Threshold Read online

  threshold

  Janet and Chris Morris

  This novel is dedicated to Herbert L. Ort—mentor, business manager, spiritual guide—with love and respect:

  Without your wisdom, kindness, and unceasing care, Herb, life would not be half so sweet.

  CHAPTER 1

  Deja Vu

  Past a sprinkle of asteroids in the foreground of his synthetic-aperture lidar screen, beyond a red crescent that ought to be Mars, was the blue-green dot of Earth.

  Or so the pilot's astronics were indicating. Captain Joseph South, U.S. Space Command, had learned to distrust his artificially intelligent "expert" astrogation system on this bad-luck test flight. Nothing had gone as planned during the maiden interstellar spongejump of the X-99A testbed he was piloting, beyond the mission being—so far—survivable.

  But the X-99A had never outright lied to him. And lidar returns, any test pilot knew, were as trustworthy as radar returns. South shook his helmeted head and rubbed his eyes under his raised visor. Better rephrase that, since radar and lidar could spoof you if you let them, and South was fresh from a jump through a spongelike space whose prolonged effects on human beings were part of what this test flight was testing.

  The laser-driven imaging system could only show him what was out there to bounce light back.

  So something like Earth was out there, even if the expert system was telling him that the micro-match didn't fit any template of the home solar system for the next five hundred years.

  The AI-expert had been giving South enough trouble on this flight that he'd promised himself, when he got home, to pull it out of the X-99A STARBIRD so that he could take it up into the hills around Vandenberg and shoot it with Grandpa's six-gun.

  Since it was too soon to put a lead slug through its charge-coupled brain, and he didn't like the readout below his lidar screen, South did what any red-blooded American test pilot would do in his situation: he whacked the offending meter, hard, with the flat of his gloved hand.

  The digital readout didn't even shiver. The date on the meter didn't change. The heads-up display reflecting it on STARBIRD's windscreen didn't, either.

  With a sigh, South slapped down his helmet's visor and pulled up all the relevant data through his suit's system, reading the results of his Extravehicular Mobility Unit's redundant command and control display. The projections on the inside of his visor showed him the same pictures and numbers that the master system had, only now he had to scroll and tap and voice-command his way through a full astro error search, because the suit's helmet could show him only four data pulls at a time and still give him a vision window in the center of his visor.

  And South needed to keep an eye on his flight deck— especially on the lidar screen—to see if anything changed while he was doing the equivalent of telling STARBIRD's AI that it had its silicon head wedged up its outputs.

  But nothing changed. The planets on his lidar were still telling STARBIRD they were five hundred years decayed in their orbits from project ETA, this system. South pulled up a standard return template and superimposed it on the realtime lidar return. It didn't look that damned different to him. So maybe the AI itself was out of kilter.

  He hoped not. STARBIRD was going to be a real handful to dock if he had to do it from his suit's astronics—or manually.

  Still, he had to do it. "Give me the quickest plot to docking, Birdy. Send it with ETA, our call signs, to Station." He flipped onto monitoring mode. STARBIRD's AI would run the message by him before it burst it by laser carrier toward the U.S. Space Station in orbit around the earth.

  The AI's voice once gave him the creeps, but now he was used to it. The mission had eaten fourteen months out of Joe South's life. Even with STARBIRD's capabilities, it would eat four more before he docked. There were better than twenty light-minutes between him and the station, and not even STARBIRD could chance anywhere near half-light speed among the complex of gravity wells that made up the inner solar system. She'd be torn apart.

  South's message would get there at light speed, lots faster than he could, but at least they'd know he was on his way. You could say "mission accomplished," at this point. He listened to the AI's communication and added those two words: "Tell 'em, mission accomplished, Birdy."

  It sounded funny in his ears. Maybe because of the helmet's close confines, visor down. He clicked his faceshield up, and the flight deck was suddenly less polarized.

