Catastrophe, n: a great disaster or misfortune.
Chapter 31 "Are we ready?" "All ready," Maddie confirmed to Jackie. "While you talk withOdin directly, A.J. will be able to query the Faerie Dust that should be all over theOdin. The low-bandwidth transmissions involved should be easy to hide in the noise, as long as no one actually is looking for it." Jackie winced. She hated unknowns like that. "And how likely is it someone will?" Maddie shrugged. "I don't thinkI would be doing it in their position. I honestly don't think this idea would have occurred to me if Darth Baker hadn't pulled off that trick on Modofori and his pals. So I think it's pretty unlikely. I just don't make one hundred percent assumptions." "Joe?
You and A.J. ready?" "Sure am," Joe said. "If they do go nuts and fire on us, we'll have quite a few seconds' warning. Even at closest approach, assuming they can manage a firing velocity of thirty kilometers per second-which I don't think they can, not even close-we'll still have five minutes or so. In that time, even with our effective acceleration cut by ten times because Jupiter's magnetosphere's squeezed us down, we can change position by four hundred fifty meters. Since the actual width of theNebula Storm is only about a thousand feet, they almost certainly can't hit us at all." "And," A.J. put in, "we've tied the engine system into our radar. If the radar plot shows something coming at us that my sensors say we can't avoid for sure by using the nebula drive, it'll give us a little kick from the main engines, however much it calculates it needs to get to full safe range. That still shouldn't be enough to change our main maneuver program, I hope. There's some leeway in the system."
"Just in case, we are all suited up, right?" Helen put in. "And I'm standing by with patch kits and a pair of hands to help. This isn't really my gig." "Not mine, either," Larry pointed out. "But being ready to be damage control's better than just sitting in a chair waiting to see what happens." "All suited up, Helen. And Joe says he's got damage-control programs in place." "And of course," A.J. pointed out, "we also happen to be inside a ship made of the same material the Vault on Mars was. A thirty-kilometer-per-second projectile would probably get through, but much less might not." Jackie nodded. "Still, let's hope none of that happens. On this pass, at least, everything should stay friendly." She looked around once more. "Okay, here goes."
She activated the radio, aiming toward theOdin for the first time in this journey. "Odin, this is Captain Jacqueline Secord of the Ares Exploratory VesselNebula Storm calling you, overtaking from approximately two hundred fifty thousand kilometers astern. Please acknowledge." Twenty seconds passed with no return. Since the radio signal crossed the distance in less than one second, this indicated either someone wasn't listening, or there was some delay in responding. Jackie tapped her finger on her chair arm. It was hard to judge how long she should wait. Just as she was about to repeat the message, the screen shimmered to life, showing General Hohenheim in what was apparently his office. "Odinreturns your call, Nebula Storm.
Welcome to Jupiter System. You have come fast on our heels, Captain Secord." She relaxed fractionally; it looked like diplomacy would at least begin the day. And with that transmission, A.J.'s data had begun flowing. The programmed contingency allowed the Faerie Dust to transmit only whenOdin itself was transmitting, so the longer they talked… "We know where you are headed, General. And it is my intention to beat you there." After a second and a half passed, Hohenheim smiled. "Of course you do, Captain. While I admit to being-well, let us not be petty-utterly astounded that you had the audacity to take such an alien antique out into space on such short notice-and quite impressed by how well the vessel performs-I cannot pretend to be surprised at your intentions. You will, of course, forgive me if I say that it is my intention to beat you to Enceladus by a significant margin and claim the world, or as much of it as possible, for the European Union." "Naturally." "Might I ask why you have waited so long to call? We have-as I am sure you are aware-been trying to contact you since we first noticed the astonishing phenomenon of a nebula chasing us." Jackie shrugged. "General, we had no warm feelings for any of you at the time, and direct communication with reasonable time lag wasn't really possible until now. You know how frustrating communication is with delays of more than a second or two. But consider this a courtesy call. We shall be passingOdin at a range of nine thousand, nine hundred and fifty-six kilometers and will then precede you farther into the Jupiter system." "We had of course noted that, but your information is appreciated." The general studied her for a moment. "Captain, of one thing I wish to inform you-the actions taken to remove and conceal the information we have taken were done directly under my orders. There are members of my crew who were friends of yours, and I would find it sad to think that these friendships would be ruined by actions which-in truth-must have been at least somewhat expected by both sides." Jackie didn't dare look around for support or hints. Were we wrong? Was it just a terrible coincidence, an accident, something that just barely missed the Odinand hit us? Or is he trying to find out if we know. After all, no one's said anything about it. That must be it, she decided. Hohenheim had to pretend nothing had happened. But she wondered what he was trying to say. If we doknow, or discover it… "General, I suppose I agree, in principle," she said slowly. "But if you have spent considerable time with someone and they have used some of that information against you… That's a rather nasty betrayal, don't you think?" Hohenheim nodded. "I would not blame people for being angry. But remember that there is duty, and these people had agreed to do what was done long before they met any of you. I assure you, it was not easy for them to do what they did, and it became harder with each day." Images of Horst flashed in her mind: of him laughing next to her; the time he'd held her hand much longer than he needed to, after helping her through a hatch; the hours they'd spent talking. All a fake? It did seem hard to believe. Even Maddie and Helen had expressed their doubts. She reminded herself sharply that keeping someone onOdin talking was the important point here, anyway. "I suppose it must have." She cut in the privacy switch. A.J. could still tell she was having a conversation, but now the images and sound would be projected to her VRD and into her suit alone. "Since we will remain in reasonable communication range for a limited time… I know it may be slightly out of standard procedure, General, but might I talk with Horst Eberhart?" Hohenheim's expression softened momentarily, in a startlingly warm way, and there was a faint twinkle in the brown-gold eyes. "Of course, Captain. I am sure Mr. Eberhart will be willing to give you a few moments of his time. Please stand by." Perhaps a minute went by, although it seemed longer than that. Then Horst's face was in front of hers, blue eyes wide, uncertain, and… almost frightened?
Could that really be an act? And if it had all been an act, why continue now? "Hello, Horst." "Jackie… I am very sorry." The apology was the first thing he said. "For everything. I had promised… they hired me for this. If I had known before…" He shook his head. "But then I wouldn't have been hired, and I wouldn't have met you. So it might have worked out badly either way." He took a deep breath and suddenly met her gaze directly, with an intensity that startled her. "But I never lied to you. Never. Not once. About anything." A crazy part of her actually believed him. The sane part justwanted to believe him more than anything in the whole world.
"Horst…" "They didn't even want us calling back for a long time after we left, so it took me days to find a way around it. And then you didn't talk to me." "You used me, Horst!" she snapped. "The program that hid the data-A.J. told me how it worked. You couldn't possibly have done that without everything you learned from me, and him for that matter." "I know! I know, Jackie. But it was what I was there to do. I wasn't… wasn't there to… to get involved with anyone. But I did anyway. And when Anthony got that information and we covered it up, both of us felt… dirty." He's telling the truth.
Dammit, he has to be!"Really?" "You do not know how many times we have talked about how much it sucks, Jackie." The dry, precisionist tone in which he said the line made her suddenly burst out laughing. She felt like something was letting go inside her, opening up like a flower.
"It sure did… Horst. Did you mean what you just said?" "That it sucks?" "No. That you got 'involved.' We never talked about it." He smiled, quite shyly. "Hard to do-get involved, I mean-on a spaceship crammed with people. Privacy is usually required. But it is how I felt, certainly." She blinked back suddenly startling tears. "So did I," she said softly. "That's why I was so hurt by what happened." The change on Horst Eberhart's face was astounding. Lines seemed to vanish from his face, and she really understood what people meant when they wrote that someone's face shone with happiness. There was nothing, for that instant, but pure crystal-blue joy in his gaze, and it was that which cut the last knot binding her heart. That look couldn't possibly be faked. Somehow-impossible as it seemed-Horsthadn't known about the coilgun attack. Maybe he'd known the gun existed, but someone else must have fired it, and he had never known they'd done so. A green light blinked on in her line of sight. That meant that A.J. felt he'd done all he could at this point. Time to wrap up. She hadn't thought she'd be so reluctant to do it, but then… "I have to go, I'm afraid. I guess I'll be seeing you again, at Enceladus. One way or the other." "Yes," Horst said. "Is it all right if I don't wish your ship good luck, or will that get me in more trouble?" She laughed.
"Sweetie, that's just fine, because while I wishyou all the luck in the world, that ship you are on isn't getting any of it!" *** "So, how did we do?" Jackie asked finally. A.J. could not restrain a triumphal grin. "We arein. We are so totally in that you would not believe it. Operation Bungee is a go." "You are sure it will work?" Madeline asked. He was used to Madeline questioning him. And of course it gave him a chance to brag more. Which was still fun, if not quite as much the absolute necessity as he seemed to remember it being back when he was younger. "Maddie, it will most certainly work. My Faerie Dust was all over their outer surfaces, and there are places where it could get inside the control runs. There's control gadgetry all along the main accelerator ribs, and I'm slowly co-opting control of it. The most important question was whether I could find a way to get inside the ship itself, which I managed while you were talking-a vent valve in the NERVA system which they hadn't changed in their design. A bunch of the dust can get in that way, then through the filtration system. It's meant to handle impurities, but not impurities that are smart enough to avoid being emptied out." "And then you can run the engines?" "The NERVA engine, damn straight. Jackie knows more about that thing than anyone other than Gupta. She worked on every part of its design. Between her and Joe, I could figure out how to basically shortstop any commands they give and substitute my own. And I really just need to do a couple of things to make 'em swing ship before blasting. "Controlling the mass-beam and the coilguns-that's a little trickier. I can mess with the control nodes on the outside, but me, you, and Joe are going to have to go over what I've managed to learn about the control parameters and designs with a fine-toothed comb to figure out exactly what I can and can't do. I can't take control of every system in that ship, at least not without a lot more Dust or a lot more time, and if someone catches on, we're in real trouble." "Were you able to verify the existence of the coilguns?"
"Not yet. On our next close approach, I will. I can say there are a few anomalies along the accelerator ribs, but none that a fast-talking engineer couldn't explain away at this point. The motes will keep trying to work their way in, try to gain access, but they've got to do it as subtly and conservatively as possible, or they'll trip something." Madeline looked satisfied. "So the whole plan doesn't need to be changed?" A.J. shook his head, confidence filling him as usual.
"Not a thing, really. We do our braking maneuver at closest approach-just about scraping atmosphere off the big guy-and then make sure they do theirs. With the right vectors we should be able to close on them again and give them the chance to make a deal." "What if they fire?" Larry asked. "People whose ships were suddenly hijacked have been known to do that." "I think I can screw that up even now," A.J. said. "And by that point, we'll also have the proof we need, I think.
So shooting us wouldn't accomplish anything, right?" "True enough. And it's not like we'll be offering them nothing." "Then," Jackie said, smiling in a more natural way than she had since they started, "in a few days this should all be over." "Just a few. Then, of course, we'll have to actually get to Enceladus, but we can both do that, especially once we're cooperating instead of competing." A.J. had to admit, he was glad it was almost over, at least on the cloak-and-dagger side.
But he did have one more bit of fun in store for himself at the expense of theOdin. Harmless overall, but it would be his little reminder to Horst-and especially the unseen Mr. Fitzgerald-of justwho he'd been messing with. He couldn't wait.
Chapter 32 "Maximum power burn will commence in approximately fifteen minutes," General Hohenheim said, his voice resonating throughoutOdin. "All stations, report readiness." "Engineering, all ready," Mia Svendsen's voice replied. "Security, all ready," said Fitzgerald from his position to Hohenheim's far left. "Damage control, all ready." "Living quarters, all secure." The remaining groups also reported readiness. Hohenheim leaned back in the command seat. The acceleration ofOdin would be relatively small, but after months without noticeable acceleration, there were still many potential chances for minor and even major disasters. "Dr. LaPointe, is all ready?" "Yes, General. Ready for Oberth Maneuver in… ten minutes." Jupiter loomed before them, covering more than half the sky.
The planetary lord of the solar system and the king of the Norse gods were speeding toward a rendezvous, a brief dance of power in which Jupiter would gift them with three times the delta-vee of the rocket burn they performed, energy drawn from a gravity well of nearly sixty kilometers per second-fifty, at the altitude theOdin would pass. "Any sign ofNebula Storm?" LaPointe shook his head. "She had drawn considerably ahead, sir. We will not see her again until we clear the other side of Jupiter." "Can you tell if she performed any powered maneuvers, or a simple flyby?" The Ares vessel had preceded them toward Jupiter, collapsed its dusty-plasma sail, and disappeared into darkness some hours before. The French-English astronomer studied other readouts. "It appears that she will have two unique accomplishments to her credit, at least. From traces of water vapor I can tell that she did indeed perform powered maneuvers. She has the first manned flyby of Jupiter, and the closest." Horst turned at that, startled. "Closer than we will pass?" At LaPointe's confirmation, Horst gave a soundless whistle. "They must be practically scraping the cloud tops. No wonder they had to retract the sail." "Impressive," said Hohenheim. "Perhaps they need every bit of speed they can get.
But let them have the small triumphs, as long as the end of the race is ours." "We will know that when next we see them. Their final velocity will be our answer. Either they will be faster, and will almost certainly win, or they will be slower, and we have won,"
LaPointe said. "Not long at all now." The general checked the chronometer. "Coming up on five minutes. Mia, the engine is ready?"
"As ready as possible, sir. No one has ever attempted to run these engines at this level of output before, so nothing is quite certain, but I am confident." "I can ask no more." The Oberth Maneuver depended on accomplishing the change of velocity as much as possible at perigee. Ideally, of course, it would be instantaneous, but absent reactionless drives and mythical acceleration compensators, some compromise had to be made. In this case, they were "redlining" the NERVA assembly to produce the absolute maximum thrust for this burn.
Modeling showed it should do no real damage for this one burn.
Hohenheim knew full well, however, that models were not the same thing as the real world. Jupiter was closer now, no longer a planet but a gigantic cream and brown-striped wall, a mass of churning clouds beyond human comprehension. The Great Red Spot was close enough to show its true nature as a titanic storm, a hurricane large enough to swallow three Earths. Alarms buzzed, and red lights suddenly appeared on LaPointe's console, just as a faint quiver ran throughOdin.
