Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWENTY

icon


I slept nearly around the clock, awaking just after midnight with a growling stomach. I got up, went to the dayroom, and grabbed the nearest quick-cook meal in the pantry—ravioli, as it turned out—and tossed it into the cooker. I was just pulling out the steaming bowl when a bleary-eyed Selene joined me, her drawn face and pure white hair making her look more like the Ghost of Christmas Future than any living person. I sat her down, gave her my ravioli, and cooked up a second package for myself.

We ate mostly in silence, both of us still too tired for conversation. We finished, and I sent her back to her cabin while I did a fast and cursory cleanup. Then, after double-checking the Ruth’s various locks, I headed back to bed.

I awoke the second time at three-thirty, finally feeling human again. I had a shower, changed clothes, then went to the dayroom for a quick breakfast. While I ate I put together a pouch with a few meal bars and a couple bottles of water for my upcoming day trip to the dead portal, then went back to the engine room to snag a couple coils of rope and all the rest of our limited selection of climbing gear.

Years ago, with most of our bounty hunting centered in cities and other more or less civilized areas, I would have scoffed at the idea of lugging around outdoor survival gear. Our experiences on Popanilla with Easton Dent had persuaded me otherwise.

On the way back from the engine room, I heard Selene in the shower.

By the time I had everything packed away she had again joined me in the dayroom. “How are you feeling?” I asked as she selected a meal bar and breakfast cola and sat down across the table from me.

“Much more rested,” she said. “I really didn’t want to take all that time, but I’m glad you insisted.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Hard enough to hold your own with the admiral when you’re awake enough to think straight.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Gregory . . . I was wondering if we might want to hold off on that another day and instead go find Tirano.”

“And if Huginn and the Patth find the portal while we’re doing that?” I countered. “Rights of first possession is a nice theoretical idea, and planting a flag in virgin territory has a definite historic flair to it. But Huginn has the numbers on his side, and I don’t think the admiral would be impressed by even the most philanthropic of excuses.”

“Why do we care if Huginn finds it?” Selene asked, her pupils going a little frustrated. “It’s dead, remember?”

“Unless we can fix it,” I said. “Which is why this day is crucial. If it’s permanently dead, then you’re right, Huginn and Sub-Director Nask are welcome to it. But if it isn’t, we need to find out as soon as possible.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “I understand,” she said reluctantly.

“Good.” I looked at my watch. “I got you passage on the shuttle this morning while I was eating. The landing pad is just south of the spaceport proper, not too far, but we should probably leave in half an hour or so.”

“All right.” She finished her bar and stood up. “I’ll be ready.”

My own preparations took only a few minutes, mostly loading the equipment I’d already picked out into my backpack.

And before we left, I made sure to unlock the hatch into the crawlway. Tirano might come back, and I was certainly willing for him to do so if it didn’t involve me being murdered in my bed. More to the point, if Selene or I needed to use the Ruth’s back door I wanted it to be available.

* * *

The shuttle lifted precisely on time, the quarter-sized grav-beam towers raising it from the pad to where it was safe to kick in its thrusters. I watched it head toward the stratosphere, both to make sure it was properly on its way and also to make sure Selene didn’t sneak off at the last minute to go Tirano hunting. Then, with my gear already stowed in the rental’s trunk, I headed east into the mountains.

It was obviously necessary this time for me to have my phone with me, and I worried once or twice that Kreega would get a warrant for its location and become suspicious about where the gimmicked reading showed me to be. But right now I didn’t really care what she thought. Besides, if she hadn’t already figured out Selene and I weren’t exactly what we seemed, she couldn’t be very good at her job.

I’d told Selene I’d head up to Seven Strands to start my trek back to the portal. But between then and now I’d come up with a slightly different plan. On the walk back from our first visit I’d noted a few more of the easy-climb trees along our route, one of them on the far side of the Patth fence and not far from the jeep trail that seemed to offer reasonable access to the footbridge. If I could get up that tree and onto the bridge, it would save me a whole lot of walking.

It turned out to be harder to spot the target tree from the jeep trail than it had from the bridge. But after a couple of false starts and double-backs I finally found it. Strapping on my backpack with my main collection of tools and supplies and looping the rope coils bandolier-style over my shoulder, I worked through the underbrush to the tree and started up.

