“Nice and loud, Lan. How are we doing?”
“Not good. I’ve been trying you and Jason on all the channels. You didn’t get anything?”
“Negative. . . .” There was a pause. “Jason says he was tuned all the while. Not a thing.”
“I don’t like this, Joe.”
“Me neither. Have you tried the beacon yet?”
“I’m just about to now.” Keene looked down and switched the portable unit to receive mode. He realized then that his chest was pounding. His breathing was shaky in his helmet, the clothes next to his body clammy with perspiration; his mouth and throat had gone dry. In the next few seconds he might find out that they were all destined to die out here. He selected one of the Kronians’ homing settings and plugged an audio decode connection into one of the suit circuit’s external jacks. . . . And a moment later, he was shouting out aloud in a relief that was almost crushing.
“YEAH! . . . OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL SHIP! I COULD MARRY YOU, YOU BATTERED PIECE OF BEAT-UP JUNK!”
The tone was coming through clear and strong in his helmet. It was the sweetest music he had ever listened to.
“Lan? . . . We’re okay?” Joe’s voice inquired, sounding a little unsure.
Keene nodded to himself, feeling drops of perspiration run off his head. “We’re okay, Joe. The receivers might be out, but the beacon’s singing. We’re getting out of here, Joe. They’re going to be coming for us.”
“Yeah, well, that’s great.” Joe didn’t seem fully to have absorbed it yet. “Lan, don’t do that to me again.”
They reeled him back in, still ecstatic and intoxicated by the sight of the stars, and for a few minutes with the weight of what had befallen Earth actually gone from his mind. It was only when he was almost at the hatch and about to guide himself in that his thoughts went back to the radar display he had watched at Vandenberg of the blip closing in toward the Osiris. The connection had been lost before they’d had a chance to be sure that the unharmed craft really was the Boxcar as Keene had assumed. If he was wrong, then none of the Kronians would ever have arrived at the Osiris to tell their story of Keene’s last-moment change of plan; and whether the shuttle was transmitting a signal or not wouldn’t make very much difference, since with Idorf and his ship long ago seized, nobody would be looking for it.
The grim set that the thought imparted to Keene’s face must still have been in evidence when he emerged through the inner door into the cabin, and Jason helped him off with his helmet.
“What’s the matter, Lan?” Vicki asked. “Joe said everything was all right. You look as if there’s bad news.”
Keene looked around at their apprehensive faces, the silent pleas to be reassured. He couldn’t dump this latest doubt on them now, he decided. But neither could he lie to them. There had to be some bad news.
“I didn’t realize how much you all stank,” he told them instead.
* * *
They turned off all the unessential electronics, wound the environmental control and air recirculation down to minimum, and made do with just the dim emergency light in the cabin. Keene surreptitiously increased a little the carbon dioxide level that the monitors would set to. It would relieve the load on the system and make people drowsy, passing the time more easily, lowering their oxygen consumption, and making them less likely to vent their anxiety in querulousness. All the same, Legermount tossed and fidgeted until it seemed he would start dismantling the ship with his hands, just to find something to occupy himself. Reynolds was just the opposite, calm and accepting in his belief that all was in the hands of a higher, wiser power.
Mitch and Cavan talked idly about military affairs and the old days, not realizing how much it sometimes affected the others, and wondered what the future might be for their line of business on Kronia. Dash revealed a literary bent and began composing a detailed account of all he could recall, at first using any scrap of paper that came to hand, later getting Keene’s okay to transfer to an on-board laptop whose drain wouldn’t make a lot of difference to anything. When Dash wasn’t writing, Jason and Joe would take the laptop forward to the flight-deck seats and play chess. Colby went off into long excursions of thought that resulted in few revelations, returning periodically to use the laptop for notes of his own that he was compiling, or to quiz Keene about workings of the ship that aroused his curiosity. He also attempted to entertain Robin with a variety of coin, card, and pocket-item tricks, none of which would work. Colby’s explanation was that he’d never realized how much they depended on gravity.