Jewel-Encrusted Sky - Chapter 1

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Thus... it made no sense, at first, that she was jolted in her pilot's webbing by just such a frightening report, issuing from her own captain, a man who had never even shown more than mild trepidation in many previous voyages they had made, through the endless void. Having cut out the continuum-distortion drive, they returned to sublight, on approach to their target, a lifeless hunk of cosmic flotsam.

Carmen Riddle thought: Something's not right here! She squirmed in her pilot's webbing, scanning the array of instruments, spreading around her in a womblike embrace. She had grown, in her years of shooting around in the galaxy, somewhat blasé about the occasional anomalous reading. Humans were imperfect; it stood to reason that their machines can be no different. Out on the cosmic frontier, however, even a small imperfection could spell disaster, for even the most hardened asteroid prospector.

Diagnostic, was her thought; her neural headpiece relayed this to the tiny spaceship's artificial brain, and it went to work, scanning itself — with... predictable results. Nothing was wrong with the ship's instrumentation. Warning signals failed to beam in from the other excursion raft. From her readings, she gleaned a story of nominal functions onboard the captain's single-seater raft, designed for use in, and around, sub-planetary bodies.

"This is Rafter Two," a voice, male, Latin-tinged, blared from the neural headpiece she wore, intruding upon her thoughts. "Carmen, are you there, amiga, or am I talking to myself here?" Her captain, Juan Caro, sounded a bit... winded, possibly breathless. That didn't scan, at all; in the confines of the tiny bug-like raft, there was no room for the fellow to exert himself — and he certainly hadn't left the little ship, and set out to cross a tiny moon on foot. That would be too much, even for Caro, who was about as far from a by-the-book pilot as she had ever known. Having seen maybe a hundred star systems, by the age of sixty-two, he knew never to go extravehicular, by himself. So, what was this all about?

Caro again: "I repeat, this is Rafter Two." This time, he sounded more than depleted; he sounded — anxious. "Carmen, answer the damned comm-link, por favor?"

Carmen jumped in her seat. Stung back to present-time awareness. Keying the comm-link to Send, she transmitted as neutrally as she knew how to sound, "Ah, this is Cervantes. Is there a problem, Captain?" She glanced at the wall chronometer. "Your check-in's not for, oh... another thirty, at the very —"

"Forget that, amiga," he cut in. She had gotten used to overlapping his remarks. He could speak almost as fast as he could think — and he was quite a swift thinker. "I've got some kind of... phenomenon down here! Never seen anything like it."

Uh-oh, she thought; nothing more complex than that occurred to her, in the tension of the moment. It was just possible that he was exaggerating the situation, possibly for benign reasons. Maybe he was excited about a good find. "Could you... I mean, what should I do here?"

"Hey, good question." A pause stretched itself across time; she held her breath, aboard his P-class, celestial merchant hauler/prospector craft, Cervantes, as it soared above the asteroid. Finally he sent her, "Activate your main EMS scans. Do a chemical analysis of this, in both UV and IR light. I want to know what this — this thing is!"

^^^^

Her hands flew over her consoles. "What 'thing' is that, skipper?" She tried to take stock and get a grip on both her own emotions and the base sum of what her ship's instruments reported to her. He knew what he was doing — and he hadn't been dazzled into child-like terror by rare earths, or volatile compounds. And merchant-marine spacer with more than a single flight's worth of experience knew that this job was routine: zip out to a chunk of rock in space; evaluate it, for its material components; remove samples; return to launch point for payment and refueling.

Her anxiousness about his proximity to the asteroid was at least half about the asteroid's proximity to Enemy space. They had been much closer than this, once upon a war, to their Enemy; no amount of pacifying language, no excerpt of the official version of events from a Worldsgov functionary, was going to soothe her brittle nerves. Humanity's galactic neighbors were not bashful about establishing their claim to several solar systems, the nearest of which lay fewer than ten light-years distant from this one. No matter the hugeness of the Milky Way, its spacefaring races still found a way to argue that they felt chafed by the presences of the others.

Oro's raft should be visible now, to the naked eye, as it emerged from its circuit of the asteroid. Carmen saw a cold landscape of darkened craters and dusty plains turning beneath her craft; the main flight cabin's amber lighting cast a peculiar, autumn-harvest sheen over this lifeless terrain. There was nothing afoot out there, no motion tracked, no heat signature recorded, to suggest that the raft had landed, braked to alter or reverse its velocity. She pinged the ground-effect cart folded up inside of Caro's raft, but it reported back that it remained folded up, not in use.

"Está aquí, está aquí," he was transmitting — "It's here, it's here," as if it, or he, required repetition to be taken seriously. "Los encontramos", his next message, was even more striking — "We found them." Carmen was sealing her excursion suit's helmet, and crawling inside of her raft, as a third signal came, not from the captain, but from the Cervantes: ship's tracking had noted the approach of several powered masses, probably alien. They had attracted the wrong kind of attention — just as she had feared they would.

