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CHAPTER NINE

The minutes trudged along. I settled down flat on my back beside Selene—it seemed as good a posture as any to be in if anything in here twitched or failed—and gazed up at the various displays curving around the inside of the sphere. Most of them meant nothing to me, their blinking or pulsating lights equally meaningless. I knew where to program in the address of the portal you wanted to go to, I knew where the display was that showed the address of the portal you’d just left, and I knew the extension-arm procedure. Aside from that, I was about as ignorant as I’d been when Tera and her buddies first popped into our lives and tossed us unceremoniously into this thorn patch.

More than once I wondered how many secrets Admiral Graym-Barker and the Icarus Group had coaxed out in the eight years since McKell, Ixil, and Tera delivered it to them. Not too many, I guessed. Alien tech was like that.

I wondered, too, if it was the slowness of that progress that had persuaded the Commonwealth money behind the project to dump Graym-Barker and bring in Kinneman instead.

Kinneman, and my father.

What would my father think when Selene and I didn’t come home from this final gamble with the universe?

Maybe he would mourn me for at least a few days before life and business once again crowded out everything else. I would like to think he would. Maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, I could at least hope I would show up as the object lesson in some future aphorism.

I doubted Kinneman would either mourn me or invoke my name in some cleverly crafted wordplay. My best hope for acknowledgment from him would be if he turned my name into a new curse word that drill sergeants could use to intimidate recruits.

I was mentally running through a list of people who’d be sorry I was dead, most of them bounty targets I’d tossed into prison who no doubt wanted to kill me themselves, when Selene stirred. “Gregory?” she said tentatively. “I think we’re here.”

I frowned, checking the vac suit’s chronometer. Forty-five minutes had passed since Selene and I settled down. “So soon?”

“Ixil told me the landing would take thirty-six minutes once the portal hit the heavy part of the atmosphere,” she said. “Unless his calculations were off, we should be on the ground.”

I took a deep breath. Up in the mountains above our City of Light, if Ixil had gotten that part of the calculations right, too. “That’s great,” I said cautiously. “It is great, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The smell in here has changed again.”

“Good or bad?”

“Just different.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to think. If we’d landed sometime in the last ten minutes, shouldn’t we have felt something? I’d handwaved a good theory to McKell and the others about how Alpha’s artificial gravity should work and play well with the planet’s more traditional gravity field, and we’d had the data to back it up. But I’d never believed the portal could slam into the ground without a jolt or bump or some kind of announcement to that effect.

Yet here we were, sitting in the middle of Alpha’s usual radial grav field, without so much as a flicker in the lights to herald our arrival.

Did that mean we hadn’t arrived? If Tera’s calculations had been off in one direction we would presumably have slammed straight into the surface without coming in along a curve that we’d hoped would cushion our impact a bit. In that case, shouldn’t we be dead? Alternatively, if the numbers had been off in the other direction, Alpha might still be in orbit, either running an elongated ellipse or tracing out a descending spiral.

Which left us with a crucial decision. If we were in a more or less stable ellipse, we needed to go back outside and use the grav beams to give us an additional nudge. But if we were spiraling toward the surface, we might step outside just in time to get squashed as Alpha tore a monster rut in the planet’s crust. “I don’t suppose you know how to open the receiver module viewports, do you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Unfortunately, as long as things in here don’t change, I don’t think there’s any way to tell if we’re down, still on the way, or in an altered orbit.”

“The outer hull must surely heat up during an atmospheric descent,” she pointed out. “There’s a lot of spare equipment out there. Maybe we can find a temperature sensor and attach it to one of the hatches.”

“That assumes Alpha descends fast enough for that kind of frictional heating,” I said. “The whole point of this gamble was the assumption that it would come in slowly enough that it would survive the trip and the impact. Besides, even if the outer hull gets hot, that temperature change might not make it inside. The Icari had some weird engineering tricks up their sleeves.”

“You’re right about that,” she conceded. “So?”

I looked around the launch module, straining all my senses to find something—anything—that looked or felt or sounded different. But I couldn’t. “How’s the scent now?”

“It’s changed again,” she said, sniffing the air. “Not much. Actually smells a little better than it did a few minutes ago.”

“All right,” I said, once again consulting my suit’s chronometer. “Let’s give it…let’s say thirty more minutes. You keep track of Alpha’s scent, and if nothing has changed by then we’ll revisit our options.”

