A.J.'s face lit up as though someone had shone a searchlight on it. "Jackie? Jackie!" The slender, wiry arms hugged her close and then swung her around before setting her down. It was always a little startling to realize just how strong A.J. was.
"Whew! Nice to know I'm wanted around here, but you're getting a little overexcited, aren't you? I mean, it's not like I don't work for NASA. You could expect I'd drop by operations, once in a while."
A.J. grinned, but there was an edge to that grin. It looked almost like a sneer in some ways. "So you don't know yet? Damn, they're good."
"Don't know what? Who's good?"
Jackie looked around. It was odd, now that she thought about it. Things seemed a little restrained here-aside from A.J., for whom the word "restraint" would only apply when used in conjunction with the word "heavy."
Even the displays weren't showing the usual multiplicity of views. Most of them seemed to show some kind of movie set in an underground cavern.
"Where is everyone, anyway?"
"Briefing, I think. There's been a lot of… stuff going on here lately."
"You're being evasive, A.J., and that's about as unlike you as I can imagine. And what the hell is wrong with the publicity machine, anyway? I'd have thought by now pics from the Faeries would be on every space site in the country. But instead, aside from a few external shots that don't tell anyone anything, there hasn't been a peep out of you guys for two days."
She suddenly looked concerned. "A.J., the Faeries didn't, like, crash or something? They didn't die on you?" She knew that a disaster at that level would have left a hush for a while, and certainly put a sour look on A.J.'s face for weeks. But…
"Go ahead and tell her, A.J."
Jackie turned and saw that Colonel Hathaway was standing in the doorway that led to the central offices. "She's going to be up to her neck in it anyway," he added.
Jackie thought A.J. seemed to relax slightly. So there was something he wasn't allowed to talk about? That explains his tension. Telling A.J. he can't talk is like telling Santa Claus he can't go "Ho, Ho, Ho."
"Well… I guess it all starts right there." A.J. pointed to the screens with the slowly moving cave scenery.
"What does that have to do… with…"
She trailed off as she realized the symbols in the corner of the image denoted material being received from Phobos. From ISM-4, what A.J. called "Faerie Princess Rane."
Rane was traveling down a tunnel inside Phobos. Ariel was apparently sitting somewhere else inside the fast-orbiting Arean moon, serving as a relay for Rane.
"The cavern looks awfully smooth on that side," she began uncertainly, "but I…"
Her mouth fell open. "Oh… my… God."
Looming up on one side of Rane's field of view was a door. There was no other possible word for it. It was half-open, showing clearly the track or groove into which it was meant to fit. Shreds of some unknown material-probably a door seal-were still clinging to one edge.
"Ohmigod." She heard herself running the words together. "Ohmigod, ohmigod, A.J., that's a door, a door on Phobos for crissake, what's a door doing there?"
She whirled, about to put some pointed questions to the blond engineer, then stopped.
"No, you'd never do this kind of joke. That's real? Someone-or something-was on Phobos before us?"
Her mind was racing ahead of her words. That explained the guards at the door, A.J.'s comments, and why she hadn't heard updates on the Faeries' progress. Someone had clamped the lid down hard on the project.
"No joke, my fave NASA engineer. I'd say more something than someone if I were guessing. We haven't found any remains yet, or if we have I haven't recognized them as bodies, and I think I would. Then, there's several doors we need to open. This one's partly open, but I'm not sure I can squeeze one of the Faeries through."
"So, if you haven't found any bodies, why do you say 'thing'? No, wait, let me guess-the designs."
"Right in one. The corridors aren't shaped the way we'd do them. At least, not where they were clearly cut instead of just adapted from cracks and caves already present inside Phobos when whoever or whatever they were took it over."
He pointed to the screen. "That door-look at it. It's more a semicircle, or a half ellipse. Either they were really short but liked very wide doorways for some reason, or they were shaped low, kinda wide, and fairly big. We've come across plaques and things set in the walls in places we might put signs-you know, 'Engineering that way, Life Sciences to the right'-and they're all set much lower down than we'd put them. Almost a meter lower down."
"So you have closed doors? Do you think… maybe…?"
