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Rear Admiral Huen sat in the Chair on Artemis’ bridge, feeling vaguely uneasy and not sure why. He looked around, seeing his usual prime crew and watchstanders. Nothing seemed out of place.
“Ready for liftoff,” his helmsman said from beneath his medusa, eyes closed as usual.
With one final look around, Huen replied, “Proceed.”
Unlike Artemis’ maiden voyage full of nuclear-bomb sound and fury, this takeoff felt smooth if not powerful. The ring of twelve human-built fusion engines bolted onto the back of her, plus the four at her waist on gimbals as steering thrusters, was enough to lift her tonnage from the low gravity of Callisto and move her sluggishly around the solar system.
Compared to true warships like the new cruisers she was a fat cow.
Even so, Huen felt pride in the ship and her crew. Disparagers called her the biggest flying bus ever built. Kinder commenters called her an old workhorse, a supertanker past her prime but still useful. In reality she had been a mother ship, carrying enormous amounts of cargo and great numbers of engineers and workers for the space program. Without her, Earth and the Fleet would be a year, perhaps two behind where they were now.
That was no small thing, Huen kept telling himself. Unfortunately, outward greatness and heroism came in no small measure from luck, from being the right person in the right place at the right time. He shrugged to himself. Not everyone got all they deserved, and if the Buddha, heaven and the gods wanted him rewarded, they would do so. He was content.
Mostly.
“Rounding Callisto now,” the helmsman said, and Huen looked up from his musings to see the path the ship was taking. Immediately after launch from Grissom Base, she had turned to sweep low over the horizon like an enormous powered zeppelin, gaining altitude slowly as she ran for the only cover available – the moon itself. Artemis was big enough and slow enough that one of the guided rocks might decide to target her, and so she zoomed into a half orbit that would end when she had put the bulk of Callisto between her and the swarm, and the Destroyer.
“Launch the probes,” Huen ordered, and his sensors officer did that thing. Icons for four tiny stealth satellites joined the rest on the big display. These would provide eyes and ears to see and hear what occurred on the other side of the moon.
Now the display showed nineteen incoming rocks aimed at Grissom, just as Artemis rounded the edge of the moon, moving out of the line of fire. As fast as they came on, the rocks could not turn quickly enough to alter course and sweep behind the planetoid to get at the ship, even if they tried. Artemis was a mouse hiding from a herd of charging buffalo behind a big tree.
Huen breathed a sigh of relief. Artemis had a full array of bolted-on point-defense lasers as hyper defenses, but those had a range of only a thousand kilometers and not a lot of power, and all together probably could not destroy even one rock. That’s why she had had to pull up from the surface, after the civilians had gone to the shelters and the stalwart Marines had set up their defenses.
It still felt like running away. It just felt wrong.
“We are in place, sir,” the helmsman reported. Now the big, unarmored ship hung in space above the back side of the moon, with Jupiter over her shoulder, using engines to hover gently instead of orbiting. It seemed wasteful of fuel, but the tanks were full and Artemis could hold here for weeks if necessary, fighting against a mere three hundredths of a G.
Huen finally identified what had been bothering him when Steward Schaeffer entered the bridge from the back door, the one that led directly to officers’ country and his quarters. The man seemed surprised at something, and took a position at his admiral’s elbow.
“Senior Steward Shan is occupied?” Huen asked. He vaguely remembered his enormous shadow saying something about needing to take care of a duty before they took off. Shan’s absence, now that he noticed it, had been niggling at his mind, especially with no other steward to fill that place.
“I’m not sure, Admiral. I can’t raise him.” Schaeffer tapped his jaw as a shorthand for his short-range internal radio. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he wasn’t on the ship.”
“CyberComm, put out a request for Senior Steward Shan to contact the bridge, please,” Huen ordered.
A moment later the assistant helmsman called from the auxiliary bridge, where an alternate crew of controllers stood ready to take over in case the main bridge became unable to function. “Sir, Senior Steward Shan left in a shuttle just before takeoff.”
Huen froze, controlling his breathing. “I did not authorize that,” he replied.
“Sorry, sir. No one prohibited the launch, and he did follow proper procedure, informing the bosun, who logged the departure.”
Huen realized this was true; there would have been no reason to inform him that a shuttle launched, assuming the occupant was otherwise authorized – and Shan had access codes to almost everything. Suspicion flared that after all these years together, all the trust that had been built up between them, the man-mountain had nevertheless for some reason turned coat.
But to whom? The leaders of the People’s Republic of China had kept their political behavior well within the bounds of good sense, stalwartly supporting the defense of Earth. What could they gain by activating Shan, if he was their agent? What could he possibly do that would benefit China without risking Earth’s very survival?
Then Huen stamped hard on that thought. If that is true, then I am the biggest fool ever born to woman. Whatever Shan is doing, I refuse to believe it is a betrayal. Instead, it must be something he believes important enough to...to take extraordinary initiative.
“Please relay through the probes and try to raise Senior Steward Shan.”
After two minutes of trying, the CyberComm officer shook his head. “No luck, sir. I’ve tried the shuttle and his internal radio, as well as querying the Marines on Grissom. No one has seen him.”
