CHAPTER FIVE
Ixil and Selene were waiting when I emerged on the outer hull. The momentum of my roll started me drifting away as the sphere’s internal gravity vanished, and left to its own Newtonian devices that movement would send me slowly but inexorably into the black void.
But McKell’s team had that covered. Even as I floated upward I bent my knees, swiveled my hips, and planted the soles of my boots solidly onto the surface beneath me. “Like that?” I asked as Ixil caught my arm and levered me upright.
“Exactly like that,” Ixil confirmed. “Though I dare say Selene did it more gracefully.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Selene demurred.
“No, you probably wouldn’t,” I agreed, peering down at my feet. The receiver module’s outer hull had been wrapped in a thin-strand, close-knit mesh, similar to the one that held the equipment and cables in place in the interior of the launch module, but much finer. According to the prep files I’d been given, magnetic boots didn’t work on portal hulls, and Kinneman had apparently decided not to risk the massive and widespread welding that would be required to install a network of anchors. The mesh had been the solution: adhesive enough to grip the soles of our boots and keep us from floating away, but not so sticky that it nailed us to the spot. As long as we kept our steps slow and deliberate, we should be able to travel more or less normally. “But just because you wouldn’t say it doesn’t mean Ixil’s wrong,” I added. “Where did McKell and Kolodny go?”
“We’re on the planet side,” McKell’s voice came in my earbud. “Come join the party.”
“On our way,” I said, watching as Ixil started walking across the mesh. Pix and Pax, I noted, were in their usual places on his shoulders, encased in little vac suits of their own. It also looked like their suits had been anchored to the torso section of Ixil’s own suit, probably to keep the outriders from getting lost, but possibly also to create a seal that would allow their claws access to Ixil’s nervous system.
Though what use that would be out here I couldn’t guess. It wasn’t like Ixil could detach them from his shoulders and send them into some narrow conduit for a quick look. There certainly wasn’t any call for the kind of scouting duties they often performed for him.
“Yes, they can detach from my shoulders,” Ixil said.
I twitched, the movement nearly dislodging my feet from the mesh. What the hell? “You’ve taken up mind-reading now?” I asked, frowning at the back of his helmet.
“No, just reading human expressions,” Ixil said. “You were wondering if Pix and Pax can be taken off, weren’t you? I saw the way you were studying their suits.”
“I was just…oh. Right,” I finished lamely. Our helmets were mostly solid metal with wide faceplates, the bulk of the helmets’ interior layered with various status displays. The outriders’ helmets, in contrast, were merely bulbs of clear plastic.
And as I belatedly focused on Pax’s helmet I saw that his head was turned partway around toward me. “So they are plugged in?”
“Indeed,” Ixil confirmed calmly. “I understand why our helmets need to be mostly opaque, but I dislike the limitations that puts on my field of vision. Having Pix and Pax providing two additional points of view alleviates much of that restriction.”
“Sounds handy,” I agreed.
Though I strongly suspected that advantage came with a heavy price. Ixil had never said whether or not it hurt to have his outriders dig through his skin and into his nerves that way, and I’d never found a good opportunity to ask him about it. But I couldn’t imagine such a thing being even moderately painless.
“Personally, I prefer having a couple of satellites or drones to watch my back,” McKell put in. “But to each his own. You planning to get here sometime today?”
“We’re just taking it slow,” Ixil assured him. “There—I can see you.”
“Likewise,” I said as the top of McKell’s helmet came into view over the curve of the receiver module. A few more steps, and the whole equipment layout was visible stretched out in front of us.
It was pretty impressive. The bioprobe and grav-beam generators had been set up near the intersection between the two spheres, the generators spaced about twenty meters apart, the bioprobe itself nestled inside a compact railgun launcher sitting midway between them. Set to one side and about fifteen meters back from the bioprobe were a pair of compact fusion reactors. The same distance in the other direction were two wraparound control boards. One of the boards, large and impressively complex, would be the grav-beam controller, while the other far simpler setup would be for the bioprobe. Everything looked to be glued to the hull with the same Corcoran Maxor that sealed the airlock to the interior. Thick power cables and thinner control lines linked everything together, all of it lashed securely to the hull mesh.
