Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER FOUR

For once, my expectations turned out to be overly pessimistic. With Kolodny still hanging around ready and willing to answer our questions, the rest of our work on the bioprobe proper was done by lunchtime. After lunch came an hour with the vac-suit fitters, and then we were able to tackle the simulator.

I’d never worked with DeepSix equipment before, and didn’t know what to expect. To my mild surprise, their simulator system turned out to be so easy and intuitive that by nine o’clock that evening I was satisfied we were ready to move on to the main event.

I figured Kinneman probably didn’t want to talk to me any more than he had to, so instead of phoning him I called my father. He congratulated us on our quickness and efficiency, promised to pass the news on to the rest of the team, and told me our Marine escort would pick us up at eight the next morning for breakfast.

As usual, the meal that Kinneman’s people had laid out was excellent. But as Selene and I ate I could see that the group assembled in the dining room had more pressing concerns than steak, eggs, waffles, and bacon. Kolodny and the other engineers, I was pretty sure, were running the tech details through their minds, searching for anything they might have missed. McKell, Ixil, and Tera were conversing quietly at their table, possibly discussing the huge implications of finding the other half of the portal directory, not just to them and the Icarus Group but also to the future of the Spiral. Kinneman and Graym-Barker, seated at a table off by themselves, were eating silently, and I would have laid good odds they were wondering if this whole incredibly expensive gamble was going to pay off or not, and what they would say to the money people if it didn’t.

But if Kinneman was feeling nervous, it didn’t show in his post-breakfast briefing.

“We’ll reconvene in one hour in the ready room outside the portal chamber,” he announced, his voice the slightly sonorous tone of someone who knows he’s speaking for posterity. “At that time you’ll do a final check on your equipment and suit up for the trip to Alpha. Colonel McKell and Brigadier Ixil will go through first, followed by Colonel Kolodny and his team. Mr. Roarke and Ms. Selene will wait until Colonel Kolodny returns with the all-clear, at which point they’ll accompany him back to Alpha. McKell will decide when all is ready, at which point Lieutenant Shevrade and Mr. Roarke will begin the mission. Questions?”

By no doubt sheer coincidence he happened to be looking straight at me right then, his expression not so much an invitation as it was a challenge.

And it occurred to me that if my father had been hired to keep the team and me working and playing well together, I should probably at least make him work for his money.

“I have one,” I said, lifting my hand as if we were all in school. “All the Royal Kalixiri commandos who were helping guard Icarus the last time I was here seem to have disappeared. Are they all on leave or something?”

Kinneman gave me a measuring look, then made a small gesture toward my father. “This was under your watch, Sir Nicholas,” he said. “Would you care to answer Mr. Roarke’s question?”

My father cleared his throat, while I took that same brief moment to field the double gut punch Kinneman had just delivered. My father had been involved in the decision to force all nonhumans out of the Icarus Group?

And he was now Sir Nicholas?

“Of course, General,” my father said. His genial smile was still in place, but I could see small tension lines at the corners of his eyes. “The agency’s undergone some reorganization over the past few months, Gregory. Part of that has been a shuffling of personnel and oversight representation. The Kalixiri guard isn’t gone permanently, but simply on hold while things settle down.”

“I see,” I said, a hard knot settling into my stomach. The words were meaningless froth, of course. I was pretty sure we both knew that. But the overall meaning was clear.

Kinneman and his people had indeed taken Icarus for Earth, the Commonwealth, and humankind.

And this time, I didn’t see any twitches from Pix and Pax. Clearly, Ixil wasn’t surprised by any of this.

“If there are no further questions,” Kinneman said, his tone strongly suggesting that there had better not be, “we’re adjourned. I’ll see you in the Icarus ready room in one hour.” Giving a brisk nod that took in all of us, he turned and strode from the room, Graym-Barker and my father close behind.

I looked at Selene, saw the tension in her pupils. Clearly, she’d gotten the same message from my father’s bafflegab as I had. “Gregory?” she murmured.

“Not now,” I murmured back. We were definitely going to have a conversation about this, but not with the mission to Alpha rushing up to meet us.

As my father used to say, Picking the wrong time for something will generally cost you more than just those few lost minutes.

But then, as my father also used to say, Alliances based solely on money are inherently unstable. If you choose to join such a group, make sure you get paid in advance.

