Boundary 2: Threshold (7 page)

"Yeah. Cosmological importance for you guys, I guess."

"Oh, there's all kinds of great data we're getting, and if we can get enough out of that oversized DVD and the other stuff we've found, we could learn a hell of a lot. But I was going over a bunch of data on the asteroids—finally got it separated out and decoded with our in-house programs a little while ago—and I found this."

Larry tied his personal VRD to A.J.'s with a standard signal. A.J. saw an image come up of a generally spherical object, sketchily drawn as the Bemmies often represented things. At first he didn't see what had excited Larry, but then he saw a small ripple-shaped line of Bemmius-style writing. Studying it he had a feeling he'd seen some of the symbols before. "What is it?"

"Don't recognize it? From the lecture a few months back with Jane and Rich? No?"

"Missed that one. Glanced over the notes. Anyway, get to it."

"Well, when Jane and Rich were analyzing the data on the images they could match between the Phobos records and those on the Rosetta Disc, they noticed repeated symbols on the labels for the Phobos base and for the one here. Long story short, they think—and so do I—that those symbols stand for
colony
or
base
."

"A third . . ." A.J. stared at the image, almost in awe. "Damn, they were busy. Um, there's an awful lot of asteroids, though. How are we going to figure out which one?"

Larry grinned. "They do show a few surface features on here. And I know it's pretty spherical, which not very many are. And I know our friends were very much into water. A quick comparison, and
voila
! Ceres, no doubt about it." An image of a dusty-gray scarred marble appeared next to the sketchy image.

"Water and
Ceres
?"

"Jesus Christ, A.J., you have so many blind spots it's amazing you can find your way to the can without some of your damn sensors to guide you. Yes, water and Ceres. We were pretty sure even thirty years ago that a really large proportion of Ceres was water ice—maybe more than all fresh water on Earth combined."

"Can you tell where on Ceres this base is supposed to be?" A.J. said, ignoring the (to him) irrelevant shot at his lack of knowledge outside of his specialty. "Compared to a planet, Ceres is puny. But after working on Phobos for months, I've gained a lot of respect for how much even puny space rocks can hide. And Ceres is far bigger than Phobos."

"If we assume the markings are accurate, yeah. So far all the Bemmie maps we've seen have matched up pretty well."

"Okay. I don't remember, but do our resident linguistic geniuses have anything to say about whether the labels discriminate between the owners of the bases? That is, can we tell if the base belonged to the Bemmie group that ran Phobos, or the one that had the base here?"

"Hmm. I dunno. Lemme check." A few minutes later Larry and A.J. were studying the still-sparse translation archives. "Yeah, though it's pretty tentative. If I'm reading this right, looks like the Ceres base belonged to the other side, the Phobos gang."

"Okay," A.J. said. "Have we got decent imagery of that side of Ceres?"

"Not tremendously good. Two probes were sent out that way, but there were a couple of accidents that screwed the chances of getting good Ceres images. We've got better pics of Vesta. Still, here's the best of what we've got."

"Good enough . . . excellent. Double excellent!"

"What's the deal?"

"Well, except for the Vault—which seems to me to be the kind of thing you'd only do once, in one location, given the extreme effort involved—the guys down here on Mars cleaned up everything on the base before they left. They obviously won the conflict, or at least didn't lose and chased off the others. They had the time to build and fill the Vault, seal it off, and do cleanup. Which would mean that their other bases in the solar system, I'd expect, will either have been smeared by the Phobos group, or they've been carefully and completely evacuated.

"But they
didn't
clean out Phobos. And that means that I'd bet that if we find a base from those guys even partly intact, like Phobos, it should have lots of goodies inside. And judging by these images"—he pointed to the critical area of Ceres—"no one nailed this base with an impactor or mega-huge bomb. So double good—the base is probably intact, and if so, it's probably not cleaned out."

"
Sweeeeeet,
" Larry said appreciatively.

"Yep. Now we have to tell Glenn and get together with Nick once we've figured out the approach." A.J. was practically bouncing in his chair with excitement. "Time to get that cooperative agreement working for
all
of us."

