Panglor Read online

  Panglor watched her silently. Whatever had happened to her, she certainly was bitter about it. The point was well taken, of course—people everywhere were stupid, provincial jerks. But it surprised him that she recognized the fact.

  "Jerks," she repeated, making mincemeat of her weyso-leaf steak. She stabbed at it with her fork and waved a piece; it flew from the fork to the deck, and LePiep scampered to gobble it.

  "Yah," said Panglor, and he got up and went to the control bay to see if anything was happening.

  It was. The emergence light was on, blue. The foreshortening field was changing. The light blinked to amber. LePiep whistled.

  Panglor yelled, "Hey!" He peered into the scoopscope. "Yeah, here we go," he said, when Alo came in. He adjusted the scope. "We got the points starting to converge, here. The field's distorting, all right." The warning light did not necessarily mean they were emerging successfully; it simply warned of gross distortions in the foreshortening field.

  "Well?" said Alo.

  The clusters of dots in the scope danced toward convergence. He peered, squinted. "Get ready—any second."

  He heard the tone and felt the twinge in his gut, and he looked up. The viewscreen came alive again, dark, with stars. He shifted the view and was rewarded with the sight of a capture-field shrinking, a dull red glow against space. "Ho-ho!" he crowed.

  Then he stopped, bewildered. "What's that doing here?" And there was something else, too, a flash of silver—Deerfield. He put a track on it with the sensor-fringe.

  "Of course there's a field here," Alo said. "They left it on so they'd have a way to get back if they wanted to. Naturally they'd leave a gateway open."

  Panglor was trying to get a scan on Deerfield. He didn't know whether they would be armed or not, but he was sure they'd be pretty sore. "Where the devil—" he fumed. "There they are!" He snapped a fix on their position and velocity for the computer to work on; and he queried, also, for a base map of this system. The screen showed confirmation that they were, indeed, in the D1 system.

  "The real question now," Alo was saying, "is whether there is a collapsing-field working. That's not such a sure thing, because they might have programmed it to shut off, and they figured if they ever came back they could turn it on themselves when they wanted to leave."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Panglor said irritably. He was trying to coordinate some readings on the Cur's trajectory, and he was having trouble making sense of it.

  "I was just wondering if we'd be able to get out of this system again," said Alo. "We don't want to stay here forever, do we?"

  Panglor scowled at her. Then his gaze fell on the viewscreen. "Mother of God!" he whispered. There was a planet on the screen, and it was no farther than a few hundred thousand kilometers away. No wonder the readings had seemed strange. Why would a capture-field be located so close to a planet?

  "That's not right," said Alo.

  He turned. "What do you know about it?"

  "Quite a lot, actually," she said. "History, you know. Dreznelles 3 was built to replace the D1 station. They were having troubles here—weird stuff, superstitious crap—and the capture-field was not located in planetary orbit."

  "It is in planetary orbit!"

  "I can see that, yes, thank you, Captain Pangy. But it was not there before. It was in Trojan orbit, just like at D3. And there was a waystation, but no planetary colony. Everything was just like D3, only not so big."

  He studied her suspiciously. "You seem awfully sure."

  "Yes. I am." Sitting back in the mate's seat, she crossed her legs.

  "Well, if you know so bloody much, would you please tell me why the field is here now if it wasn't before, and where the bloody station is, and for God's sake where the collapsing-field is?" he roared.

  Alo shrugged. "I can't tell you all that. We'll just have to find out. But if there's a field working, we should be able to find it."

  "Terrific. Start looking."

  She settled at the viewscreen controls. Panglor, meanwhile, went back to tracking Deerfield and evaluating their position and velocity with respect to the planet. It was a terrestrial body in terms of size and mass; and it had an atmosphere, though there were no glaring indications of life in the spectrum. He instructed the computer to work up a picture of the planet, based on sensor-scan and library data, for later; right now he was worried about where he was flying, and where Deerfield was flying.

  The com started crackling just then, and after a few seconds he heard a human voice: "Other ship, other ship, this is Vikken Limited ship Deerfield. This is Deerfield." The voice repeated the ID several times. Then it said, "Other ship, what the fucking hell do you think you are doing? Please fucking respond."