Hohenheim leaned forward. Jupiter was moving, the entire field of view in the forward screen rotating. "What is it, Dr. LaPointe?" "I do not know, General! The lateral thrusters, they have fired!" LaPointe's hands moved over the controls. "I am getting no response. We are continuing to rotate." Horst Eberhart brought up his displays. "It looks like a reversal of vector. But it's not accepting the cancellation codes." "Dr. LaPointe, if we are even slightly off when we make this burn, it could seriously impact our outward course."
"Yes, I know, General." LaPointe was now working virtually every control in sight. "Mr. Eberhart?" Eberhart shook his head. "Our commands are not getting through to the thruster systems, General. It will take time to figure out why-and I don't have that much time."
"Dr. Svendsen," Hohenheim said calmly. "Are you following this situation?" "Naturally," Mia Svendsen's cool, controlled alto replied.
"I will go to manual control. This means that your controls will be cut out, however." "They do not seem to be of much use at the moment.
Get us back on course, Dr. Svendsen." "Yes, sir." Jupiter and the stars outside appeared to have completed approximately half a rotation when the lateral thrusters rumbled again. The rotation stopped.
Hohenheim waited, but no additional movement commenced. "Dr. Svendsen, we are waiting!" The voice was now no longer so cool or controlled.
"They are not responding to manual control. The problem appears to be in the embedded controller code itself." "Damn!" Horst cursed. "That will take hours, maybe a day or two, to figure out." "We have two minutes," Hohenheim said. "I think it would be wiser to troubleshoot with maximum fuel for course correction in case of emergency. Since our controls are still cut out, Dr. Svendsen, please cancel the main burn. Shut down the NERVA drive for now." "Yes, sir." He leaned back slowly, thinking. "Dr. LaPointe, obviously without a powered flyby our course will be quite different. Please begin to-" The entire ship shuddered, and the thundering roar of a NERVA rocket at full power filled the air. "Svendsen! I told you to shut the engine down!" "Idid , General! The reactor is refusing to respond! I entered all the commands, I got all the regular acknowledgments, and then it went right ahead with the burn!" Hohenheim pursed his lips, then sighed.
Nothing to be done now. All I can do is try to salvage the mission. He waited until the entire burn completed itself. "Mr. LaPointe. I would presume that in this orientation we lost, rather than gained, velocity?" Looking somewhat shell-shocked, Anthony LaPointe nodded.
"Approximately thirty-six kilometers per second, sir." "Please recalculate our orbit and determine whether we are headed for immediate disaster-and if so, what we can do about it." He rose. "Mr.
Fitzgerald, I will see you in the briefing room in five minutes." No one said anything as he left.
"Horst Eberhart, General," Richard Fitzgerald said. "It can't really be anyone else." He could see by the grimness of the general's face that Hohenheim had already reached the same conclusion. "Can we be sure?" the general said. "Look at the facts, General. Hewas control systems. He and Svendsen together, but Svendsen isn't a programmer.
Oh, she can code all right when she has to, but not a patch on him. He had a hand in every single bit of control code written, from the firmware in the bloody control nodes to the main user interface. So he's got the opportunity. Motive, well, you were the one who let him talk to his little skirt over on the Ares ship. First thing out of his mouth is how sorry he is, and the two of 'em are going sappy a few minutes later. Eberhart's just the kind of guy to figure that he could make it all right by letting them get ahead of us." He could see Hohenheim's grimace of distaste, both at the bluntness of his commentary and the fact of his eavesdropping on a private conversation. Well, too bad. Thatwas his job in such delicate circumstances, and in this case it looked to have been bloody good he'd done so. "Horst is a good man," Hohenheim said finally. "He wouldn't risk the ship just because he felt guilty." Fitzgerald waved that off. "He isn't the type to kill anyone, I know that. But there wasn't much risk in this. He just screws up the whole mission, but no one gets killed. He knows we can get home eventually." "Ares had motive, too, of course." "Too right on that. But they never had access to our systems. Sure, if even one of them had ever been on board I'd be looking real close at our friends on the alien ship, but there's just no way. They'd need time to get into the systems, figure out how to cut out the right areas, and they'd have to do thatwithout alerting our friend Horst. I don't believe that last part one little bit, unless we go the whole way and make him a double agent.
Which"-Fitzgerald held up a hand, forestalling Hohenheim's protest-"I don't believe, either. He's not sneaky enough for that." He stopped and waited. He didn't need to say any more. The general knew what had to be done, no matter how much he liked the young engineer. General Hohenheim nodded. "Have him brought here." It only took a few minutes before Horst arrived. He looked startled when he saw Fitzgerald as well as the general. "Sir?" "Sit down, Horst," the general said. When the system engineer hesitated, Fitzgerald stepped forward and shoved him down. "The man said sit, boyo, and sit you will. And listen, and then talk when we say. Now, why don't you just come out with it?"
Horst stared at him in apparent disbelief. "What are you talking about?" "Don't go playing an idiot, Eberhart! There isn't anyone else on this ship that could've messed with the drives like that, and you know it." "Calm down, Mr. Fitzgerald," Hohenheim said. "Horst, please.
I can understand why you did it, but denying it will do no good." "You thinkI caused the drive failures?" "Well, somebody bloody did. And it sure wasn't me, and it wasn't the general, and I'd like to ask you who elsebut you could do it." Horst glared at Fitzgerald, but said nothing. "Mr. Eberhart… Horst. You have been an excellent member of the crew so far, but you cannot deny appearances are very much against you. One odd drive failure, in one drive system, could be accident. Two, under these circumstances, are entirely beyond the pale of believability. And, again in these circumstances, I really cannot afford to take risks. However, there is one other obvious group of suspects. If you can only tell me how they could have done it." "You mean theNebula Storm." "Exactly. Is there any way that they could have done this, given what we know about the access they had to our vessel?" Moments passed slowly as Horst thought. Richard smiled inwardly as he saw, by the young engineer's expression, that there was no way out. "Sir… No, I can't see one, not even for A.J. Baker.
If he had access to our system designs, or any interior access… or if he had his Faerie Dust on our ship, yes, he could.
But there's just no way I can think of he could have done that. If they'd had that on board our ship near Ceres, they'd have stopped us long since-they'd have had plenty of chances"-he glanced at Fitzgerald narrowly-"to find out what we did, and how we did it. They wouldn't need to do this-they'd just have transmitted the evidence." He looked desperately at Hohenheim. "But… Sir, I didn't do it!" The general shook his head. "I truly wish I could believe you, Mr. Eberhart. But I can't." He nodded to Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald grabbed Eberhart's arms, forced them behind his back, and slipped on the cuffs. "Horst Eberhart, you're under arrest for suspicion of sabotage and possible espionage. Come along with me." He hustled the stunned Horst out of the general's office, toward the security area. Weeks back, anticipating possible problems, he'd had his security team set up three tiny holding cells. It was a jury-rigged arrangement, but it should do the job well enough. This was working out well. While Richard had never had any personal animus against Eberhart, he'd always known the idealism of the young man could be trouble. And here the trouble was. "Once this crisis is over, we'll have a longer time to talk. And talk you will, boyo. Talk you will."
Chapter 33 "Are we a go?" Jackie asked. "No sign ofOdin yet. And if she'd stayed anywhere on original course, she'd have come blazing out of there quite a while ago," A.J. answered. Jackie glanced at Madeline, who nodded. "If our guesses were right, Jackie, they would have been accelerating on that leg, and we reversed that." "Of course, if we'd been wrong and they'd been planning a deceleration, that would have meant we'd have sent them accelerating out of control, wouldn't it?" Jackie asked with sudden concern. A.J. gave her a hurt look. "Do I look that simple-minded? We planned onemulating a glitch that reversed the vectors. I wasn't actually putting in something that boneheaded and unadaptable. If they were planning on decelerating, Larry and I had figured out specific changes to their profile. No way was I taking chances on doing that, because then there really wouldn't be anything in the system that could catch them, at least not without getting lost itself." The sensor expert shrugged. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. The fact that we haven't seen them tells us what happened.
They had to have decelerated." "Larry? When will we see them?" "Unless celestial mechanics have changed, I'd say we can expect our guests to pop into view in about… twenty minutes." "Once we establish contact, A.J., how long until you will be able to confirm the existence of the coilguns?" "A few minutes, no more. I've already got a lot of contingency programs laid in for establishing a no-go lockout on them. That shouldn't take too long." "What if theydo fire on us?"
Helen asked. "Same drill as before," said Joe. "But remember, we've already done the calculations. There's no way they can hit us. That goes double now that we'll have the Faerie Dust in the systems. Even if A.J. can't do anything to stop the firing, we'll know exactly when it fires, and even sluggish asNebula Storm is down here, we can get out of the way. We still have enough reaction mass for a short emergency burn on the main engine, too." Maddie frowned. "So this weapon is useless in space?" "Hardly useless," A.J. retorted. "Worked damn well on Ceres. If you don't know it's coming, it's effective over a pretty long range. Beam weapons would be a hell of a lot better, but those would be hell to hide. Not that they'll be able to hide weapons like this now, either, but it was a useful trick the first time, just like the original Trojan Horse. A projectile weapon of that kind is useful against fixed targets or targets that either don't know it's coming, or that really can't accelerate out of the way. You could probably even put a little bit of terminal guidance into the shell to predict and adjust for target accel that wasn't too large." He looked abstracted for a moment. "In this case it wouldn't make much difference. We start with a regular sail maneuver. If the shell shows a shift in course, we do a bigger burn. It can't have much maneuvering capability, since there's a limit to what you can stuff into a projectile. And especially a projectile that's going to go through a coilgun. The combination of electromagnetics and radiation will fry anything except very, very hardened or shielded electronics, or some MEMS/NEMS or optical units." "Radiation?" Maddie asked. "The way the accelerator works, you tend to get X-ray or gamma pulses out as a side effect. If I'd suspected anything of the sort before the fact, I'd have been able to prove they used a coilgun just by being able to localize a radiation pulse to theOdin. That's why they'd have to have the things out on the drive ribs anyway, now that I think about it.
You want to keep the gun away from habitable areas, no matter how good your shielding is." "And magnetic shielding is useless against X-rays and gammas," Joe noted. "So the only shielding that would work is a lot of mass. The same arguments would apply to the main drive, if not as intensely, so it wouldn't have been hard to justify the design to maximize the fuel tankage and reactor shielding along that arc. It'd make sense, given that you're putting the NERVA engine in that area anyway." "All right, everyone," Jackie said. "It'll be showtime in a few minutes. As we discussed, we're basically going to our old choice number two, except this time we're the ones in the stronger position.
We'll have proof they had the means to perform the attack on Ceres-a weapon deliberately concealed from the IRI and other powers-and that we can now probably beat them to Enceladus." "So, then we make them the deal that should have been made all along-for all three groups to work together. We'll even let them be in on the first landing on Enceladus. Yeah, we know, Captain," A.J. said. "And we blow the whistle on them if they tell us to screw off." "Exactly. And that would take us just a few seconds, right?" "Well, longer than that,"
A.J. said. "Not normally, but remember, we haven't even completely cleared Jupiter yet, and Io's going to be getting in the way. I figure it'll be another… what, six or seven hours, Larry?" The astronomer nodded. "Six or seven hours until we can punch through a message to Ceres, let alone Earth or Mars." "But it's only a few seconds of transmission, anyway. And they can't stop us from transmitting, correct? Jam us or something?" "Not a chance," said Joe.
"At a range of thousands of kilometers, tens of thousands? Nope. We'll get through. They can't shoot us, and they can't jam us. They'd be crazy or stupid to do anything other than cut the deal." Jackie glanced at A.J. "You wanted to open the conversation. You wouldn't tell me why. Are you going to embarrass me?" "Youmight be embarrassed to do it," A.J. said. "But it's nothing too bad. I thought of a lot worse. Besides, all of you have been complaining about how I've been growing up too much. Consider this my one last great hurrah of immaturity." Jackie studied him, then smiled and shrugged. "I got my personal phone call on company time, I guess I can give you one last A.J. stunt, as long as you promise it's nottoo extreme. And you know what I mean by that." A.J. gave a little seated bow. "I do. And it will in fact be very much extreme, but not extremely embarrassing.
And"-he gave the trademark A.J. grin-"extremely apropos to the situation, I assure you." "Then take your places, everyone," Jackie said. "We've got about seven minutes."
"When willNebula Storm be in view?" Hohenheim asked. Anthony LaPointe shrugged. "I would expect very soon, General. However, we do not know exactly what reaction mass they had to expend, what ISP they could manage to obtain from their necessarily improvised nuclear rocket, or exactly what course they intended to take. These will affect the exact point at which we will regain line-of-sight on the Ares vessel." LaPointe was clearly ill at ease, with his best friend currently held in theOdin 's tiny brig. Hohenheim couldn't spare the time to reassure him-and if there were others harboring similar thoughts of sabotage or collusion with the Ares vessel, this would certainly make them reconsider. Hohenheim hated having to think this way, but despite Eberhart's appearances of sincerity, there did not seem to be any other reasonable explanation for theOdin 's drastic misbehavior. He connected to Engineering. "Mia, how are things?" "I am trying to trace the faults, sir." Mia Svendsen's voice was tired and harried. "It really does look like the problem with the laterals is in the control nodes, probably in the firmware driving them. That's the only way I could see something being able to intercept and abort the commands from here. I've sent two people up to take one of them out of the housing, put in one of the replacement units, and bring the old one down for a full examination." "What about the NERVA systems?" "I only have so many people, sir. The NERVA engine is essentially out of the picture in terms of useful-or even nefarious-applications. The laterals, which share controls with our ion drive, could still be of very significant use. I am personally performing some pre-use testing of the control systems on the mass-beam, in case…" She hesitated, then went on. "In case the same person has managed to compromise those as well." Hohenheim nodded. "Any results?" "At the moment, all seems to be functioning normally, although I have been detecting slightly higher than normal RF noise, which I am trying to localize." "Nebula Stormin view, General!" Hohenheim turned. "Range?" "About ninety thousand kilometers, General. We are slowly overtaking them."