Madeline watched Glendale pace the Phobos Station room with slow one-third g steps. She shook her head slightly, noting that his temples looked more gray than they had just a year before, when he first arrived. He seemed unaware of her presence, which was possible, as she hadn't made much noise entering. Finally he turned. "I'm terribly sorry, Madeline. Woolgathering again."

"Woolgathering," she repeated with a soft laugh. "Director Hughes used to use that sometimes, too. Do you know, I never actually looked up where that term came from."

"Really?" Nicholas smiled, looking momentarily younger. "Then allow me to enlarge your education. In the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, the poorer folk who owned no sheep would search the areas where the sheep belonging to others roamed. Some of the fleece would come off naturally—get snagged in briars or bushes, that sort of thing—and they would gather this wool, eventually hoping to have enough to be worth weaving or selling. As this took a lot of time and effort wandering about, the term 'wool-gathering' soon came to mean occupying oneself in wandering unproductively at apparent random—especially within one's own head."

"You are a well of knowledge, sir."

"A sink of trivia, mostly, I'm afraid." His gaze wandered back toward the black-starred window.

"You sent for me, sir?" she said quietly.

"Yes. They're off, now. I suppose . . . I want advice. Or another reassurance. Is this the right thing to do?"

Madeline knew exactly where his concern came from. "Director, whether it really
was
the right thing to do we won't know until a long time from now. But I know the reasons
you
would be sending out this mission so fast, before anyone else gets wind of it. And I agree with them."

"Should you be going along?"

Maddie took a moment to consider that. "I honestly don't know. I suppose it depends on if anyone else decides they want to play hardball, and if they can get there in time. But it's not really worth it, given that we can track anyone in the system fairly easily. Stealth technology is pretty damn tough to manage in space. I don't think it's an issue that way, sir. So offhand I don't see a good reason I should go, especially since I'd really hate to go trucking off into the outer solar system without Joe. I'll do it if I have to, of course, but it's not my preference."

"Naturally not, and I'd try never to ask that." He made a visible effort to relax. "Besides, Bruce and Larry assure me that none of the other ships in the system, except maybe
Nike
, are in any position to compete, and if they don't react immediately,
Nobel
will get there first."

She nodded. "And the real thing to worry about is the shortage of equipment downstairs."

"Ah, not for long, however." Nicholas gave her a more natural grin. "As we are to receive a deputation from our Indian allies via
Nike
, I had already arranged for some of
Nike
's cargo space to include additional equipment. I admit I had originally intended that equipment to be used for expansion in our own interests, but it will serve just as well in this situation. What do you think the United States will do when they figure it out?"

Madeline shook her head. "They won't be happy. In fact, I'm reminding you to make it an absolute priority—once they've found the base on Ceres and gotten the essentials set up—that Helen and the others send
Nobel
back right away, unless we can arrange something else with one of the other space-capable nations. And I don't think
they
will be happy with us, either, so I wouldn't bet on getting any other arrangements. We'll need
Nobel
to do at least one supply run for us if the other countries decide to get grouchy with the Institute." She gave a predatory smile. "But, if you'll pardon me for saying so, sir, I'd just love to see their faces when they figure it all out."

Oberth Maneuver, n: a method of drastically changing a spacecraft's velocity by performing a rocket burn within a gravity well near perigee. The spacecraft gains or loses velocity according to the equation:

ΔV
_total
²
= (V
_esc
+ ΔV
_burn
)
²
-V
_esc
²

Where ΔV
_total
is the total change in velocity, V
_esc
is the escape velocity from the gravity well at perigee, and ΔV
_burn
is the change in velocity resulting directly from the rocket burn. The Oberth Maneuver can thus be used to greatly increase or decrease the velocity of a spacecraft.

"I don't know about you blokes," Bruce said, a subdued tone in his voice, "but 'asteroid' don't seem to do this bastard justice."

