Eugenie Satterwaithe had been plying the solar system in concentric ripples ever since she had first jumped into that vast, dark ocean. She had flown in the beginning as a ballistic pilot: a young woman, lightning-witted, riding a fiery arc between the antipodes of Earth. There was nothing especially skilled about such work—the AI did all that was needful, save only the close docking with the LEO stations—and if something ever did go wrong, it was hard to imagine any duties save frantic futility or a vast and short-lived surprise. But ballistic pilots had “the glam” and they walked large steps, drank and sang with abandon, and made love with fierce intensity. “Lift fast; die young” was their motto and, though fatalities were actually rare, the risks were real enough; and it matters less what is true than what people think is true, no less so about themselves than about others.
From ballistic, she had gone on the LEO circuit. Orbital pilots did not have the daredevil air of their ballistic sibs. There was less of the go-for-broke in their work. The skills were different. Gravity played less of a role; inertia and Newton’s Third Law played more; and this showed in their demeanor: more grave, more patient, more inexorable. But then The Herald’s Lark had dipped into the Earth’s magnetosphere to dock at Celestial City and those gossamer sails seduced Satterwaithe from her very first sight of them. She mastered first magnetospheric sailing, running a tugboat between LEO and GEO; and then, on the Luna run, the far different, far grander skills of flight before the solar wind.
A loner by nature, she found courier work flying a singleton for Reuters-Wells-Fargo. It was little more than a habitation sphere pulled along by a loop of hobartium, but she was her own boss. They stuffed the sphere with bonded packages, artifacts, and hard mail and, almost in afterthought, a sailor-pilot to work the shrouds. She flew the Red Ball route to Mars and the Green Ball back. Once, she even flew the Long Orbit around the sun when Mars had been in superior conjunction. A long, solitary time, that had been, and she had coasted into the Martian Roads with nearly too much delta-V for capture. But the packet she had carried must have been important, for the expected war between Syrtis and Marineris never came to pass.
Mars had been her next lover—a rough and untutored lover who demanded much and gave little. Iron Planet Lines was hurting for arean ballistic pilots and snapped her up. That was near the tail-end of the go-go years, when things were settling down. Tiki Ferrér was bringing law and order to Port Rosario and, if a man’s life there was worth only a nickel, that was still an improvement on its prior valuation. Satterwaithe may have had a hand in that taming. The records are unclear. She could be pretty mean with a warden’s quarterstaff, and downright deadly with a pellet gun. She never spoke of it, but sometimes smiled quietly when the subject came up. Tiki Ferrér had used a quarterstaff too and another staff beside, and if Satterwaithe’s wells had long dried up, they had once flowed as freely as had primordial Mars itself. Not that she needed men; or women, either. Living with solitude, couriers learned to love it; and after a time a bedmate could seem a strange and alien thing. But need wasn’t in it. One’s most treasured possessions are seldom the necessities.
She met Moth Ratline on Deimos. The main transfer terminal for intra-arean fractional-orbits was situated there. The River of Stars had come to dock and Ratline had taken shore leave to gawk at the ancient warrens the Visitors had dug. Fu-hsi was looking for shuttle pilots and, learning that Satterwaithe was both rocket jock and sailor, hired her on the spot.
It couldn’t last. Satterwaithe wanted those captain’s rings and Fu-hsi wasn’t about to hand them over. So Eugenie posted for navigator on the Great Sail The Swan of Ares, moved up to sailing master in the trefoil Monarch, then to mate on the ’stroidal iron-boat The Black Diamond.
Sails were fading by then. Satterwaithe could see which way the wind was blowing and it broke her heart, but the orbit to captain’s rings lay elsewhere. She declined a berth in City of Selene on the Jupiter harvest and used her guild seniority to bid down to master’s mate onto the Farnsworth ship, Aaron ben Shmuel. (And a good thing too. The magnostat Selene and all her crew would be engulfed by the Jovian atmosphere during the Great Flare of ’73.)
Satterwaithe set herself to learning the Farnsworth and proved in the end a cannier master than most.
“And she plied the tumbling asteroids
From Billgray to Cybele.”
That old song wasn’t written about her in particular; but it could have been.
Satterwaithe was a far-seeing woman, though it was not Gorgas’s ever-branching tree of possibilities that she saw. Her future was as right as a carpenter’s rule, and if the universe insisted on twisting and turning, she soon set it straight. So, whether she had planned it so or not, when Centaurus Corporation sought a captain who knew both sail and cage, there were few enough who could cock their hats and one alone who had ever served in The Riv’.
It was a sorry vessel that she took command of; nothing much like the dogged emigrant ship she had briefly known and nothing at all like the elegant liner it once had been. Yet Satterwaithe was incapable of saying no. Sails were where her heart lay, and when they vanished at the last, her heart vanished too.
