The Rescue Read online

“Shit. Boris! Come inside and get out of that suit. Now!”

  “Da, sounds like very good idea.”

  David quickly stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes, and yanked his pants inside-out past his feet, then peeled off his socks. The magnifier and electronic multitester and Swiss Army knife he kept in his pockets rattled against the bulkhead as they tumbled free, and Raedawn said “Hey!” and slapped something out of the air.

  “Wasn’t me,” he said. He hesitated with his thumbs inside the waistband of his shorts, reluctant to remove that final layer of protection and privacy, but those socks had come off hard. And it wasn’t like anybody was going to see him anyway. He gritted his teeth and pulled off his shorts, wincing at the sensation of cloth sliding through skin as he did so.

  They could hear Boris banging around inside the airlock. “Come on, let’s go help him,” he said.

  He pushed himself to the doorway and bumped softly into something warm and probably very private. He expected a knee in the groin in return, but Raedawn merely flinched backward.

  “Sorry,” he said. “After you.”

  “All right.” Her voice came from only a few centimeters away. He backed off a bit farther, then after a couple of seconds followed her into the cargo hold.

  Boris had already opened the inner door. They had to find him by feel and by sound. David helped him remove his helmet, while Raedawn worked at the wide straps that constricted the suit at the joints to keep it from ballooning out under pressure. Their fingers kept sinking into the fabric and back out again, but David couldn’t detect any permanent damage to either. In fact, the effect seemed to be letting up now. It was getting harder to push his hand through things—or to pull the suit’s arms and legs free of Boris’s skin.

  His hands kept touching Raedawn’s, and their arms and legs brushed against one another from time to time, but they concentrated on freeing Boris from his suit. The Neo-Sov helped as much as he could from inside, and eventually they got the top half peeled away and went to work on his legs.

  A patch of darkness slid against another. David bent close and realized he could see Raedawn’s arm. “Hey,” he said. “We’re getting light again.”

  “Look behind you,” Boris said.

  He did, and saw that the doorway into the control cabin was a gray rectangle. “I hope that’s a good sign.”

  “Can you two finish up here?” Raedawn asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Da.”

  “Good.” A very feminine silhouette moved into the gray light and into the control cabin.

  They peeled off the rest of Boris’s spacesuit, then his clothes. Neither man spoke for at least a minute, even when they felt the ship spin halfway around. Raedawn was turning it so they were facing into the anomaly. Either she was firing the thrusters manually, or the ship was responding to the controls again.

  Then David realized he could see the overhead light. The air looked grainy, like black sand, but he could see vague shapes through it. “The effect is definitely dissipating,” he said.

  “We must be emerging into normal space again,” Boris replied.

  “Let’s hope.” David moved forward to the control-room door and knocked. “You decent yet? I want to look at the monitors.”

  The door popped open a few centimeters. “I’m not putting anything back on until I know it’s safe.”

  David didn’t exactly want to put his clothes on, either, but the thought of letting Raedawn see him in the nude was equally chilling. Under cover of blindness and panic he’d been okay with it, but now . . .

  On the other hand, he really wanted to see what the instruments could tell him. Their survival could depend on it. David took a deep breath and moved into the control cabin.

  He tried not to look at Raedawn but caught glimpses of pale skin at her shoulders and hips. She seemed to pick up on his discomfort, rolled her eyes, and loosely covered herself with her shirt. But when David saw what was outside the ship, he had no trouble keeping his eyes off her, and he nearly forgot his own discomfort.

  There were planets in the distance. Dozens of planets, stretching away above and below like particles in a gas giant’s rings. The scale was way off, though. Each particle was an entire world, and there was no central parent body; only ring after ring of alien worlds circling a distant ice-blue nebula that glowed bright as the Sun.

  And off in the distance far overhead, just two specks of brightness among thousands, Earth and the Moon glittered like tiny jewels in a cosmic necklace.

  8

  We found it,” David whispered. He pulled himself down into the copilot’s chair and tapped at the telescope controls, zooming in until they could see the cloud patterns over the Pacific Ocean. There seemed to be a hell of a lot of storms, but it was unmistakably Earth. They could see the northern coast of Australia peeking up from below and the eastern half of Asia off to the side.

  “Can you pick up radio signals?” asked Boris.

  Raedawn, holding her shirt against her chest with one hand, reached out to the radio controls with the other. David glanced at her bare back, her vertebrae standing out in shadowed relief, then forced himself to look away.

  The radio squealed with interference and hissed with static, but there were voices. Raedawn scanned through the standard comm frequencies, searching for anything intelligible, but most of it was not in standard sideband encoding.

  “What the hell is that?” she said softly. “I can’t make any sense of it.”

  David felt a chill run down his spine. Here within a space no larger than the solar system were hundreds of worlds. He wondered what kind of life they might support.

  Maybe that had been the point of Earth getting sucked into this other space. Had some superpowerful alien race decided to gather all the sentient species in the galaxy into one place? If so, was it for contact or for quarantine? He didn’t know enough to even speculate.

  Raedawn narrowed the focus of the antenna to Earth alone, and then she finally got something that sounded like words. David heard “missiles” and a moment later an entire phrase as clear as a bell: “—don’t care if they have twenty of them, we’re—”

  “There,” he said. “That’s English.”