I made a mental note to ask him later if he’d been paid in advance.

* * *

Selene and I didn’t have any equipment to prep, and were therefore ready a good ten minutes before the now familiar Marine guard came to fetch us. The omnipresent escort was just one more reminder, if I’d needed one, that we were the unwanted side dish in this little family dinner.

The rest of the team were already suiting up when we arrived, McKell and Ixil halfway into their vac suits, Kolodny and the other two engineers not far behind. Kinneman and my father were off to the side, silently watching the procedure.

Selene and I weren’t nearly as expert at the procedure as the others, but with some help from our Marine shadows we were ready only a few minutes behind the others. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Kinneman was watching us closely, but if he was annoyed at the delay he didn’t say anything.

Finally, everything was ready. One by one we rolled through the open hatchway into the Icarus receiver module, my father and Kinneman tagging along behind the rest of us. We all walked around the interior of the huge sphere to the launch module and rolled our way into that one as well. As per Kinneman’s earlier orders, McKell and Ixil went first, fastening on their helmets and then riding the extension arm up to the center and vanishing. As the rest of us watched, Kolodny, Ganic, and Shevrade did likewise.

“Any idea how long before Colonel Kolodny comes back for us?” I asked.

“The others will first want to exit the receiver module to the outside,” my father said. “An airlock has been set up over one of the hatchways for that purpose. They’ll then walk the entire exterior of the portal, both spheres, making sure everything is as they left it and that there are no surprises.”

“You mean like someone having moved in during their absence?” I suggested.

“As in like nothing has broken loose or run afoul of a meteor,” Kinneman said tersely.

“There’s never been any indication of anyone elsewhere in the system,” my father added. “Either on the planet itself or in interplanetary space.” He raised his eyebrows. “Which, I’ll point out, correlates well with your theory that the last Icari to travel there from Meima found themselves in an isolated, dead-end situation.”

“Emphasis on the dead,” I murmured, eyeing Selene out of the corner of my eye. She tended to be sensitive to conversations about the dead, even if those specific deaths had occurred ten or more millennia ago. But aside from a little queasiness in her pupils as she visualized the last days or hours of the marooned Icari she seemed to be holding up okay. “So, what, five or ten minutes?”

“More like fifteen or twenty,” my father said. “As I always say, You want it good, fast, and cheap? Pick two and get back to me.

“In this case it’s just the good part, I assume,” I said. In other words, Selene and I could have hung out in our suite another fifteen minutes and not been any farther behind the curve.

My words and tone were just as civil and polite as they could be. But Kinneman apparently heard something he didn’t like. “You’ve never been in the military, have you, Roarke?” he growled.

“I’m pretty sure you know I haven’t, sir,” I said. “Unless you want to count the time I’ve spent working with Admiral Sir Graym-Barker and the Icarus Group.”

Kinneman grunted. “As Sir Nicholas said a couple of days ago, there’s the question of whether you were working with us or against us. But that’s beside the point. The point is that the maxim hurry up and wait isn’t just a cynical view of how the military does things. Everyone needs to be in the right place at the right time before an operation can begin. Some of those people will be early, and they have to wait for everyone else. Those who are late…” His eyes bored into mine. “Let’s just say that they’d better not be late.”

“Yeah, I get it,” I said. “As my father used to say, A late soldier often becomes a late soldier.

“When did I say that?” my father asked, frowning. “I never said that.”

“Didn’t you?” I asked, putting puzzlement into my voice. “Must have been someone exactly like you.”

“Really,” my father said. He eyed me curiously, then shrugged. “At any rate, General Kinneman is right. All the pieces have to be prepped and ready before the operation begins or you risk losing by default. For want of a nail…

…a shoe was lost,” I finished the first part of the old quote. “You didn’t say that, either.”

“Oh, I’ve said it often enough,” my father corrected, his half-smile going a bit enigmatic. “I just didn’t say it first.”

Kinneman tilted his head suddenly toward his right ear, the one with the earbud in it. “Colonel Kolodny’s here,” he said.

I stepped over to the sphere interface and looked down into the receiver module. Kolodny had appeared, all right, drifting downward from the center of the sphere. His faceplate was turned away from me, but his hands were curled in the double thumbs-up that Kinneman had specified for the all-clear signal.