  Panglor stared at the com, trembling.

  "Aren't you going to answer?" asked Alo. "I was kind of wondering what you were doing, too."

  "This is Deerfield, other ship. We are armed, and we are going to burn you into little pieces if you don't answer." The voice sounded angry, he thought. And Panglor was starting to become angry, too. Goddamn Vikken ship. He'd tried to avoid diverting them; he'd tried to give them a berth. And what did they do to deserve even that? He should have rammed them, sent them to real limbo. They were from Vikken. Why the hell had he risked his life for them?

  Suddenly he shouted, "Vikken, this is the goddamn Fighting Cur—that's who! It was all an accident, you morons—but maybe it was too good an accident for you! Maybe we should have dumped you into a goddamn star, but maybe that would have been too good for you, too!" He was fuming, years of anger boiling up.

  Alo opened her mouth in astonishment. Awe filled her eyes—a combination of terror and admiration.

  Panglor glared at the computer readouts. Deerfield was indeed changing course to intercept the Cur. But their emergence velocities had been different, reflecting the difference in their insertion velocities and Deerfield would have to go some to catch them. And if he decelerated the Cur into a corkscrewing orbit around this planet, they'd have an even tougher time. Good. He worked at the board; the ship turned over, and the drivers kicked on full.

  He studied what he had done, making sure he had got it right. Then he sat back, picking his teeth. By God, he wasn't about to apologize to Vikken, not by a long shot.

  "Pingly," said Alo. "What's with them? Do you hate them on general principle, or for something special?"

  He twitched. "Didn't I tell you to look for a collapsing-field to get us out of here?"

  "Yah, I did," she answered, scratching her side. "Didn't find any. But I found the station, in orbit around the planet. Still don't know why." She displayed the station's track on the screen.

  Panglor nodded grudgingly. Even if she was a witch, she was an astonishingly good spacehand, too. He would have preferred thinking he could deep-space her without loss. But she was too good; she was the best assistant he'd ever had.

  "Are you going to tell me what's going on between you and them?" she asked.

  He tapped his teeth. Checking Deerfield's track, he muttered quietly to himself. The other ship was aiming to intercept, but the Cur had a good lead. "You haven't told me why you did what you did. All I know is that you're a juvenile delinquent who stowed away on my ship." He met her gaze, hard.

  "I am not a juvenile—"

  "That's not answering the question."

  "I asked you first."

  "I'm the captain. And I asked you hours ago. Are you afraid to tell me?"

  "Why should I be afraid?" Her eyes burned. She pulled at her disheveled hair, then shrugged. "You know what it's like to have everyone thinking you're weird or something, and you know they're the ones who are weird? Just because I didn't come from there." She stood and talked to the viewscreen. "They've never been to Earth, and they think they know all about it, think there's something better about being born in a huge can in a star system that doesn't even have a decent planet. I think they're jealous. They never left me alone—always picking at this or that, and when I did b
etter in training, and when I was a better spacer than they were, they just did it more."

  She turned from the viewscreen and back, and then began to pace. Her eyes smoldered. "That's when they started in about my parents and how they were afraid of something, and that's why they were immigrating, and that's why I was there." Her voice was steel. Panglor swallowed, but she wasn't finished. "The bloody bitching bastards, talking about people who aren't even there to defend themselves. They're cowards—they know they aren't half the people we were."

  LePiep crouched nervously, watching Alo, sending out waves of alarm. For a moment, Alo appeared to soften, and she reached toward the ou-ralot. LePiep backed away.

  "Where are your parents, then?" Immediately he wanted to take it back; he didn't want to know.

  Alo turned toward him, looking right through him, and answered in a strangely light tone of voice, "They're dead. The stupid bastards killed them. They let our ship crash at the station, because they couldn't keep the traffic straight. And still they think they're smarter than anyone in the universe. I'm glad we don't have to go back." Her eyes were unfocused, and her lips were set in a childlike, icy smile.