  They listened for more, but the signal faded into static.

  “Transmit,” Boris said. “Tell them we’re here!”

  “Not yet,” said Raedawn. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we announce our presence.”

  “We probably already have,” David said, switching to the aft view. Sure enough, back the way they had come, a swirling white cloud glowed against the gray background. That’s why it was black on the other side. All the light it gathered was radiated inward, shining like a beacon for all to see.

  Then he realized the scale of the thing. This little hole in space wouldn’t be naked-eye visible for more than a few kilometers. It was barely bigger than their shuttle. He zoomed in on a dark shadow in its midst and saw the probe they had shoved through, its tether still dangling off into nothingness.

  He wondered if they could follow it home somehow. Part of him wanted to try it right now, but another part held him back. Wherever this place was, he and Boris and Raedawn had survived their transit. They had come here to help, not scurry away at the first sign of difficulty.

  He looked back out the forward window. “Take us closer,” he said.

  Raedawn looked over at him for the first time since he’d entered the cabin. He automatically sucked in his gut, then felt foolish for the impulse. Then he was glad he did, because she didn’t look away. He watched her try not to stare, watched her lose the battle, and waited for her to say something snide about the cut of his jib. Instead she merely nodded and turned back to her own console.

  “Okay, closer it is.”

  “Wait,” said Boris. “We don’t know it’s safe yet. Things are growing hard again, but—”

  Raedawn snickered.

  “What is funny?”

  “Nothing.
You were saying?”

  David casually plucked his shirt from where it had drifted against the ventilator grille and laid it over his lap.

  “Things not pressed together seem to keep own identity, and effect seems gone now, but under thrust, who knows? Let us wait few more minutes before we try, neh?”

  “Good idea,” David said. He turned back to the telescope controls and shifted the view over to the Moon. Behind it glowed another white cloud, much bigger than the one their shuttle had just come through. That had to be the nebula that had swallowed Earth and Moon. It was smaller now, too small for both bodies to fit through without squeezing much closer together, but it was still thousands of kilometers across.

  Near the Moon itself they could see tiny sparks of light flitting across the shadowed craters. “That’s rocket exhaust. They still have ships.”

  “And missiles, too, by the sound of it,” said Raedawn.

  “I can’t believe they would keep on fighting,” he said. “Not after getting sucked down the rabbit hole into this.”

  “That’s sure what it sounds like.” She turned up the volume and they listened to more static, catching the occasional word. Most of them were meaningless out of context, but there were a few that could only be interpreted one way. “Incoming!” was pretty unmistakable, as was “Fire!”

  “Those stupid sons of bitches,” David whispered. “How could they do that?”

  “They were ready to throw nukes at one another even before they disappeared,” she reminded him. “When the black cloud hit, somebody must have thought they were being attacked. And once you start a nuclear exchange, there’s no going back until one side totally wipes out the other.”

  Boris pulled his hand loose from the back of David’s chair, then grasped it lightly again to keep himself from drifting away. “Perhaps not. Perhaps they just need example to follow.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like us. We have Neo-Soviet and Union operatives together on rescue mission. Very good evidence that Mars has stopped fighting. If we tell them it has, they would have no choice but believing us.”

  “Yeah, right,” Raedawn said. “If we get too close to our side, I’ll be arrested as a traitor, and if we get too close to your side, the same thing will happen to you. These guys are still at war.” She played with the radio again, eventually receiving a clear broadcast in Russian.

  “They’ve landed troops in Alaska,” she said disgustedly. “And we’ve apparently landed troops in Vladivostok.” She tapped the flight controls and whirled the ship around, almost making Boris lose his grip. “Fuck this,” she said as she lined the ship up with the white cloud they had just emerged from. “Let’s go home.”

  “We can’t just abandon them here,” David said. “It’s the governments who are fighting. I’ll bet the civilians don’t like it any more than we do. Probably less.”

  “The civilians are probably all dead by now.”

  “They aren’t. You can see for yourself that the planet’s not in that bad a shape. It’s obvious the war hasn’t screwed up the biosphere yet.”

  “Give ’em time.”

  “All the more reason for us to help them now.”

  In her agitation, Raedawn had forgotten to hold her shirt against her chest. David tried not to stare as she reached out to the controls to try the radio again, but it was tough. He’d had no idea such a sensuous, feminine woman lurked beneath that brittle exterior of hers.

  The voices on the radio pulled his attention back to business “. . . command and tactical forces obliterated . . .” said one. “Medevac twelve to base, we’re under . . .” said another.

  “Where’s the music?” she said. “If the civilians are still alive, where’s the music? Where’s the weather report? Where’s the news?”

  “Maybe there’s been a radio blackout to keep the Neo-Sovs from targeting the stations.”

  “Oh, that’s encouraging.”

  “What do you want?” David slapped his hand down on the control console, careful even in his anger to miss anything vital. “The planet’s at war, Raedawn. So’s the Moon, by the looks of things. They both just got sucked into this—this maelstrom of alien planets, and you’re pissed because nobody’s playing ‘Hava Nageela’?” He lifted his hand, noting that it hadn’t stuck to the surface this time.

