Final Inquiries by Roger MacBride Allen Read Free Book Online

Hannah had every reason to believe he was also an honorable and trustworthy adversary. Until the moment came when they couldn't trust him any longer. Just because things were complicated on the surface, that didn't mean they weren't even more complicated underneath, Jamie told himself.
    "Safe distance and thrust vector now achieved," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Commencing primary acceleration maneuver."
    "Look up," Brox said in a low voice. "You wouldn't want to miss this."
    Jamie and Hannah turned their heads upward toward the gleaming stars, the swirling glory in the blackness--and watched as the sky began to melt.
    It was the stars directly overhead, at the zenith, that first started to smear, to stretch, to blur, shift in color toward the blue, and fade to nothing. But the contagion spread outward from there, more and more stars smearing, spreading, growing dimmer and bluer.
    After only a few minutes, all the overhead stars had vanished altogether, and those near the horizon were mere compressed, misshapen blurs.
    Jamie understood what was happening. As a spacecraft moved faster and faster, and got closer and closer to the speed of light, the light from stars directly in the line of travel was affected so strongly by blueshifting as to vanish altogether, while the light of stars that were merely close to the direction of travel were affected to a lesser degree. The closer your ship got to the speed of light, the more pronounced and dramatic the effect.
    But on even the most powerful human-built ships, or for that matter, on any xeno-built ship Jamie had ever heard of, it took days, or at least hours, to generate enough velocity for the effect to be noticeable, let alone significant. The transition happened too slowly for the eye to notice. For any ship, to say nothing of a ship of this size, to accelerate from effectively motionless to a velocity this close to light-speed in a matter of a few seconds would require unspeakable amounts of power, power that they were expending in order to get James Mendez and Hannah Wolfson somewhere in one hell of a hurry.
    What had happened? Why were they so short of time?
    Time. Suddenly it struck him. Blueshifting wasn't the only effect of moving at near light-speed. "Time dilation," he said to Hannah. "A lot of it."
    "Quite right," said Brox. "To an outside observer, measuring in human units, our whole journey will appear to take about seven hours. But so far as we are concerned, we'll be there in something like four hours."
    Brox sat down on the deckplates, calmly folding his legs under himself and wrapping his tail around his body as if he were some giant, self-satisfied cat. "So," he said, "We are flying in a vehicle as massive as a small moon, we are shielded from all detectors by the full mass of the vehicle itself, as well as by the primary drive radiation--which is so intense the command sphere has shifted to the forward end to get as far from it as possible--and by the fact that we have just accelerated, in a matter of seconds, to roughly eight-ninths of the speed of light. I would expect there are all sorts of jamming and silencing systems running as well.
    "However, as noted, our Vixa friends feel we are not yet quite secure enough for me to brief you on the specific situation. But perhaps you can suggest something else for us to talk about in the meanwhile, so as to pass the time away.
    "Do you have any suggestions?"

THREE
    THE PLANETS ON THE TABLE
    Hannah smiled, shook her head, and sat down tailor fashion on the deck facing Brox. Jamie did the same. "I can't think of a single thing we need to talk about," said Hannah. "Maybe we should just stare at each other until we get there."
    "It would be an unsuitable use of the time to stare at each other," SubPilot Greveltra announced. "Inquirist Brox must perform a briefing."
    "It would appear that SubPilot Greveltra can acknowledge your existence," said Brox, "and also that he lacks a sense of irony. But before you warn me