Liz chuckled. “Well, if you put it that way…”

  He nodded and his eyes blazed. “Now I go a little off the path that is beaten. About 560 million years ago, life on Earth got a good, uh, kick in the trousers.”

  “The Cambrian explosion?” She began to roll her eyes. “That’s way too much of a coincidence.”

  David shrugged. “That is why I’ve said nothing, officially, yet. But I think maybe I will find some biology around this red star we go to. And I wonder if it is biology we have already seen.”

  The importance of what he said sank into Liz. An independent origin on Earth, or an import from elsewhere … “Campbell is almost three billion years older than the Solar System…”

  David’s eyes glowed. “Ah, you understand!”

  Liz thought about her finding the kuiperoid, their chance meeting in the hall of the administration tower, and now heading together for Lacaille 9352, sharing the same passion to do something significant. Perhaps there was something to fate.

  “Are you busy for dinner?” she asked.

  “What about lunch?” he countered, delighted by her attention. “It is almost lunchtime now.”

  She laughed. He was as eager as she was. But she had an engagement. “The captain offered to show me his collection of ancient navigation equipment. He’s going to establish a small museum at the Minot Space Colony around Campbell. I’ll be in his quarters for lunch.”

  “Well, dinner then?”

  Liz allowed herself a slight smile. She had to be a decade older than him, even subtracting the years she’d spent in cold sleep. Was he looking forward to more than just dinner? The prospect was not entirely unpleasant. “Okay,” she smiled. “1900 in Sphere One.”

  Liz touched the net for a map. The Singer’s habitable parts consisted of six spheres spaced hexagonally, like beads on a stiff hoop, around the magnetic field generation cable. Between spheres, sections of a torus enclosed the wire and a passageway. The ship spun about the hoop axis for stability under thrust along that axis and for centrifugal gravity. The heavier lower half of each sphere rotated on the hoop to keep its floors level under any combination of acceleration and spin. The diagram showed the floors parallel to the spin axis, as they were now with no axial thrust. She was now in Sphere Three, with most of the other passengers. Sphere One, two spheres antispinward, was crew country.

  “Captain’s table, then?”

  Liz nodded. Let him think he has competition.

  Liz looked forward to seeing the old hardware and was a little early to Captain DeRoot’s quarters. On the way, she passed a woman who looked upset and gave Liz the strangest look imaginable, but said nothing and hurried down the access tube.

  Judi Lalande, the AI identified.

  Each sphere had four decks and a mess. By tradition, Room 131 on deck three of Sphere One was the captain’s quarters in all ships of this design. In her voyage to Earth as a teenager, she’d never come close to Room 131; Captain Yuri Ivanov had been a serious, forbidding figure who smiled at girls maybe twice in a voyage. Remembering that sense of forbidden territory came back to her now. Liz had captained her own exploration craft in the Solar System, but here in this moment on the Singer, she was an excited child again.

  The captain’s door slid silently open as she approached. He was at his desk, seated with his back to the door. Overhead was a set of shelves holding various pieces of metal equipment with dials, buttons, brass tubes, and lenses that all looked strange to her. The room itself was no bigger than her own.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, almost as if irritated. Then he turned and smiled. “Peter DeRoot, and you are the redoubtable Elizabeth Avonford?”

  She nodded.

  Instead of rising to shake her hand, he pulled a brass tube from his desk and offered it to her. “It’s a telescope made five hundred years ago or so. A whaling ship captain out of Lisboa, Portugal, used it in the early eighteen hundreds. Go ahead, pull it out.”

  She grabbed the end of the tube and pulled; it slid easily out to a length of about half a meter.

  “Does it work?”

  Captain DeRoot got up and motioned toward the side of his cabin. An ordinary man, he wore his hair relatively long so it flopped over his forehead in a careless, boyish way. In contrast, his bearing and reserve spoke of self-confidence and authority.

  A door opened revealing a room with a polished wood-grain table surrounded by plush chairs. She walked in and gazed around; the walls, except for one, were hung with real framed pictures of sailing vessels and spaceships. She smelled real wood. The wall without pictures had a great box mounted on it with shiny brass fittings—hinges and a hook. The wood was varnished so deep and lustrous that it seemed still wet.

  Captain DeRoot walked over to the box, lifted the hook, and swung its doors open, revealing a black shiny surface. “Lights,” he said softly.

  The lights went out, and as her eyes adapted, Liz could see stars slowly spinning around, except for one bright one. A direct view window! “How…”

  “The inner and outer windows line up during the coast phase,” Captain DeRoot said. “Go ahead, try the telescope.”

  She put the tube to her eye. After a slight adjustment of the length of the tube, she brought the golden point of light into focus. “Oh! A bright violet star,” she said. “It seems impossibly small and intense. Is that Lacaille 9352?”

  “That is its communications laser, blue shifted by our velocity. By the way, Roger Gunheim says Lacaille 9352 is called Campbell now, after an author who wrote a novel about using solar energy to power space flight about three hundred years ago. The planets were named after characters in it.”

  She felt his hand find her waist in a gentle, if presumptuous way. Her heart pounded. Was this really happening? She moved his hand away.