A.J. shook his head. "Not unless they have some super-miracle materials and no need for power. There isn't any significant source of energy left on this rockball. If there was, the Faeries would have picked it up. And without some kind of energy, nothing's going to be alive here for long. But there might be some other stuff in the closed rooms."
Hathaway joined in. "We've had some of our other engineers going over part of the data A.J.'s been feeding us. It looks to us like something violent happened to the base-maybe a collision with something else, maybe some kind of internal cataclysm. But whatever it might have been, there's been a lot of damage to various areas. Explosive decompression, shockwaves, the whole nine yards. If this was on Earth, there would probably have been cave-ins. As it is, there are places we can't get to easily."
"So," Jackie said, "maybe the doors that are closed got jammed during the disaster?"
A.J. nodded. "That's kinda what we're hoping. Yeah, it'd be pretty grisly for our alien friends who got stuck, since they'd have run out of whatever it is they breathed once the main base power went down. But it would also mean we'd have a good chance of finding something intact in there-bodies, maybe even equipment."
"Intact?" Jackie asked,
"Well… intact enough so we have a chance of figuring it out." Hathaway replied. "I doubt anything will work. But first we have to get inside."
A.J.'s grin was smug. "At least we actually do have a chance of getting inside."
Hathaway rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay, okay, yes, A.J., you were right and we were wrong. There was a point to putting manipulators on the Faeries. It was still a waste of resources. There was no way you could possibly have known what you were going to find."
"How can you call it a waste when we're using them? Besides, it was my grant money to spend. I was sure I'd have an occasion to use them for something. I'll admit, I didn't expect it to be something this big."
"You think the Faeries have the ability to move doors like those?" Jackie asked doubtfully.
"Not sure, really," A.J. admitted. "Maybe not. The systems were set up to be maximally configurable, and I'm going to be selecting the highest mechanical advantage. And using three of them at once, if I need lots of force."
"What if something goes wrong? You don't want to lose three Faeries."
"I don't want to lose one Faerie. But it's not likely I'll lose any of them. Even if it goes badly, the worst I'd expect to happen is that they'll blow the manipulators or break them. They're not going to explode or anything silly like that." He pursed his lips. "A shame, in a way. If I could make them blow up, then I'd have a way to open at least one of the doors even if the manipulators don't do the trick. I'd originally planned for them to have Fairy Dust dispensers, but the sensor mote design ran into problems and had to be scrapped. They'll be up and running for the real mission, no doubt, but for this venture it just wasn't in the cards."
"No way to get whatever mechanism opened them in the first place to work?"
A.J. shook his head. "I don't think anything in this base is going to be workable any more. If the colonel's scenario is correct, something went wrong to keep these doors from opening in the first place. So even if the power was on, they'd be jammed shut anyway."
"Then what are the odds of them being openable now? Wouldn't the survivors have tried?"
"First, we don't know there were any survivors. Second, on the ones I'm interested in, I don't see any signs of heavy prying or other forcible entry attempts. And third, after all this time the seals and other things may have become fragile, turned to dust, or otherwise changed in their basic nature enough that force which couldn't move them before can do so now."
"What about vacuum welding?"
He shrugged. "There's a lot of different materials involved here. I don't think that will be a factor. Speaking of welding, I'm still playing around to see if there's some way I can get some kind of welding or cutting electron beam out of one of my babies, but I'm not hopeful. There are limits to the configurations I can get."
"When do you think you're going to try to get one of these closed doors to open?"
"Not for a while yet. We want to explore as much of the base as possible with all Faeries running before we risk damage to any of them. Oh, yeah," A.J. brightened again and waved his hand to activate some commands, "here's the real important jackpot aside from the discovery of the century."
The screen in front of them flickered, then showed another Faerie-eye point of view, drifting down a different corridor. Before it a large doorway loomed, mostly shut but with about two and a half feet of space on the one side where the apparently rotating valvelike door had stopped. The Faerie slowly drifted down to that level and spent a few moments making sure it could fit through the opening. Satisfied, it began to move forward again.
