Anderson, Poul - Fleet of Stars by Anderson Poul

Author:Anderson, Poul
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

17

GUTHRIE WOKE.

It happened instantly, at the closing of a switch. No dreams faded out of him as he opened the shells

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over his optics, extended them on their stalks, and gazed around. He had been inactivated—in a sense, dead—and now he was again functioning—in a sense, alive.

Thirty-five years, he thought, as close as makes no difference. What's the universe been up to?

Before pursuing that, he meshed himself with the ship's instruments and computers. The data reassured him. Everything that could be under control was. Not that he had ever doubted the vessel he'd renamed Dagny. But something unforeseeable might go wrong for her, or right for an enemy.

No, he was on his flight plan, still decelerating but not far from his goal, bound back into the Solar System after more than a millennium away.

You could hardly tell by vision. Stars crowded sable clarity, the Milky Way girdled heaven with its crooked winter road, nebulae glimmered, the Andromeda galaxy lay huge, wan, and mysterious: sights he had seen at two other suns and in between, very little changed by his crossing a mere few light-years.

Only Sol marked this region out, and at almost six hundred astronomical units' distance, it was only the chief among the stars, fiercely brilliant but casting no more than a third again as much illumination as a full Luna above Earth. Nevertheless, Guthrie dwelt on its image for many minutes.

Juliana, he thought. Your ashes lie yonder, strewn on theLeibnizMountains of the Moon where it's always day, mingled with the ashes of my first body, the body that knew you.

Dagny enclosed him in silence. She was no c-ship, no Yeager, minimal in mass and thereby able to fly close to the velocity of light. She was a cruiser, also running on field drive but originally meant for interplanetary work. Thus she was amply big to carry cargo, accommodations plus full life and medical support for several humans, and the weapons that the Lunarians of Centauri had installed for him. Seen from outside, she was a conoid, not quite a hundred meters in length, broadening from the bow to a rounded base about forty meters in diameter. Hatches, airlocks, and a few streamlined turrets studded the matte skin. Antennas and dishes were newly deployed, stretch-ing forth skeletal to catch what signals and other infor-mation they could. With speed down to a few score kilometers per second and dropping, the particle deflector field was at low strength, invisible, no longer a glow like St. Elmo's fire streaming aft from ahead of the hull.

Guthrie muttered an oath and pulled out of his reverie. The instruments showed three ships under high boost on what must be interception paths. They were plasma-drive, but surely formidable. At any minute a voice on a laser beam would challenge him. He'd better get briefed.

By agreement, the Centaurians had beamed an en-crypted update to overtake Dagny a little earlier than now. Of course the news was four and a third years' old—the

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