The minutes ticked slowly by. I tried closing my eyes, hoping lack of sight would enhance my senses of hearing or touch, quickly decided that not seeing what was happening—even though what was happening was exactly nothing—only enhanced my twitchiness. I tried staring at the displays, but the slow shifting of lights meant nothing to me, and try as I might I couldn’t see any pattern to the changes. I tried watching Selene, but the rhythmic movements of her nostrils and eyelashes were just as useless to me, plus they underlined the frustrating fact that she was doing something constructive and I wasn’t.

Plus the minor annoyance of seeing that she didn’t seem to have any problem keeping her eyes shut.

We’d used up twenty-four minutes of my suggested thirty when Selene suddenly stiffened. “Something?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. “It’s like Alpha’s suddenly gone weak.”

“Weak, like it’s breaking down?” I asked, feeling my heartrate picking up.

“No, more like…maybe quieting down is a better way to put it. It’s almost like a long-distance runner who’s finished a race and is feeling the strain—”

Right in the middle of her sentence, the diffuse light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere disappeared.

And an instant later I found myself sliding helplessly along the module’s curved inner surface in total darkness as gravity suddenly shifted to my right. I heard Selene gasp, felt mesh-covered cables and display board corners grabbing briefly at various parts of my vac suit. Through the interface I heard a cacophony of crashes and crunches as the equipment and workstations that had been resting peacefully on the deck all tumbled to the portal’s new definition of down. Apparently, a lot of stuff in there hadn’t been glued down. I reached the new bottom of the launch module, grunted as Selene slid into me—

And then all was silence.

With an effort, I found my voice. “You all right?”

“I think so,” Selene’s voice came in the darkness. I felt a hand touch my side, move up my chest to my chin. “You?”

“I’m fine,” I assured her, digging into my suit’s small hip pouch. There should be a flashlight in there somewhere. “That was fun.”

“I can’t find my helmet,” she said, her searching hand brushing my hair as it probed the deck beside my head.

“Do we need them?” I asked, a sudden tightness in my throat. She would know instantly if something had gone wrong with the air in here. Had something gone wrong? “Is the air going bad?”

“No, it’s still fine,” she said. “I just don’t know where it went.”

So if the air was still good, why this sudden need to find her helmet? “Just relax,” I soothed. “You stay put here. I’ll find it.” My fingers found the flashlight. I pulled it out of the pouch, flicked it on, and played it around the sphere.

From the sounds of crashing Marine property in the receiver module I’d expected the landscape here in the smaller sphere to be pretty messy. To my mild surprise, it wasn’t. Aside from a couple of cables bulging a few centimeters through the mesh above us, plus all the displays and lights being off, everything looked pretty much as usual. I swept the beam around some more and finally spotted our helmets sitting together at the base of the extension arm. “There,” I said, pointing. “They’re over—”

I broke off. The helmets weren’t caught on something, as I’d assumed, either the mesh or some of the equipment beneath it. They were just sitting there.

Which meant that while the main part of the portal’s internal gravity had failed, the generator around the extension arm, the one that expedited travel to the center of the launch module and thereby the full teleportation procedure, was inexplicably still operating. “Selene?” I asked, wiggling the flashlight beam over the helmets for emphasis.

“Yes, I see them,” she said. Her pupils, faintly visible in the backwash from my light, looked thoughtful. “I thought that’s where they would be.”

“You thought they’d be by the extension arm?”

“Yes,” she said, her pupils shifting to an odd sort of puzzlement. “Why did I think that? It has to have been the scent.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “So the scents in here are multicolored enough that you can get that level of precision out of them? Why haven’t you been able to do that before?”

“Because the scent inside the portals we’ve visited has never changed before,” she said. “Not until Alainn.”

I pursed my lips. Not until Alainn, and the portal she’d declared dead.

On the other hand, this was a phenomenon I was already familiar with: the Ruth’s status displays assuring me that everything was working properly even as a subtly altered scent emanating from one of the systems warned Selene that it was about to go gunnybags on us. The monitors always caught up, but without Selene’s advance warning there’d been one or two occasions when we could have been in serious trouble. Was she using a similar technique to root out Alpha’s status?

Maybe. But for the moment the how of it wasn’t the question uppermost in my mind. The more urgent issue question was—“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Is Alpha sick? More to the point, is it sick and getting better? Or is it—?” I stopped, suddenly reluctant to say the word out loud.

“Dying?” she asked quietly. “I wish I knew, Gregory. But right now I don’t. Alpha’s been through a horrible experience. I think we just have to give it time to rest and recover.”

“Okay,” I said, gazing at the dull metal and muted displays at the far end of my flashlight beam. “Any idea how long before we know?”

“No,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and see. I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” I said, reaching over and briefly squeezing her gloved hand. “We wouldn’t know even this much without your abilities and insight. As my father used to say, Everything has its own time and its own rhythm. Try pushing either of them faster, and you’ll just annoy everyone involved.