Or course, they hardly needed a hand signal when there’d already been whatever radio confirmation he’d presumably just given to the general. But I’d noticed that Kinneman liked putting multiple redundancies into even the simplest parts of his plans.

Which, I realized suddenly, might be one reason he was so resentful of Selene and me. Selene’s unique Kadolian senses, and her refusal to cooperate with the Icarus Group without me, meant that we were a factor that couldn’t be duplicated and didn’t have a backup. For want of a nail…except that the nail we represented couldn’t be replaced by a quick trip to the supply depot. For a detail-obsessive person like Kinneman, that had to be both annoying and concerning.

“Over there,” the general ordered into my thoughts. “Roarke?”

“Excuse me?” I asked, looking at him.

“Over there,” Kinneman repeated, jabbing a finger toward the base of the extension arm.

I frowned again into the receiver module. Kolodny hadn’t even landed yet, and furthermore was coming down about a quarter of the way around the big sphere. It would be at least another minute and a half before he could join us, and Kinneman had already said he would be accompanying Selene and me through to Alpha. “I assumed we were still in the waiting part of the hurry-up-and-wait,” I said.

“You are,” Kinneman growled. “You’re going to wait over there.

I looked at my father. But he was just standing silently, sending a neutral look in my direction. “Yes, sir,” I said briskly. Taking Selene’s arm, I walked us around the sphere to the extension arm, mentally counting down the seconds.

Sure enough, as I’d estimated, it was another eighty-nine seconds before Kolodny rolled over the edge of the interface into the launch module. He touched a key on his forearm control array—“Everything looks good,” his voice came through my earbud as he brought Selene and me into the conversation. “You two ready?”

“Ready, willing, and able,” I confirmed. “Though as my father used to say—”

“Stow it,” Kinneman cut me off. “Helmets on, and get moving.”

Obediently, I lowered my helmet over my head, listening for the click as it engaged the locking collar and then confirming on the chin-level status display that it was secure. I wrapped my hand around the black-and-silver-striped extension arm, waited as Selene and Kolodny did the same, and as that section of the launch module’s artificial gravity reversed direction we all floated up toward the sphere’s center. We reached the luminescent gray section, and with the familiar tingle and couple of seconds of blackness we arrived in the center of Alpha’s receiver module.

The last time I’d been here the sphere had been completely empty, with only the plate that McKell’s people had welded over the sphere interface showing that it hadn’t sat untouched for the past ten millennia. Now, the place looked like a combination workshop and supply depot. There were a dozen stacks of crates piled in carefully delineated areas all along the interior of the sphere, some of them clustered around workbenches or welding stations alongside tool racks and equipment dollies. One rack held six emergency vac suits, of the no-frills, no-nonsense, blow-up type a person could get into and zip up in twenty seconds flat. Other racks featured Barracuda underwater maneuvering packs, high-altitude ramjet and low-altitude owl-wing flightpacks, and a couple of suits I’d never seen before but which looked capable of a trip through an active volcano. Off to another side were a pair of large weapons lockers. They were closed, so I couldn’t see what Kinneman had given his team for possible self-defense purposes, but since most of the people here were EarthGuard or EarthGuard trained I didn’t have to use my imagination very much. Directly across from the launch module interface was the big rectangular block of a portable airlock, its power supply and oxygen tanks connected to it by cables and hoses like they were all heading up the Swiss Alps together.

Tethered beside the airlock, bobbing gently in the breeze and looking for all the world like the driveway marker for a child’s birthday party, was a thirty-centimeter-diameter helium balloon.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” I commented. Normally, arriving passengers headed off in random directions toward the inside of the sphere as the interior gravitational field pulled them away from the center. In this case, I’d taken hold of Selene’s wrist as soon as we popped in, and as a result we were heading together toward our projected landing spot near one of the workbenches. Kolodny, in contrast, was headed in a different direction, closer to the airlock. “Especially the pointer,” I continued. “Someone worried we wouldn’t be able to find our way home?”

“Pointer?” Kolodny asked. “Oh—you mean the balloon. No, that’s our intruder-deterrent system. When all the legitimate traffic for the day has come and gone, the sentries release the cable and let it float to the center of the sphere.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding understanding. Solid matter sitting in the center of the receiver module would automatically keep any unwanted company from popping in. “Simple and elegant.”