This room was huge. The "floor" slanted slightly in what would be the "downward" direction, but soon the smoothness vanished, replaced by a chaotic mass of dark brown and black, with occasional white streaks. The floor was rippled and scalloped and extended back into dimness, with deep hollows and narrow columns connecting it to the ceiling. The scalloping was almost scalelike, in some places. Much of it was dull and absorbed light almost like a sponge, making the range of vision even shorter than normal.
In a few spots there was a bright glint, a shine from something smooth. That seemed more common toward the rear, which was confirmed as the Faerie cautiously continued farther into the huge room.
"What is that?" Jackie asked finally, as she watched the images wend their way through an increasingly narrow and hallucinogenic set of passages of the dark material.
"Mud," A.J. answered with satisfaction. "Looks like it's more water towards the back, more dirt towards the front, which makes sense. It's been subliming away for a long time through that door and these passages. But even after all that time, there's still a hell of a lot of water there. Our unknown visitors were possibly aquatic, or amphibious, because this seems awfully excessive for a reservoir but very sensible for something like a staff mudbath/swimming pool/whatever combined with a main water supply. From the surveys I've done, I think there's enough water left in this room to fill a cube a hundred meters on a side."
"A hundred… That's a million metric tons of water!"
"And all in one easily accessible chunk. Run it through a filter and I think you'd be able to drink it. Unless our extinct friends left some very long-lived bacteria behind. But I doubt if any diseases they had are something we could catch, anyway."
"So Phobos Base is definitely a go."
Colonel Hathaway smiled. "You could say that, Jackie." His wristphone buzzed. "I have a meeting to go to. There may be one both of you want to attend later, in a few days."
"No offense, Ken," A.J. said. "But I doubt I want to go to any meetings."
Hathaway's smile widened. "You'll want to go to this one, I think. See you people later, I have some business to attend to." As he turned to go, he paused. "Oh, and Jackie-this is under complete nondisclosure. You can't even tell anyone back at the labs, at least not yet."
She shook her head. "Ken, that's asinine. There's no way you can keep a lid on this very long. A few more days, maybe. But not much longer. Don't they realize that?"
"I think they do, Jackie. They're trying to decide how they want to approach it, and the time pressure is not helping. I'm trying not to add any pressure on our side. People, we can afford to wait. As you say, they can't keep this secret very long. When they do make that decision, I want them to think of us as the people who didn't give them a hard time over it. Capice?"
Jackie couldn't quite stifle a giggle at Hathaway's excellent "Mafia Don" accent, though his appearance didn't lend itself to the impression. "Okay, I get it. If we're the good boys and girls, they'll want to keep us all on the inside of whatever gets done."
"Exactly. So help me by not giving me any flack, and keeping A.J. from indulging his revolutionary impulses. Gotta go-important people waiting in my office."
As the door closed behind Hathaway, Jackie turned a mock-stern gaze on A.J. "No trouble from you!"
"I gave him my word," he said, a little sulkily, plopping into a nearby chair. "He doesn't need anyone to watch me."
"Oh, lighten up, A.J. You're getting to do your work, and you don't have to do much in the politics. Or would you rather have Ken's job? He's supposed to be in training for the Nike mission, but he's ended up being a part-time politician just to keep everything moving smoothly so that he can be on Nike when we launch."
She debated with herself, then sat down next to A.J. "You had your dream, you know. Remember how much it hurt to lose it?"
She could see he didn't quite understand where she was going with this, but he nodded, lips tight. The memory was obviously still painful, many months later. "Well, Ken has a dream too, a silly one that he's told to a few of us, the ones he was sure wouldn't laugh. You know what that dream is?"
"Well, no. He doesn't know me well enough to talk about anything like that."
"Ken's always dreamed of being the captain of a spaceship. And he just might make it. He's the highest-ranking military crew candidate right now, and he's got the training for it, and Nike is just about big enough to actually need a real boss. So if he seems a little uptight about anyone throwing a wrench into the works, remember he's on the edge of his dream too."
After staring at her a moment, A.J. smiled slowly. "Captain Kenneth Hathaway, commanding, NASA Exploration Vessel Nike…"
"Don't you dare make fun of him. Or tell him I told you. Or I'll-"
"Whoa, hold your horses. I was about to say 'that does sound cool.'" A.J.'s expression was grave. "Don't worry, I can respect a silly dream like that one."
Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor
Boundary