But it was because she had knocked about the Middle System for so many years that Satterwaithe awoke at three strokes after her watch had ended, though she lay awake for several minutes before she could track down the mouse of thought that had awakened her. When she had it, she pulled on a hasty singlet and kicked around the B-ring to the bridgeway.
Satterwaithe found The Lotus Jewel on deck, idling in the captain’s chair and looking indelibly bored. Satterwaithe wondered that the ship’s whore hadn’t brought a man to spend the watch with her.
The Lotus Jewel, hearing a sound behind her, swiveled the chair full round. Having already decided that Corrigan would come to her in the night, she had further decided to make his apology as difficult as possible. No wound galls so much as wounded pride. And while The Lotus Jewel was not a proud woman in the way that Satterwaithe was, a poor man robbed of a dollar feels the loss more keenly than a rich man that of his thousands.
The sysop was pouting, Satterwaithe decided, settling for an easy category. She had been celibate for several hours and did not care for the experience. Oh, Satterwaithe could be cruel in her judgments. Tiki Ferrér was a precious memory, but he was only a memory.
“You couldn’t sleep?” The Lotus Jewel asked. She might not like the flinty sailing master, but sympathy did not require liking.
“Put the radar image on the viewscreen.”
Technically, The Lotus Jewel was officer-on-watch, but she was third officer, temporary and acting, and she had never been one to stand on formalities. Satterwaithe’s abruptness irritated her, but it was a passing irritation. If Satterwaithe wanted an image, The Lotus Jewel would show her an image. That was what most people showed each another, anyway.
Repeated laser mappings of the object had refined the resolution, so that much of the earlier haze and fuzziness was gone. Satterwaithe examined Stranger’s Reef with a small frown.
“There’s no atoll,” she said at last.
To The Lotus Jewel, a rock was a rock. “What’s an atoll?”
In the days of magnetic sails, shiphandlers in the ’Stroids had always taken careful note of the close approaches to their worldlets, observing such minutiae as axes of tumble, reflectivity, vector, coupled bodies, and so on. One never knew when such a detail would prove vital. The iron boat Nikolai Kornev had survived only because her first officer remembered hearing of a body in an accessible orbit bearing plentiful water-ice. Such information was widely shared at depots and terminals and spaceport bars; for in the spare reaches of the Middle System, no spacer was the enemy of any other.
Thus it was that deep in Satterwaithe’s memories lay a conversation from years past, in the notorious Unicorn Bar on Ceres, where she had traded shoptalk with three other master pilots. “Stranger’s Reef,” she remembered, “has a cloud of micro-bodies ballistically coupled to it. There’s no sign of them on the refined image.”
“Is that what an atoll is? A lot of little mini-’stroids?”
Satterwaithe did not correct the redundancy. “Did Ship think they were random noise and filter them out of the echo?”
The Lotus Jewel called up the raw image; but, while there were a few spots that really might have been noise in the data, there was nothing like the atoll that Satterwaithe had once heard described.
“Maybe they were stripped off by Jupiter,” The Lotus Jewel suggested. “Or maybe they’re too small to detect at this range. Or maybe—”
“Or maybe that isn’t Stranger’s Reef…”
“You mean the careful Mr. Corrigan made a mistake?”
There was a strange elation in that question that Satterwaithe could not quite bring true. “No,” she said curtly. Corrigan was no leader, but she granted him his mastery of detail. “A Jovian passage is always chaotic. There may have been collisions, ricochets. The Reef was traveling with two companions when it was last observed. Jupiter could have shaken them like gaming dice and tumbled all of them onto unpredictable, new orbits.”
“Then, you think this is one of the companions?”
Satterwaithe folded her arms to ward off further stupid questions. “That, or a million other possibilities.”
The sailing master turned her attention to the forward viewscreen. The starfield had been color-coded. The red dot so near Jupiter in the dead-ahead was the rock they had called Stranger’s Reef. In the upper right, a pale gray designated the empty region they had found earlier. Satterwaithe pondered the picture and its incompleteness. “The rock that the Younger Boyle observed just before Flipover Day. Did you prick it on the chart?”
“Nobody told me to do that.”
Satterwaithe turned from the screen and stared at The Lotus Jewel, who flushed and said, “We don’t have a positive fix because we can’t ping the muffing Fixed Point!”
“Dead reckoning will do. Put an error ball around it, if it makes you feel better.” The Lotus Jewel lifted a hand to her throat mike but the sailing master stopped her. “Wait. Has Ship picked up any other rock messages?”
The Lotus Jewel began to look uncomfortable. “One from Queen of the Yemen that I gave to Gorgas, and another from Inish Fail. I downloaded that to the bridge.”
Where it was probably still sitting in the In-basket. “Have you been checking the receiving basket?”
