Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [181]
“Markis, is that really on the log?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so, Kile.”
“My God. But the bastards are killers.”
“Only because they were being hijacked,” insisted Yoshi. “That’s the way they saw it. And the way the media will play it. Look, I’m not trying to blame anybody. But we need to think about this. Reputations, careers, everything’s going to go. We’ll even show up in the history books as dummies of the first order. They’ll be laughing at us for centuries.”
They were in mission control. Emily’s body had been retrieved and placed in her bunk. The celestial was centered on their screens, lying pinned by gravity to the cargo deck. “We can’t just throw this away,” Tripley pleaded.
No one answered.
29
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than what people think.
—ARISTOTLE, 340 B.C.E.
Kim reran the sequence in the cargo hold. She froze the picture at the moment of impact, when the bolt struck Emily, and she magnified it and focused on her sister’s face plate. She could make out her expression, which betrayed more surprise than agony.
She died quickly, and that was some consolation. But there had been a few seconds after the attack, when the lights were going out, when Kim could almost read her thoughts: I have it in my hands, a ship built by another civilization, and I’ll never know who they are—
The design of her colleagues now took on a kind of Greek inevitability. They would take the turtle-shell back to Greenway and find out what they could about it and its occupants. But first they had to negate the vehicle’s capacity to do damage.
They accomplished the latter by determining that the weapon used against Emily was the “fork” mounted on the prow. They used a bar to break it off and then secured the vehicle in a stowage locker.
They next engaged in a heated debate before taking the eventually unanimous, if reluctant, decision to conceal the outcome of the mission. “Until,” in Tripley’s words, “the time is right to reveal what we’ve found. If that ever happens.” Kane was most opposed to the plan, perhaps because he did not like deceit, but also and most certainly because it required him to falsify the ship’s records. But he eventually succumbed to the argument that if they reported events as they had occurred, their careers would be ruined and their reputations destroyed. They would be remembered for their folly as long as the species endured.
So they would take the microship back to Greenway and examine it themselves. And in the meantime they hoped that maybe one of them would think of a way out of the frightful dilemma into which they had sunk.
The strategy required that Emily be left behind, since there was no way to explain her death. It was Tripley who devised the plan that they would “return” her to Terminal City, book a hotel reservation for her, use her ID to create the illusion that she’d gotten into a cab, and let the authorities figure out why she never arrived.
Having laid out their course, their last action before leaving orbit was to consign Emily to the void.
All this was on the record, as if Kane wanted to make it available to some future—What? Historian? Judge?
The logs ended immediately after the burial service. The screen went blank and the power blinked off.
Kim sat in the lengthening shadows listening to the ocean.
“Kim, you have a call from Canon Woodbridge.”
“Put him on, Shep.”
Actually, she got an assistant, a young male with a somber, self-important manner. “Dr. Brandywine?”
“Yes? This is she.” If he gave his name she missed it.
“Dr. Woodbridge wishes you to come to Salonika tomorrow. He asked me to express his regrets that he couldn’t call you himself, but he’s extremely busy.”
“Why?” she asked.
“He’s always quite busy, Doctor.”
“I mean, why does he want me in the capital?”
“I believe it’s an award ceremony of some sort. He’s quite anxious that you be here.”
“You can’t tell me what it’s about?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have details. But transportation’s been arranged. You’ll be picked up at nine tomorrow morning. I hope that’s not inconvenient.”
Ten minutes