Climbing this particular type of tree, as I’d already discovered, was pretty easy. Working my way across to the footbridge through the tangle of other tree branches was less so. But with a little persistence and only a couple of scratches I made it.

I kept careful watch on my progress along the bridge, painfully aware that falling through a broken slat while I was alone would be far worse than doing so with Selene there to come to my immediate aid. But the structure remained secure, and after a few minutes I arrived at the end.

The portal, like the bridge, was just as we’d left it. I’d brought a more powerful light with me this time, and by its focused glow I could see that the hatchway I’d opened up was maybe thirty degrees around the hull from a straight-line connection with the smaller launch module section of the portal’s double sphere. That meant that instead of my immediate drop taking me straight through to the launch module I was going to end up inside the receiver module, near the cusp where the two spheres met. Slightly less than ideal for initial transit purposes, but it would mean I would have a resting spot when it came time for the climb back up.

I tied my rope securely around the trunk of the nearest tall tree, double-checked the knot, and dropped the other end down the hatchway I’d opened. I’d brought a signal booster, just in case the portal metal interfered with my phone transmissions, and wrapped it around the rope right at the opening. From that position it should be able to pick up my transmissions and kick them out into the planetary phone system and vice versa.

I attached my ascenders to the rope and my boots, took one last look around at the clearing and the thick forest beyond, and started down.

I’d set my light to lantern mode and fastened it to my belt, and as I climbed down I could faintly see the distant curve of the receiver module’s inner hull. There was a slightly musty odor, though possibly it had been worse before we popped the hatch and let it have a day open to the outside air. Fortunately, the rain didn’t seem to have made it this far up the mountain, so hopefully I wouldn’t have to wade through a fresh puddle at the bottom of the module.

The silence didn’t bother me. All the other portals I’d traveled through had been equally noiseless. But the rest of the atmosphere was totally new and more than a little eerie. Other portals were fully lit, the glow coming from an unseen and untraceable source, and had been filled with breathable air that smelled like all impurities had been freshly scrubbed out of it. This place felt less like a portal than a tomb.

Halfway down, I finally understood why Selene had declared the place to be dead.

I reached the lowest point of the receiver module and unfastened the ascenders. The interface opening into the launch module was about three meters up the curved wall. I pulled one of my grappling hooks from my backpack, attached it to the other rope looped around my shoulder, and lobbed it over the cusp. It caught and I pulled and walked my way up to the opening.

I’d secretly held onto the hope that, even if the receiver module’s gravitational field was off, the one in the launch module might still be functioning. But it wasn’t. I got up on the cusp and straddled it while I peered inside the smaller sphere.

My plan had been to turn the grappling hook around and flip the rope to the other side of the opening so that I could walk down the launch module the way I’d just climbed up the receiver module. But that turned out to be unnecessary. As with other portals I’d seen, the interior of the launch module was covered in a mesh designed to cover the controls, displays, and associated power and control cables. The mesh at the top of the sphere had sagged considerably in Alainn’s gravity, as had the cables it was supposed to be holding in place, but in the lower section the mesh was still in place and offered a sort of broad rope ladder down. A quick test showed that the mesh would still take my weight just fine.

Still, with the memory of the near disastrous failure of the Seven Strands footbridge fresh in my mind, I decided at the last moment to go ahead and reconfigure the grappling hook and the rope to that side. It would be highly embarrassing for the mesh to fail somewhere along the line and leave me stranded with the means of escape sitting tantalizing a couple of meters above my head.

I worked my way to the bottom of the module, where I spent a few minutes studying the cables and unlit displays beneath me and the sagging cables and equally dark displays above me. Shifting my light back to spotlight mode, I methodically took pictures of every section of the module’s inner surface, including close-ups of everything within easy reach. I made them into a file and fired it off to Selene, where she could access the pictures whenever she was ready to do so. Then, pulling out one of my water bottles and taking a sip, I turned off my light and lay down on the curved surface to wait.

