Enigma by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Page B

you—
    Except that she was dead, and he was beginning a new life.
    In his mind’s eye, he would still her voice and freeze her form, and he would bury her. With a will, perhaps he could forget her.
    That way, he would not have to find a way to forgive her. Because he did not see how that would be possible.

THE VETERANS
    (from Merritt Thackery’s
JIADUR’S WAKE)
    … For some reason, the Flight Office was eager to see that there was Survey experience aboard every outbound ship. Older surveyors saw it as a sign of creeping conservatism, since the all-novice crews of the Pathfinder and Argo ships had managed to cope with what they encountered.
    Nevertheless, the Flight Office worked hard to see that, at minimum, the commander, exec, and contact leader on each new ship were veterans. That was a deceptively ambitious goal. To place three vets on each new Pioneer-class ship and keep even that number for each refitted Pathfinder-class ship, nearly half of each returning crew had to be coaxed into going out again.
    But asking a vet to sign a second contract, even a limited-term, three-year mission contract, meant asking them to give up the country-club atmosphere of the resynchronization center at Benamira, New Zealand. It meant asking them to pass up figuring out how to spend the enormous fortune which resulted from sixteen years’ salary invested (even at the Council-imposed ceiling of 3 percent) for more than a century.
    There were only two kinds of veterans to whom returning to space was the more attractive alternative: those happy few who had found their identities there, and those unhappy few who had lost their souls…

Chapter 4
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Hysteresis
    Contact Leader Mark Sebright sat on the edge of the lab workstation, crossed his arms over his chest, and surveyed the expectant faces of his surveyors. The team was studying him just as intently, for they had seen little of him since he came aboard.
    The last name added to the Descartes roster, Sebright was the long-awaited and often despaired-of replacement for Jaiswal (who, according to rumor, had left the Service entirely and gone back to teaching at Hzui-Tyu). And he promised to be a more than adequate stand-in: Sebright was not only a Pathfinder, but a veteran of Hugin , the ship which had discovered the Muschynka colony in Eridanus.
    Sebright’s assignment was finalized a bare five days before departure, the minimum required to pass him through the gnotobiotic tortures, and two days after the team had transferred to Tycho . Thackery had caught only a glimpse of Sebright since then, as the vet had spent most of his time huddled with Neale, Rogen, and Dunn. What little Thackery had seen encouraged him. The rangy, tangle-haired Sebright comported himself confidently and casually. Where Neale seemed to be constantly on edge, Sebright had the worldly-wise eyes and demeanor of someone for whom life holds no more surprises.
    “Morning,” Sebright said, his inspection complete. “This won’t take long.”
    There were several skeptical smiles, for that was a promise Graeff had made often and never kept.
    “I’ve been over your records,” he continued. “You’re a damn sight more educated than we were. Half of you have quals in specialties that didn’t exist until we found out the Service needed them.
    “Unfortunately for you, the Com doesn’t agree with me. She says we don’t know enough. She wants to solve it by sending everybody up for another qual test when we reach A-Cyg. That’ll be worth a few more Coullars in the pay account, so I suppose there’s some of you who won’t kick too hard,” he said with a shrug. “But the way I see it, it’s not that we don’t know what to do—”
    Eagan, sitting at Thackery’s elbow, whispered, “He should have seen us in Queen Maud Land.”
    “—It’s that what we know how to do doesn’t need doing yet,” Sebright continued. “I suspect she’s a lot more worried about idle time on the leg out than she is about