I yawned, fatigue suddenly pulling at my eyelids. “I don’t know about you,” I added, “but my brain still thinks it’s four o’clock in the morning. As long as we’re doing nothing right now anyway, I vote we do that same nothing with our eyes closed.”

I stood up, eyeing our wayward helmets. They were hanging a quarter of the way around the sphere above us, but with a climbable mesh stretching across everything it should be easy enough to retrieve them. “And we should probably put our helmets back on if we’re going to sleep,” I added, hooking my flashlight into one of my suit’s connectors so that it would continue to light my way. “In case something goes wrong and we lose our atmosphere.”

“I can’t,” Selene protested. “I can’t keep track of Alpha’s progress unless I can smell it.”

“Not a problem,” I assured her. “Remember how the Marine vac suits can use outside air until and unless the tanks are needed? Ours can do the same thing. We’ll program them to leave the vents open unless the pressure or oxygen content drops below a specified level.”

I snagged the helmets without trouble, though reaching through the edge of the field into full gravity did momentarily throw me off balance. I climbed back down to Selene and after a couple of minutes’ trial and error was able to activate the fail-safe programming I’d described.

And with that finished, there was nothing more we could do.

“Try to get some sleep,” I advised as I shifted myself into as comfortable a position as the mesh and underlying equipment allowed. “We’ll get some rest, let Alpha do likewise, and by the time we wake up everything will be back to normal.”

“Yes,” Selene murmured. “I’m sure it will.”

I closed my eyes. As my father used to say, It’s surprising how often a lie turns out to be nothing but a thin layer of deceit wrapped around a secret and all but abandoned hope.

I hoped Alpha would pull through. Not just because I wanted us to live, but also because I didn’t want my last words to Selene to be a lie.

* * *

Four hours later, I was awakened by a sudden glare of light in my face.

I snapped my eyes open, my right hand reflexively going to my hip where my plasmic would normally be holstered. The whole launch sphere was ablaze with light. “Selene!” I barked.

“I’m here,” her voice came back calmly.

I turned my head. She was sitting cross-legged beside me, her helmet sitting on the deck beside her. Her face was turned upward and her eyelashes were fluttering. “What’s happened?” I managed, working myself up into a sitting position.

She looked at me, her pupils puzzled. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Alpha’s waking up.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.” And now that my eyes were adjusting, I could see that what I’d taken to be unnatural brightness was simply the portal’s usual steady light. “So it’s working now?”

“Partly,” Selene said cautiously, her pupils going a little worried. “The lights and gravity are back, but the launch controls are still dormant.”

I looked over at the display that usually showed the destination address. Where there were normally four rows of twenty red squares that could be changed to yellow or black when programming in your destination, all the squares were now a sort of pasty white. The previous-portal display on the deck just below it was the same. “So I’m guessing we shouldn’t plan to be back at Icarus for lunch.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Selene said. “The scent hasn’t changed for the past few minutes, either. I think it’s…I don’t know. Resting? Regrouping?”

“Let’s go with resting,” I said. “Sounds more optimistic. We can work on the diagnostic terminology later if we need to. What about the hatch controls? Are they working?”

“I don’t know,” Selene said, looking at me with wariness in her pupils. “Why?”

“I was thinking I should step outside and see what the planet looks like from ground level,” I said. “Or rather, ground level plus a thousand meters if we landed in the mountains Ixil was aiming for.”

“What about disease organisms? We can’t stay in these suits forever.”

“There is that,” I conceded. The vac suits would protect us just fine while we were outside in the alien air. But as soon as we opened one of the portal’s hatches we’d be inviting all manner of buggy things inside. If there was something dangerous in that mix, if and when we were able to go back to Icarus some of those ickies could teleport back with us.

Bad enough that my memorial plaque might read Disappeared and Lost in Eternity. I really didn’t want Also Unleashed Devastating Pandemic Upon Humanity added to the fine print.

“On the other hand, as you pointed out earlier, there’s a lot of very expensive equipment out in the receiver module,” I said as I got to my feet. “Good chance that one of those items is a backup biothreat sampler.”

“Let’s go see,” Selene agreed as she stood up beside me. “We should also make sure the balloon’s out of the way for when Alpha’s able to receive travelers again.”

I looked at the dead, pasty-white display. Selene had said when. Distantly, I wondered if the more appropriate word would have been if.

But there was no point in being overly gloomy about it. As my father used to say, Pessimism can be useful when formulating backup plans, but it makes for a depressing life philosophy.

“Good idea,” I said. “You go do that, and I’ll go find that sampler.”