Hohenheim breathed a sigh of relief, glancing at Fitzgerald. If the Ares vessel had been moving faster-had accelerated, rather than decelerated, strongly-the mission would have been almost certainly at an end, and probably his career with it. It seemed, however, that theNebula Storm had no special tricks available to decelerate at Saturn, and therefore, even with the loss caused by the reversal of thrust on their Oberst Maneuver, there was a good chance that they could still beat the Ares vessel to Enceladus. It would just be a much, much closer race. He studied the viewscreen. This deep in Jupiter's magnetosphere, theNebula Storm 's captive nebula was vastly compacted, only a few tens of kilometers across; the vessel appeared as a tiny dot of light. "Any sign of communication?" "Not yet, General. Do you wish to initiate contact?" "In a moment. Let us take a closer look at our competition and see how they are doing from the outside." LaPointe brought the powerful telescopes of theOdin into play. The view dissolved, then reformed, the dusty-plasma sail of the vessel now filling a large portion of the screen. LaPointe gave a faint French curse of disbelief as the image came into focus.
TheNebula Storm 's sail was no longer an abstract mixture of light and fog; a great shield-shape was formed from the dust and plasma, a huge badge with a rising sun behind some tall building and the number "714" at the bottom. At almost the same moment, theOdin 's speakers blared out with a simple fanfare, four emphatic notes followed by five more, and A.J. Baker's voice filled the bridge. "Odin, this is the Ares-IRI vesselNebula Storm. You have the right to remain silent, but I don't think it will do you much good. Instead, I think you'd better talk to our captain. Captain?" "General Hohenheim, this is Captain Jacqueline Secord. Are you receiving me?" Hohenheim's mind was racing furiously.
"The right to remain silent" was a phrase familiar to almost anyone who had followed any American entertainment, especially police dramas.
The implications… "Odinreceives you, Captain," he answered. To shape the material of the sail that way… He did not believe it could be done simply with the magnetic fields, even assuming the aliens' control mechanisms were indeed advanced. The material of the sail itself would have to be mobile, which now made all too much sense. "Am I to assume, from your rather unexpectedly confrontational contact, that you are responsible forOdin 's current difficulties?"
"We are, in fact," Secord answered. "My overly melodramatic sensor engineer will take the credit for much of that, of course." "Captain Secord," Hohenheim said carefully, "such actions are clearly an assault upon my vessel. Is it truly your intention to attack the European Union and, in effect, declare war between a small corporation and a U.N. agency and one of the most powerful political units on Earth?" Secord's smile was not comforting. "General, it was not Ares or the IRI which began this. And as of this very conversation, I now have incontrovertible evidence that the E.U., or at least some components of it associated with the final design and outfitting ofOdin, have deliberately and with malice aforethought armed theOdin with a weapon-a coilgun-capable of firing projectiles at meteoric speeds. Combined with other evidence, we have sufficient justification to state with conviction that it was an attack byOdin, and not a meteor, which disabled the power station on Ceres and led to the injury and very nearly the death of one of Ares' personnel." Hohenheim felt the grim weight of the trapped descend upon him-but at the same time, a paradoxical lightening of his heart. "I see." "Do you deny these charges?" The general shook his head. "I would be a fool to do so, Captain Secord. If you had sufficient control of my vessel to force us to do what we have done, it would seem obvious you must have the evidence you mention. Yes, Odin did indeed fire a single projectile at Ceres. Is it your intention that we now proceed back to Earth?" "That is one possible path," Secord said. "However, we don't think that this is the best choice for all concerned." "What are you proposing, Captain?" "A compromise, General. One that should have been done the moment Dr. LaPointe discovered the Enceladus connection. A joint venture, with Ares, the IRI, and the E.U. having equal shares of the discoveries, and perhaps even with E.U. personnel making the first landfall on Enceladus." She spread her hands in a pacific gesture. "We reallydon't want enemies, General. We are, as you implied, not nearly large enough to play with the big boys if they get rough. Certainly we could get you dragged back and arrested. But that would still be so completely embarrassing to the E.U. that we would be lucky to ever get any cooperation from them ever again-at least for years. And we don't have the resources to explore, catalogue, and properly exploit another alien installation, anyway. We've been running on a shoestring ever since this thing began." She laughed, and the sound made the bands of tension around the general's chest loosen for the first time in months. "Hell, look at our expedition here, flying after you in a sixty-five-million-year-old antique. We can't afford this kind of crap, and neither can the human race." General Hohenheim nodded thoughtfully, vaguely aware that Anthony LaPointe seemed to have slumped back in relief at his console. "I presume that this logic was what convinced Horst to cooperate with you?" "Horst?" For a moment, Jackie Secord looked completely taken aback. Then she laughed. "Oh, no, poor Horst! You thinkhe sabotaged your systems?" The general blinked. The connection had seemed obvious, as well as the methodology he could have pieced together: signals hidden within the main transmissions, with Horst having the key in his own head or personal data unit. But her reaction… "Then how, please, did you manage to suborn my own systems? No member of Ares has ever been on boardOdin , and, in fact, if you had managed to infiltrate the systems prior to our departure, this chase would never have been necessary." A.J.
Baker's image joined Jackie's on the screen. "Thank Madeline Fathom for the idea, General, and me for my Faerie Dust, which is allover your ship." Anthony LaPointe sat up suddenly. "My God!" A.J. chuckled.
"Yeah, I think you just caught on." Hohenheim understood suddenly.
"Your supposed drive failure. It projected your Faerie Dust towardOdin , and eventually caught up with us." Hohenheim saw the sensor expert's grin widen. "And then, when you were close enough, you initiated contact to gather data and program the maneuver. And by now your Dust is spread throughout the main systems." It made sense. Horst Eberhart had been as blameless in this as he had been in the attack on Ceres.
It appeared both sides would owe the earnest engineer an apology. "It seems that you do indeed hold all the cards. So, I agree in principle, Captain Secord. What would be the terms of this agreement?" "I am not a lawyer, General. The agreement would be based on the one currently existing between the IRI and Ares Corporation, which has been very satisfactory so far. The only additional stipulation is this." She looked suddenly stern, a judge passing sentence. "The people directly responsible for the attack on Ceres will be arrested and, whenever practical, sent back to Earth for punishment. And you and your crew will provide full statements as to their actions and complicity." And so ends my career. Well, it will be in a good cause. And I will at least be able to look at myself in the mirror."I will allow you to choose the exact level of guilt that this encompasses, Captain. But I agree to your terms." "Level of guilt?" Hohenheim shrugged. "Such actions are taken by, and known to, different people at different times, and the responsibility for actions can be direct or indirect.
For example, I myself did not directly order the attack. It was, however, done to accomplish ends which I had agreed to. And while it was from my point of view unnecessary and extreme, as commander I take the ultimate responsibility for those under my command, especially as I obviously colluded with those responsible after the fact. I will permit you the judgment of how widely you wish to spread your net."
Secord nodded. "I see what you mean. I will-" The screen went blank.
With sudden sinking conviction, Hohenheim glanced to his left. Richard Fitzgerald was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 34 Once the talk-talk had started, Richard had realized that Hohenheim would be going along with anything the Ares captain suggested. TheOdin 'scommander had always been unhappy with the whole situation, and this was just the kind of honorable exit the bastard was looking for. Unfortunately, that exit would inevitably include sending one Richard Fitzgerald up the river, and that would never do.
But he'd prepared for this contingency, along with many others. While attention was focused on the Ares group, he'd slipped out, down the main shaft toward Engineering. The controls for the ship were still locked down in that area, with Mia doing the troubleshooting and all.
The bridge might be the main control area, but it wasn't hard-connected. That was his first goal. Well, first after establishing all the control he could manage by remote. That bastard Baker. That would certainly complicate things; Richard's prior arrangements hadn't assumed a Faerie Dust wrench in the works. The real question was how many people were going to be a major problem.
Eberhart wasn't even a question mark. He'd have to be dealt with.
Hohenheim, the same, andthat was the real pain in the arse. With the general on his side, even the straight arrows would probably have fallen into line, but with Hohenheim trying to make deals with the other side, it was going to get really sticky. First things first. He opened a channel that his people would be monitoring. "Code seven.
Repeat, code seven." They'd spent a long time going over the various scenarios, but he had to admit he'd really never thought he'd have to go to code seven-taking control ofOdin directly. If it didn't work out, he was going to be in for a long prison sentence. Even if things did work out, the situation would be chancy. But he thought the resounding success of seizing a major Bemmie base on Enceladus, even if some lives were lost as a result of violence, would satisfy the powers-that-be in the European Union enough to allow Richard to slip through the legal cracks-and now as a very wealthy man. Johnson replied. "Codeseven, sir?" "You heard me. Seven." He cut off. It was remotely possible that his team would back out on him now, leaving him pretty much alone, but he didn't think so. The potential rewards were still extremely attractive, and the immediate risks were fairly minimal. The first thing to do was cut off the discussion. He'd arranged a pretty foolproof cutoff for communication-a major issue for any security chief, and in this situation doubly so. He triggered that code, saw it register. Good. No more talking with Ares. Now, what next? As he thought of the next step, General Hohenheim's voice suddenly boomed out, echoing throughout the entirety ofOdin.
"Attention all personnel. Attention all personnel." Silencing in-ship communications was of course another contingency, which Fitzgerald triggered immediately. Hohenheim was cut off in mid-sentence, before he got to the crucial point of informing the entire crew that the security chief was a mutineer. Not that Richard liked to think of it that way. He felt that he was simply doing the job he'd been hired to do, and assuring the success of the mission. It wasn't his fault that the commander of the expedition did not have a spine to match his reputation. Hohenheim had lost sight of the essentials. The biggest essential of all, of course, was to preventNebula Storm from talking.
They'd said they had just found their evidence. That meant they hadn't had a chance to send it yet, and until they cleared Jupiter and Io there wasn't going to be a chance. He triggered his own controls. As he'd expected, the ship responded. Baker and the other Ares crew weren't trying to keep total control ofOdin. That would be rude, a pain in the ass to handle, and they didn't have the crew to spend watching things anyway. Nor did they have the programming time to be able to trust it all to automatic. TheOdin would line herself up for a shot right nice, especially sincehis control protocols were separate from the others. Sure, Baker and his damn Dust would figure a way to cut it off, but if they didn't manage it in the next few minutes, it'd be too late. He just had to get to Engineering in time to make sure the deployment and loading worked right. TheNebula Storm crew weren't idiots; they'd be ready in caseOdin fired on them. He had to anticipate that, and deal with it, and he'd been working on that issue for months. First, though, a clear and simple immediate task. He keyed his communicator. "Dominic." Alescio responded immediately. "Here, sir." "Deal with Eberhart. Codeseven, remember." "Yes, sir." The main corridor running down the center ofOdin was normally empty, especially under running conditions, which was why Richard had chosen this route-that and the fact that in zero-gee he could practically fly along, and could outmaneuver anyone else in the crew. The monitors would of course usually be able to pinpoint anyone's location, which is why he'd taken those out of the picture, too. He could use them, of course, but not on the run. A technician-Erin Peltier, that was it-popped suddenly out of a side passage. "Chief Fitzgerald, what-"
Bugger. I don't havetimefor this. Peltier wasn't one of the mission-criticals, but she could have been useful, especially as they really didn't want to lose many people at this stage. But he couldn't afford someone who might talk to the wrong person at the wrong time, either, at least not for the next few hours. He kicked against the wall, hooked the shocked Peltier as he passed, and used leverage and angular momentum to slam her into the wall. The impact clearly stunned her. He gripped her throat, cutting off the carotid artery, and thus bloodflow to the brain, until she went unconscious. What now? That wouldn't keep her out long. He thought a moment, hands moving to a position that would snap Peltier's neck like a straw. Then relaxed his grip. He wanted to avoid killing except where it was absolutely necessary, and it simply wasn't in this case. With code seven in effect, most people on the ship would figure out what was happening in a few minutes, anyway. He stuffed Erin into a crawlspace. A bit tight, and she might suffocate in there if she couldn't work her way out, but probably not. He'd have someone check on her later, once the situation stabilized. Another call came in; this one more favorable. Engineering was under control-and he was almost there. Fitzgerald allowed himself a quick smile. Give him a few minutes more, and the inevitability of the results just might even convince Hohenheim that there was no point in fighting. If not, they'd at least get more of the crew to give it up. Especially onceNebula Storm was no longer in the picture. That was now the critical task.
Madeline stared at the suddenly blank screen, her gut tightening. Hohenheim's reactions, the attack on Ceres, her own inside knowledge of how certain people worked, it all fit together. "Jackie, I am assuming command. We are about to come under attack." Jackie nodded. "Are you sure? The general seemed almost relieved by our contacting him." "I'm sure," Madeline said. "General Hohenheim may not be in command over there any longer. If he is, I suspect he is currently preoccupied with trying to keep that status." A.J. winced.
"You think there's amutiny on board? That's crazy, isn't it?"
"Undoubtedly crazy," she answered, keying in commands and looking over scenarios. "But people like Richard Fitzgerald are only technically sane. Jackie, I want our rotation stopped. We don't need any additional stresses on the ship if we need to maneuver, especially with damage." "Slowing rotation. Won't take that long to stop-a few minutes." "A.J., I need some intelligence. They know about the Dust now, so there's no need for subtlety. Talk to me." The blond head nodded as A.J. fixed his helmet on. "I'm on it. At this range it may take a while-remember how much interference there is, and how very low-power the Dust's transceivers are. Evenen masse they're not up to significant broadcast strength. But-" His tone sharpened. "I can confirm something's very not right. Odin is swinging ship, which would bring the coilguns to bear on us." "Have you managed to cut their controls to the weapons?" Madeline asked. "Not yet. I was starting to get in there during the conversation. Then the Dust went to sleep with the cessation of their transmissions. I've finally got it woken up again, and I'm starting the process. Damn this separation! I've got actual speed-of-light delay on everything I'm doing, and I feel like I'm typing my commands out on some stone-age three hundred-baud terminal. And the bandwidth sucks, since I have to duty-cycle everything to match the available scavenged power." "They are closing with us, correct?" "As planned," Larry said. "But not all that fast.
We've got a differential of less than four kilometers per second.
It'll be hours before we reach near approach, which isn't going to be all that near anyway. We cross each other's courses, heading…"
Maddie saw the slight shift of the astrophysicist's posture. "What's wrong, Larry?" There was a pause, as Larry seemed to be checking something. When he spoke, his voice was grim. "Odinhad better get its personnel issues sorted out reasonably soon. Near as I can tell, they're headed for a landing on Io. AndOdin isn't meant for landing, even if you could do it on Io, which I'm not sure any ship could."