  “Look,” Boris said, pointing out the window. David followed his finger and saw a glint of silver against the mottled gray barrier between this place and normal space. It was far to port of the anomaly they had created, and much farther out from the rings of planets.

  “What’s that?” David asked. “A spacecraft?”

  “Da, but not like any I ever saw before.”

  David aimed the telescope at it, and the monitor showed an oblong wedge of polished metal, with three large fins in back and a small canard in front for atmospheric flight. The sides were painted in an intricate pattern of squiggly lines, but it wasn’t any form of writing he was familiar with.

  “Those are missiles,” Raedawn said, pointing at a row of narrow tubes mounted along the undersides of the fins.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “All right, then what are they?”

  He tried to imagine. They wouldn’t be fuel tanks; there were too many of them and they were too small. Nor were they external cargo pods for the same reason. He had to admit that if form followed function, they did look an awful lot like the missiles mounted on the flanks of their own shuttlecraft.

  “Maybe they are,” he said.

  As if to offer proof, one of them leaped away from the silvery ship and streaked toward them. Raedawn immediately fired the engines to move the ship out of the way, but the missile was guided; it simply swerved to follow them.

  Boris nearly fell through the door into the cargo hold, but he caught himself on the door frame. “Hide behind cloud!” he said.

  “In a second.” Raedawn turned the shuttle toward the other ship, activating another control panel on her far right as the ship spun around. The moment the other ship was dead ahead, she slapped the controls three times, and three missiles streaked away toward their target.

  “We’ll show those bastards a thing or two,” she said, firing the engine again and steering them around toward the white cloud. They had to hang on with their hands, since they hadn’t strapped down for fear of becoming one with the belts.

  The cloud had grown smaller in the few minutes that they had been here. The probe’s power supply was wearing out and no longer able to maintain the magnetic field necessary to keep it open. But it was still big enough for the shuttle to hide behind. Raedawn took them toward it at two gees of thrust, spun the ship on its axis with dizzying speed, and braked to a halt just as quickly and shut down the drive before its magnetic core could attract the anomaly. It didn’t seem to matter; the anomaly wasn’t reacting as strongly to magnetic fields on this side, but it never hurt to be careful.

  David kept his eye on the telescope feed until the cloud blocked their view. He watched the incoming missile veer after them and the outgoing missiles flash past it on their way to the other ship. Part of him was furious at Raedawn for firing on what were probably the first aliens humanity had ever encountered, but part of him knew she had done the only thing she could to save their lives. The other ship had fired first.

  Was everyone fighting everyone here? Was this place nothing more than a cosmic bug jar where different species were thrown together and shaken until they fought?

  “I take it back about the music,” he said. “Maybe that is a bad sign.”

  If Raedawn had a comment, she kept it to herself.

  They couldn’t see if the missiles she had fired had hit anything, but the cloud suddenly billowed out toward them as the incoming one struck it from the other side. Raedawn hit the attitude jets and the nose of the ship dropped down, throwing them into the ceiling but dodging the white-shrouded missile by a couple of meters. The twisted fabric of space churned like a thundercloud just beyond the w
indow.

  “Back us out of here nice and slow,” David whispered.

  Raedawn swallowed hard. “Right.”

  She pulled herself down into the pilot’s seat and this time strapped herself in. She didn’t even attempt to cover herself with her shirt again, but the wide five-point harness did a better job of it anyway.

  The attitude jets didn’t use fusion rockets, so they didn’t generate an intense magnetic field. As Raedawn used them to push the ship away, David hovered over the telescope screen, waiting for their first glimpse of the alien ship.

  It wasn’t long coming. He had half expected to see a dozen more missiles streaking toward them, but instead he saw a dozen tumbling pieces of wreckage instead.

  “Woo hoo! We got ’em!” Raedawn crowed.

  “Yes, we did, didn’t we?” He wasn’t nearly so pleased. Earth had been here for over a day, so maybe this wasn’t humanity’s first alien contact; but it was the first for him, and he had just killed them.

  Or maybe not. “Front section seems intact,” Boris said.

  It did. It looked as if all three missiles had hit in back, probably drawn to the heat signature of the engines. The three wings tumbled away like leaves in a strong wind, and two curving sections of hull spun end over end into the distance, but the long, slender nose of the craft drifted forward without tumbling at all.

  David zoomed in on it. There were no weapons ports in evidence, and no suspicious hatches where weapons could pop out from. It looked like Raedawn had effectively pulled their teeth. There was an obvious cockpit set back about a third of the way down the remaining length of the ship. It had two big windows in front and two more on the sides, giving the pilot a wraparound view of space. Either these beings had better eyes than humans or their windows doubled as display screens; no human-built ship would dedicate that much space to an unmagnified view.

  Inside the windows, backlit by their own instruments, two long, slender humanoid silhouettes peered outward.

  “Now what?” Raedawn asked.

  “Is simplest to finish them off and investigate remains,” Boris said. “But not best,” he added before anyone could protest. “We might learn much from them. We have upper hand; this is good opportunity to try.”