* * *

We’d heard the equipment in the receiver module go crashing to the deck when Alpha’s gravity shut down, and as we walked to the interface I wondered how long it would take to dig through a literal mountain of large and heavy tools and crates of supplies to find what we were looking for.

Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. The supply cabinets were indeed piled together at what had temporarily been the bottom point of the big sphere, their packages of food, water, and spare equipment modules scattered around like oversized confetti. But the heavy equipment—machining tools, workstations, and the like—were still spaced around the hull right where we’d left them. Either Colonel Kolodny hadn’t trusted Alpha’s internal gravity to remain steady or else his engineer’s natural distrust of vibration and other unwanted motion had persuaded him to anchor down his heavier pieces of equipment.

So while finding what we needed was still going to be an Easter Egg hunt, at least I could be fairly sure it hadn’t already been squashed by a quarter ton of falling table lathe.

It took nearly an hour of wading through the scattered debris and prying open jammed cabinet doors. But it was an hour well spent. In the end I found not just a spare biothreat sampler, but also a standalone analyzer, which would relieve us of the burden of trying to locate the necessary programming in the main computer.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” I told Selene as I double-checked the connections on the fresh oxygen tank I’d loaded into my vac suit. The old one was still showing half full, but with the uncertainties of an outside trek looming ahead of me, basic caution dictated that I start with a full tank. “I’ll go into the airlock, open the hatch, and wait there while this thing takes its samples. If I’m reading it correctly, the analyzer should transmit the data and results directly to the computer.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait a little longer?” Selene asked, her pupils showing concern. “The biothreat data from the probe’s last trip is surely already in the computer. We could try to find that first.”

“We could,” I agreed. “And you’re more than welcome to keep hunting while I’m in the airlock. But that data was taken from the stratosphere or upper troposphere, and the situation may be different here at ground level.”

“I know,” she said reluctantly. “I just…”

“You’re worried about predators and native spears,” I said. “To be honest, I’m not exactly thrilled about this myself. But we can’t just sit here until Alpha brings its teleport system online. Besides, I’ve got this.” I tapped the holstered Sigurd plasmic I’d borrowed from the weapons locker. “If I need to scare someone or something away, I won’t have any problems.”

Her pupils told me exactly what she thought about that line of reasoning. But she didn’t comment. I finished my checks, locked my helmet back on, and tucked the sampler and analyzer under my arm. “Am I coming through okay?” I called.

“Yes,” Selene’s confirmation came through my earbud. “You’ll describe everything you’re doing, won’t you?”

“Of course,” I assured her as she held the airlock hatch open for me. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the full running commentary. By the time I’m back inside you’ll probably be sick of my voice.”

Again, she didn’t say anything. I stepped inside the airlock and waited while she closed the hatch behind me. I confirmed that the seal was solid, then knelt down and set the sampler on the deck.

Portal hatches could be set to open either inward or outward, and given the uncertainty of the landscape outside we’d opted for the first. Bracing myself, trying to ignore unpleasant mental images of tigers and native spears, I touched the control spot. The hatch started to swing inward—

And to my utter surprise, a surge of water burst through into the airlock.

“What the hell?” I snapped, jerking back upright as I stared in disbelief at the water pooling around my ankles.

“What is it?” Selene’s anxious voice came back.

“Water,” I said. I couldn’t feel the temperature through my vac suit, but the stuff looked cold. “We’ve got water coming in.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” I said, staring down at the water, my mind trying to get a grip on this unexpected development. “Alpha didn’t come down in the mountains. It came down in water.

“You mean like in a lake or river?”

“Or like in the ocean,” I said grimly. “Remember the ocean a hundred kilometers west of the mountains?”

“Oh, no,” Selene breathed. “Oh, Gregory. If we’re that deep…”

“Okay, let’s not panic,” I said, trying mightily to take my own advice.

Because Selene was right. If we were even a hundred meters below the surface, we might well be doomed. I didn’t know what the decompression tables were for this kind of situation, but I did know that an ascent with pressurized oxygen had to be done very carefully if the diver was to avoid getting the bends.

Not to mention the more immediate problem that vac suits designed to hold in pressure against vacuum might fail spectacularly against heavy water pressure coming at them from the other side.

“Can you get out of there?” Selene asked. “Come back in here, I mean?”

“I think so,” I said, frowning at the gently bobbing pool around my ankles. “But I don’t think I need to. The water’s stopped rising. Looks like about twenty centimeters deep, maybe twenty-five.”

“That’s all?” Selene asked. “It must be a very shallow ocean.”

“I think it’s more a case of the water pressure hitting equilibrium with Alpha’s gravity,” I said, eyeing the sloshing water.