"What about us?" "We'll be quite a ways from Io, though still in spitting distance in astronomical terms. Our really close approach will be Europa. But it's not looking like a dangerously close approach." Jackie looked pale. "But with their communications out…" "We can't warn them right now. I know. They have their own navigators on board, of course, but if Maddie's right and there's a mutiny going on, they're not going to be looking at that aspect yet.
Hell, they probably alreadyknow, but if this goes on, they may not maneuver in time." Conley shook his head in bemusement. "What are the odds? Space is practically empty. A random course change should have almost zero chance of sending you on a collision course with anything." "Someone's definitely running out the guns," A.J. interjected from his own position. "And he's using his own protocols and controls, different from the ones normally in place."
"Fitzgerald," Madeline said, her tone of voice making the name a curse. "Just the type to do that." "Hey, it's not all that different from what you did on boardNike," A.J. pointed out mildly. Maddie restrained a sharp reply. After a moment, she shrugged. "You're right, of course. The difference is that I think Richard Fitzgerald is doing this for himself, not for the mission. Like a lot of people in my profession, he's a past master of justifying any action that he takes." "It's still insane," A.J. said. "He can't possibly believe he can get away with it." Maddie laughed bitterly. "How I wish I could agree with you. But he probably does believe it, and if he can get rid of us, he may even be right. It's not as if there are any police out here to check the crime scene to see if it matches the suspect's story." "I'm getting into the coilgun control systems," A.J. announced. "Damn slow work, comparatively, but it shouldn't take too much longer." "You'd better hurry," Larry said bluntly. "Odin's just about finished lining up for the shot." "But there's no real danger, right?" Helen said. "You guys told me that." Maddie looked at the screen with gathering foreboding. From everything she knew, Helen was right. There wasn't a chance in hell that the coilguns could fire anything effective at this range. Even the molasses-slow reactions of theNebula Storm would be sufficient to evade, or should be. The problem was that she found it difficult to believe that Richard Fitzgerald didn't know that as well as she did. His actions so far might be reprehensible and even crazy from some perspectives, but he'd been playing in her league all along. "Thereshouldn't be any danger,"
Madeline Fathom said finally. "But I'd feel a lot better if they never got to fire at us anyway." She looked at A.J. "Shut them down."
"Working on it," A.J. said absently. "Just a few more minutes, and we can all relax."
Chapter 35 Horst Eberhart sat quietly in the tiny, almost featureless cell. Outside he looked calm, but inside he was raging.
And, he had to admit, afraid. He didn't know what was going on outside, but the situation couldn't be good. It was still gnawing at him how he'd managed to end up here in the first place. Heknew he hadn't touched the controls and ruined theOdin 's maneuver, yet he also had yet to figure out a plausible alternative. Fitzgerald?
Couldhe be doing it? Horst was intrigued by the idea, now that he thought of it. Wasn't one of the classic intelligence-agent ploys to make allies look like enemies? If Fitzgerald was really on Ares' side-workingwith Madeline Fathom, and just making it look like they were enemies-that would explain what just happened. But, no, that didn't make sense. If he was working with them, there was no way that Joe Buckley would have been within a kilometer of the power-control facility whenOdin blew it to powder. Fitzgerald might be cold-blooded enough to think it'd help things look more convincing, but there was no way Fathom would have done so. Besides, if Fitzgerald were on their side, they'd have known what they were up to from the beginning. He shook his head. There had to be another explanation. Mia Svendsen? As the engineer, she could have pulled that off. Maybe. Certainly after the overrides were authorized-by the general. But before that… and again, the same objections applied to her. The reason it made all too much sense for him to have done it-and he gave a weak grin as he realized that he was now arguing the prosecution's future case-was that he'd developed a personal relationship with an important member of the Ares/IRI grouplong after the mission began. And while his relationship with Jackie Secord had remained undefined, it had been getting increasingly close-certainly enough to give credence to the charges against him. Added to that, he had discovered the treachery ofOdin considerably after they'd left. In this scenario, he would have gotten guilty over his initial, smaller betrayals, and then, after finding out that his own people nearly killed Buckley and did cripple the base, would have decided to turncoat. It was neat and made perfect sense, and even fit with Horst's gut feelings on the whole situation. "The real problem," he said finally to empty air, "is that I didn't do it!" Given that this was true, though… what happened? Horst didn't believe it was an accident, any more than did the general or Fitzgerald. It was too exact, too carefully timed and totally unstoppable by any ordinary means, to be a random glitch or set of glitches. There had been a couple of other close friendships between Ares/IRI andOdin personnel, like that between Dr. Conley and Anthony LaPointe, but none of the people there were capable of the "black ops" programming necessary to pull this off, as Horst was. He leaned back and folded his arms, then continued to think on the problem, as there wasn't much else to do in his current situation.
Since he'd basically eliminated any possibility of a traitor on boardOdin, that left only one answer. A.J. Baker. Horst had spent more than enough time around Baker to know that in some ways he'd underestimated the sensor genius. Yes, A.J. was not quite his equal in the programming arena, especially the systems programming that Horst focused on, but he was as smart as his reputation made him out to be, and the Faerie Dust he had was beyond cutting edge and right on the bleeding edge of capability. Faerie Dust. Horst sat up as a possibility burst in on him. They had security procedures, of course, but with the capabilities of that Dust, Baker could have smuggled some on boardOdin by using the personnel as unwitting mules. You'd practically have to examine each person as they entered under a microscope to have a chance of detecting the stuff. Self-powered and self-mobile, the motes could hide and might well be able to spoof many forms of sensors if properly programmed-and there was no one in the solar system who knew more about programming such things than A.J.
Baker. But, again, that theory fell under the weight of his own argument, given to Fitzgerald months-no, well over a year ago. It would be totally out of character for Baker to do something like that.
After the fact of the attack, yes, he might be able-make that, hewould be able-to justify doing it as a wartime necessity, but not while everyone was cooperating. It would be a temptation, but one that Baker would resist. Yet it made so much sense otherwise. It was the ideal answer-if Horst could only figure out a way that the Faerie Dust could have made it all the way toOdin without anyone noticing. It was the exact phrasing of that thought-placing the Dust itself in the active role-that suddenly crystallized his thoughts into a clear and perfect vision of what had happened. He laughed aloud, both in relief that he understood and in the sheer devilish brilliance of the approach. At that moment, the speaker overhead suddenly spoke in the general's voice: "Attention all personnel. Attention all personnel." The words were filled with tension and anger. "TheOdin is currently under-" The silence that followed was objectively no different than the silence that preceded those cryptic lines, but it now seemed filled with menace. What was going on out there? Horst stood in the middle of the little room, tense and uneasy. Without warning, the door slid open, revealing Dominic Alescio, one of Fitzgerald's men, holding one of the specially-modified shotguns designed for shipboard use. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, adrenaline stretching every perception to breaking limits. That was the last horrid piece of the puzzle, and in that moment Horst Eberhart knew he was going to die, as Alescio, without so much as a change in expression, began to pull the trigger. Barreling in from the rear, a third figure plowed into Alescio. The gun went off, the explosion deafening in the confined space, and shot ricocheted and whined like a cloud of enraged bees throughout the room. One pellet grazed Horst's cheek, but his location in an adjoining but separate room had shielded him. From the cries of the other two, both combatants had gotten worse. Horst Eberhart charged from the tiny cell toward the others. With shock he recognized the bloodied form now underneath Alescio as Anthony LaPointe. Alescio, also bleeding but clearly in far better shape than the astronomer, rolled aside just before Eberhart reached him and came to his feet, trying to bring the gun to bear. But Horst was close, he was furious, and he was younger and faster. He was also very strong. Before the other man could pull the trigger or even get the shotgun decently lined up, Eberhart smashed the gun aside and slammed a full-strength right into Alescio's gut. The shock of impact screamed red agony through his fist-of course the guard was wearing armor. Still, the impact was enough to make Alescio grunt in pain and stagger backward, trying to get into a combat stance. Horst ripped the gun out of Alescio's hand and spun it around, pulling the trigger. Nothing happened. Nothing except that Alescio, bloodied and furious, started backing Horst up with a series of kicks and punches that the engineer could barely ward off even with the gun as a makeshift shield. Idiot! he snarled to himself. The guns were individualized, with a personal-characteristic lock; if the wrong person or persons were to get hold of the weapons, they were useless. As guns, anyway. Horst took a kick to his own gut which made him glad he hadn't eaten anything recently, but he'd known it was coming. In the moment of contact, he brought the gun barrel down. Alescio gave a high-pitched scream as the metal barrel shattered his kneecap. Horst jumped back and stared incredulously as the other man somehow tried to shrug off the pain and move in on him again. But the pain and injury to his knee-as well as other wounds from the earlier ricochets-slowed him by too much. This time the gun barrel cracked heavily against Alescio's temple. He went down like a dropped sack of potatoes and didn't move.
Horst paused a moment, breathing hard and letting some of the shaking die down. He was lucky this had happened in the habitat section ofOdin . Without gravity, he was pretty sure he'd have lost the fight. He thought he felt the deck quiver under his feet, but there was no way to be sure right now. He went over to LaPointe. "Anthony, are you crazy?" "So it is crazy to be rescuing your friends? Then, yes, I am completely mad." The English-French astronomer's left arm was bleeding profusely from multiple holes; clearly he'd taken the edge of the initial shot. There were several other small wounds, mostly on his scalp and face, that Horst presumed were the result of ricochets.
Fortunately, most of the energy had been lost by those projectiles before striking LaPointe. Only one of them was bleeding, and not badly. The other ricochet wounds were bruises. Horst bound the arm tightly, tying a tourniquet high up on the bicep. The bleeding appeared to stop. "Thank you, Anthony. I would have been dead." "That is exactly what I was afraid of once I saw Fitzgerald had taken off.
So I left the bridge and came here as fast as I could. It did not take a genius to know what he would want done to you." He grunted in pain as Horst pulled him upright, but he stood reasonably steadily. "So it's happening. I can't believe it." Horst peered out of the doors. No one in sight at the moment. "We've got to get to your cabin, then find out how we can help the general… unless he's working with Fitzgerald?" "No, not a chance. He was about to make a deal with theNebula Storm that would have saved the mission-but not, obviously, Fitzgerald's career. In fact, the bastard would probably have wound up serving a long prison sentence once we returned." Now, there was a pleasant surprise. Too bad he didn't have time for the story yet.
"Then let's see what we can do to make sure that happens. Can you keep up?" "I think I shall have to. Lead on." Gun still gripped in his hand, since it was the best club he had available, Horst Eberhart moved out into the corridors of the mutiny-wrackedOdin.
Chapter 36 "Either help me or get out of the way, Svendsen,"
Fitzgerald said. "Or I'll bloody well have you shot." The Norwegian engineer glared at him. "You can't afford to shoot me." Say whatever else you would about Svendsen, she was not cowardly-and there was enough truth in her statement that Richard wasn't about to kill her casually. He sighed as he continued to maneuver the heavy cylinders toward the loading area. If it had been in an area with acceleration, he'd have needed forklifts and assistants. As it was, he had to be careful not to end up crushed by them. "You're right. I can't quite be shooting you when I'll be needing the engineering talent to run this beast," he conceded. "But Ican have my boys work you over and lock you in a closet. Which I'll do if you don't either help or sit down and shut up, because I have to get this done fast." He had no doubt that Baker and the rest of the Ares crew were working hard to shut down the coilguns. Mia Svendsen glared again and looked like she was going to spit at him. Instead, she settled for something presumably insulting in Norwegian before strapping herself into one of the seats-away from any critical controls. He nodded at Johnson, currently the only other person present to keep Engineering secure. There were about a hundred people on boardOdin, and he had less than ten percent of them on his side. Admittedly, they had all the weapons and most of the combat training, but right now things were stretched really, really thin. He glanced at Mia again and shrugged. I could have used the help but I suppose it's just as well; she might have tried to bugger things up at just the wrong moment. And withthese loads for the coilguns, it would not be a good thing to have anyone screw up. The other concern was Eberhart. Poor Alescio was still out, so no one knew exactly what had happened. But it was clear that either he'd screwed up and somehow Eberhart had gotten the drop on him-unlikely, in Fitzgerald's opinion-or that someone else had arrived in time to turn a simple execution into a fight. Since no one had reported securing LaPointe, Fitzgerald was willing to bet that it was the astronomer who'd buggered up that little part of the plan. But the most critical thing was theNebula Storm. She had the data, and in a few hours she'd be transmitting it. The whole mission would then be over-unless she never transmitted. I'll bet you think you're nice and safe, thousands of kilometers away. Well, old Richard and his friends have a few more surprises for you. Weaponry had been one of his specialties from way back, in his days in the military. As soon as he recognized the limitations of the coilgun, he'd had people looking for ways to at least minimize those. And then he'd tailored the best ideas for application in the scenarios he thought might eventually emerge. It was nice when your careful planning paid off in the end.
Anthony and Horst burst into Anthony's cabin. Horst glanced around, looking for something to tend to Anthony's arm. Something about the window caught his eye. He drew in a shocked breath as he realized that he had not, in fact, imagined the deck quiver under his feet as the ship's orientation changed. As if to confirm his realization, another rumble passed through theOdin. "Oh, God," he breathed. "What is it, Horst?" Anthony followed his gaze. "Do you think…?" "Fitzgerald's going to fire onNebula Storm!" Leaving Anthony to search for his own bandage materials, Horst sat before the room's terminal and brought up his own access. "But does it matter?"
Anthony said painfully, starting to clean out the wounds with the cabin's first-aid kit. "You know how little they must move to avoid the projectiles." "Yes, I do. But Fitzgerald knows that, too." He brought up the work he'd begun weeks ago. Now that there was no more need for subtlety… "Time to disable the guns for good." But when he saw the results, he hissed. "That bastard has his own application suite!" "Yes, he would. Not taking chances with General Hohenheim locking him out." "It just means I'm having to improvise a bit more, and on a lower level, with the shutdown." Horst frowned in concentration, then began to grin. "But I think I will beat him. He's still loading the guns. Just a few more minutes."