  Panglor started to clear his throat, but stopped, afraid to make the sound. A cry of sympathy was trying to escape from his windpipe, and he grunted to keep it down. He sat rigid, elbows at his sides. Jittery waves of fear came from LePiep; it was too much pain coming from too many directions. But it's just coincidence, he thought. And not even true coincidence: her parents were killed in a spaceship crash—and that's not what happened to both his parents. Just his father. And then his mother left him, but that's no big deal, not in the 82 Eri belt, with community parentage.

  "So," he choked. "They gave you a hard time, and you got them back. That it?"

  Alo's eyes narrowed, and she began to show consciousness of her surroundings again. "The bitch. Marney. I should have rigged it to kill her—she didn't deserve to be rescued. Should have put a flag on the wreckage: 'The Earthwoman did it.' What I should have done." She turned and busied herself with the view-screen, sweeping space.

  Panglor, his heart thundering, pumping blood against the backs of his eyeballs, forced himself to study the planet they were orbiting.

  * * *

  "So when are you going to tell me?" Alo demanded.

  "What?" He glanced up nervously. The silence had been comforting. They were decelerating smoothly in a loop around the planet. He had been puzzling over the presence of the foreshortening station in planetary orbit. Could some alien race, perhaps the mysterious Kili, have come here and moved it, for their own purposes? And the planet—it didn't correlate with any of the library data.

  "You know frinking well what," Alo said. "Why is someone out to kill us?"

  "They're not out to kill you," he said sardonically.

  She snorted. Panglor sighed, finally, and told her about the orders from Grakoff-Garikoff, and why he had been trapped in such a bind. He explained, also, about Vikken—how they had fired him for "psychiatric incompetence."

  "They were probably right," Alo said, clucking evaluatingly. "But they're bastards, and you ought to get them.

  Panglor hooked a finger at the scanner-tracking of Deerfield. "Vikken ship," he said.

  Alo thought a moment and nodded.

  Panglor, however—spurred by the memory—was feeling greater hatred at the moment for Grakoff-Garikoff. If he could avenge himself against them . . .

  "What about you?" she said suddenly. "I'll bet people where you lived didn't like you either."

  He blinked, then growled, "You listen here—"

  "Isn't that right?" Alo said. "We're just alike."

  "No, it's not right," he answered, but his voice betrayed him. What she had said was true; he had never been liked. There was Lenia Stahl, of course; and Edor, a boyhood friend, but he'd moved to another part of the 82 Eri belt. But . . . "Well, not like you're trying to say. Of course there are all those goons you meet in the shipping business, and most spacers aren't fit company for dogs. But there have been people here and there, in different places, who—" He stopped.

  "Who—?" she prompted.

  "What?"

  "People who what?"

  Panglor shook his head dumbly. He'd said enough.

  LePiep hopped across the console at that moment, chasing a ball of dust. Panglor watched her, then noticed the viewscreen. "Hey!" There was a ship in the screen. It was Deerfield—too large and too close—and there was a flickering of laser light on its hull. "How?" Panglor demanded. "They shouldn't be there!"

  Alo stared, mystified.

  "How?" screamed Panglor.

  A hull sensor hooted. Panglor scrambled and hit the variable thrust program to dodge the laser. "Get me a new track on that station!" he commanded. Alo darted to work, and Panglor began blocking out a course change.

  "We can't reach the station this way," Alo reported. "The orbits are all wrong."

  Panglor gargled and shouted, "Our orbit's all wrong! What's happening here?" His head was starting to swim. Something very strange—was he losing his sanity? Orbits don't play tricks. "Scan that planet. There must be something . . . explainable." The planet was twice the size it should have been on the viewscreen; it was a misty, ochre-and-white ball, much lighter in hue than he remembered it being earlier.

  A blast of static interrupted her answer. "Fighting Cur, this is Captain Thaddeus Drak of the freighter Deerfield. Cease your evasive actions and respond on open channel at once."

  "Turn that thing off!" Panglor snapped. What, what, what? The navigational computer was spewing nonsense. He checked the hull sensors; good, the laser was missing them.