Lieutenant Shevrade was strapped into the grav-beam seat, hunched over the board as she presumably ran her final checklist. Kolodny stood behind her, watching her work. The colonel half turned toward us as we came into view, pointed at the two unoccupied seats at the bioprobe board. “You two over there,” he ordered.
“Got it,” I said, eyeing the control layout as we approached. The arrangement here was somewhat different from what I was used to on the Ruth, but we’d run through everything several times during our simulation runs and should be fine with it.
Which raised the question of why Selene and I were out here in the first place. There was only a limited amount of anything I could do with the bioprobe itself, and Selene certainly couldn’t do an analysis of whatever it brought up until we were back in atmosphere, either inside Alpha or more likely all the way back in the Icarus base.
Had Kinneman sent us here simply so that we would be out of his sight for a few hours? Or was this my father’s way of positioning us as absolutely vital parts of the Icarus team?
In which case, we probably shouldn’t undercut his efforts by looking even the slightest bit incompetent. As my father used to say, Low expectations can be your friend, but don’t overuse them.
Fortunately, in this case, low expectations weren’t likely to be a problem. As Kinneman had said, handling the bioprobe during its atmospheric journey was mostly a matter of watching it do its job. Selene and I belted ourselves into our designated seats and started running our own checklist. With the simpler system we had to work with, we were finished well before Shevrade also pronounced herself ready.
“Okay,” McKell said. He gave each of our boards one final look and then stepped over to join Kolodny and Ixil. “Go.”
Shevrade nodded and keyed the launcher. The railgun’s warning lights flashed, and ten seconds later it spat the bioprobe out toward the hazy-edged planet below.
And for the next few minutes, at least, there was nothing at all for Selene and me to do. The planetary surface read out as about two thousand kilometers away, with meaningful atmosphere beginning at about the three-hundred-kilometer mark. I confirmed that the bioprobe was on its designated trajectory, then shifted my eyes to the planet itself.
Alpha’s receiver module had a set of viewports that could be opened from the launch module, but I’d never had a chance to look through any of them. For that matter, until that fateful conversation about our newly found directory half all those months ago, I hadn’t even known the portal was orbiting a planet instead of simply drifting on its own through interstellar space.
I’d seen a lot of planets from space before, of course. But usually I was busy piloting, or else talking with Planetary Control for a landing field assignment, or was getting the Ruth’s two bioprobes ready to fly. This was possibly the first time I’d been able to just sit back and look.
Planets seen at ground level could be impressive, grotesque, or disgusting, depending on where you ended up. They were crowded with humans and aliens, peppered with conversation, noises, and odors, and usually took some getting used to. Some of the people were decent enough company, others did their best to cheat the unwary, and a few seemed to like taking pot shots at anyone whose looks they didn’t care for.
Planets seen from two thousand kilometers out were the complete opposite: silent, elegant, and majestic. Alpha was currently passing over the terminator line, showing us the blackness of night on one side and the sunlit end of the day on the other. On the lighted side I could see scatterings of white clouds floating over swatches of green and blue, the green areas cut into irregular pieces by the wavy brown lines of mountain ranges or the muted blue of rivers. The larger blue sections, lakes or oceans, sent sparkly reflections of sunlight peeking through the clouds. Stunning, serene, mysterious—
“Gregory,” Selene whispered urgently. “Gregory, do you see it?”
I frowned. Was she talking about the general magnificence of the planet? “See what?”
“There.” She pointed at a spot on the night side, just barely past the terminator line, where the tops of the highest clouds were still catching the last rays of sunlight. “There, in the middle of that line of clouds.”
I followed her extended finger. The clouds were pressed up against a faintly visible dark line, probably a mountain range whose highest peaks were also still catching some of the fading light. In a small gap in the clouds—
“Shevrade!” I snapped, dropping my eyes to our control board and searching desperately for the display and controls I needed even as my fingers reflexively went toward where those spots would be on the Ruth’s board. “We need a grav swirl at—damn it—”
“I’ve got it,” Selene said calmly, her fingers punching in numbers on the controls I’d been looking for.
“Selene’s getting you the location,” I told Shevrade. “You know how to do a grav swirl?”
“Whoa,” Kolodny put in before Shevrade could answer. “What are you talking about?”
“A grav swirl,” I repeated through clenched teeth. “Shevrade?”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said, frowning at me through her faceplate.
“I asked you a question, Roarke,” Kolodny said, his tone taking on a warning note.
