Arlington.

Saturday, March 15.

HAROLD NEVER REGAINED consciousness, and was pronounced dead at 4:32 A.M.

Hutch was still there when the word came, trying to provide what support she could to Mildred and the cousin. She notified the lab watch officer and listened while the doctor said he was sorry, there was really nothing they could have done.

He was 106. Mildred explained that the doctors had wanted to give him a synthetic heart a few years back, but he’d refused. She wondered why. He’d always seemed rational. And he had everything to live for: He seemed content with his work and was respected around the world.

“He was alone,” Mildred said. Tears leaked out of her eyes. She looked relatively young, but she was Harold’s aunt so she, too, was past the century mark.

Hutch came out of the hospital under a sky still dark and cold, wondering why she hadn’t seen it coming, why she hadn’t stepped in. She’d never invited him to the house. Not once. Despite the fact they’d eaten lunch countless times, that she’d confided in him when she’d gotten frustrated with the job. And he’d always told her to calm down, everything would be okay. It’ll pass. It was his favorite line. Everything passes.

Tor’s parents lived in Britain, and her own father was long dead. Harold would have made a superb substitute grandfather for Maureen, if Hutch had only known. Had only thought.

So she stood in the access station, watching the last few flakes drifting across the rooftop. Probably windblown, she decided, suspecting the snow had stopped. Banks of the stuff were piled up around the landing pads.

Harold gone. It was hard to believe.

Her link sounded. It was Tor. “What’s happening?”

“We lost him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“About a half hour ago.”

“You okay?”

“Yes. I’m on my way home now.”

“All right. I’ll have some breakfast waiting.”

“No. Nothing for me, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

A taxi descended, a woman got out, and Hutch’s commlink sounded, alerting her it was her cab. She climbed in, and the harness descended on her. And the thought she’d been pushing aside for the last two hours settled in beside her. Harold, what are the omegas?

A medical unit drifted down onto the far end of the roof, where the emergency pad was located. She gave the taxi her address and settled back.

It lifted off, turned south, and picked up speed toward the Potomac.

SHE USUALLY WORKED a half day Saturdays, especially when things were happening, which was pretty much all the time. She’d been at her desk less than an hour when the report came in. The Gallardo had inspected a cloud out near Alpha Cassiopeiae and found another hedgehog. The circumstances were the same: It was out front, same course, same velocity. Six and a half kilometers in diameter. Preliminary scan suggested it was an identical object. The only thing different was its range from the cloud, only fifteen thousand klicks.

The two sites were hundreds of light-years apart.

She’d barely digested the information when the watch officer called with more. The local cloud had one too. Again it was identical in everything except range, which was forty-two hundred kilometers. Even the spines were set in an identical pattern. As if the objects had come out of the same mold. There was some minor damage, probably caused by collisions.

It looked harmless.

She sat several minutes studying the images and went down to the lab. Harold’s office was empty, but Charlie Wilson was there, and a few of the technicians. It had been Hutch’s experience that bosses are rarely loved, and whatever the employees might say, there was inevitably a sigh of relief when they moved on. Even when the movement was to a better world. But everyone had liked Harold. And the mood in the lab was genuinely depressed.

“You know why we needed him?” Charlie told her after she’d sat down to share a glass of pineapple juice. “He was as big as any of the people who try to shoulder their way to the equipment. Which meant he could say no. He could keep things orderly. Who’s going to refuse time on the systems now to Stettberg? Or to Mogambo?”

“You will, Charlie,” she said. “And I’ll back you up.” He looked doubtful, but she smiled. “You’ll do fine. Just don’t show any hesitation. You tell them no, that’s it. Let them know we’ll call them if we get available time. Then thank them kindly and get off the circuit.”

He took a long pull at the juice without saying anything.

“Charlie.” She changed her tone so he’d see the subject was closed. “I want to talk with you about the omegas.”

“Okay.”

“Last week, Wednesday, I think, Harold told me he thought he knew what they were.”

Charlie tilted his head, surprised. The reaction was disappointing. She’d hoped Harold had confided in him. “He didn’t say anything to you?”

“No, Hutch. If he had any ideas, he kept them to himself.”

“You’re sure.”

“Of course. You think I’d forget something like that?” Harold’s office was visible through a pane of glass. The desk was heaped with paper, disks, magazines, books, and electronic gadgets. Waiting for someone to clear them away, box them and ship them home. “I just don’t know what he was thinking, Hutch. But I can tell you one thing you might not know.”

