Portal-eARC (12 page)

But they didn’t cause him to tip, which was the important thing. “
Munin
now well clear. Engaging auto-launch sequence.”

As with most vehicles,
Munin
could pilot herself most of the time, given the right circumstances and assuming nothing too terribly unusual; the last few flights had, of course, been rather decidedly unusual. A takeoff, however, even from a low-gravity moon with rough ice terrain, was something for which
Munin
had been designed. The onboard computer surveyed the area with LIDAR, millimeter-wave scanners, and optical imagery and came to a decision. There was a staccato burst of activity from the forward nose jets, and
Munin
reared up on her tail—and then with a silent roar of flame blasted up into the black sky of Europa.

Horst grunted as almost two gravities of acceleration crushed down on him; it had been almost two months now since they had landed, and in that time he’d gotten far too used to Europa’s puny grip.

The others felt worse. “
Jesus!
” came the strained voice of Jackie, and Anthony LaPointe croaked, “Horst…is
Munin
running away? This acceleration, it is…far more than you said!”

“I hate to tell you, Andy,” he said, trying to force a relaxed tone into his voice, “but that is only one point eight gravities.”

LaPointe said something obscene in French. “We are in worse shape than I thought.”

“Which is precisely why we must cannibalize parts of the drive spine coils to make a controllable centrifuge,” Petra said, her voice labored but clear. “Drugs may or may not work, but hours spent in heavy acceleration will definitely help. Brett and Joe should have the design perfected by the time we return.”

Intellectually, Horst approved of this plan immensely. There was, however, a small part of him that was already complaining.

Real gravity was
tiring
.

* * *

“
Mon Dieu.
” Anthony said softly.

Though he’d have phrased it in German, Horst would have said the same thing.

The wreck of
Odin
loomed large in
Munin
’s forward port. They had of course seen the pictures A.J. had been able to capture…but that was, somehow, completely different from seeing it in person.

The proud, sleek ship, the vessel that had stretched nearly one and a half kilometers from end to end, longest if not most massive vessel every constructed, was no more. Even the tattered, shrapnel-riddled wreck they had last seen when leaving to rendezvous with
Nebula
Storm
was gone.

In its place, a truncated, sharp-edged hulk drifted through space, now silhouetted against the half-illuminated Jupiter.Three long spines jutted from
Odin
, and for a moment she looked like an alien, long-taloned hand grasping at the largest planet to claw it from the sky. The fourth drive spine was of course gone, blown off at the base—almost in the position of a thumb, a ragged, torn thumb.

Odin
looked dead, a tomb for those sacrificed to Fitzgerald’s calm insanity. But there was a living voice coming from that metal mausoleum:

“
Munin
, this is
Odin
,” the deep voice of General Hohenheim said, filling the cabin with its confident warmth, dispelling the momentary feeling of gloom. “I now have you by visual. Horst, the number three airlock is clear. I have activated its beacon and it should be visible to you.”

He studied the screen. “I do not see—wait.”

A small, steadily blinking green light was coming slowly into view as they approached. Zooming in, he could see that it was indeed the beacon light for Airlock Three. “Visual of target acquired, General. Proceeding to docking maneuvers.” He activated the autopilot program, painted the target airlock with a target laser, verified target acquisition. “Transferring control to autopilot…now.”

The little autopilot knew what it was doing.
Munin
slowed and approached the airlock with precise care, lining up, matching vectors, even rotating
Munin
to make sure that the airlock exit matched in orientation with the internal corridor layout as stored in
Munin
’s memory bank. There was a rustling
shifting
sound, followed by clear metallic vibrations transmitted through the hull. “Contact…locked. Telltales show airlock pressurizing.”

He stood, his heart pounding surprisingly fast, and headed for the airlock; Anthony was right behind him, magnetic adhesive boots thudding clearly on the deck.

Munin
’s airlock door opened easily, pressure now equalized. He stepped in, closed the door, and reached out, spun the wheel to unlock
Odin
’s side.

