sister. He belted her in securely and they set off over the low purple hills where Dutch settlers were recreating a mode of religious life that had all but vanished on Earth.
Michael flew the scooter too high, and Katrina did get scared. She panicked, unlocked herself (Michael had not realized she knew how to do this), and climbed off. The scooter was thirty feet above the ground. The little girl died three hours later in the De Kooy medcenter.
McChesney was already there. His intelligence network was among the best in the galaxy. Despite their terrible grief, the Van Rynns agreed to McChesney’s plan. They were patriots. They also hoped that the use McChesney would make of Katrina’s body might help Michael. The boy was wild with guilt. The family needed to salvage something, anything, out of what had happened to them all.
Katrina’s body was flown by flyer to Space Tunnel #86, one of several that orbited the New Holland system, at the maximum speed the flyer and the corpse could sustain. Katrina wasn’t frozen. It was important that nothing be done to the body that would change its composition in any way.
Seven tunnels later, the flyer reached Mowbray Base, a brand new military space station beside Tunnel #472. Orbiting beside both of them was another tunnel, #473, that gave onto an obscure Faller colony. Mapping tunnels was an intricate task. A ship that flew through a space tunnel and then eventually went back through the same tunnel would be returned to its place of origin— if nothing else had gone through the tunnel in the meantime. If something had, the first ship emerged in the same place the second one had. Much-used tunnels were thus fluid, requiring complex central routing in order to keep them focused on a given system.
Tunnels #470 through #473, however, were not much used. Newly discovered and remote, they had been explored by only one human flyer. It had passed through #473, discovered the small Faller colony on the system’s single planet, and immediately popped back through the tunnel. The colony had not been military. It was possible the Fallers did not yet know that the star system had been discovered or visited by humans. McChesney gambled on that.
Katrina’s body was strapped into a small two-person personal flyer, of the kind that rich people and commercial explorers used. In the pilot seat was strapped the body of a young soldier who had died that same day of a brain virus, one of the virulent strains that demolished entire cerebral centers in hours. The flyer was loaded with provisions, including toys and holos suitable for a four-year-old girl. Except for the usual civilian light arms, the craft was defenseless.
The computer, preset, flew it through Space Tunnel #473, shut down all engines, and let the flyer drift in space.
McChesney and his team waited on the other side of the tunnel. They were effectively blind. No probe could go with the flyer, no signal could be sent back; the Solar Alliance had ample evidence that the Fallers were well able to detect anything electromagnetic. Their detection technology seemed to be equal to humans’. So did their weaponry. And their defenses, since they’d acquired the mysterious beam-disrupter shields, were infinitely superior. A proton beam fired at a Faller skeeter, the equivalent of a human flyer, simply disappeared. No scientists had been able to discover where the beam went, or why the conservation of matter/energy had not been violated. McChesney didn’t concern himself with the physics problems, which he knew he wouldn’t understand.
He didn’t understand nanotechnology, either, but the science advisors told him that might be the one area in which humans were ahead of Fallers. No one knew for sure. No Faller had ever been captured alive, and no skeeter had ever been taken as anything other than a melted hulk unsuitable for reverse engineering. However, neither the charred dead Faller bodies nor the charred dead Faller craft had shown,
Michael flew the scooter too high, and Katrina did get scared. She panicked, unlocked herself (Michael had not realized she knew how to do this), and climbed off. The scooter was thirty feet above the ground. The little girl died three hours later in the De Kooy medcenter.
McChesney was already there. His intelligence network was among the best in the galaxy. Despite their terrible grief, the Van Rynns agreed to McChesney’s plan. They were patriots. They also hoped that the use McChesney would make of Katrina’s body might help Michael. The boy was wild with guilt. The family needed to salvage something, anything, out of what had happened to them all.
Katrina’s body was flown by flyer to Space Tunnel #86, one of several that orbited the New Holland system, at the maximum speed the flyer and the corpse could sustain. Katrina wasn’t frozen. It was important that nothing be done to the body that would change its composition in any way.
Seven tunnels later, the flyer reached Mowbray Base, a brand new military space station beside Tunnel #472. Orbiting beside both of them was another tunnel, #473, that gave onto an obscure Faller colony. Mapping tunnels was an intricate task. A ship that flew through a space tunnel and then eventually went back through the same tunnel would be returned to its place of origin— if nothing else had gone through the tunnel in the meantime. If something had, the first ship emerged in the same place the second one had. Much-used tunnels were thus fluid, requiring complex central routing in order to keep them focused on a given system.
Tunnels #470 through #473, however, were not much used. Newly discovered and remote, they had been explored by only one human flyer. It had passed through #473, discovered the small Faller colony on the system’s single planet, and immediately popped back through the tunnel. The colony had not been military. It was possible the Fallers did not yet know that the star system had been discovered or visited by humans. McChesney gambled on that.
Katrina’s body was strapped into a small two-person personal flyer, of the kind that rich people and commercial explorers used. In the pilot seat was strapped the body of a young soldier who had died that same day of a brain virus, one of the virulent strains that demolished entire cerebral centers in hours. The flyer was loaded with provisions, including toys and holos suitable for a four-year-old girl. Except for the usual civilian light arms, the craft was defenseless.
The computer, preset, flew it through Space Tunnel #473, shut down all engines, and let the flyer drift in space.
McChesney and his team waited on the other side of the tunnel. They were effectively blind. No probe could go with the flyer, no signal could be sent back; the Solar Alliance had ample evidence that the Fallers were well able to detect anything electromagnetic. Their detection technology seemed to be equal to humans’. So did their weaponry. And their defenses, since they’d acquired the mysterious beam-disrupter shields, were infinitely superior. A proton beam fired at a Faller skeeter, the equivalent of a human flyer, simply disappeared. No scientists had been able to discover where the beam went, or why the conservation of matter/energy had not been violated. McChesney didn’t concern himself with the physics problems, which he knew he wouldn’t understand.
He didn’t understand nanotechnology, either, but the science advisors told him that might be the one area in which humans were ahead of Fallers. No one knew for sure. No Faller had ever been captured alive, and no skeeter had ever been taken as anything other than a melted hulk unsuitable for reverse engineering. However, neither the charred dead Faller bodies nor the charred dead Faller craft had shown,
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