  South was rubbing his eyes again, still blinking. He was seeing a ghost image of his own, haloes around letters and numbers, toggles and keys, when he looked at them. But that had been happening for a while.

  It was thinking about the mission, maybe, that made his voice funny. The mission was accomplished, you bet. But every time he thought about it, he kept itching in the back of his brain. His heartbeat would race, and his suit would get all concerned and jab him with mood elevators and its damned physiology package would come to life, recording his galvanic skin response to stress and he didn't know what-all.

  Yeah, he did know what-all. On take off, his pulse rate in STARBIRD had been fifty-eight. He'd been proud of that. Jumping into oblivion—the first guy to do it for real, rather than a quick in-and-out punch that wasn't any more than a roller-coaster ride for a couple of chimpanzees—he'd racked up a hot eighty-eight.

  But every time he thought back to his flyby of X-3, the star system in question, his pulse rate shot to one-twenty, he began to sweat, and his ears rang. The evaluation team was going to have fun with that set of responses when he got Birdy parked. He'd had a long time to think, and he figured he'd skip telling them about the memory blackout parts, since he might be imagining them. Like the bad dreams he'd had out there (dreams of walking on a planet when he'd never left the ship), the blackouts were phantasms. Had to be, because otherwise, he wouldn't be spiking his physiology meters.

  Joe South was a great test pilot because nothing—nothing whatsoever—spiked him. Except weird sponge dreams and old dreams about the Central African war—dreams about being shot down in his ATF and running around in the jungle trying to evade the Africans, and getting caught, and being a POW and, finally, being traded out. You didn't let your Space Command pilots waste away in the detention camps. . . .

  The jungle on the planet in his dreams was sort of like that African jungle, but the alien detention camp was lots nicer, and the dream aliens had bigger eyes even than the blacks in Mozambique. But Mozambique had really happened, and nothing had shaken him since then, except dreams about it.

  Joe South should have died in Africa. He'd known it then. He'd never forgotten it. Test pilots were made from fighter pilots who figured they were indestructible because they were on borrowed time, should-be-dead men who were sure that God had given them Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards, and South had won Test Pilot of the Year three years running.

  He'd win it again, if he could just get through the physical on the other end of this mission and get back in the game. This one mission would put him way ahead in the standings.

  And he had plenty of time to practice biofeedback controls of his erratic pulse rate and whatever else he needed—months of easy cruising toward the little blue-green ball on his lidar.

  So maybe he should get some sleep, give Birdy her head, and see how he felt once the transient jump effects wore off. If he had the dreams again, complete with flowers and sunsets like he'd never seen in his life, and soft-skinned aliens with wide eyes and sad mouths, then maybe he could get used to it. Ten years as a fighter jock and five more as a test pilot had taught South that you could get used to most anything.

  "Birdy, I'm going off-line. Maintain present heading." He didn't have to talk to the AI, he'd just gotten used to doing it. He canted his couch back, not bothering to tak
e off his suit, or even his helmet, let alone go aft where he could shower and shave, and sleep in his bunk. You could get used to anything.

  He wanted to let the suit's system, rather than the bunk's system, monitor his condition while he slept. You personified, in space. He'd personified the suit into a buddy, and the ship into a command chain, representative of Space Command. He knew it, and he knew it was a little wacky, trusting your suit more than your ship. But it had been a wacky mission.

  Part of the trouble with his memory, which the medics had predicted, was remembering the jump phase stuff, and the directly post-jump phase stuff. You were in a different time dimension than your biology was built to handle. What was good about that was that he hadn't come back an old, shriveled, incontinent geriatric. What was bad, everybody at Mission Control was waiting to find out.

  One bad thing was going to be coming home eighteen months later and seeing everybody again—seeing his buddies with promotions, his retraining on new equipment because the tech improved so damned fast; seeing his folks, who were getting old now; seeing Jenna, who'd probably waited for him this time because she'd always waited for him before, even when he'd been a POW.