“A grav swirl,” I said again. If Shevrade didn’t even know what that was… “Never mind,” I said, punching my strap release. “Move—I need your seat.”
“Stay where you are,” Kolodny snapped. “What the hell—?”
“Stand down, Colonel,” McKell said, his own voice glacially calm. “You heard the man, Lieutenant. Out of your seat.”
“McKell—?” Kolodny began harshly.
“I said stand down,” McKell cut him off. “Roarke? What is it?”
“Give me a second and I’ll show you,” I said, easing myself out of my seat and heading for the grav-control board. My brain was screaming for me to hurry, that the longer I delayed the smaller the chance that a grav swirl would do the trick. But I nevertheless forced myself to walk slowly, painfully aware of the fragile grip my boots had on the mesh.
Shevrade was clear by the time I reached her station. “Selene?” I called as I lowered myself into the seat.
“I have it,” she confirmed. “Grid position: 35.01.41 north by 111.01.24 west.”
“Thanks,” I said, punching in the location. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the grav-beam generators shift aim to comply. “Come on over—this will be easier with two of us.”
By the time the grav generators had settled onto their new vector and I had them dialed up to full power, she was at my side. “Take portside,” I told her, moving my hands to the fine-tune control stick for the generator to the right. Kolodny had gone silent, but I could imagine the look he was probably giving the back of my helmet right now. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
I nodded and keyed the power. The generators blazed to life, and if I looked closely I could see the slight distortion inside the twin beams as they yanked at the tenuous atmosphere this far out from the planet. “Okay,” I said, getting a grip on my control stick and bracing myself. “Go.”
The distortion as the beams cut through the interplanetary medium had been extremely subtle, visible only if you knew what to look for. The microscopic swiveling of the generators as Selene and I sent them twitching, rotating, and jinking back and forth was even less noticeable. I wasn’t expecting any of the others to see anything at all, and I was right.
“Well?” Kolodny growled.
“Keep an eye on the far end of the beams,” I told him. “You can pull up a visual overlay on your—”
“I know how to do it,” the colonel cut me off. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“The clouds at that spot,” I said. “They’ve closed in now, but Selene and I saw something there. Swirling the beams like this sometimes clears them away, just enough.”
“At two thousand klicks’ distance?” Kolodny scoffed. “What do you think they are, military-grade tractors?”
“Don’t worry, they’re strong enough,” I assured him. “I’ve done more with less.”
Of course, the times I’d made this trick work I’d always been a hell of a lot closer to the cloud layer in question. But Kolodny didn’t need to know that. I kept the stick moving, mentally crossing my fingers…
And then, like a gift handed down directly from heaven, the clouds parted. Just for maybe a second or two, but long enough.
There, right where Selene and I had seen it—
“I’ll be damned,” McKell breathed. “Is that a light?”
“That’s a light,” I confirmed.
And felt a hollow feeling settle into my stomach. An uninhabited planet, Kinneman had said. Ours for the searching, ours potentially for the taking.
Only it wasn’t.
“Apparently,” I distantly heard my voice say, “we aren’t here alone.”
* * *
“No,” Kinneman said flatly. “It’s not possible. We’ve been watching that planet for almost eight years. Whatever you saw down there, it wasn’t some indigenous people or lost civilization.” He glared at me as if this was all my fault. “No, we’ve got company.”
“I don’t think we can be quite that definitive, General,” McKell said. “Up until Project Needle, our surveillance mostly consisted of brief and fairly casual eyeball and sensor readings of the planet, usually in conjunction with the various physical measurements we were taking. A low-tech, isolated culture could easily have escaped our notice.”
“Particularly in that location,” Ixil added. “It’s only about ten kilometers west of a high mountain range, with the prevailing westerly winds coming off a warm ocean current less than a hundred kilometers farther away. I’ve looked at some of the weather archives we’ve collected over the years, and that region is frequently hidden under a dense orographic cloud cover.”
“Maybe that’s how surveillance was handled before I arrived,” Kinneman said pointedly. “Not anymore. We’ve been watching the planet closely for over six months, and I can assure you there were no signs of anyone down there during that time.”
“What about natural phenomenon?” McKell suggested. “What we saw could have been a tight cluster of flames, maybe from the early stages of a forest or grass fire.”