  “I thought that wasn’t official,” she said, going back to the telescope.

  “We’re a long way from the Interplanetary Astronomical Union.”

  She felt his hand again.

  Captain DeRoot laughed. “And, I am in charge here.”

  His hand moved up from her waist toward more intimate territory. It had been a very long time since a man had touched her that way, and she felt both fear and excitement. But her mind told her this was too soon, way too soon. Liz pulled one hand free of the telescope and gently removed the captain’s hand.

  She felt momentarily rattled. He clearly meant it in a friendly manner, she tried to convince herself. Then she flashed back to the look on Judi’s face.

  “You’re going to Campbell to take charge of the impactor project,” DeRoot said, “to see that it gets made and flung toward the implosion site.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are people on site already with much more experience who can do that.”

  “Zhau Tse Wen sent me.”

  Captain DeRoot quietly chuckled. “At the risk of paraphrasing myself, we’re a long way from Dr. Zhau. The man in charge at Campbell is Roger Gunheim. He’s a nice enough man as long as you do what he says.” DeRoot’s smile was genuine, but his eyes were penetrating.

  Liz carefully kept her voice level. “He’s got a whole colony to worry about. I just have the BHP operation.”

  “Roger is a good friend of mine. We’ve made the Sol-Centauri voyage twice together, without hibernation. There is much time to think between the stars, about how things are … and how they should be. Now I could put in a good word for you….”

  Or not, she realized. Chaos! There it was, bald and simple. She could give the bastard what he wanted, or maybe risk everything she’d come for—everything she’d promised Hilda she’d do.

  Liz went through her internal arguments pro and con. She craved power and she didn’t want to risk losing it. She wanted to be in charge and wanted it in the worst way. It meant never getting kicked out of your own office at the drop of a hat, never being humiliated like that again. She could pay the price. She could take a shower afterward.

  She let the captain lead her back into his room.

  The dinner table was almost full when she and Captain DeRoot arrived; she felt as if every eye was upon her. What did her face look like? Did they know?

  “How was your visit to 131?” David seemed cheery and oblivious.

  But a dark knowingness in Judi’s eyes screamed to Liz. Liz sent her a message on the ship’s net. It’s not what you think. He wanted something from me, I wanted something from him. Nothing emotional. Besides, I’ve had worse.

  “I got to see the brass telescope. We looked at Campbell and the comm laser,” she said to David.

  A nervous smile flickered across Judi’s face. What does he have on you?

  What does he have on you? Liz answered.

  Judi frowned. My kid. A custody judgment. He could take the kid to his father and leave me here.

  “Captain DeRoot has an interesting collection. Did he show you his working reproduction of that ancient Greek computer? He made it himself.” David, of course, had replied to what she’d said aloud.

  Liz touched the net for data on the device and recognized it; it had been on the top shelf in DeRoot’s bedroom. She’d stared at it during his heaving climax.

  “I saw it.”

  Come on, what’s he got on you? Judi came back.

  My job. She gave Judi the details.

  “Uh, ladies, is something going on?” David asked.

  It must have been transparent that they were exchanging net messages. Liz gave a quick glance toward Captain DeRoot, but he was explaining something to an entranced female passenger, one of the last to come out of hibernation.

  Liz gently shook her head. Later. Aloud she bantered, “You wouldn’t believe it. Well! Any luck with your panspermia studies?”

  “Oh sure. Did you know that there are at least forty stars that made visits to the solar neighborhood? Five of them came through at roughly the same time as Lacaille 9352….”

  After dinner, David found himself walking back along the curve of the access tube with Elizabeth Avonford.

  She seemed subdued, and he tried to think of something to say to cheer her up, but when he opened his mouth he shut it again. What was one supposed to call her? Dr. Avonford, Elizabeth, or Liz? He deferred to his more normal upbringing and compromised on Avonford. Okay, maybe Elizabeth Avonford, he thought.

  She looked increasingly upset, so he risked seeming foolish. “What’s wrong?”

  She stopped in the passageway and looked into his eyes, her face hard and weary. “I shouldn’t say anything.”

  David watched her sigh, knowing she needed to unload. He waited. Finally, she began to talk.

  “The captain has certain connections at Campbell. Those connections can help or hurt me. He also has certain … needs.”

  David risked touching her shoulder. “There was a threat implied?”

  She nodded, holding back a quiet anger.

  “I understand this well. It is not the act that bothers you so much, but the feeling that you have no choice in the act, am I right?”

  She nodded.

  Why, David wondered, should the artificial intelligence that really oversaw this starship permit such a transparent abuse of its human master’s power? But he could answer his own question; ultimately people had insisted on a person being in control.

  He spoke. “You have an interesting problem. For instance, if we were to present evidence to the second in command and demand that he take over, how would we know that the second in command is not either complicit or otherwise under the primary’s control?”

  Avonford shook her head. “We don’t. What is the check on such people?”

  “I think the threat of exposure would hold much weight with him,” David told her. “He could find himself with nowhere in settled space to go. But to fight this would not be without risk.”

  “If it was just me,” she said, “I’d raise hell. But the whole human universe is counting on me to get this job done!”

