”

  “Nyet! Jump toward that? You are to joke.”

  “Then hang on to the handhold and throw your tether reel. Maybe the two lines will get tangled together.”

  “Not likely.” He grunted with effort, then said, “I have jumped. Now you are happy?” A moment later he said, “Caught it. Tying cables together—yaah!”

  “What? What happened?”

  “It pulled me free! My line broke. I am stuck to missile!”

  How could that be? David wondered. Those tethers were supposed to hold a fully suited person against five gees or more. The anomaly must have degraded the fiber somehow.

  Raedawn laughed. “Let go, dummy. You’ll fly away on a tangent, and we’ll come pick you up when we’re both out of range.”

  “No I won’t! Look!”

  They couldn’t see the anomaly out of the window anymore; it was already falling behind them. David called up the aft telescope view and ran the magnification down to nothing. Sure enough, there was Boris, looking like a ghost in his white spacesuit as he tumbled slowly toward the swirling blackness.

  Just then the anomaly reached out a thick tendril toward him. “The probe!” Boris shouted. “Shut it off! Is dragging darkness with it.”

  “Right.” The ship had managed to give it a good tug before Boris’s line had pulled loose, but its magnets were still on, generating more field as it moved toward them. David sent the deactivation signal again, but it did no more good than before.

  “We’ve got to go get him,” he said.

  Raedawn looked at the monitor, then swore. But she powered up the engines again and whirled the ship on its axis, then fired the main drive to send them straight toward Boris. Beyond him, the dark patch roiled and spit lightning, its long, probe-bearing arm slowly reaching out toward him as well.

  “You’ve got one chance to grab hold, Russkie. I’m not making a second pass.”

  “Believe me, none will be necessary.”

  The anomaly threw another tendril out toward them, jagged as a lightning bolt, but it stretched out to nothing before it even reached Boris. Raedawn kept them on course, but she turned the ship broadside. “That ought to give you a better chance of finding something to grab on to,” she said. “And us a better chance of getting away.”

  “Hurry,” Boris said.

  She hit the attitude jets again, firing both the top and bottom sets at the same time to shove them sideways without spinning the ship.

  “Five seconds,” she said. “Three, two . . .”

  They heard a small thump against the hull overhead.

  “Oof. Pashlee! Go, go, go!” yelled Boris.

  Raedawn fired the main engine, and three gees slammed her and David into their seats.

  “Are you still there?” David had to struggle for breath enough to speak, and not entirely because of the acceleration.

  “Yes, I have arm wrapped around handhold and feet braced, but darkness is following! Go faster!”

  The aft telescope screen showed the column of lightning-lit blackness that had followed the probe shooting toward them with phenomenal speed. They would never outrun it.

  “No,” David shouted. “Kill the engines. We’re drawing it toward us!”

  “Kill em? You’re nuts.” She throttled up instead, but a second later saw that it had been a mistake. The cylindrical extension of the anomaly that had followed the probe leaped toward them at least ten times as fast as they could accelerate. She killed the drive the moment she saw what was happening, but it was too late.

  “Is going to hit us!” Boris yelled.

  David braced for impact. A moment later everything went dark and the ship lurched backward. He couldn’t see a thing, but he felt the straps digging into his shoulders and waist and heard things crashing into the bulkhead between the control cabin and the cargo compartment. He had tied everything down against acceleration from the engines, not from getting yanked backward.

  “Boris?” he called. “Boris, are you still there?”

  “Da, I have . . . hold.” The intense magnetic field was interfering with his suit radio.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Nyet. Black as night.”

  They were definitely inside the anomaly. David’s heart was pounding like a trapped creature trying to escape, but he tried to rein in his terror long enough to think clearly. He would need to pay attention if any of them were to survive this. Now, more than ever, they would need every scrap of data he could collect.

  He leaned forward, putting his nose right up to the display screens he had been watching a second ago. Nothing. It was as if the photons it radiated never made it across even that short space to his eyes.

  “Does . . . does the ship respond to the controls?” he asked.

  “Do we want to try?” He heard rustling sounds as Raedawn shifted in her chair. Other than that, silence. The darkness seemed to be swallowing up all but the closest sounds, too.
r />   “What have we got to lose? We’re already caught.”

  “Good point.” More rustling sounds, then, “No good.”

  “I see something,” Boris said.

  “What?”

  “Area of brightness. Growing brighter.”

  “Which direction?”

  “Topside of ship. Straight out.”

  David reached for the telescope controls, pressing what he hoped were the right command sequences by feel and by memory, then stuck his nose up against the screen again. Yes, there was a feeble glow. Faint and silvery, like the Moon behind a cloud, but definitely something. It was growing brighter.

  The heavy backward acceleration eased off. He reached for his seat belt to tighten the straps in case it happened again, but suddenly had second thoughts. “Be careful you don’t stick to anything. If this works the way it did in the lab, our bodies might slip right through things until we’re out of the influence of the anomaly.”

  “Great,” Raedawn muttered. “What else?”

  “I don’t know.” He gripped the edge of the control board with his right hand, then felt the boundary between fingers and plastic with his left. Were they inside the surface, or just on top? It was hard to tell by feel alone.

  When he pulled away, he felt a hint of resistance.

  “I think we should get out of our chairs. Boris, change your grip every few seconds. And try to float inside your suit with as little contact as possible.”

  He heard more rustling from beside him, rustling that went on longer than it took him to get out of his own harness. “Do you need a hand over there?” he asked.

  “Stay away!” Raedawn snapped.

  “All right, jeez, I just asked if—” Then he connected the sound with the situation. “You took off your clothes, didn’t you?”

  “Got it in one, hot shot. And they came off like warm taffy. If you don’t want to be wearing yours for the rest of your life, I’d advise you do the same.”