The vast gray bulk of Ceres covered most of the forward viewing area, a titanic object that showed none of the fuzziness of living planets like Earth and Mars, but also none of the human-scale, comprehensible irregularity of Phobos. Instead, it had the cold, crater-scarred sphericity of the Moon, and with nothing else around to compare it to, seemed to be at least as large, especially in the light of the clearly-shrunken Sun, more than two hundred and fifty million miles away. Helen thought it looked less hostile than Phobos had on first approach, but a lot more lonely.

Jake Ivey, the mission archaeologist, shrugged. "It's still nothing even compared to the Moon, let alone any decent planet." This was a typically Jake comment; he had a focus on his specialty that was like A.J.'s with respect to sensors. Rumor had it that absolutely nothing impressed him unless it was in a properly labeled dig site, which Ceres obviously was not, at least not yet.

"Poor Ceres," Larry Conley said. "Always the little guy. Every debate on what should and shouldn't be a planet has always kept just on this side of letting Ceres into the club. He's a little shy of a thousand kilometers wide, so people always proposed that as the cutoff."

"Right now I wouldn't be inclined to argue with Ceres," Jackie said. "It's got an actual gravity well that we're going to feel, not like Phobos, where we could shuttle back and forth without hardly noticing the cost."

Jake brightened. "But that's
good
. Phobos had so little that you couldn't rely on anything having remained in place for you to study properly. Ceres will have kept things where they belong. Hopefully they had disposal areas, and there will be remnants of their entire range of activity."

Helen nodded. Even more in some ways than her own paleontology, archaeology relied on the forensic approach of examining objects in context; said context was hard to verify in microgravity. "Good in some ways, bad in others, Jake. As you probably know."

She glanced over at the others. "What's escape velocity from Ceres?" She knew she'd heard the answer before, but it hadn't really registered.

A.J., predictably, answered first. "About half a kilometer per second. Not much compared to Earth or Mars, but definitely not irrelevant like Phobos. Unless and until we can get things set up down there to produce us extra fuel—probably from the water, if there is any—we'll have to be very, very careful about how many trips we make."

"I could try to land 'er," Bruce said, grinning.

A.J. shuddered. "No, thanks. I know you and I set up that sim, just to see what would happen, but there's many things that could go wrong. And
did
go wrong in the sims, early on."

"Are you serious?" Larry demanded, staring across the bridge of
Nobel
at A.J. and Bruce. The bridge, unlike
Nike'
s photo-op–ready installation, was just a control room with viewscreens, safely buried in the middle of
Nobel'
s blocky central body. "You could land
Nobel
on Ceres?"

The Australian captain of
Nobel
flashed Larry a devilish grin. "Well, like A.J. says, mate, too many things could go wrong to risk it if we don't have to, but the sims show that this old girl could take the strain. She's built for accel up to a quarter-g under the right conditions, remember, and Ceresian—"

"Cererian or Cererine, if you please," the astrophysicist corrected pedantically.

"Cerelian, whatever, mate, gravity is only about a ninth of that—about one thirty-sixth Earth's. But the landing would be dicey, I admit, so I'm not quite so keen to try it as I might have sounded. Nice to know we could if we had to, though."

"I suppose," Helen agreed. The idea that the fourteen-hundred-foot ship could land and take off from the miniature planet below was, indeed, oddly comforting, despite the obvious risks in ever actually trying it. "So are we go for scouting the target area?" Helen asked.

"By remote at first, as usual," A.J. said breezily. "Once more, you will all be hanging on my every word, awaiting my blessing on your perilous enterprises."

"Hey, Mr. Ego, we're not a whole A.U. away this time," Larry pointed out. "At this distance I can do an awful lot with the sensors on
Nobel
."

"Which I designed, programmed, tested, and helped install. OW!"

The "OW" came as a result of Helen kicking A.J.'s shin. "You are getting too old to act the
enfant terrible
, A.J., and try to one-up everyone. And that wouldn't have hurt if you'd been wearing your suit."

A.J. tried to look loftily defiant and only succeeded in looking like a three-year-old being scolded. He opened his mouth to say something but reconsidered under Helen's watchful eye.