“I haven’t had time to—”
“And why not?”
The Lotus Jewel made a pair of fists and banged them on the arms of the chair, which in ziggy caused her to lift slightly from the cushions. “Because I’ve been helping the muffing sailing master prep the muffing sails for muffing deployment!”
Satterwaithe grunted, then acknowledged the validity of the excuse with a curt nod. “My apologies, Sysop. But let’s upload to the chart, shall we?”
There were nine messages, all told. Ship translated the Fixed Point coordinates in the messages into ship-centered, Ptolemaic coordinates and plotted a scatter of fuzzy blotches south and sunward of the body Corrigan had located. Satterwaithe studied the array silently for a considerable time, until The Lotus Jewel half-thought that the sailing master had fallen back to sleep. Then the officer pointed out a broad perimeter with her arm.
“Give me a scan of this region.”
“But Gorgas said…”
“I don’t care what Gorgas said. I’ll square things with our acting captain. Do it.”
The Lotus Jewel went under the cap and with her dataglove traced out the area Satterwaithe had wanted. She computed the cone required to cover the region and designated a nominal “sky.” This was the surface of a notional sphere at the limit of useful resolution. Ship calculated power usage and resolution and suggested some trade-offs among the area covered, the depth probed, the fineness of the mesh of pings, and other factors so that a useful estimate of size and position could be obtained without diverting power from other systems. That is, if there were any bodies in those positions. If the mesh were too coarse, swarms of bodies could hide in the cracks between. If it were too fine, the power drain would be prohibitive. Satterwaithe asked her twice what the holdup was, for there are no tasks more simple than those demanded of others.
The Lotus Jewel nearly told the bitch to set up the muffing scan herself.
(That was a hard conclusion to come from a woman so soft. And perhaps it would be unfair to call it anything so definite as a conclusion. Being a woman in constant motion, The Lotus Jewel very seldom came to one. Yet, when she felt especially oppressed by the older woman’s criticisms, bitch would pop out of her mouth like the seed from an olive. Sometimes she amended her reaction to first-class bitch, which was at least a promotion. She could not say exactly why she felt that way. It was more a general perception than a detailed list of wrongs and offenses. Bhatterji, who had himself no great love for Satterwaithe, had asked the sysop once while they were washing up together after a game of bounceball, what the sailing master had done specifically to offend her, and The Lotus Jewel, almost in irritation, had answered that it was her general attitude. That was fair enough. It’s hard to gin up empathy for someone who thinks you’re a whore.)
The scan took several minutes to prepare and send, and several minutes more to receive and integrate the bounceback. While they waited, the two women said little to each other. Satterwaithe asked how long it would take and The Lotus Jewel told her. The Lotus Jewel said she would throw the data onto the forward display as it came in and, when Satterwaithe did not say No, took that as assent.
The pips appeared on the display like raindrops on a car’s windshield. First one, then a few others, then a few more as the echoes returned from farther out. Some were a little fuzzy, for resolution dropped off rapidly with distance, but you didn’t have to be Rave Evermore to connect those dots.
Suddenly sisters, the two women groped for one another’s hand as they gazed at the horrid, speckled sky. The silence, broken only by their oddly synchronized breathing, ended when Satterwaithe whispered, half to herself, “Tsunami.”
It was a very small hour. The ship ran by long tradition off the zero meridian of a far off planet, and dawn had not yet touched the Downs of England. Nevertheless, Satterwaithe aroused Gorgas immediately and Gorgas decided upon a general meeting. The captain knew how humm could buzz around a ship. Satterwaithe would mention it to Ratline, or Lotus Jewel would blurt it out, and it would spread—and grow in the telling. Better that they hear the news directly and from the same source.
Everyone came, even the passenger. It was the largest gathering the wardroom had seen since The Riv’ had left the Martian run. They were by degrees, surly, apprehensive, or groggy, depending on whether the summons had called them from their work or kept them from their rest.
The deck officers had strapped in at the table, all of them on the same side, as if they were a tribunal or the table a barrier between themselves and the crew. Gorgas sat in the middle, flanked by Corrigan on his right and Satterwaithe on his left. That this arrangement left the nominal captain’s chair vacant went unremarked, even by Satterwaithe, who appeared drawn and worried. Perhaps Hand sat in that empty seat, perhaps not.
The others filled the space before the table, not in rows but in tiers, as if a wave of humanity were about to break on a mahogany shore. Dr. Wong floated cross-legged in the epicenter of that wave. Flanking her were Ratline and Eaton Grubb on the one side, Bhatterji and The Lotus Jewel on the other. The youngsters adorned the walls, clinging to whatever was handy. Above, at high noon, the Lunatic passenger gripped a monkey bar.