Fitzgerald slammed the port shut, sealed it, and activated the loading cycle. "Now we're ready to go, my friends. A little gift from theOdin for you all. Actually, four little gifts, each with something extra." The coilguns-one on each of four support ribs-signaled readiness. Even as he pressed the final button that started the firing cycle, Richard's eyes registered that one of the status lights had just gone amber. But his finger was already in motion, and sluggish neural impulses could not be recalled. The first coilgun cycled, magnetic fields synchronizing in perfect timing, grabbing the shell and accelerating it outward with immense force, hurtling directly toward theNebula Storm at over fifteen kilometers per second. The next gun also cycled, neither A.J.'s Faerie Dust nor Horst's last-minute interventions quite able to affect it. The third would not have fired at all if Fitzgerald had relied on the original control suite, which was by now totally crippled by Horst and by the general, who had just locked the system down. As it was, one of the embedded controllers failed and the acceleration rings associated with it shut down. As the firing cycle had already begun, however, the following rings tried to compensate, mostly successfully. Now it was the fourth and final shell's turn, and it too began to accelerate at hundreds of gravities.
But there were now no fewer than three different agencies trying to control the coilgun, at levels ranging from parts of the hardware up, and the embedded controls were no longer receiving reliable signals.
Halfway down the acceleration ring, the field inverted, unstably reversing twice. The shell's own controller, minimally complex in order to survive the hellish environment, miscued and took the sudden deceleration and heat to be impact. And did what any good armed shell should do in that situation: it detonated. The explosion tore apart theOdin 's fourth mass-driver support rib like a firecracker on a straw, blasting shrapnel throughout the area. Some of that shrapnel was from the rib itself, but the rest was payload-high-density depleted-uranium pellets, coated to enhance penetration. The semi-smart shell had not had time to set for a directed blast, but at that short range theOdin still covered a huge fraction of the sky; there was no way to miss, and thousands of pellets did not. Like the blast of a monstrous shotgun, the storm of armor-piercing bullets ripped intoOdin, both the main body and the wide-flung habitat ring.
Never meant for atmospheric entry, Odin 's hull was strong enough to take micrometeorite impacts. It also had design contingencies, alarms, safety features, and emergency procedures meant to deal with one or two unexpected larger holes. But this was not just one or two holes, and the personnel who might normally have been in a position to respond were busy with a mutiny, on one side or another. The explosion and impact were puny compared to the mass of the huge ship. It did not reel under the blow, was not sent spinning and fracturing; it continued relentlessly on its way, outwardly almost unchanged. But the interior of theOdin had become a charnel house.
Chapter 37 "Almost…" A.J. suddenly sat up. "Oh, that's bad."
"What?" Jackie looked worried. A.J. ignored her for the moment. The status reports for the coilguns had stopped abruptly. The Faerie Dust was probably cycling, looking for more data, until it met another contingency to act on. But the last data he'd gotten… "Something bad's happened. I can't tell what, though. Ithink we've been fired on, but something went wrong with the fourth shot." "They got offthree shots?" Madeline said, in a tone of mild reproof. "You seem to be slipping, A.J." "Gimme a break," he muttered as he tried to redirect the motes onOdin to new assignments. The responses were not encouraging. "Fitzgerald had his own control protocols, as well as the original layer, and someone-I'll bet Horst-was trying to shut him down on their end. The combination was like having a four-way duel with blindfolds." "I got them on radar," Joe said. "The shots, that is.
They're pretty darn close for quick shots, but none of them are coming anywhere near us. Well, on a cosmic scale Fitzgerald was dead-on, but on a personal scale he's still way off." "How close?" Madeline asked.
"Kilometers off, all of them. We won't even have to dodge. My guess is that even though A.J. and Horst weren't able to stop the firing, whatever they were doing probably screwed up the targeting. Even just a little nudge would be enough." Some of the Dust finally responded with some data. And it looked like… "Larry, give us a close-up ofOdin," A.J. said, feeling a coldness begin to seep into his chest.
"Fast." "Second that." Joe's voice suddenly had no humor in it. "I'm picking up other targets nearOdin. Looks like debris." The screen blanked, then returned. At the current range, even with the highest-resolution imagers A.J. had been able to put inNebula Storm 's systems, the huge ship looked like a diatom. But they could make out enough detail to see that the perfect symmetry ofOdin was no longer perfect. "What happened, A.J.?" Jackie demanded. "Are they going to be okay over there?" "I can't be sure what happened, exactly," A.J. said.
"Not at this range. Not with all the other crap going on, when I'm having to get low-bandwidth answers to my questions. Something went badly wrong on the last shot. I'd guess that Fitzgerald's last shell blew up in the middle of firing, probably because we were all screwing around with the controls at the same time. Hell, it might not even have been the shell. If the magnetic drivers went wrong, they could probably have fired the shell the wrong way or something like that. I don't know the details. Everything that was going on shut down a lot of the Faerie Dust, too. I've lost a lot of it-I knew it'd happen with it being that close up to the firing, but still… Anyway, I'm trying to get more info. I'm really worried by the fact that they haven't reestablished communications. That means that whatever Fitzgerald set up wasn't just a temporary glitch." "You can't tap into their comm systems and get them working?" Helen asked. "I wish. I know I pull off a lot of crazy stunts sometimes, but there really are limits. It's not like TV and movies where the super hacker is really a magician who uses techno-jargon. Wish it was. I could just spout off some obfuscating phrases and hey, presto, I'm running all their systems. But all I have access to right now is Faerie Dust which isn't even in the right locations and that can't communicate anything to me except in short low-bandwidth pulses, and we're still far enough off that we've got fractions-of-a-second comm lag, though that's shrinking. I've given the Dust some instructions to concentrate in some of the other systems I know something about. But since the Dust doesn't come with jet engines or rockets, it's going to take a while for it to get there." "I see." Madeline's brow furrowed for a moment.
"Can you get anything out of our sensors?" "Lemme see what I can coax out." He shifted to the onboard sensors ofNebula Storm, which included visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radar, and a number of others. A picture of the space around the distantOdin began to build up. Filter… spectroscopics… Oh, not good. "Definitely worse than just the one accelerator rib. I'm getting significant gas and vapor around the ship. She's leaking atmosphere, reaction mass, maybe other stuff like a sieve. Best guess-when it happened, it shredded a large part of the rib and blew pieces of it intoOdin." "And they're still headed straight for Io," Larry added. "You'd think they'd have been able to calculate that right after the main burn, though," Jackie said, puzzled. "Why didn't they shift orbit? They can't becompletely out of fuel." "No, they probably have a little left," A.J. agreed. "I dunno why they wouldn't have shifted." "It's obvious," Madeline said.
"Given the amount of time, we know that dodging even something the size of Io wouldn't take much effort from them for quite a while. They don't need kilometers per second of delta-V for that, just a relatively few meters per second, and they have enough for that. So, instead of correcting right off, they were waiting to find out wherewe were. They needed to know the strategic and tactical situation before making that move." "Except that the longer they wait, the harder it's going to get," Joe continued. "And with a mutiny and now what looks like major damage, I'll bet no one's thinking about that right now."
Jackie looked at Larry and Joe. "Can we match up withOdin? Do anything to help them?" Larry sighed. "We're closing at about four kilometers per second. We can bias that for a closer approach at course intersect if we want, but we don't have the power to make up the delta-vee difference. If they manage tomiss Io… taking just the right orbit flyby, they might be able to come close to matching up with us at Europa. Maybe." The Ares astronomer shook his head. "I think they'd still have to do a minimal Oberth even there, and I don't think they have that much left. I think it'd take at least a kilometer-per-second burn." Joe looked depressed and angry. "Even if we did… I really don't know what we could do. We can't tow them clear. Even almost dry in the tanks, Odin masses something over ten thousand tons. We don't have the room on board to take more than a few refugees, and I don't know how far we could push life-support." "Then the only thing we can do is keep trying to warn them," Madeline said decisively. "Jackie, I want you to broadcast a warning to them, with details of exactly when they will impact and a constantly updating timetable of how much they have to shift their current course to escape. A.J., keep trying to get information out of their systems… and findsome way to deliver a message. Can you do that?"
A.J. studied the meager data he was getting back, compared it with what he knew ofOdin, its systems, and its crew. "I think so. I just hope I can do it fast enough."
Alarms screamed throughout theOdin, almost deafening Horst and Anthony. Horst's display flickered, paused in mid-update, and then went to local. "The shipboard net just went down." "But I thought that was impossible!" Anthony said with a stunned look. Horst felt the back of his neck prickling as though something horrid was creeping up on him. Which maybe it was. "Nothing is impossible. But that is a very improbable thing to have happen. A distributed network it is, not so centralized… Some nodes are coming back. I am trying to find out…" As he managed to force some kind of status evaluation out of the crippled network, the full horror began to sink in. "Dear God," he breathed. Most of the habitat ring had suffered some kind of damage. A few cabin segments-including Anthony's-had been in the shadow ofOdin 's hull, shielded from the debris and shrapnel, but the vast majority of the habitat ring, standing so far out from the main hull as it did, was in line of sight of the explosion. Damage ranged from single punctures to shattered composite viewports to segments so riddled with holes they looked like a section of sponge. The entire facing side ofOdin 's hull was riddled with holes, random punctures through hull, support networks, power conduits, and stored supplies.
One of the external cameras showed an image that Horst quickly blanked out: an image of debris slowly moving away from theOdin -debris that showed several human silhouettes. Anthony was looking over his shoulder, muttering something that sounded like prayers. "Horst, how bad is it?" "I am trying to get more accurate information. Connecting to the controllers for the main systems. But it is very bad." Horst knew that most members of the crew, during the last few hours, had been in their cabins or in the hab-ring laboratories. The main hull was for command or bridge crew and engineering, for the most part, especially during maneuvers. Which implied something he did not want to think about. "Connected, finally. A lot of discontinuities in the network… Well, one good piece of news-theMunin is undamaged and can probably be launched." "But it cannot hold that many people, yes?"
Horst hesitated for a moment, but there was no reason to evade the issue. "There may be not that many people left to load on," he said grimly. Anthony stared at him, wordless for a moment. "You… you cannot mean that." "I am very afraid that I do," Horst said quietly.
"We need to get into our suits now. According to the data I am getting, any route we take out of here will take us through vacuum."
Anthony nodded silently, and began-painfully-to pull on his suit.
"Where do we go?" "To theMunin first. It has independent systems, including its own communications, life support, and power. We need to be able to tellNebula Storm what has happened. Maybe they can help.
And we can useMunin as our own fortress, if Fitzgerald and his people survived. Assuming, at least, that the bastards are not yet on board it." He went to shut down the terminal, but stopped as an unusual signal was highlighted by his application. He sat back down.
"Who…?" The signal was coming from one of the surviving controller units on theOdin 's driver-support ribs. But it wasn't a normal control or update signal. It looked like… Suddenly he understood. Decoding the signal didn't take long. Reading it, however, he almost wished he had taken longer. Anthony saw it in his face as he turned. "Horst, what is wrong now?" "I just got a message from A.J.
Baker, through some of the Faerie Dust he still has on board. And he tells us that soon we will have a much worse problem to worry about."
Anthony froze. "Oh, God, I had forgotten! Io!" "Yes. Io." The astronomer resumed putting on his suit. "We must find a way to get control ofOdin very soon." "We will have to use the laterals. The NERVA drive is no longer usable." "What?" "Oh, the reactor and so on is basically intact," Horst said bleakly. "But the thrust nozzle is shredded. Try a burn with that kind of damage, and it will vaporize. I have no idea what would happen after that." "Then," Anthony said, clumsily forcing his wounded arm to cooperate, "we have even less time than I thought."
Hohenheim struggled slowly back to consciousness. How long have I been out? What happened? He tried to move, but found that something impeded his movement. Opening his eyes, he gasped. Below him, space rotated slowly, majestically. Jupiter passed him, and other distant objects. Nowhere was there a sign of theOdin. He was alone, spinning through the void, four hundred million miles from Earth. Not while still feeling gravity, I am not. He moved his head; everything seemed to be working. He looked around, trying to ignore the vertigo of space all around him. Looming above him like a constantly falling skyscraper wasOdin. Looking down his body, he could see that he lay facedown across one of the habitat support ribs. The part of the cabin unit that would have been under his upper body had been blown away somehow.
His legs and abdomen were trapped under wreckage that had fallen on top of him rather than being sucked out into vacuum. He was hanging, in effect, off the edge of a cliff that dropped off into infinite space. Do not move yet. It seems stable for the moment. I do not seem to be badly hurt. What happened? It came back in a rush: theNebula Storm 's victory and face-saving offer, Fitzgerald's treachery… Yes, and then he'd realized that real fighting might break out, since Fitzgerald controlled the armory. So he ordered the bridge crew to prepare, and… Disaster. He'd gotten into his suit, but the others had not yet finished when the doors opened. The lockdown had been subverted. They hadn't managed to kill him, but he'd forced them to split up. He hoped that they hadn't killed the few people remaining on the bridge. So he'd diverted them away in one direction, managed to take down one who'd relied more on guns than bare-hand skill, and… and come to his cabin. And then there had been a shockwave and impact… Something had gone dreadfully wrong. Looking down the length ofOdin, he could see the mangled ruin of the fourth support rib. To the right and left of him, the habitat ring curved down and away, riddled with holes, missing pieces as far as he could see. Some of the drifting debris he could make out was not mechanical or structural in nature, either. He wished he could believe that this meant most of the mutineers had perished, but he knew better. They'd been wearing their armor, almost certainly ready to put on helmets. Some might have already been wearing the helmets. Maybe one or two were dead, but a far larger number of the main crew were now gone. He realized there had been no chatter of communications. The shutdown Fitzgerald had imposed was either still working, or the damage had been extensive indeed. In either case, it occurred to him that it might be even more useful to be thought dead. He could access the communications and update software… Yes, he could do it.
Reception should remain, and deliberate communication, but anyone doing a regular search would not get operating-status data from his suit. He studied his position. The wreckage that pinned him must weigh at least three hundred kilos-in this case, a good thing, because otherwise he'd probably have slowly slid out of its grip and plummeted off into the deep. The problem was going to be getting out from under it without possibly causing worse problems. He had no way of knowing how strong, or fragile, the wall on the other side of the support was.