There was hardly a whisper of air, showing that the equalization held for both vessels, and he heard—through his suit, in the air!—the door behind him open again. He removed his helmet; the smell was sharp, a lingering faint but clear burning odor that tried to send little spikes of worry through him. A waft of air from behind brought suddenly-clear other scents, and he wondered just how badly
they
stank from the point of view of another, presumably neutral, party.

Enough musing
, he told himself, and pushed the
Odin
’s door open.

Standing on the other side, not three meters away, was General Alberich Hohenheim. He was drawn to his full height, in what looked like a carefully—if not perfectly—repaired dress uniform, rows of ribbons and medals showing bright colors in their lights, wide shoulders set straight, one hand up in a salute to just above the bright golden eyes. “Welcome back aboard, Mr. Eberhardt.”

For a moment he was back in the
Munin
’s landing bay, watching the General stand proudly, alone, sending them off to live so that he could deal with the man who had killed his ship. He returned the salute, but heard his voice waver. “Thank you, General…”

Anthony LaPointe managed to stand next to him and return the salute as well. “We…did what you asked, sir.”

The simple words broke the general’s poise and he suddenly strode forward, caught Horst and Anthony in a double-armed bearhug. “I…thank you both, and it…it is
very
good to see you again,” Hohenheim said. “To see you
all
again,” he continued, looking past them into the airlock where Petra, Dan, and Mia were now waiting, and his smile was both bright and painful, the look of a man who had almost lost hope, only to find it standing before him. Horst realized that only now, with living, breathing survivors of his crew before him, could General Hohenheim truly believe that they were not all dead; only now was it
real
.

And as the General pulled away, straightening his uniform, Horst saw a sparkle in the air nearby.

In space, both tears
and
dreams could fly.

Chapter 15.

“This,” Helen said to apparently empty air, “is possibly the most boring thing I have ever done.”

“Coming from someone who used to think spending weeks scraping away a centimeter of rock from some dead bone using dental tools was
fun
, that’s a hell of a statement,” A.J. said.

“It’s nothing but the truth. At least with those rocks you got to
do
something. With this,” she gestured to the images in front of her, “all I can do is stare at a lot of frozen nothing!”

The screen before her—several screens, actually—showed various angles of the same thing, specifically, the ice through which
Athena
was steadily, implacably, and very slowly moving. Half a meter an hour, a hair under twenty inches, or about an inch every three minutes.

“Sorry, Doc, but them’s the breaks,” her husband said in his usual not-very-sympathetic tones. “Everyone gets a turn at the boredom, and we’re back to your turn.”

“I’d
think
this would be something the machine could do
itself
.”

“Yeah, you’d think that. And according to Horst and Mia, it
would
have, probably, except that the prep and programming for specific circumstances was supposed to happen on-site. Turns out no one actually finished the smart-video suite that was tailored for this rig—or else someone
really
screwed up and failed to load it, but I don’t really believe that.”

“Can’t
you
write it? You’re the super-sensor expert, right?” Helen was aware that she was probably sounding a bit plaintive, but—despite the probably literally groundbreaking science that
Athena
was doing—she really would rather be doing just about anything else. Unfortunately, the emergency cutoff and other direct controls were integrated into
Athena
’s control station and no one had felt like trying to tamper with the design. Thus, someone had to sit right where she was during the entire time the melt-probe was active.

A.J.’s still-handsome, only slightly lined features popped up in a corner of her VRD. He grinned apologetically and shrugged. “
Could
I? Sure. Almost certainly, especially with Horst and Mia to back me. But that kind of work—which, for our current circumstances, would be absolutely mission-critical stuff, no failures of any kind allowed—takes a lot of time and patience. And a LOT of checking. Even with our current software tools, that’s weeks, at least. And there’s so many more things to do here. So everyone gets shifts watching, because we’re
already
good at picking out patterns.” He glanced sideways, obviously looking at a feed of the same video. “And that wouldn’t have been an easy analysis problem, let me tell you.”