Fife spoke up before Gorgas could begin. “This sort of meeting is rather unusual, so I gather the news is bad.”
Gorgas fiddled a little bit with the stylus on the table, doodling a note on the ’puter-pad. (Wong wondered what sort of note the captain was making on her lover.) “Not as bad as it might have been,” he said after a moment. Corrigan, who had already been briefed, laughed bitterly, but under his breath. Gorgas pretended not to hear. “There is no reason for undue concern.” He paused a moment, realizing that he had not yet given them reason for any concern, due or not. “That is, there is a serious situation developing that I, that is, the deck, thought you all should know.”
“And one day,” Ratline whispered to Grubb, “he’ll tell us what it is.”
Gorgas could not proceed. He was already imagining the myriad possibilities contingent on passing through a dense rockfield. He sketched an order of battle on his ’puter. The Romanian army at Gilau Bridge. “As Ms. Satterwaithe was the first to note the, ah, developing situation…” He was loathe to call it danger, which sounded so melodramatic, but he knew he sounded in consequence tentative and unsure. “Genie, fill them in.”
Satterwaithe was not surprised to be handed the verbal bounceball. She had long ago decided that Gorgas was more talk than action—and he seldom talked. Though impatient of others, he would rarely make a decision himself. That had been tolerable when Gorgas had only been Hand’s Number One, but it sat ill now that he wore the captaincy. Gorgas’s trouble, she decided, was that he thought too much. Satterwaithe sometimes thought too little and, where Gorgas often saw an overwhelming number of alternatives, the sailing master seldom saw any. Tunnel vision possesses the singular benefit of focus, but it has its drawbacks too.
“We are rapidly overtaking a tsunami,” she said without preamble. “The last Jovian passage roiled the edge of the Belt and pulled a significant number of rocks—we have identified one hundred and twenty-three separate bodies, so far—into cisJovian space. They appear to be mostly Thules from the three-four resonance with a scattering of Hildas—plus a few others in chaotic orbits. We shall be within the trailing reaches within a day and a half. They lie directly athwart our path.”
“Like birdshot,” Corrigan suggested.
“There is no need for worry,” the captain said. “The Main Belt, even at its thickest, is mostly empty space; so the chances are excellent we will come nowhere near any of these strays.”
“Why not?” asked Corrigan suddenly. “First a rock hits us; then we hit a rock. It has a certain symmetry, don’t you think?”
Gorgas frowned at him, it being an officer’s duty to put a positive face on things for the crew. Yet it was Ratline who spoke up. “Symmetry ain’t in it, ’Dul. This isn’t some story, all neatly plotted and tucked away for bed.” But Corrigan only shrugged.
“There are always possibilities,” Gorgas went on. “Even a tsunami is mostly empty space.” He knew he was repeating himself and in consequence sounding desperate. He tried to project cheer, but…Birds of a feather…He remembered thinking that at the very beginning, after the engines had been struck. When a low probability event occurs, it may mean that the probability is not so low, and where there is one event there may easily be others lurking. He had been expecting this moment, dreading it, refusing to think too deeply about it lest his constant rumination bring it about. Why, they were almost surely within the tsunami already, and had been for weeks. Over a hundred bodies. And those were only the ones large enough to raise at this distance. Milligee thrust did not make for a very responsive helm. At a velocity better than one-forty kiss, they must spot a hazard from a sufficient distance to turn. And the smaller the bodies were, the harder they were to spot. How many more were there as small as the one that had hit them? How many close calls had they already unknowingly had? He placed the stylus between his lips and sucked on it thoughtfully.
Satterwaithe glanced at Gorgas and waited a moment to see if he would speak, but the man seemed lost inside his own head. “We have,” said Genie Satterwaithe, “by damn-all, got to act!”
Her sudden vehemence startled everyone, including herself. Gorgas, recalled to the moment, blinked several times. “Act in haste…” he began to say.
“Fucking Christ!” said Bigelow Fife, drawing twenty-six astonished eyes to him. “You muffing muffers! Haste? I boarded this ship because your captain promised me a faster passage. Since then, it’s been one botch after another. Now we’re heading into the midst of a flock of asteroids, and I may never see Dinwoody Poke in this muffing lifetime!” His voice had risen to a shout and he was dimly aware that everyone was staring at him. But the lack of logic and order in the ship’s affairs had finally brought him to the breaking point.
“Dinwoody Poke,” said Ratline with a cackle, “ain’t all that much to see.”
Fife stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head. “You’re all going to die,” he said. Then he monkeyed on a stanchion and kicked his way out of the ward room.
In the silence that followed, Corrigan spoke in calm, reasonable tones. “We are, you know.”
Satterwaithe shot him a look of venom. “Not bleeding likely.”
Gorgas gathered himself. This meeting was taking a bad turn. “Everything is well in hand,” he said.