If he moved wrong, put stress on the wrong place, it might fracture, leaving only the main support he was sprawled over intact. This might get him out from under-but it could also drag him overboard with the rest of the debris, and there was no swimming back to this ship. He wasn't wearing a suit with reaction jets. An idea struck him. He reached down to the area of his belt. Yes, the safety line was still there. That should work. Carefully, he managed to force the safety-hook end out of its place underneath him. Once that was out, the slender composite-metal combination line slid out with minimal effort. With great care he managed to loop the line entirely around the support, which was almost-but not quite-small enough to get his arms around. He had to try whipping the hook end from one hand to the other several times before he managed to catch it, but after that it was easy to pull it the rest of the way around and hook the line to itself. He tested the loop to make sure the hook was locked shut, then started wiggling, tugging, and pulling. The suit moved a fraction of a millimeter. Then a centimeter. He pushed and grunted and swore and gave a mighty heave. Abruptly the pressure holding him shifted, tilted, pulling him back and down as the other wall cracked. But the looped line prevented him from falling, while the carbonan suit shrugged off the glancing blows and scrapes as the remaining debris fell away fromOdin. Hohenheim dangled from the main support for a moment, then grabbed the support and clambered onto it. Standing up, he slid the loop of safety line with him, looking for a higher point to fasten it to. There was no floor left to this room now except the pieces remaining on the support beam, but the main door was visible.
And so was his wall safe, still securely fastened to the wall. The wall safe was what he had come here for. He studied the situation. The safe was about two and a half meters from the door. Maybe a bit more.
He couldn't reach it standing in the doorway. He looked up. That was more promising. Some of the ceiling had been ripped away when the cabin depressurized, and there were pipes and cables visible. Taken together, they should support his weight. If he climbed up the main support… It was not nearly as easy as it looked. Without the little safety line, he was not sure he could have managed at all. But eventually he was suspended from the plumbing and air tubing and slowly lowering himself to the safe. A code and verification later, and the safe opened. Hohenheim reached in, found what he was looking for, and pulled it out. A few minutes later he stepped through the doorway into the silent vacuum of the corridor beyond and made his way, gingerly, to the nearby connecting tube that led to the main hull. He paused a moment, looked down at his waist, where the gun now rested, waiting, and gave a nod of satisfaction. Alone in the silence of space, General Hohenheim crawled toward the body of his wounded ship.
Chapter 38 "Anything new, A.J.?" Madeline asked after a long period of mostly silence. The blond sensor expert nodded. "Getting something finally, with Horst's help." Jackie's head snapped around.
"Horst's alive?" A.J. grinned, the first normal smile any of them had managed in a while. "Sure is. Alive and kicking, in fact. He and Anthony are headed toMunin, their other lander. It has separate comm systems, so hopefully we'll have communications going soon." "Taking them a while," grumbled Larry. "Do they know about their deadline, emphasis ondead?" "Yeah." A.J. looked serious now. "But they're having to try to get past Fitzgerald's people-andOdin 's very badly hurt." "How badly?" Maddie asked. Something was starting to nag at her. "Do we have any idea how many people they have left, and what the condition of the ship overall is?" "Starting to get the picture," A.J. answered. "And I don't like it. The NERVA engine's workable, but the thrust nozzle is toast, and so is some of the venting around it. The mass-beam's totally screwed right now. Even if we could work around the lost support beam, the software's going to have to be reinstalled all through the thing after what we did to it." His lips tightened in an almost-white line; Maddie could tell he was both furious and upset.
"The habitat ring's the worst, though. There was damage all through it, and people weren't ready for this. It's… bad. Really bad."
Madeline felt her eyes narrow as a tight, cold feeling crept up her spine. "A.J., Jackie, give me a model of an explosion on that support rib. I want to see how it did that much damage." "Okay." A.J. worked for a few minutes, asking Jackie to help him on some points. "Here we go… Hmm, no, that didn't do it. Some damage, but nothing like what I see. Okay, boost the power… Nope. Hmm. Well, we've got… but no…" Maddie raised her head, looking at the image ofOdin. "A.J., try putting fragmentation in the shell itself-say five hundred kilos of armor-piercing, maybe ten to twenty grams each."
"Okay." A few moments went by, and he sighed heavily. "Yeah. Yeah, Maddie, that does it, all right." His voice sounded leaden. Now she knew."A.J., give me a plot-where are those shells fromOdin 's salvo going to be when they miss?" "Son of a bitch…" The screen lit up, showing the courses of the three shells andNebula Storm. Madeline leaned forward tensely in her seat, already knowing what she was going to see. At closest approach, the three shells bracketed theNebula Storm, the alien ship at the nearly precise center of a triangle. The third shell seemed to be lagging slightly, but not much. "Damn him. If we hadn't had so much going on, I probably would have thought of this sooner. Jackie, Larry, get us out of here." "Don't have much fuel left, and they're gettin' kinda close," Larry said. "But… let's see, we need to get probably well over a hundred kilometers from them to make sure not too many of those little beasts hit us. Yeah, we've got enough to do that. Stand by-we're doing a burn. Toward the side of the third one there. That one's a little behind the others."Nebula Storm began to pirouette, bringing its drive to the proper alignment to take them out of the path of the oncoming weapons. "That won't take usinto anything else, will it?" A.J. asked. "Not likely, but lessee… No, it'll take us closer to Europa in the end, close enough to do quick sightseeing from far up, but not dangerous. Jackie, drive ready?" Jackie looked up from her controls. "Accumulators charged. How much of a burn?" "Get us a delta of one hundred sixty meters per second. That'll do it." "Wouldn't want to do much more than that. We're kinda tapped right now," Jackie said. "Firing in three… two… one…" The adapted NERVA drive thundered briefly, shoving theNebula Storm sideways. A.J. watched as the trajectories diverged. "Yeah, that'll do it. We'll be over two hundred kilometers from the nearest one when it goes off. I don't know if we'll avoid all the damage, but I don't think it can concentrate fire enough to really screw us at that range." "Probably not," Maddie said, slowly starting to relax. "Not with a simple explosive shell. You can do a shaped and directed charge for some reasonable directionality, but there's a big difference between hitting a two-hundred-meter target at one kilometer versus hitting it at two hundred kilometers.
I-" "Course change!" A.J. suddenly shouted. "The three shells just did a burn! They're matched with us again!" "I was afraid that might happen," Maddie said in careful, precise tones. "I've been underestimating Fitzgerald all along. He's a sociopath, but a very smart one. I wonder how much delta-V they can carry." "Can't be much more than that," A.J. said. "I know what the approximate mass of those shells was. Can we do another burn?" "One more," Jackie said. "Then we're on fumes, so to speak." "Here's the vector." Nebula Stormroared again, dodging from the path of the closing shells. Maddie watched, tensely. Please be out, please be out… "Shells doing another burn…" "Oh, hell." That was Helen. "But they ran out of juice."
Maddie relaxed a bit. "How far short?" "They'll be… well, closer than I'd like, but a lot farther away than they were going to be if we hadn't moved. About ten kilometers, give or take." "They'll have to blow a little before actual closest approach," Joe pointed out. "Yeah, probably about thirty or forty seconds. Maybe a little less, depending on how fast the explosion makes them go. I doubt they're going to hit much more than a couple of kilometers per second from the boom." "It's a moot point anyway. Our closing velocities are almost ten times that." "How long until they hit?" Madeline asked. "Or until they miss?
We've got about ten minutes." "Seal off all doors now. Can we lower the hab sections?" "You mean lying flat, like before we first launched?" Jackie asked. "Yes, since we're not rotating. It'll take a few minutes, but we have enough time. I don't know if that's going to be better or worse." "Most of the vector is forward. If we lower the hab sections, we present a smaller overall target. Lower them." She glanced at Joe. "Retract the sail and pull in the control cables."
"Understood." A waiting silence descended upon theNebula Storm.
Slowly the four hab sections at the end of their long booms descended to lie as flat as possible against the hull of the alien vessel. Like a deflating balloon, the nebula sail began to shrink. "Don't suppose going through the nebula sail would affect them?" Helen asked. "Don't think so," Joe answered glumly. "Doesn't matter now that we're retracting it." "Five minutes." The great glittering nebula had faded, and the Smart Dust retracted within the hull, along with the tendril-like control cables. "One minute."
Seconds passed. Simple calculations were made. The decision reached. The three shells recognized the only possible target in range and adjusted shaped charges. The range was distant, but there was still a chance. The first two detonated, the third just fractions of a second behind them.
"Incoming targets," A.J. said. "Uncountable on radar-it's like a goddamn cloud. Impacts possible in… thirty seconds… twenty…" Maddie braced herself, even though she knew the impacts would likely be nothing to the ship as a whole, as A.J. counted down to zero.
A storm of armor-piercing bullets ripped through space. Focused to as narrow a cone as their configurable explosive propellant charges could manage, they had still been much farther than optimum from their target. The vast majority of the man-made meteoroids streaked harmlessly pastNebula Storm and on into empty space. A few, however, did not. Fourteen thumb-sized projectiles with a relative velocity of twenty-one kilometers per second slammed intoNebula Storm, each carrying the energy of a small cannon concentrated in an item the size of a small thumb. Even the Vault material of the alien hull, tough as it was, could not simply shrug such impacts off with impunity. The impacts, even at poor angles, ripped gouges down her sides, punched into the interior, bored through composites and metals like a bullet through butter. But theNebula Storm was huge, and the chances that a handful of hypersonic bullets would hit anything critical over a two-hundred-meter-long hull were miniscule, and none of them came close. Except for one.
The alien hull suddenly chimed to multiple impacts, blows so close together that they almost sounded as one: a high-speed machine gun. Alarms screamed out, and the bridge went black, the blackness just as abruptly relieved by red emergency lighting. "That doesn't seem good," Larry said. "It's not," Jackie said. Her voice had a hollow, shocked quality to it. "What happened?" Jackie didn't answer for a moment. Then she chuckled, a laugh that carried an almost creepy overtone. "Jackie, no offense, but what the hell are you laughing about?" A.J. demanded. Madeline stared at the dark-haired engineer with rising concern. With apparent difficulty Jackie got herself under control. "Sorry. It shouldn't be that funny. But it is. Remember where we get our main power from? Well, that's thesecond time that goddamn E.U. ship has shot the same goddamn reactor!" Maddie felt her lips tighten along with her gut. "The reactor itself?" "I think so, this time. The safety seals tripped and all-I don't think we're looking at a radiation hazard-but it's totally scrammed itself." Jackie shook her head, looking grim now. "Can we fix it?" "I'll have to find out what's really wrong first. Give me a few minutes. A.J., Joe, help out here."
Helen and Larry nodded to Maddie. "We've got holes to patch."
"Understood," Maddie said. "Stay away from the engineering area until we know what's going on there, though." "You got it." The two scientists cycled the lock out of the bridge. A few minutes later Jackie sat slowly up and turned to face Madeline. Her expression gave the answer. "No." "No chance at all?" "Not really," Jackie said. "It didn't actually punch the core, but the amount of work we'd have to do… At the least we'd need a big dock or a big, flat area to work on-one with enough gravity to keep things in place, or else someplace sealed off. And without the reactor, we can't even sail around very long. We don't have the fuel to set down anywhere, even if somehow I could get enough energy." A.J. looked at her with a horrified expression. "You're saying we're going to drift through space until we just run out of power and die?" "I…" She looked momentarily defensive, then suddenly sighed. "Yeah. We are." "I don't suppose,"
Maddie said, feeling unnaturally calm now that the worst news was delivered, "there's any way we could get help." "No," A.J. said. "Not unlessOdin can pull off a miracle." "How long do we have?"
"Well… that'll take a little while to figure out. If we can get to the lander…" Jackie and Joe went into a combination live and electronic conference. Maddie glanced over at A.J.; the sensor expert was staring bleakly into space. "How are things onOdin?" she asked quietly. A.J. shook himself and bent back over his controls. "I'll find out. Can't be any worse than it is here." Maddie looked at the screen, which still showed the image of the huge E.U. vessel surrounded by debris. "I'm not so sure."
Chapter 39 Fitzgerald cursed. "Move it, you bloody fat-arsed bitch!" Mia glared at him again, probably more from the personal insult than from his giving her orders. The insult was completely unjustified, in point of fact. The Norwegian engineer had quite an attractive figure. Richard couldn't believe how quickly it had all gone wrong. He still had a few of his people left-Johnson, Desplaines, Feeney-but the explosion and subsequent damage had wiped out over half of his team along with most of theOdin 's crew. It had also damaged the systems all over the ship, although the vessel's material structures had taken a lot less damage than human bodies. Still, as serious as the situation had become, it was still not desperate-providedthat he'd succeeded in taking out theNebula Storm.
Or at least disabled their ship and its communication equipment, if not killed them outright. Without a functioning and mostly intact spaceship, no one could survive the orbital environment of Jupiter and its hellish magnetosphere for very long. If there were no Ares and IRI survivors left-or wouldn't be, before they could send a transmission to the inner system-Richard thought he could still salvage the situation. Well enough, at any rate. Other than his own people, no one still alive aboard theOdin had any idea what had caused the catastrophe with the exception of Horst Eberhart and Anthony LaPointe.
If Richard could take them out of the equation, he'd have plenty of time to remove the evidence of the coilguns and plant evidence that indicated the disaster had been caused by enemy action coming from the-now happily destroyed-Nebula Storm. That evidence probably wouldn't fool a really good and determined forensic team, once they returned to Earth orbit. But Richard was quite sure his patrons at the ESDC and in the E.U. Commission of Enterprise and Industry would see to it that whoever investigated the affair would be safe and reliable.