  Alo shook her head. "We shouldn't be this close for hours yet."

  "Deerfield shouldn't be in range, either. Orbital configuration's all wrong." Panglor muttered. He looked up. "What are you scanning with?"

  "Huh? Radar and dopplering."

  "Check angular size and use this for comparison." He punched up the planet's physical data from the previous sighting and transferred it to Alo's screen.

  "No," she said, a moment later.

  "What do you mean, 'no'? Just do it."

  "I mean, no, it's not right. That's odd."

  "You mean you did the correlation already?"

  "Yes, of course." She pulled on her tangled hair. "Something must be wrong with the instruments. I'd better do it the long way and take star sightings."

  Strange feelings were running up and down inside Panglor. "Why?" he asked, though he knew the answer. Wouldn't anything stop this thundering in his ears?

  "None of this is making sense," Alo said. "I check our velocity and distance one way and get one answer, and I check it another way and get another answer."

  "I don't have to listen to this," Panglor warned, startled by the almost hysterical edge in his own voice.

  She looked at him in confusion, and he returned her stare, trembling. The pressure behind his eyes was terrible, and there was a large constriction in his throat. He turned to check on Deerfield and was surprised to see that the Vikken freighter had fallen behind, so much so that it was about to be eclipsed by the planet's horizon.

  The planet's horizon?

  "Hey, uh," he started, but stopped when he saw the look in Alo's eyes. She had seen the planet, too. There was no way this could happen; but the planet was close enough to swallow them. The horizon was a gently curving rim of golden brown against black space; a tissue-thin hazing of atmosphere was visible, as though brushed on as an afterthought.

  They were impossibly close. They were in a low orbit—no more than a few hundred kilometers up.

  Panglor made a sound of distress, then deliberately stopped his hand from shaking. Well, he could deal with impossibilities with the best of them. He reached out calmly and cut the drive engines. "What's our distance from the planet's surface?" he demanded.

  Flaring her nostrils, Alo said, "Three hundred thirty-two on radar—or one eighty-seven on laser. Take your pick.
"

  "Wrong." he said. "It's two eighteen from here. You know how to read those instruments?"

  She shot him a corrosive look. He shrugged and said, "Okay, figure me a periapsis, and when do we hit it?"

  That took her a couple of seconds. She bit her nails and said, "A hundred and three kilometers in seventeen minutes, or—" her voice became hoarse"—minus three in twelve."

  He met her gaze. "I get one seventy-three in thirteen." There was a bad buzzing in his skull, and his lips felt numb. If her last estimate was right, if the lowest point in their projected orbit was minus three kilometers . . . then that meant they were about to . . . crash.

  "Christ!" he howled, slamming the console. "Nothing means anything!" Shaking, he prepared to start the drivers to raise the orbit. But what sense could he trust? Direction? He couldn't trust anything else; could he trust backward and forward to mean anything? He kicked the drivers on again, muttering to himself. The direction and attitude seemed correct.

  "Think we'll crash?" asked Alo, squinting. She seemed unafraid, except for a twitch in her mouth.

  The planet grew in the screen. The horizon flattened, and now they could see the planet's surface crawling beneath them. It looked rocky and lifeless. But the atmosphere was terrestrial: nitrogen, oxygen, trace gases. "Give me a readout on the atmosphere," he demanded, keeping his voice tight.

  "You being funny? There's no atmosphere."

  Panglor chuckled desperately. "No atmosphere? Okay, we'll—ohh!" His stomach dropped, and he suddenly began crying, with real tears.

  "What?" Alo demanded. "What?"

  He pointed. "Auh!" said Alo. The hull sensors showed the nose heating, rapidly. They were entering the atmosphere that didn't exist, and they were going to burn up, because the Cur was not an atmospheric craft. Panglor tilted the nose up and throttled the drivers to full, trying to climb out. Tears broke from his eyes and ran down his cheeks.

  "It's not going to work," Alo said, and she was right—it wasn't working. The planet continued to grow in the screen, until it was nothing but a blur of speeding landscape.