Our timing had been based on the assumption that I would be walking all the way from Seven Strands, which put me somewhat ahead of schedule. On the other hand, we’d also assumed Selene would pass my photos on to the Icarus Group and let them do a quick analysis and gather some questions before she contacted me. The necessary time frame for all that was a lot harder to anticipate.

It was just over two hours after I’d sent the file and settled down when my phone vibed with her call. Sitting up straight, shaking off the light doze I’d fallen into, I keyed it on. “Selene?”

“I’m here, Gregory,” she said. “Happy happy. You?”

“Dancing with joy,” I gave the countersign we’d arranged. “You at StarrComm?”

“Is that him?” Graym-Barker’s familiar growl came somewhat distantly from the other end. “Roarke?”

“I’m here,” I called, hearing the subtle shift in the background as Selene switched her phone from private to speaker. “Nice to hear your voice, Admiral.”

“I wish I could say the same,” he said stiffly. “What in the name of God’s green Earth did you think you were doing?”

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

“This political satchel charge you just dropped on the Commonwealth,” he bit out. “Your big Loporr sapience claim. Do you have any idea the kind of uproar this is causing?”

“It seems to me that the only people who would be worried are the ones benefiting from the illegal Vrink trafficking,” I said stiffly. With the opportunity of yet another Icari portal hanging in the balance, this was not the topic I’d expected him to lead off with.

And the investigators and scholars over the past thirty years who concluded the Loporri weren’t sapient and now look like idiots,” he shot back. “And their universities and research establishments who rubber-stamped their findings and look like even bigger idiots. And the passionate and deceptively loud self-appointed defenders of public morals who have pounced on all of the above.”

“Admiral—”

“Not to mention the quiet and highly secretive governmental sponsors who provide our funding and do not like seeing the name of one of their supposedly secret operatives splashed across every news feed and social grid in the Spiral,” he finished darkly. “One has to wonder if you have a firm grip on our priorities.”

As my father used to say, Poking a helpless bear is some people’s way of showing their superiority and dominance. I’d seen that in superiors and clients before, and I was more than willing to sacrifice a little pride to keep things running smoothly. In this case, I’d been fully prepared to shift into humble mode, to explain that we’d been caught up in the moment and that it furthermore had been an important connection to our mission.

But that last one was just one jab too many. Because as my father also used to say, Sadly, those people often forget that if they hit a particularly soft spot, it may not matter how well they think they have the bear tied down.

“I have a firm grip on my priorities,” I told him coolly. “Not sure about yours or the government pipers you’ve got calling the Icarus Group’s tune. I can tell you I’m sitting in the middle of their biggest one. Do we want to get down to business, or shall we call it a day and go home?”

“We get down to business,” the admiral said briskly. “From your photos it looks like there are two large access panels near the current bottom of the launch module. I assume you brought tools; I’m sending you pictures on how to open them.”

“Okay,” I said, frowning. There’d been a subtle change in his tone there, from angry bureaucrat to the perennially cantankerous mood I was more used to from him.

Was a quick switch like that really in his repertoire, and I just hadn’t seen it yet? Or had the angry bureaucrat part been a rebuke he’d been ordered to give me despite a personal disagreement with either the substance or the philosophy behind it?

Not that it made any real difference. Whether Graym-Barker himself was mad at me or it was the people above him, it was still someone who held the Ruth’s finances in hand.

I’d always assumed the admiral was more or less in charge of the Icarus Group, with the money people shoveling over the necessary funding with no questions asked. I was now getting the sense that he was maybe just another employee like Selene and me. Higher up the food chain, but still subject to the whims of someone else.

If so, I really ought to make it my business to find out who that someone else was.

The pictures Selene sent popped up on my info pad. I turned my light back on, looked around, and found the two panels the admiral had specified. The bolts holding them in place didn’t fit any of the Commonwealth standards, but my fancy midsized Proteus driver conformed neatly to the shape of the holes. The captions on the admiral’s pictures had already warned me that the threads were backward from what I was used to, and a minute later I had the first panel open. “Got it,” I announced.

“Here’s a picture of the interior,” he said. Right on cue, another picture came up on my info pad. “Note particularly the blue glow coming from the long cylindrical tube—”

“Not glowing,” I interjected.