  Everybody would be glad to see him, on the surface, but you were a stranger after so long. Being a stranger to your friends, to your wife and family, was something that hurt every time, and there wasn't any regulation that could make the dissociation into something else.

  Now that he was almost home, he could feel the tension of the inevitable reunions seeping into him, even from such a great distance, while he tried to fall asleep.

  So he thought, when he heard the alarm blare, and saw the red light strobing beyond his lids, that he was dreaming. If he had a problem, out here, he wouldn't have to worry about what it was going to be like reentering society. His mind was giving him a quick and easy out: a dream of not making it home because of systems failure.

  But the strobing wouldn't stop and the alarms hurt his ears, despite his helmet. Even as he was returning the couch to operating position, he was pulling up scans on his helmet system.

  It was the plain old fusion pack, nothing exotic. But a runaway reaction or a shutdown could get him just as dead as anything more obscure.

  He had a schematic on his visor that wanted him to add liquid to the system. Well, if worse came to worse, he could urinate in the emergency feed tank.

  But worse didn't come to worse: there was emergency coolant available in a backup tank, and Birdy was telling him not to worry about it.

  He sat up for three hours watching the digital readout cool down and stay down. Birdy wanted to move the system back up to speed.

  He didn't. It was a gut reaction, and South always trusted his gut. Let STARBIRD tool along at lower power for a bit, at least while he got some sleep.

  The AI had no way of testing whether the malfunction was a heat sensor or the system itself, or whether the additional coolant had done the job, unless he pushed the burn enough to hot things up.

  "How long to Station dock, at this speed?" he asked it, the first thing he'd said aloud since the trouble started.

  Birdy's uninflected, precise voice told him.

  Too long.

  "Crap." The damned thing was right. He didn't want to spend three years extra getting home, not when he was already hyped about it.

  He sat back in his couch, crooked one knee, and reached for the autopad on his armrest. With it, he banished the synthetic aperture lidar and replaced it with a realtime forward view.

  Staring at it, he thought he saw something move.

  He really was tired. They'd told him to watch the psychological effects on either side of a jump. First he'd seen spacemen, dreamed of other worlds when he'd never left STARBIRD, now he was seeing moving blips of light out here where nothing was.

  Joe South took off his helmet carefully. Holding it between his knees, he ran his gloved hands over his face, then scratched his scalp all over. Time for a haircut. He looked toward the realtime view and caught his reflection: beard-shadowed guy in his mid-thirties, eyes a little large and radiating concern, perfunctory nose, and a mouth that seemed, today, like it was a little too large or a little too loose for his oval face, though women said he was sexy because of it. He was just an average guy with an above-average need for adrenaline and a naturally athletic body that, trim and under six feet, was better suited to piloting than to professional sports.

  If he was going to get dead out here in STARBIRD, he was going to do it in some above-average way, not starve to death or freeze to death or go quietly mad waiting for his life support to run out.

  So maybe he ought to power her back up to her redline and see what happened.

  He was about to do that when he saw the flicker in his forward view again. He cursed it, told Birdy to put it on the scope, and put his helmet back on. Inside his personal cocoon, he felt a little more in control.

  He kicked back once more in the command chair, nearly horizontal, taking all the feeds on his visor display and letting himself get pumped up. He always felt better when he'd defined a threat.

  He hoped to hell this was a real one, and not a phantom, like his dreams.

  But Birdy had it, too. After giving him coordinates and zooming the lidar image so that he could read numbers on the sides of spacecraft such as he'd never imagined in his wildest nightmares, the artificial voice said calmly, "Unidentified spaceborne objects."

  "You bet," he confirmed. "Let's say hi, nice and polite: All hailing frequencies you can imagine, Birdy, our call signs, and make sure they know we're U.S. Space Command." American affiliation ought to be worth something, unless these were Creatures from Outer Space.