The captain had gone down there, intent upon probing those cavern-mouths, leading to what he had heard might be a repository of useful metals — the lore of the ore, so to speak. He knew just how to pitch a sketchy endeavor to appeal to her — "You want to buy your own ship, Carmen? Run your own crew? This might satisfy that desire, and then some."

"This destination is pure heartburn," she'd insisted. "You may pat yourself on the back, for the way we've avoided space piracy and migrant black suns in the past, but this is a very different sort of an animal. I mean, the black suns don't shoot at us, and the pirates are amateurs, compared with our former 'costars' in the Great Emergency." She tried to push the tantalizing prospect of taking possession of her own ship out of her mind, and failed. She was thirty-two. She fought, then worked, for her compensations. Still worked.

"Excuse me, my dear, but haven't you heard? The war is over. They're not our enemies any more." They sat together, in a Venus Port Authority café; with the vanilla glow of Earth's sister planet, wafting through the nearest viewplate, they could watch other ships dock or relaunch in the starscape.

"They're mine," she had insisted. "Besides, what do you suppose the head of 'SERCH-1' will say, once he learns of our intended destination? I hear they've put Kranz in the director's seat. Maybe you're not... 'in the know' about that, but I used to work for him, during the war; Eta Carinae, and other battles. He's a crafty one — a regular fox."

"We may wish we hadn't waited for permission from our neighbors and friends on the other side of the border," he riposted. "I've been informed, by... let's call them, semi-reliable sources, that there's more to this system than just iron and lead and uranium. A chum told me of a scout ship that snapped images of what looked like facets of light, from one chunk of rock, that tested out on the spectrograph to be diamond. So we could be talking about a heavenly treasury. Diamond is carbon. That's... life."

^^^^

"It amazes me that I ever went along with this," Carmen snapped, only a few hours later, at her employer and captain, as they crept, all but tiptoed, onto the edge of their cosmic Foe's space. "If we 'get famous' out here, I'm not sure even our own people would come look for us. Far better to let the other side have us, they'd say." She added some corrective thrust, to shift the Cervantes past one asteroid, towards another.

"Hey, this is who I am, Carmen," he responded — a bit too blithely, for her tastes — nothing new for him, of course, whose optimism could have been engineered at the genetic level, for all that she knew, to take such absurd chances, just to secure this claim on this piece of space rock. Their vessel carried nothing in the manner of 'offensive' weaponry, unless a mining blazer was reclassified as military equipment —

"El diamante, es muy brilliante," he said, which indicated to her that the stories had been correct, at least to that detail. He followed up that mild observation, half in shock, half in astonishment, with "Me ciega," which meant somehing rather more terrible: "I blind myself."

Carmen heard a scream. Not an exclamation of surprise; not a roar of pure outrage. It must have been an injury; she couldn't fathom what could scare her jovial captain. In sixty-two years, most of which, over her full lifetime, he had spent earning his daily bread amongst the stars, he had only been truly scared twice — he'd been a support pilot, in wartime.

She opened up the thrust on her raft, descending to the asteroid's cavern-mouth. Hot on his trail — literally. The raft, acting as half vehicle, half vac suit, moved as she moved, braked or fired its thrust at a thought, reliant upon the neural feed from her headpiece for flight instructions. Before she had time to rethink her reaction, Carmen swept down inside the inky black of the asteroid's cavern-mouth. It was not to remain darkened for long...

She had glided into what looked, at first, like a cloud of mist or gas, lit from within its many gaseous folds, by some unknown power. She blinked back a protective moisture from her eyes, trying to adjust herself to the luminosity of this tunnel — but it was not just a tunnel, forming naturally over eons in cold void. It showed signs of having been polished to a hexagonal shape, by someone's conscious design, and it throbbed and oscillated with radiance. How many individual reflections of herself mirrored back at her, from the many facets? She wanted to take stock, waving one arm up and down so it would take active scans of the polished tiles, if that was what these were.

"Captain?" she barked, squinting as her faceplate screened out all but the most harmless optics. "I'm with you. We've got to get wrapped up here — our so-called friends are on their way here." She glanced about. "I have to admit, you called it right. This must be high-grade diamond. Who carved out this tunnel? Bad guys?"

To her relief, he sounded much less distressed, almost calm. "They did. Not bad guys." He pointed a gloved finger at the wall and waved it about. "All of this. It's them. They live here. We found something huge, incredible, here, Carmen." She had never known him to marvel so unironically, at a mining-related find, in all of their past expeditions. "This isn't like anything we've ever dug up before. This is first contact — the walls told me so!"

© Eric Wolf 2022.