“—and the”—he stumbled a bit at my interruption—“and the two pale yellow bulbs that look like melted hens’ eggs.”

“Also not glowing,” I said, taking a picture of my own and sending it to Selene. “Aside from that, everything looks intact. No broken tubes or wires. No rust or scorch marks that might indicate a burned-out circuit.”

There were a few seconds of silence as the admiral digested that. “All right,” he said. “Seal it back up, and then—”

“Why?” I asked. “Why seal it, I mean? Are we trying to pretend to Huginn and Nask that we were never here?”

“Roarke—” He broke off. “Fine. Don’t seal it, but do set the cover back on top of the equipment bay. At some point we might need to know which cover goes with which bay.”

“Right,” I said. That one actually did make sense—I’d seen systems where the cover or fastenings were integral parts of the mechanism, usually involved in safety interlocks. I slid the cover under the mesh and laid it on the bay, then moved on to the next panel. Another minute’s work with my driver, and I had it open. “Ready with bay number two.”

“Here’s a picture,” he said as another shot opened up on my info pad. “The glow on the central tube in this one should be a pinkish red—”

“Whoa,” I said, frowning at the maze of equipment. “There’s no tube.”

“What?”

“I said the glowing red tube isn’t there,” I repeated, taking a photo of my own and then looking back at his. “In fact . . . let’s see. Two of the three thick connector cables in your picture aren’t there, either.”

There was a brief silence. “What about the third one?” the admiral asked.

“The third one’s there,” I confirmed. The cable in question was a millimeter or so in diameter and bridged the space between a pair of connectors like the ones the missing set had apparently fit into. I looked back and forth between the bay and Graym-Barker’s photo, feeling rather like eight-year-old me doing a spot-the-differences puzzle. “Everything else I can see looks like your picture.”

“But nothing’s running?”

“Nothing’s glowing or chugging or making thruster noises,” I said, trying hard not to be too sarcastic. As my father used to say, The only known system that still functions with half its components missing is a government bureaucracy. “Were you expecting them to?”

“A meter to the left is another access plate about the same width but half again its length,” the admiral said, ignoring my question. “Do that one next.”

* * *

I ended up opening ten more access panels for him. Nine of the underlying equipment caches looked just like the pictures he sent, though nothing in any of them seemed to be running.

The tenth equipment bay, like the second one I’d opened, was missing components. Four of them, to be exact.

“So,” the admiral summarized as I lowered the last panel back on top of its bay. “Twelve panels, seven missing components. And those are just the ones you can reach. Who knows how many more are missing from equipment bays in the upper part of the module?”

I shined my light up at the sagging mesh and cables above my head. Actually, my guess would be that all of those were intact. Digging into them would be fine when the sphere’s radial gravity field was up and running, but as soon as it went off—possibly when the first component was pulled—everyone involved would find themselves performing a fifteen-meter free fall. A maintenance person with even the slightest experience would know enough to start at the bottom.

Though the fact that the components hadn’t been replaced strongly suggested this hadn’t been normal maintenance.

On Meima we’d seen evidence of a battle. Had whoever was responsible for killing this Alainn portal gone the more subtle sabotage route?

But there was no point in bringing any of this up right now. The admiral was envisioning wholesale damage, and as my father used to say, When someone already knows what answer he wants, it’s usually best not to argue. “That’s a good question,” I said dutifully. “But I’d need a full scaffold or repulsor-and-grav setup to look into that.”

“I suppose you would,” he said regretfully. “Another day, perhaps.”

Even given my less than enthusiastic attitude toward the man, his manner, and his methods, I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of empathy. Whatever Admiral Sir Graym-Barker’s career path had been like before Jordan McKell and his team found the original Icarus portal, I had no doubt the device and the project had consumed his entire life for the seven and a half years since then. And up until this moment, he and the Icarus Group had had a mostly unbroken streak of success.

Though to be fair, a lot of the most recent successes were due to Selene and me. Not that the admiral seemed to notice.

“All right,” he said, the regret fading into his business-as-usual mode. “That’s it, then. Pack up and get out of there. Selene will return to Bilswift on the evening shuttle. Once she’s back, you two will be free to return to your crockett hunting duties until and unless something else arises that requires your attention.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, frowning. “That’s it? We’re just quitting?”