“Can you see any light out there?” she asked. “If you can, that might tell us how deep we are.”

“Yeah, hang on.”

I eased myself down into the water and maneuvered into a position where I could stick my head through the hatchway. I did so, looked around, then pulled myself back in again. “Nothing,” I reported as I got back to my feet. “But from the feel of the gravity, I think I’m under Alpha’s curve. It could be blazing sunlight out there and I wouldn’t be at the right angle to see it.”

“So one of us is going to have to go outside.”

“Eventually, yes,” I said, gazing thoughtfully at the pool sloshing around my feet. “But before we do that, maybe we can use the water’s equilibrium depth to calculate how deep we are.”

“Do you know how to do that?”

“Not a clue,” I said. “But that’s an EarthGuard engineering computer you’re sitting at. It ought to have the relevant equations in there somewhere.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” she said. “What about you?”

I looked down at the biothreat sampler, its top just visible above the water. “As long as the sampler and I are in here anyway, I might as well run some of this water,” I said, reaching down and lifting the device out of the pool. “Let’s see which of us comes up with some good news first.”

* * *

I ended up winning the informal race, mostly because my data search was fully automated while Selene had to hunt manually through the computer for the equations she needed. But both our results were gratifying enough that neither of us cared who’d won.

“So nothing dangerous in the water,” she said, running her eyes over the data dump from the sampler. “And you say that’s not just the water?”

“Nope,” I confirmed, leaning over her shoulder and pointing at one of the lines. “We got water and atmosphere both. Turns out there’s a lot of dissolved air in the water, and the sampler got good readings on both. And it gets better.” I reached past her to the computer’s controls and scrolled down another couple of pages. “There was enough biomass in the mix to get readings on those, too.”

“And there’s nothing dangerous?”

“Nothing the sampler could find,” I said, feeling way more satisfied with myself than I should be, given that my only contribution to this information treasure trove was scooping water into the sampler and keying a few switches. “Like McKell told us, life here is built on the same amino acid spectrum that we are. But none of the resulting microbes seems to have been put together in a configuration that’ll be a problem for us.”

“And if there is something like that the sampler didn’t catch, we just have to trust our wide-spectrum immunities to keep us covered?”

“That’s the theory,” I confirmed. “Actually, given how many biospheres we’ve run across during our travels, and how seldom either of us has gotten sick from one of them, I’d say the theory is pretty solid.” I gestured to the computer. “I’m done. Your turn.”

“My findings may not be as solid as yours,” she warned as she keyed for a different file. “But if the formula I found was the correct one, and if I did the calculation right, the airlock is between twenty-five and thirty meters below the surface.”

I frowned over at the airlock, rising up from the deck in the middle of the small puddle that had spilled out when I came back into the sphere. It was a little less than a quarter of the way around the sphere from the pile of supplies that presumably still defined planetary down, putting it about midway up the receiver module’s diameter.

But that diameter was forty meters. If the distance to the surface of the water was twenty-five to thirty…“Are you saying we’re only five to ten meters underwater?”

“From the top of the portal, yes,” she confirmed. “But again, my calculation could be off.”

“I’m sure it’s close enough,” I said, my earlier nightmare scenario of a hundred-meter upward swim vanishing into dawn’s comforting light. “Ten meters will be trivial to deal with. Five meters will be even easier.”

“I’m more worried that your vac suit won’t be able to handle full immersion in water,” Selene warned. “Just because it can keep air in doesn’t mean water won’t get somewhere it shouldn’t.”

“There’s that,” I agreed reluctantly, looking down at the control bars on my suit’s forearms. Civilian vac suits were designed to be simple, fail-safe bags of air for untrained people, and the variety Kinneman had supplied us with were even more idiot-proof than the more upscale ones we had on the Ruth. “On the other hand, all the exterior controls are this molded flexible plastic with no openings where water can get in,” I pointed out. “They should be all right.”

“What about the joints and connections?” Selene persisted. “Will water do anything to them?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. But the option is for me to float up naked and hope I can hold my breath long enough to get back down to Alpha again.”

She gave a soft sigh. “So you’re going alone?”

“I have to,” I said, wincing at the quiet pain in her pupils. The whole reason we’d both ridden Alpha down from orbit was so we could face these horrible threats together. Now, I was heading off to face one of them on my own. “There are too many variables in play for both of us to take that risk. Don’t worry—a quick look, and I’ll be right back.”

“All right,” she said, clearly still not convinced. “We need to figure out the best way to get you outside and back in again.”

I grimaced. “Yes. Let’s definitely make sure I can get back in again.”


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Framed