  This seemed a little much to David, who took a longer view of things, but her sincerity and enthusiasm were evident. He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Is it that important to study relativity? Why?”

  “Look, if the Anderson, Lu, and Yoseph paper is right, we can use one asteroid-sized black hole to make more.”

  David shrugged. “And then what?”

  Her eyes gleamed. “Look up Wheeler, Forward, Thornsen, and Zhau. With several black holes, we can make some of the gravitational machines that the relativity theorists predicted. For instance, imagine a gravitational catapult that would send us up near the speed of light without our feeling any acceleration at all! Imagine…”

  David held up a hand. He had his own doubts about what people might do with the fruits of the project. But it was obviously so important to Elizabeth that she was willing to be used for it. He was moved to concern.

  “Look, we live forever these days. If there is a setback, it can be overcome in time. Besides, who knows where the captain’s demands will stop? His behavior must be changed, or many more women will experience what you have. I think you must threaten to expose him. Then you will be in the driver’s seat.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “It can’t be just my word against his, and we can’t count on the ship’s AI.”

  David smiled. “I do biological nanotech. I have in my room all I need for bench-level fabrication. What we need to do is record an hour or so of conversation with something too small and diffuse to be detected by all the usual precautions, which I’m sure that he will take. So I make a distributed network of nanocells. I could hide it under your skin, or in your hair.”

  Liz looked at him, worry in her face, but with anger and excitement, too. She nodded, not feeling powerless any longer.

  David met Liz again the following evening. They listened to the recording of Avonford’s noon encounter. DeRoot had walked right into it.

  “What would Gunheim do for me if I did this?” Avonford had asked in a totally playful and innocent voice.

  “Let you run your project, most likely,” DeRoot had said.

  “And if not?” She’d asked laughingly, but David noticed a hint of strain.

  “Well, the converse, I would suppose. Will you take off your clothes, now?”

  “Enough,” David said. He had what he needed. She could have walked out right then, he told himself, and if she had not … Well, he didn’t want to know.

  All locked in, Liz told herself. They had the recording, and the evidence was already on its way to both Earth and Campbell, encrypted, but in a way that would be released if the AIs involved did not get positive instructions from her to not release it. David had been very clever to come up with that insurance policy.

  In the last twenty-four hours, she and David had developed a closeness she’d never felt before. No man had gone to bat for her like this, and she allowed the pure warm feeling to wash through her for a moment.

  Still, she felt nervous as hell. David might not have anticipated everything. Judi had declined to be a part of it. She still had too much at stake. DeRoot could get back at her without anyone being the wiser, she’d said. David had reluctantly agreed. Besides, they had enough without her, hopefully.

  They walked into the Sphere One Commons. DeRoot, waiting for her, frowned a bit. Not expecting David, Liz thought.

  The captain recovered quickly. “Ms. Avonford, good to see you. Mr. Levi?”

  “Captain,” David said, “I suggest that we sit down. We must discuss something with you. I suggest you tell the AI to not record what we have to say. I think you understand what this is about.”

  DeRoot frowned and pursed his lips, then he looked at her. The threat was silent, understood.

  She looked back, just as cold. She hoped her refusal to back off was every bit as clear.

  At length, DeRoot nodded.

  Without any further word, David produced a comm card and played back the segment with the incriminating language. “We have taken the necessary and obvious precautions, and have supporting evidence of other kinds concerning other events, not involving anyone on this ship,” he said afterward.

  The last was a complete lie, Liz knew, but one that might give Judi some protection.

  “You will understand the implications for both you and Mr. Gunheim,” David said.

  DeRoot stared coldly at her, ignoring David. “You goddamn whore.” His voice rumbled in anger.

  Liz stared, unable to help the start of a tear, but willing herself not to give an inch in this contest of wills.

  No one spoke. Each looked at the other. DeRoot’s face tinged pink. David watched in amazement. Liz valiantly worked on a poker face, wondering if this was the first time the captain’s persona and behavior had been questioned to such a degree. He was a smart man; surely he would take this no further. Liz watched quietly. Only when she thought the steam had gone out of DeRoot did she glance at David.

  “It’s your show now,” the younger man said.

  She nodded. “Captain DeRoot, I want your assurance, and Mr. Gunheim’s, that there will be no interference with my work in the Lacaille 9352 system in support of the Black Hole Project.”

  He snorted. “That’s beyond my power.”

  “You had best hope not,” Liz countered.

  “It may be in the best interest of the ship to have you two hibernating for the remainder of the journey.”

  He might, Liz realized, be able to order the ship’s AI to do just that. Then, while they were totally out of touch, any sort of revenge might be orchestrated.

  “Then,” David said calmly, “we would be unable to keep the encrypted data from being released where we have sent it.”

  “A moment.” DeRoot turned away from them and stared at a wall screen that showed stars gliding by with the ship’s rotation. They waited.

  Then he turned back and smiled. “Very well. I apologize. I’ll speak to Roger and Cyan, I’m sure there will be no problem.” He sighed. “Eternity is a long time, and if our paths cross again, perhaps I won’t make such a mess of it.”

 

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