“Did you see any flickering?” Kinneman asked. “Or smoke?”
McKell and Ixil exchanged looks. “No to both,” McKell conceded. “But a couple of seconds’ worth of observation doesn’t really count as a significant sample.”
“As to smoke, it would have been difficult to distinguish between smoke and the cloud cover,” Ixil added.
“Not after Roarke churned up everything in sight, anyway,” Kinneman agreed sourly.
“I think that’s a bit unfair, General,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw McKell flash me a warning look, but I didn’t care. “If we hadn’t swirled the clouds out of the way, you still wouldn’t know there’s someone down there.”
“You think it unfair, do you?” Kinneman said. “Well, let’s flip the coin over and look at the other side, shall we? Up until twelve hours ago, whoever’s down there also had no idea we were flying past them on Alpha. Now, they probably do.”
I looked at McKell. The warning look I’d seen a few seconds ago had turned into a sort of resignation. “I don’t think that necessarily follows,” I said, turning back to Kinneman. “At that distance those grav beams were too weak to affect anything solid or liquid. Unless our visitors were looking up at that exact spot at that exact time, they would have missed the show completely. Plus it was night. Stargazing is a popular pastime. Cloud gazing isn’t.”
Kinneman said something under his breath. “Sir Nicholas?” he invited, waving a hand toward where my father was sitting by himself in a corner of the room. “You want to explain the facts of life to your naïve offspring?”
My father stirred. “I think the point General Kinneman is making,” he said, “is that a civilization advanced enough for star travel is likely to have the kind of instruments that can detect the presence of grav beams overhead, no matter how weak.”
“If they’re tourists,” I countered. “As McKell’s already pointed out, we still haven’t established they aren’t locals.”
“Or they may be something in between,” Kinneman said, his voice going a very unpleasant shade of black. “Tell me, Roarke: What exactly have you said to your Patth friend Nask about the portal directory?”
The room was suddenly very quiet. “I’ve said nothing,” I said into the silence, carefully enunciating my words. “I’ve hinted nothing. I’ve offered nothing.”
“Really,” Kinneman said, his eyes boring into me. “I only ask because you’ve not only offered him a couple of portals, but delivered on that promise.”
“One of those portals, I’ve already explained, I had no choice about,” I reminded him, holding tightly onto my temper. As my father used to say, Your temper is like a small bird: very hard to catch again once you lose it. “The other I did for Earth and the Commonwealth.”
Kinneman raised his eyebrows. “You did it for Earth? That’s how you’re going to pitch that debacle?”
“I suggest you ask Ixil sometime what a Patth transport embargo means to a planet,” I said. Since he’s the only Kalix still here, I wanted to add.
I resisted the temptation. As my father also used to say, It’s even harder to find someone else’s temper when you’re the one who goaded him into losing it. “As for Sub-Director Nask being my friend, I think he would laugh his little mahogany-red butt off if he heard you say that. I’m pretty sure his main plan is to squeeze me for everything he and the Patth can get.”
“And he seems to be doing a damn good job of it,” Kinneman growled.
“Only if you look solely at his side of the balance sheet,” I said. “If you look at our side, I would submit that we’re holding our own pretty well.”
Behind me, the conference room door opened, and I turned to see one of the Marine guards at the door usher Selene inside. “This conversation isn’t over,” Kinneman warned me as he shifted his eyes to Selene. “Well?”
Selene’s pupils gave a reflexive wince at the sharpness of his tone. A second later their expression shifted again, this time settling into a calm determination. “Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” she repeated. “No Icari metal, either the portal or directory variants.”
“But there was a sampling of biomass, I assume?”
A slight frown crossed Selene’s pupils. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Your people have already taken it away for analysis.”
“Good.” Kinneman’s eyes were still on her, but I had the sense that he was thinking about something else entirely. “Good enough for now, anyway,” he amended. “You and Roarke are dismissed back to your suite. The Marines will pick you up in an hour for dinner.”
“When will we be going back to Alpha?” I asked as I stood up.
Kinneman frowned. “To Alpha? What for?”
“The next bioprobe survey,” I said, frowning back. “Our current data is from a hundred kilometers away from the light show. We’ll want to do a flyby of that particular spot as soon as possible.”
“Perhaps,” Kinneman murmured. “We’ll see. Dismissed.”