“What’s that, Charlie?”

“We matched the tewks with the omegas. With the waves. Or at least with the places where the waves should be if they’re consistent.”

“He told me that. So there’s a connection.”

“Apparently.”

And two of them with hedgehogs. Did all the clouds have hedgehogs? “Charlie,” she said, “these objects that we’ve spotted running in front of the omegas: They seem to be booby traps. Bombs. Is it possible that what you’ve been seeing is hedgehogs exploding?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“How can you be sure?”

“Did you look at the pictures from the Heffernan?”

Hutch hadn’t. She’d read the report.

“The explosion that destroyed the Quagmor—Is that right? I keep hearing two different names for the ship—is nothing like what we see when one of the tewks goes off. It’s on the order of difference between a firecracker and a nuke.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just a thought.”

THEY WENT INTO Harold’s office and looked through the stacks of documents. But nothing presented itself as particularly relevant. “Charlie,” she said, “I need you to go over everything he was working on. See if you can find anything new on the clouds. Or the tewks.”

“Okay.”

“Let me know if you find something.”

“Actually,” he said, “we’ve already started.” Charlie was tall and rangy, with sandy hair and clear blue eyes. Unlike most of the researchers who came to the Academy, Charlie kept himself in decent physical condition. He played basketball with his kids on weekends, swam an hour a day in the Academy pool, and played occasional tennis. He lacked his boss’s brilliance, but then so did pretty much everybody else.

“Okay,” she said. “Stay with it. Let me know if anything turns up.” She started to leave but stopped short. “What about the nova patterns, Charlie? Anything new on those?”

“You mean, about the way they line up?” He shook his head. “Maybe if more of them get sighted, we’ll have a better idea. But I think the notion there’s a pattern is an illusion.”

“Really. Why?”

“They tend to bunch up in a relatively small space. When that happens, you can almost always rotate the viewpoint and get a pattern.”

“Oh.”

“And the sightings are probably confined to those two areas not because that’s the only places they are, but because we don’t have that many packages up yet and functioning. Give it time. There will probably be more. If there are, I think you’ll see the patterns go away.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

Harold Tewksbury

. His achievements over an eighty-year career have been adequately chronicled elsewhere. He is one of the fortunate few whose work will survive his lifetime. But that is also on the record elsewhere. What mattered to me was his essential decency, and his sense of humor. Unlike many of the giants in our world, he was never too busy to talk to a journalist, never too busy to lend a hand to a friend. It is entirely fitting that he died helping a neighbor.

Everyone who knew him feels the loss. We are all poorer this morning.

— Carolyn Magruder

UNN broadcast

Sunday, March 16, 2234

Union Space Station.

Sunday, March 16.

TWICE TO THE Wheel in a weekend.

Standing with Julie Carson, the ship’s captain, Hutch watched the people from Rheal Fabrics pack the kite onto the Hawksbill. Eight large cylinders, each more than thirty meters in diameter and maybe half again as long, were clamped to the hull. These were described on the manifest as chimneys. They were, in fact, rainmakers. Four landers had been stored in the cargo bays, along with an antique helicopter whose hull was stenciled CANADIAN FORCES. There was also an AV3 cargo hauler; a shuttle reconfigured to accommodate an LCYC projector, like the big ones used at Offshore and other major theme parks; a half dozen pumps; and lengths of hose totaling several kilometers. A second LCYC was already mounted on the underside of the ship.

The Hawksbill was not part of the Academy fleet; it was a large cargo carrier on loan from a major shipping company which had donated it for the current project with the understanding that they would get all kinds of good publicity. Plus some advantages in future Academy contracts. Plus a tax break.

Like all ships of its class, it wasn’t designed to haul passengers, and was in fact limited to a pilot plus two. Or three, in an emergency.

The workers from Rheal were in the after cargo hold, running a final inspection on the kite before closing the doors. A cart carrying luggage appeared on the ramp and clicked through the main airlock. “Dave Collingdale will direct the operation,” Hutch was explaining. “Anything that has to do with the Hawksbill, you’re in charge. Kellie will be there with the Jenkins. Do you know her? Yes? Good. She’ll be switching places with you so you can help Marge get the rainmakers set up.”

“Which means,” said Julie, “that she’ll be taking the Hawksbill out to play tag with the omega?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said. “Whatever you guys want.”