“What more do you suggest we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, floundering a little. “We know which components are missing. What if we take replacements from one of our own Gemini portals and plug them in here?”

“To what end?”

“To the end of seeing if the damn thing works,” I said with a sudden flash of anger. After all Selene and I had been through, the Icarus Group was just going to abandon any further efforts to salvage something from the mess?

“Again, to what end?” the admiral persisted. “We would be trading one working portal for another. I see no real gain in that. Do you?”

“Well, there is the whole science thing,” I said. “You remember science, don’t you?”

“Calm down, Roarke,” he warned. “Didn’t you learn not to get emotionally involved in your work when you were a bounty hunter? Think it through. Best-case scenario is that we swap out one working portal for another. A portal, you’ll note, that’s buried up to the top of its receiver module in a backwoods planet like Alainn. A portal, moreover, being sniffed at by the Patth. Agreed?”

I clenched my teeth. “I suppose. But this is a Gemini portal. Aren’t you curious to see where it links?”

“That’s the best-case scenario,” Graym-Barker continued, ignoring the question. “Worst case is that the reason those components are missing is that they burned out or otherwise failed. Absolute worst case is that something elsewhere in the system caused those failures, and would cause similar failure in any replacements. At that point we would have lost one working portal and gained absolutely nothing.”

“I think that scenario rather unlikely,” I said stubbornly.

“When you’re gambling with irreplaceable alien artifacts, you learn to avoid the soothing siren song of the word unlikely,” the admiral said. “As for your question, after ten thousand years I don’t expect there to be anything of real interest at the other end of this particular Gemini. Odds are also very good the linked portal will be underground, necessitating a long and laborious process of digging it out.”

“It would still be another portal.”

“Which we would then need to transport back to one of our locales if we wanted to study it,” he countered. “Unless it happened to already be in a location that would be useful for us. Dare I invoke the word unlikely on that possibility?”

I glared at the open equipment bay, wanting to unload a salvo of choice language squarely into the admiral’s smugness.

But I couldn’t. I’d seen the book of portal addresses—rather, the book that listed half of each of those address—and the Icari had apparently sprinkled a lot of portals around. He was right; the odds of this one linking to someplace we would actually want to travel were pretty damn low.

“If that’s what you think, fine,” I growled, trying for some obscure reason to hold onto at least a shred of dignity. “Thanks for your time. Selene, I’ll be waiting for you at the shuttle landing pad when you get in.”

There was no answer. Mouthing a curse, I keyed off my phone, shut down my info pad, and packed them both away. I looked around, making sure all the access panels were on their proper equipment bays, and turned toward the opening to the receiver module.

And paused, a petty and very unprofessional thought popping into my head. The Icarus Group was just going to wave away all the effort Selene and I had put into this and abandon the portal to the Patth?

Fine. Their job, their money, their decision. But in that case, I was at least going to grab myself a souvenir.

The connectors holding the remaining cable in that second bay took a little ingenuity to loosen. But once I figured out the proper technique, they were easy enough to unscrew. I’d originally thought of taking only the cable, but the cable plus one connector turned out to be a perfect fit for the larger of the two hidden compartments in my artificial left arm. The other connector would fit in the smaller compartment if I dumped my collection of knockout pills, and for a moment I was tempted to walk out with a complete set.

But those pills had proved awfully useful in the past, and even in my current state of snit I had enough brain power to organize my priorities. The cable and one connector would have to do.

I replaced the tools in their case and stuffed everything into my backpack. With the spare rope again coiled over my shoulder I headed back up the inside of the launch module, allocating my weight equally between the mesh and the rope-and-grappling-hook setup I’d left anchored to the cusp. It would be a long climb back to ground level, but with the ascenders doing most of the work it would be more tedious than tiring. I reached the cusp, once again balancing myself there, unhooked the grappling hook and turned it around—

And felt my breath freeze in my throat.

The rope I’d left hanging from the tree at the edge of the clearing, the rope that was my only way out of here, was gone.


Back | Next
Framed