Golden Fleece

She scrambled for one of the steel bars used to lever the lids off these crates and—“Damn you, JASON!”—smashed the splayed end into my wall-mounted camera unit. Shards of glass cascaded to the floor, falling on and on through the open gratings. Undaunted, I swiveled an overhead camera pair to look down on her. This angle foreshortened her appearance. From here she didn’t look like an entirely adequate astrophysicist, a shrewd collector of antiques, a recently separated but passionate lover, or—by all accounts—a great cook. No, from here she looked like a little girl. A very frightened little girl.

Di’s wrist medical implant told me that her heart was pounding loudly enough to thunder in her ears. Still, she must have heard the electric hum of my overhead camera swiveling to track her because she turned and hurled the metal bar at that unit. It fell short, bouncing with a whoomp on the lid of a crate. For a moment, she stared up into my camera eyes, horror and betrayal plain on her face. Such an attractive woman: her yellow hair separated so well from the shadows. Given the lighting in the hold, she could probably see her own reflection, a fun-house parody of her fear, spread wide over the curving surface of my twin lenses.

She ran on, but stopped again to evaluate her alternatives when she came to a four-way intersection between rows of crates. As she stood, she fingered the tiny pewter cross she wore on a chain around her neck. I knew it was her mannerism when she was nervous. I knew, too, that she wore the cross not for its religious significance—her Catholicism was nothing but a field in a database—but because it was more than three-hundred years old.

She decided to run down the aisle to her left, which meant she had to squeeze past a squat robot forklift. I set it after her, the antigravity force from its pink metal base lifting it four centimeters off the floor. As it hummed along after her, I let loose a blast from its horn. I looked at her now from the forklift’s point of view, seeing her from behind. Her hair bounced wildly as she ran.

Suddenly she pitched forward, tumbling onto her face. Her left foot had caught in the open floor grating. I cut power to the forklift’s antigravs, and it immediately dropped back to the floor a few meters behind her. It wouldn’t do to crush her here. She got up, epinephrine surging, and took off down the corridor with two-meter strides.

Ahead was the hatch I’d been shepherding her toward. Di made it through into the vast hangar deck. She looked up, desperate. Windows into the hangar control room, thick panes of glass, began ten meters above the floor and covered three sides of the bay. They were dark, of course: it would be six subjective years before we would arrive at Colchis, where the ships stored here would be used.

On either side of the hangar were twenty-four rows of silver boomerang-shaped landing craft, the nose of one ship tucked neatly into the angle of the next. Names mostly associated with the Argonauts of myth were painted on their hulls.

Ahead was the plated wall that separated the hangar from vacuum. Diana jumped at the sound of groaning metal. The wall jerked loose in its grooves, and air started hissing out.

Di’s hair whipped in the breeze, a straw-colored storm about her head and shoulders. “No, JASON!” she shouted. “I won’t say anything—I promise!” Foolish woman. Didn’t she know I could tell when she was lying?

A thin stripe of deadly black appeared at the bottom of the hangar’s outer wall. Di screamed something, but the rising roar drowned her words. I swung a spotlight onto the lander Orpheus, its outer air-lock door open. That’s right, Diana: there’s air inside. The wind fought her as she climbed the stepladder into the tiny, lighted cubicle, the growing vacuum sucking at her back. Her nose had begun to bleed from the sudden drop in pressure. Grabbing the manual wheel in both hands, she forced the lock to cycle. When she was safely within the body of the lander, I slid the hangar wall all the way up.

The view of the starbow was magnificent. At our nearlight speed, stars ahead had blue-shifted beyond normal visibility. Likewise, those behind had red-shifted into darkness. But encircling us was a thin prismatic band of glowing points, a glorious rainbow of stars—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.

I fired Orpheus’s main engines, a silent roar in the vacuum, clouds of greenish gold exhaust billowing from the twin cones. The boomerang lifted from the deck and moved with gathering speed across the expanse of hangar and through the open space door.