  He didn't think they could be: the numbers were Arabic, there on the spacecrafts' sides, and the armaments looked like futuristic railguns on turrets, supplemented by underbelly cannon that were the direct descendants of the sort of Kinetic Kill Devices that Space Command had been testing for orbital deployment when South had left the solar system.

  If they were KKD cannon, and whoever was on those ships decided to shoot STARBIRD, there wasn't a thing that Captain Joe South could do about it. The X-99A wasn't armed. She was a testbed.

  He hoped to hell she wasn't going to become a deathbed as he toggled himself into the com system and began identifying himself and sending a mayday in English, pidgin Russian, French, German and Spanish.

  After all, he was having trouble with his power plant. As for what kind of other trouble he was getting into, he couldn't see any way to avoid contact with whoever was out there.

  They were headed straight for him, armed and dangerous.

  Unless he'd stumbled into somebody else's test program, something was terribly wrong out here.

  Either there was a war going on that had pushed tech parameters at an ungodly rate and Joe South had just stumbled into the middle of it, or the lidar return and his AI's reading of it was right.

  And if that were so, it was goddamn five hundred years since he'd left, local time, and Joe South was going to have one hell of a lot of explaining to do.

  If those guys out there would let him, not just shoot first and the hell with questions later, the way those battleships told South they might . . .

  CHAPTER 2

  The Relic

  Consolidated Security didn't take chances. The ConSec ship dispatched to take the Relic craft in tow was armed to the teeth and prepared for the worst. The tug and backup patrol cruiser alongside the Blue Tick were there if the Tick needed them, but that didn't make Reice, at her helm, feel all that much better.

  Five years ago, Reice, now a lieutenant, had been the poor fool of a sergeant who'd decided he could go one-on-one with a Relic pilot. Reice had ended up in the Stalk hospital for a week, and the Relic had killed himself anyway.

  That prior brush with history in the person of a pilot from the early days of interstellar space flight had qualified Reice, above all others, to deal with the next Relic who came along.

  If he
'd been lucky, there never would have been another Relic encounter in Reice's lifetime. There didn't have to be. It wasn't as if these crazy coots came popping out of the spongeholes of the universe every day. And it wasn't as if they all had to be as crazy as the last one Reice had dealt with. But you could never be sure. Early administrations, especially the American, Japanese, and Soviet governments, had sent test craft with human pilots into temporally anomalous hyperspaces with only the slightest inkling of the nature of spongespace, T2 effects on biological systems such as human brains, and the most primitive of technological assistants.

  It was a wonder the damned galaxy got colonized at all. Most of these old ships had primitive fusion power plants, no zero-point apport packs, no asymptotic spacetime navigational aids—nothing.

  They'd send the guys out to push a button. The pilots would do that, and come out . . . somewhere . . . wherever chance and their tech level dictated.

  Most of them never made it back at all. The one Reice had grappled with had been certifiably mad, paranoid and full of stories about advanced cultures with impossible attributes that couldn't exist, or somebody, somewhere, from one of the three hundred colonies man had established among the stars, would have run into them.

  Reice had nearly lost his ship the last time, when the Relic had tried to ram it. That first Relic was sure that Reice, too, was part of the advanced, hostile, alien civilization. Hard to convince someone that he's come home when that someone's crazy and home's a whole lot different.

  Reice had no intention of losing his ship this time. He was proud of the Blue Tick. The G-410007 Blue Tick insystem cruiser had a top speed of 3/5 light and a temporal reorientation module; she was a 1K-ton, mini-pursuit ground-to-space vehicle, search and rescue capable, with kinetic armament and surveillance/cratology packages. He'd just gotten her. And he was a lieutenant, now, with a certain degree of autonomy that a sergeant just didn't have.

  But Reice had gotten strict orders, from the desk of Secretary General Michael (Mickey) Croft himself, to bring in the Relic ship with no fuss, no violence, and if possible, no fanfare.