“No,” she had to concede, “it wouldn’t.” Even naïve as she was with respect to the precise difficulties in smart image processing, she needed no explanation of this problem. The ice of Europa—at least, in this area—was filled with varying concentrations of cloudy colored materials ranging from cream to pale orange to dark brown, even black. A lot of those were from various organic molecules, which was certainly exciting and had Larry and Anthony in a constant running debate, trying to make sense of things; from Ceres and Ares Base on Mars, there were a large number of other scientists hanging on every transmission—especially, of course, the xenobiologists. Helen couldn’t really restrain some smugness at being the only person even vaguely in that field who was actually on-site.

But all those impurities in the ice meant that it was often the case that even with bright lighting you couldn’t see more than a few centimeters into the ice—and there had been at least three cases where the observing party had spotted something just before Athena melted through. The last time it had been a rock—probably an old meteorite fragment—which could have seriously clogged an intake pump if
Athena
had melted the ice away. They’d had to pull the probe up, lower someone—Joe, to be exact—down, and pull the stone manually. This wouldn’t have been necessary if all of Athena’s components had worked perfectly, but the accessories that were intended to remove and eject such obstacles stubbornly refused to deploy.

Up until an hour or so ago,
Athena
had been passing through an area of relatively clear ice, visibility through it up to half a meter. But over the last hour or so, reddish-brown haze had become ever closer, and now almost entirely blocked
Athena
’s vision.

Which meant, naturally, that she didn’t dare take her eyes away from the screen for more than a minute or so at a time. That meant that idle chatter would be her only real relief.

Fortunately, wireless connections meant never having to be silent. “I know you’re refining the wide-area sensor network. What are Joe and Maddie up to?”

“Surveying the ice around us for the flattest, hardest stuff we can get for the centrifuge,” Brett answered, interrupting A.J.’s attempt to reply. “I’ve pretty much got the design modeled and we’re fairly confident we can drive it whenever
Munin
’s down here to give the power. But we can’t make it terribly huge—just don’t have the resources—so it’s going to have to spin pretty fast and hard, and the last thing we need is it to come loose and start walking like a badly-balanced washing machine.”

“Well,” Joe said, his own image popping up on the other side of her VRD, “we’re going to try to counterbalance whenever someone’s in for a run. Not hard to put opposing mass in the other chamber, at least I’d hope not.” The blue-brown jagged mass of the nearby ridge showed in the background as he turned, holding some device pressed to the ice below him.

“No, not hard,” Brett conceded, “but not hard to forget, either. A.J., we’ll have to program in some failsafes.”

“Already thinking about it, along with all the other ’leventy-dozen things on my plate. Not that you guys don’t have all that same amount of stuff to worry about either,” he added quickly. She couldn’t repress a small grin. Her darling A.J. was still learning how not to casually insult people.

“And always one more than we thought,” Maddie’s voice said. “For example, we completely neglected to realize how important it was to figure out some substitute for gravity because we were so busy, and then it was two months gone by. Dr. Masters—Petra—reports that even the short burn to make Europa escape almost completely exhausted our crew. So now we work on the centrifuge and slow down other work.”

“Well, it’s not like we can really take the nozzle off right away,” Joe said. “Until
Odin
is in a lot better shape, we won’t even be able to
install
it. So that job has to wait. And…hold on…” he stopped, adjusted the device—a sort of geosounder, she thought—and put it down again. “And a lot of the work needs more people. Who’re doing stuff on
Odin
.”

“Is…is this going to affect our timetable?” Helen didn’t want to sound
afraid
, and she wasn’t, exactly…but there
were
some completely immovable limits, most especially food, on their survival, which meant that anything that significantly delayed them was eating—literally—into their time margin.

“Some,” Madeline answered cheerily, “but not terribly much. Don’t worry, Helen. We’ve got a lot of contingency plans. We’ll get home one way or another, I promise you.”

“Thanks, Maddie.”

She glanced back at the screen. Now there was additional darkening in the center screen.
Wonderful. A thicker layer? Visibility is almost down to one centimeter.
“A.J., what do we do if I get to a patch that I can’t even see a centimeter in? That’s about one minute of decision time.”