There was still Mia Svendsen, of course. She'd have to be silenced also, eventually. He still needed her expertise, but he couldn't allow her to mingle with other survivors of the crew. That was going to be a tricky situation, but he was confident he could deal with it. Right now… And then he thought to check theOdin 's course. Straight for Io, possibly the least hospitable spot in the solar system outside of Jupiter itself or the surface of Venus. He growled and gestured to Jackson to keep an eye on Svendsen; he moved ahead of her, with Feeney ahead of him taking point. God damn them! That spineless Hohenheim, A.J. Baker and Horst Eberhart. Together they had managed to buggereverything up. He'd had the situation completely under control until they'd created a total cock-up in the coilgun systems. Baker, well, he could understand that, but couldn't the general at least realize that taking out theNebula Storm would end up being for the good of everyone in the long run? Fitzgerald had been hired to do a job-so had the blasted general himself, for the love of Christ-and then bloodyeveryone had to keep getting in the way. To put the cherry on top, they'd managed to get theOdin turned into a colander. Mia Svendsen had told him that it was going to take her weeks to get the engines back on line-and they didn't have weeks before their up-close meeting with the most volcanic body in the system. That left only one option for anyone who wanted to stay alive: theMunin. The lander/transport-and its missing twin, Hunin -were the largest pieces of cargo ever transported between planets, each massing five hundred tons fully loaded. And for convenience and efficient use of space, theMunin had been loaded with maximum supplies as soon as they had set out. It would hold up to ten people, and that would be more than enough, it seemed. Of the total of one hundred or so original crew of theOdin, there probably weren't more than a dozen left alive. Twenty, at most. But most of them were cut off. He couldn't afford to spend hours dragging possibly injured people out ofOdin 's wreckage, or arranging spacewalks to reach them. And, being realistic, at this point the fewer people from the expedition who survived, other than his own team, the better. There would be no way now to continue on to Enceladus, so the original mission was in the crapper. The only thing left to do was to survive until they could be rescued, which would probably take years. Then, perhaps, he could cash in eventually on the inevitable fame that would accrue to him from being the surviving officer of the ill-fated expedition. The prerequisite for that, however, was that no one could survive until rescue other than himself, his team, and whatever crew members were completely ignorant of what had happened. So those of them who were already dead or would die soon were simply saving him the trouble of disposing of them later. It was an unfortunate situation, certainly, but Richard was no stranger to hard times. He'd get through it well enough, he thought.
And there was one bright spot at the moment: Hohenheim had apparently not survived. The general's life signs had gone to zero shortly after the disaster. Shame that, but you brought it on yourself, boyo. If you'd only just listened to old Richard, we'd both be sittin' pretty right now. The sporadic connection to the formerly seamless shipwide network sputtered back to life. He could access data about the hangar area now. Oh, bugger me. "Feeney! Hold up." "What is it, Chief?"
"Someone else got to the hangar bay first," he said calmly. He really should have predicted this, but then, there hadn't been much time.
"And they're trying to talk to our old friends off onNebula Storm."
He queried the net, using his security authorization. The answer was, in its own way, rather gratifying. "Well, well. It's Horst Eberhart and his sidekick, LaPointe." Vanna Desplaines looked concerned. "If they're already aboardMunin, that's a problem. We can't force the doors." "Of course not," agreed Fitzgerald. "But there are ways to convince 'em to come to us." He grinned. "There are always ways, you know."
"-ingOdin. You are on a collision course with Io. You will need to change course. The following is the most efficient…" Horst glanced at Anthony, who nodded. "They are accurate." "A shame that we cannot do that," he said. Once they'd managed to access theMunin 's communications gear, it hadn't taken long to pick up on theNebula Storm 's automated warning. He activated the transmitter. "Nebula Storm, Nebula Storm, this is Horst Eberhart onOdin. There is no point in continuing to broadcast. We can do nothing." A few moments later, Jackie's voice responded. "Horst! How bad is it?" "It is hopeless, Jackie," he answered soberly. "The NERVA drive is damaged and would take weeks to repair out here. Lateral thrusters cannot produce the delta-V we need, even if enough of them were intact, which they are not. There are maybe twenty of us left alive. If that."
"Jesus Christ." That was A.J. "Eighty percent of youdied? "
"Everything went wrong at once, A.J. Some must have been killed by Fitzgerald's people. A lot of them were in the habitat ring, which was shredded by the blast. Most of them wouldn't have been in suits, so they'd have been killed by the decompression even if they'd been otherwise uninjured. And getting to whatever survivors there might still be on the ship would be hard, if it was possible at all." "And of those twenty," Anthony put in, "at least four are Fitzgerald and his people." "Marvelous," Maddie said. "So he's got all the weapons, and the survivors are divided." "But we are onMunin, which is the only escape," Horst said with a touch of grim satisfaction. "If he wants to live, he's going to have to play our way. He cannot force the doors on something this size, especially if he wants it intact."
"Don't get cocky," Maddie said. "He may have overrides or other plans.
If there's nothing else we've learned about Fitzgerald by now, it's that he's a cunning bastard." "I will try to remember that," Horst answered. "Once we getMunin out, we will be able to escape from Io. I believe theNebula Storm could then tow us eventually to safety, with the right computations, yes?" There was silence-silence for so long that Horst thought for a moment that they must have lost the connection. Then Jackie's voice came on, this time heavy with regret.
"I'm afraid not, Horst. We could have… but Fitzgerald got us."
"How?" demanded Anthony LaPointe. "It is too far, and you are too small. It is beyond belief that you could have failed to see the attack or avoid it." "Fitzgerald was a smart one," A.J. said. "Those shells weren't like the little fat bullet he shot at Ceres. These were big, relatively smart cans of armor-piercing BBs the size of my thumb.
He bracketed us with his shots, and then the damn thingschased us when we tried to dodge. So… short story is, he got our reactor." "No way to repair it?" "Not without at least a place to sit her down. Or a spacefloating drydock. I need a place that either has gravity or that's enclosed so I can work on the ship opened up without worrying about where stuff might drift off to," Jackie said quietly. "And we haven't got what it takes to-" Her voice dissolved into a mass of static. Horst blinked, then swung toward the instruments ofMunin;
Anthony was doing the same thing. "Horst-" "Yes. I do not think they suddenly stopped transmitting, and that means we are being jammed.
Which would need something very close." The external ramp cameras came on. Standing in the doorway of the hangar were three figures: Richard Fitzgerald, security officer James Feeney, and Mia Svendsen.
Fitzgerald gave a cheery wave. "Why not say hello, boyo? It's the friendly thing to do."
Chapter 40 Richard saw the furious face of Horst Eberhart materialize in his VRD. He let Horst give vent to a considerable range of epithets. Most of them were in German, some in French, two in English, one in Italian, and one in Czech. He hadn't realized the lad was such a linguist. Shame he wasn't in any position to actuallydo anything. "Yes, yes, let's take it that you've told me what you think of me and my ancestors. We're wasting valuable time here, since our dear friends onNebula Storm have sent us heading straight for a very un-soft landing on Io." "Nebula Storm? It isyou who have doomed us, Fitzgerald!" Anthony LaPointe almost shouted. "Had you never attacked them, had you not tried again, then all of us would still be alive!"
He shook his head. Of all the wrongheaded things to be arguing about!
"I was doing a job. You don'thave my job, and innocents like you never do understand how things work, anyway. It's simply a waste of time to argue about who did what to whom. The real question is how those of us still alive can stay that way. "Now, it seems to me thatMunin has more than enough room for you two, the four of us, and little Mia here.
She's all fueled, she's loaded, she's ready. And I happen to be qualified to pilot her, too, which I don't think either of you two are." "I have flown some," Horst said. "In space. Between myself and Anthony, I think we can fly it." "Maybe so. But it's a lot different in real life than the simulator, don't you forget that. Still, I won't force you to trust my flying. Just open up and let us on board." Horst laughed. "Letyou on board? You must be joking!" Richard shook his head. "Now, that kind of talk gets us nowhere, Horst." He nodded, and Feeney pointed his pistol at Mia's head. Behind him, Johnson and Desplaines emerged, flanking him on either side. "Do I have to draw you a picture? Surely you're bright enough to see the bargain. Or do you think we won't hurt her?" Horst was silent, clearly trying to think of some argument he could make, or of some other threat which wasn't immediately cancelled by the threat to theOdin 's chief engineer. "We'd be outnumbered four to three, counting Mia. That's bad enough. No one's coming on board armed." Richard considered. He liked having weapons, but he really couldn't afford to shoot anyone at this point, even Eberhart and LaPointe. Eberhart might also be able to get around the guns' personalized locks, in which case bringing them on board could end up putting a weapon in the German engineer's hands. "I suppose I can give you that, for the sake of some small goodwill.
You're not silly enough to think that us getting rid of the guns will mean we can't hurt Miss Svendsen, are you? Didn't think you were." He gestured. "Lose the guns, mates. And any other toys we brought along.
We shouldn't be needing them." Johnson stared at him. "Chief, are yousure about this?" He cut out his transmitter. "Seven of us having to survive somehow is none too many," he said, voice low but carrying to the others. "And besides, if two engineers and an astronomer can beat the four of us in unarmed combat, we're nothing but a bad joke and that's the truth." The other three looked reluctant, but followed orders. Richard collected the weapons-six firearms, three knives, and an explosives kit-put them in one of the mesh holding bags used for loose items in weightless spaces like the hangar, and held it up.
"There they are," he said, transmitter active again. "I am putting them over here." He went to the wall, clipped the bag securely, then rejoined his group, where Johnson was keeping Mia in a restraining hold. "Satisfactory? Now open up." "How do I know you don't have anything concealed inside your suits?" Richard rolled his eyes.
"Youdon't, boyo. And I don't think I'm getting out of my suit just to make you feel better. Sudden decompression without a suit doesn't appeal to me, and the shape oldOdin is in, that could happen just about any time. You take what you see. Now open up." Horst hesitated, but Richard could see that he knew he'd run out of options and delaying tactics. The younger man began to reach for a control out of sight of the camera. Something warned Richard Fitzgerald; perhaps it was a very slight shift of Horst's gaze, a widening of the eyes; perhaps it was an intake of breath on the part of Anthony LaPointe.
Perhaps it was just more than a quarter-century of instincts honed in lethal conflicts around the world. Whatever it was, he found himself suddenly diving forward and up, launching himself across the hangar toward the support and loading mechanisms-just as the thunder of a large-caliber handgun blasted out from behind him. Johnson never had a chance to even scream. One second he was stolidly holding Mia immobile, the next his head exploded in a spray of red. Feeney, startled, tried to whirl, actually managed to complete a quarter-turn before the gun roared again, blowing a hole in his neck. Vanna Desplaines made a desperate dive toward the net bag holding their guns. Two more shots echoed out, deafening in the enclosed room. The firstspang ed off her carbonan suit, sending her into an uncontrolled spin to smack into the wall. The second hit her just as she began to rebound, and took her right between the eyes. Richard stared down incredulously at the shadowed doorway, searching for some sort of weapon-a crowbar, a hammer, something. Four shots, three dead? Evenhe would have had a hard time pulling that one off. Who in the name of… An involuntary chill went down his spine as the figure in the doorway moved into view. Looking directly at him, golden eyes gleaming cold as dead men's treasure, General Hohenheim raised his pistol.
Chapter 41 "General! You're alive!" Hohenheim found the relief and genuine pleasure in Horst's exclamation warming. But he didn't have time or luxury for enjoyment at the moment. "I am. Mr. Eberhart, while Mr. Fitzgerald stays extremely still, I would like you to open theMunin 's hatch and allow Mia to board." He looked down at the wide-eyed engineer, who was pale and shaking-and covered with blood and other remnants of her former captor. "My apologies for being unable to warn you, Miss-do not move, Mr. Fitzgerald! I have excellent peripheral vision, and I believe I have demonstrated my accuracy with this weapon. As I was saying, my apologies, Miss Svendsen. I hope you are unharmed?" Mia swallowed, then nodded. "I… I am all right, General. They had said you were dead." He smiled grimly. "That is what I intended them to think." TheMunin 's hatch opened. "Now get on board." Mia stood, a bit shakily, and moved toward the ramp. Her boots gripped the deck and allowed her to walk and keep her balance despite being at the edge of collapse. It was at that moment that everything went wrong. Vanna Desplaines' body had continued to ricochet gruesomely in slow-motion around the docking area, and at that crucial instant she passed between Hohenheim and Richard Fitzgerald. The speed of Fitzgerald's reaction showed that he had already anticipated exactly that turn of events-had watched everything, estimated angles, movements, timing. He dove toward the body, her armored corpse making a shield that Hohenheim's single reflexive shot did not penetrate. He then spun his body around, flinging his associate's toward Hohenheim and gaining a change in vector that caused him to sail directly to the wall he had just recently left. Before the general could get a clear shot, his former security chief had ripped the mesh bag from the wall and bounded away, back into the shadowed reaches of the support and loading mechanisms. And now he is fully armed, and I have one gun, Hohenheim thought grimly as he pulled himself back into the doorway from which he had entered. He gestured savagely to Mia, who had frozen and tried to drop to the ground-a gesture which had ended with her floating mostly motionless near the boarding ramp. "Get on boardimmediately." As she moved to comply, Hohenheim continued: "Once she is on board, Mr. Eberhardt, you will close the hatch." "Sir?"
There was concern in the young engineer's voice. "Are you not coming on board?" "No, Mr. Eberhart. I doubt if Fitzgerald is less of a marksman than myself, and in order for me to reach the ramp I must cross a considerable empty space. He will have an excellent field of fire and cover, while I would have to give up all cover in order to board. "On the other hand, you must get out of here immediately for two reasons. Firstly, because if you go to these coordinates"-he transmitted a location on the wreck ofOdin -"you will find a few more survivors whose time is running out. And secondly, because if I do not keep Mr. Fitzgerald busy"-he suited actions to words by firing two shots in the general direction of the renegade security chief-"he will almost certainly find a way to disable or control the launching mechanisms, and then no one will leave here unless he allows it."
"Only… a few survivors?" "Five, when I left. One was… not well. I believe there are no others left that we could reach in time.
The radiation shielding was badly damaged in most areas, in addition to the general decompression damage and the many people killed or injured directly by projectiles. I am afraid that even if there are people left alive currently, other than in the location I gave you-which is still shielded-they are simply breathing dead." "Dear God. I had forgotten about the radiation hazard." "As did I, at first, until my radiation alarm went off when I tried to enter one of the cross corridors. We are being reminded again, and now as savagely as possible, how deadly the environment is so close to Jupiter. Now go, pick them up. You are no pilot. It will take you some time to master the controls and reach that location, and we have no time to waste."
"But, General-" "That is a direct order, Mr. Eberhart. Get yourself and the remainder of my crew to safety." "Are you insane?" Fitzgerald finally burst out. "Munincan handle at least ten people! There's plenty of room for both of us!" He could not make out the former Irish mercenary, but looked in the direction of the outraged voice. "Mr.