“We like it,” Kolodny said. “I’m told you used something similar once to keep out a group of unfriendlies.”

“Yes, though the execution was a lot trickier,” I said. “Why just one balloon, though? Seems to me a cluster would be even more secure.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Kolodny agreed. “That was actually our first approach, in fact. But it turns out that having a bunch of balloons rubbing against each other builds up static electricity and shortens their lifespan considerably.”

“How considerably?” I asked.

“A single balloon sitting by itself will last six to eight months before failing,” Kolodny said. “A clump of balloons—or even just two of them—start to fail within a few hours.”

I gave a low whistle. “That fast?”

“That fast,” Kolodny agreed. “We figure the gravity field somehow interacts with the static charge to enhance the material degradation, but so far the brain people haven’t figured out how.”

“What if you don’t use rubber?” Selene suggested. “Would a nonelectric material avoid that problem?”

“That balloon isn’t rubber now,” Kolodny told her. “It’s a thermoplastic we had specially mixed up for the job. But no. We tried a full range of materials, and none of them was light enough to maintain position in the center of the sphere, non-permeable enough to contain the helium, and able to hold up to the friction degradation.”

“Interesting,” I said, eyeing the balloon. Still, given how the receiver module’s radial gravitational field was configured, one single helium balloon sitting in the center was absolutely not going anywhere and therefore absolutely not letting anyone in. “Requires a very precise timetable to make sure you reel it out of the way so that your own people can get in, of course.”

“You might be surprised at how precise EarthGuard engineers can be,” Kolodny said with more than a hint of pride. “McKell? We’re here.”

“Good,” McKell’s voice came from my earbud. “We’re ready for you.”

“There in three,” Kolodny promised.

Half a minute later we hit the deck, the last half meter marking the usual surge of acceleration as the gravity came up to the module’s full strength. I glanced at the workbench we’d landed near as we walked past, but the half-disassembled gadget lying on it wasn’t anything I was familiar with. We kept going, and reached the airlock the same time as Kolodny. “What do we need to know about operating this thing?” I asked as the colonel swung over the lever that opened the hatch.

“Don’t worry, I’ll handle it,” he said, gesturing us inside. “Go on, get in. There’s room for all of us.”

The chamber hadn’t looked that big from the center of the sphere, but the three of us were indeed able to squeeze inside, though it was something of a tight fit. I watched as Kolodny ran the cycle: first firing up the pumps to remove the air from the box into one of the nearby tanks, then checking the indicators to confirm when the vacuum inside matched the vacuum outside, and finally squatting down and touching the spot that would activate the module’s hatch. The hatch swung open, and I saw the starry blackness of space beyond.

“Ladies first?” I suggested, gesturing to Selene.

“Colonels first,” Kolodny corrected. Lying down in a sort of fetal position in the cramped space, he rolled through the hatchway and out of sight. “Okay. Selene?”

Obediently, Selene lay down and followed him out. I took her place, settled myself…

And paused, peering at the line where the airlock met the module’s deck. I’d assumed it had been welded to the sphere’s inner surface, since that was the best way to guarantee an airtight seal. From my current vantage point, though, I could see that the interface wasn’t fused metal, but instead a thick, translucent plastic. “Colonel Kolodny?” I called. “This seal. Is it Corcoran Maxor?”

“You’ve got a good eye,” Kolodny’s voice came approvingly. “Yes, it is. Best vacuum adhesive on the market. Three centimeters thick and solid as the commark.”

“Good to hear,” I muttered, making a face. Corcoran Maxor was good enough, I supposed, but it was hardly the best the Spiral had to offer. Informed opinion was that Crooea technology was the platinum standard for vacuum products of all sorts.

But then, Corcoran Maxor was the best sealant produced in the Commonwealth. Apparently, Kinneman’s new Humans Only policy also included ignoring equipment or materials made by anyone who wasn’t in that elite club.

As my father used to say, Allies and assets come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. If you let yourself get prejudiced against any of those options, you might as well tie one arm behind your back.

I doubted he’d mentioned that one to Kinneman. Not that Kinneman was likely to have listened even if he had.

I was starting to really hope he’d been paid in advance.



Back | Next
Framed