Fitzgerald, there is no room on any ship under my command for a mutineer, a traitor, and a murderer, and you are all three. While I live, Odin andMunin remain under my command. And since I sincerely doubt that you are ready to nobly allow me to boardMunin and go down with my ship in expiation for your crimes"-Hohenheim carefully inserted another magazine into his weapon-"it appears that we are about to play out the final act of a melodrama. Carry out your orders, Mr. Eberhardt." After a moment's pause, Eberhart replied. His voice was strained and thick. "Yes, General." "Good luck, Horst, Anthony, Mia. It has been an honor having you on my crew." "It's been an honor to serve under you, sir," Anthony said quietly. The noises in the background indicated that perhaps the others simply could not speak.
"Not so honorable as I might have been, I'm afraid. Please tender my apologies to theNebula Storm and, when the time comes, to my superiors. I accept all the responsibility for the mission's failure.
I am now carrying out my final duty as the captain of this vessel." He triggered the airlock, which shut behind him and Fitzgerald. "Launch, Mr. Eberhart." Fitzgerald's angry voice came again. "So, we're both going to just bloody sit here and watch the only hope we've gotfly away? " As the ramp ofMunin locked closed and atmosphere began to vent out, Hohenheim chuckled. "Yes, Mr. Fitzgerald, we are going to do exactly that. Because if you make any move to stop them, you will show me where you are. And then"-he braced himself against any backblast from the shuttle-"I will most certainly shoot you dead." *** I can't bloody believe this. Fitzgerald saw the doors opening, and very nearlydid try to make a dive for the manual cut-outs that would have forced the launch bay to close back up. If theMunin left without him, he'd only live another few hours on the dyingOdin before being shot by Hohenheim, killed by a radiation overdose, or-oh, happy day!-making landfall as a meteor on Io. But Hohenheim had demonstrated the deadly accuracy of his microgravity firearms skill.
Someone had slipped up on part of his background, obviously; the file Fitzgerald had on the general hadn't indicated anything like that kind of skill. While none of the other deaths appealed to him, even less did Fitzgerald like the idea of being shot down like a desperate dog leaping for something he knew he'd never reach. Better to die stalking each other than like that. Dignity mattered. And there were still some other angles possible. He'd heard the coordinates Hohenheim had given Horst. Although he knew the rudiments of handling the landing craft and had been given some basic training, Eberhart was a programmer and system engineer, not an experienced pilot. It would take him some time to getMunin under enough control to be able to dock with the right area ofOdin to rescue the other refugees. If Fitzgerald could somehow get past the general, he could cutthrough the ship to get to the refugee area and once more pull the ancient but still effective hostage approach. And once he was on board, Hohenheim would either already be dead or be as good as dead. So he watched-not without considerable concern-asMunin lifted and drifted out the doors, which closed once the shuttle was well clear. Time to get things moving. And talking is always a good distractor. "Well, now, that was bloody brilliant, General Hohenheim. You've sentenced us both to death, and for what? A little overenthusiasm on my part in carrying out my orders? In trying to make sure we actually succeeded in our mission?
Which, if I might remind you, was to find the treasure and get it for ourselves, not share it out to those who were already awash in wealth." Hohenheim sighed. "You see, that's the problem. I see now that it's always been the problem, Mr. Fitzgerald. You see everything about you in simple terms, no matter how complicated it really is. To you, this is about you doing one simple job-no matter what. I suppose it was Bitteschell who gave you your directives?" "He hired me. He set the general terms." Fitzgerald saw no reason any longer to dance about. Either he or Hohenheim or both would soon be dead anyway. "But the specific orders-not to mention the offer of a monster bonus-came from Osterhoudt at the ESDC." "Ah, that company's chief operations officer. That makes sense, now. I had been puzzled by the thought that Bitteschell had given such ruthless instructions. That's really not like him. But Osterhoudt does have such a reputation." Fitzgerald didn't really care what Hohenheim said; it was simply important that he be kept responding, because the more he focused on the conversation, the less he might focus on other things. As he got out one of the charges, Fitzgerald said: "I'm amused by your use of the term 'simple.' Itmight have been simple, if you hadn't kept making it harder. Though I have to give you credit, sir. That was impressive shooting you did. I wouldn't have expected it from a man in your position." "Even good intelligence usually misses things, especially when they don't seem important at the time. Fifteen years or so ago, when I was stationed in America for a while, I was friends with some people in their Special Forces. I spent considerable time learning something about small arms and their military uses. I was quite a marksman, in fact. Of course, using those skills in space poses its own challenges. But I have as many hours in space as any astronauts in the world except a handful of Americans and three Russians." That explained a bit. But there was a great deal of difference between being a marksman with small arms, even one trained by elite military forces, and being what Fitzgerald himself was. He eased himself along the support as slowly as he could. There were shadows here, and some cover, and he knew that Hohenheim still had to be in the cover of the doorway. If Hohenheim remembered that… His instincts warned him again, pulling him entirely around the loading arm as two more shots rang out in air that was just starting to return to the landing bay.
Thank engineering for nicely redundant and independent support, at least. "Bloody hell!" "Yes, I remembered to try infrared sensing this time, Mr. Fitzgerald. A shame I didn't remember that earlier, but most of us are used to visible light. You stand out quite nicely. I can make out your glow even behind that support." I'll bet you can.
Fitzgerald could see the shadowed infrared glow of General Hohenheim too, if he cared to risk a glimpse at the door. It was nice that sensor suites cut both ways. "And so we'll just be sittin' here for the next, what, day or so until we meet the friendly face of Io?"
"Actually, Mr. Fitzgerald, I intend to leave that contemplation for you. I have another engagement." Dumbfounded, Richard heard the door open and then close. Understanding came immediately. That clever bastard. Hohenheim had realized the same thing that Fitzgerald just had. Fitzgerald had to get past the general, but the general didn't have to get past Fitzgerald. If he succeeded, of course, Hohenheim would have to take back that lovely melodramatic farewell, but Fitzgerald supposed he'd get over it. The general could always console himself with the fact that he'd left Fitzgerald here to die. On the other hand, the new situation meant that Hohenheim was also no longer an immediate threat. Richard dove straight down for the doorway, bringing boots finally back into solid floor contact and hitting the control. The door, however, did not open. He had rather expected that, of course; the general didn't want him leaving. But Hohenheim probably hadn't known exactly what Fitzgerald still had on him at the end. The one charge he'd selected before might not be quite enough, but adding a second one should do just fine. He set the timer and moved well away to the side. A moment later the shaped charges gave a dullbang, and the door blew to pieces. He restrained himself from going right through. Time was of the essence, but he didn't put it past Hohenheim to have waited for a few minutes to see if, in fact, Fitzgerald did have a quick solution to the locked door. The general might be sitting in ambush outside. Richard sidled up to the area and took out a small mirror-amazing how useful a polished piece of metal could be. He scanned the area carefully in the reflective surface and caught a faint shape in one of the now-black monitor screens on the wall.
Hohenheim was there, all right. And obviously he knew Fitzgerald was coming out. Bloody hell. However, the general didn't know exactlywhen his opponent would come out, nor how. Hohenheim would have to react, while Fitzgerald would be acting. The problem was that there was a lot of straight corridor outside of this door. He could take a dive that would force a hand-to-hand confrontation if Hohenheim didn't get him instantly, but he remembered the general's unexpected strength. While Fitzgerald was not afraid of facing just about anyone in amano-a-mano confrontation, Hohenheim was in surprisingly good condition for a commanding officer, and he outweighed Richard by many kilograms. It was always possible that he'd gotten some training in hand-to-hand combat from his special forces friends, too. Quality generally outweighed quantity, but, as others often said, quantity had a quality all its own. While he was undoubtedly a more skilled fighter than the general, Richard saw no reason to test whether or not his extra skill would outweigh the general's superior size and possibly superior strength. But hedid know where Hohenheim was. Which meant…
Seconds later, a body dove headlong from the doorway. General Hohenheim fired twice, hitting both times, before it registered on him that the body had been flying oddly limp to begin with. But by that point, Richard Fitzgerald had already gotten a good bead on him from his position at the bottom of the doorway and shot twice. The angle was bad, though. Richard would have preferred to do this standing, but that would have exposed him too much. The two bullets ricocheted from the carbonan suit, one very narrowly missing the faceplate, sending the general tumbling. That did, however, give Richard the opening to get out of the launch bay. He continued to shield his escape by shoving Feeney's body down after the general. Another bullet whined by him, and another, but by then he was to the end, and through! His security override code locked down that door. For the moment, he was safe. And, now that he thought about it, the situation was better than he'd realized. General Hohenheim had guessed Fitzgerald had remembered the location of the others, figured out his plan, and had set himself up on theother side of the corridor from the direction that led there, figuring that Fitzgerald would be heading in that direction and thus leave his back exposed. So, he'd outthought himself. Now Richard was already heading in the direction he needed to be, and Hohenheim was the one who'd have to take the long way around-if there was a safe way around at all. TheOdin was still partially intact, but the combination of damage and the fact that nothing had been done to neutralize her spin before the disaster meant that she was still turning. With pieces now no longer connected as they were supposed to be, the giant ship was wobbling on her axis, stressing components in ways they were never meant to be stressed. Things were getting worse, and Richard had to move quickly. By now, Eberhart would have gotten his craft under control, and he only had to make one stop. Richard swiftly made his way along the corridors. He knew what route the general must have taken; there were only so many ways to get where they were going.
Momentarily there was a flicker of connectivity, and he was able to get a partial outside report. There'sMunin! Not where she's going yet.
Good, good. I have more than enough time. He opened the next door, leading to the radial corridor up to the hab ring-and his radiation alarm screamed. Reflexively, he slapped the door shut and backed off.
Shield failed… That would cover the whole radial. His suit would reduce the dosages, but at this range from Jupiter and Io, even insideOdin, he wouldn't have that much time. Normal radiation flux inside this region was over thirty-six hundred rem per day, and right now the sensors had been measuring doses of almost twice that, which meant that half an hour's exposure would start making you sick, and a few hours would make you a dead man. He'd gotten a quick glimpse up the radial before the door closed, and there was no possibility of making it up in time. It would be a thousand-foot crawl through a tangle of wreckage which could shift and fall at any time. But there might still be a way. There were a couple of maintenance access shafts that provided a shortcut through parts of the main hull, and one of them was just a little ways back the way he had come. He could move over to the next section through that, and then go up to the hab ring where Eberhart would be trying to dock. He backtracked, found the access tunnel, and wormed his way in. It was a tight fit in the suit, but he could make it. Another hundred feet and he'd be clear. Even as he thought that, theOdin quivered again, and something snap-crunched behind him. Simultaneously, radiation alarms began and an automatic cutoff door slammed down only twenty feet behind. Still, his suit would protect him easily for the next hundred feet, and once he was past this section the other would, hopefully, be shielded. It was darker up ahead than he'd expected; he should be seeing light coming from the central corridor. He had to hurry. The dosage meter was slowly moving. That wasn't an immediate concern yet-wouldn't be for at least a half hour, actually-but he didn't like any exposure. Richard didn't fancy coming down with cancer eventually, assuming he survived all this. As he continued, it became clear that something was blocking his path. He shone a suit light at it, and realized it was a body. He felt his lips stretch in an ironic smile as he realized it wasn't justa body. It was a body he had put there himself-that of the technician, Erin Peltier. Peltier hadn't been dead when he left her, but she was dead now. That much was obvious by the fact that there was no air left in this section of the tunnel. Something, probably one or more of the armor-piercing pellets, had punched a hole through a nearby area of the hull. Too bad for the technician, of course.
Fitzgerald hadn't intended to kill her-but it was of no major concern to him, either. Whatwas of concern was that her body blocked his exit and, in vacuum, had swelled and securely wedged itself into the tunnel. Since she was already dead, however, there was no need for delicacy. A quick set of efforts showed that he couldn't budge her by hand, especially without any weight or leverage. But he still had what was left of Johnson's kit. Explosives… Richard sometimes thought there were no problems theycouldn't solve. He squirmed backward and made sure he covered his head as well as possible. The detonation slammed into him through the floor and walls. Doing his best not to dwell upon the nature of the mess all over, he was able to shove past the remains and come out into the central corridor, back behind still-operating shielding. Only to find that another sealed door was cutting off access to the central corridor, one that had been concealed by the dead woman's body. Bloody brilliant. Of course there would be. No decompression of the central corridor would go unsealed.
He was running out of explosives, but there should be enough for this last door. He'd just have to hope there were no more obstructions. He felt, rather than heard, cracking and groaning noises from around him.
Whole bloody ship's coming apart soon. A blast shook the maintenance corridor, and he started moving forward immediately. Air whistled past him now, and abruptly everything spun around him, accompanied by screeching, shattering sounds in the thin atmosphere. Weakened by impacts, stress, and two successive nearby explosions, a section of the main hull suddenly blew out under the return of air pressure.
Richard Fitzgerald was hurled outward fromOdin, scrabbling desperately to catch hold of a cable, a support stay, anything.
Something loomed up and struck him a heavy blow; he blacked out.
When he came to, he realized he was falling, falling through space. The jets on his suit managed to stabilize his spin, and he looked around. Jupiter loomed over him, enormous, its roiling surface filled with storms beyond imagining. In one direction, receding slowly but surely into the distance, layOdin. Ahead, a small dot of yellow-orange waited. That would be Io. He couldn't see it growing slowly yet, but he knew it would soon enough. Richard quickly checked the fuel remaining for his jets. Not enough to return to theOdin. Not nearly enough. He sighed. It was over, then. All hope, all struggle, all effort. All life. Done, over, finished. He was a dead man. So be it. Oddly, perhaps, he had not lost any of his equanimity. He'd been a lot more depressed on his fortieth birthday, actually. Besides, there was still time for sightseeing. He'd visited the Grand Canyon once and found himself getting bored after gazing upon the magnificent vista for an hour or so. He wondered how long Jupiter would keep its interest.
Considerably longer, as it turned out. The Grand Canyon had been created by the infinitesimally slow forces of erosion. The thing was grand, certainly, but also static. You saw one part of it, for a while, and you'd pretty much seen it all. Jupiter, though… The giant planet wasalive. Richard found it fascinating, the way those immense storms worked their way across the face of the great globe.