Portal-eARC (2 page)

Unfortunately, only minutes before
Odin
and
Nebula Storm
had passed out of sight around Jupiter, WASTA’s control system had crashed due to an adaptive virus infection which had taken a day and a half to eradicate, and another twelve hours had elapsed before the multiple elements of WASTA could be realigned properly; even a very small element of uncertainty in the positioning of the several dozen WASTA telescopes would eliminate their tremendous light-gathering capacity and resolution.

So instead of pictures of the ships down to less than a meter resolution—almost enough to read the
Odin
’s name on the hull—we lost them entirely for a few days.
Odin
’s a shattered hulk,front half severed from the rear and most of two of its drive spines shattered, and
Nebula Storm
…is nowhere to be seen.

Even radar had been misled, because whatever had happened, the two vessels had completely changed their courses. Instead of charging forward out of the Jovian system, both had for reasons unknown
decelerated
and emerged—or
not
emerged, he corrected himself, since
Nebula Storm
was nowhere to be seen—on utterly unexpected vectors. It had actually fallen to the Infra-Red Survey Telescope (IRST) to detect the wreckage of
Odin
and allow the others to home in on it and try to start making sense of the disaster.

As no trace of
Nebula Storm
had yet been found, the theory that made the most sense—a terrible sort of sense—was that she had for some reason slowed enough to drop orbit, scrape the atmosphere of Jupiter itself and be drawn ever closer until the friction melted even her alien hull and Jove pulled the remains down into the crushing blackness of its deadly atmosphere.

Nicholas shook his head and felt the ache not just in his head but in his joints, seeming buried in his bones.
I’m getting too old for this,
he thought.

It dawned on him with a faint chill that, in fact, he
was
getting old.
I’m past seventy now. It’s been nearly fifteen years since Helen, Joe, and Jackie first dug up Bemmie. Ten years since I stood on Earth and watched
Nike
blaze its way out of orbit. Almost five years since we discovered a base on Ceres.

These days seventy wasn’t
that
old, true. When he was born—when personal computers were new and the web not yet worldwide—seventy was nearing the end of a man’s life. People lived longer now and the last great medical advances had pushed active, healthy lifestyles even farther, so that he was physically more as his father had been at forty or forty-five.

But right now he felt more like twice that.

He sat back down and called up the almost blank document which was supposed to be a press release—one he simply couldn’t put off much longer. Oh, there’d been a quick one expressing everyone’s shock and loss, with some hope that perhaps
Nebula Storm
would be located soon—but this was different. He would have to decide what direction he would take, both in public and behind closed doors, in placing—or not placing—blame for the disaster.

The European Union itself certainly wouldn’t have resorted to such tactics…but the European Space Development Corporation might have; according to Walter Keldering, who was still the United States’ representative here at Phobos Base, the ESDC’s Chief of Operations Osterhoudt had some rather dark-gray, not to say black, operations history.

“Not
directly,
of course,” Keldering had said, some weeks ago, “but he’s connected. We’re sure of it back at the Agency. And with the political pressure and having seen the benefits coming out of the discovered bases thus far…no, I wouldn’t put it past him.” He’d made a very expressive face. “And picking—rather forcefully—
FITZGERALD
for this? Sorry, Nick, but that pretty much screams ‘dirty tricks.’”

He’d appreciated Keldering’s honest input—the more so since he could
get
it now. The President who’d tried to screw Madeline over and, when Maddie foiled him by resigning and signing on with the IRI, sent out Keldering as a replacement was gone now, his final term marred by a completely home-grown scandal that put the opposite party in power. The new President was much more interested in cooperation, the more since he could then rely on others to do a lot of the work while he showed a focus on domestic issues. With those pressures gone, Agent Walter Keldering had become more an associate who simply had to be treated with respect and the same caution over proprietary information as any other, not a specifically-assigned spy.

He sighed again and started dictating. “The IRI apologizes for the delay in this announcement, but we have all been in a state of shock, and mourning, ever since we received the news that the
Nebula Storm
and the
Odin
had both been lost or suffered terrible damage, presumably resulting in the deaths of all aboard. We have lost friends and even family on those vessels, as have those in the European Union, and we extend our own sympathies to our brethren in the EU over this terrible accident…”

This was, naturally, the obvious and wisest course, to say nothing to anyone. Treat it as a terrible tragedy whose cause would likely never be known and perhaps arrange a true joint mission to Enceladus with the EU.

But he had to stop the dictation again, because the very idea made his gut rebel.
They killed my friends. How can I allow anyone to get away with that?

He knew he couldn’t really live with himself if he did. That was the reason Madeline, Helen, A.J., Joe, and even Jackie and Larry had gone out on that half-mad venture, chasing down the
Odin
in a vessel sixty-five million years old: because that kind of action, that sort of robber-baron treachery, could not be tolerated,
must
not be tolerated in the greater reaches of the solar system.

But at the same time he couldn’t afford to lose the support of the European Union.

I really should have stayed a paleontologist. I had no trouble dealing with the petty politics
there
.

A light blinked on his desktop and he touched the icon.
A message from Ceres. Encrypted.

Perhaps they’d found some evidence, at least. If he could
prove
what had happened on Ceres…

He was startled to find it was
heavily
encrypted. The standard decrypt key in the desktop wasn’t sufficient; it was demanding a personal one-time key and biometric verification.
It must be something important.

The screen lit up and his heart seemed to stop for a moment.

Then it gave a great leap and he felt a laugh of joy and relief rising as the golden-haired (if somewhat bedraggled) woman on the screen smiled at him.

“Hello, Nicholas,” said Madeline Fathom. “I’m using the secure Ceres relay for this because I’m
sure
you’ll want to decide what to do—and what you want
us
to do—very much in private.

“A warm hello from all of us here on sunny Europa.”

Chapter 2.

“Pull—
gently
, dammit, smoothly, don’t jerk!” A.J. couldn’t keep the tense exasperation from his voice as he barely reacted in time, commanding one of the three autonomous “Locust” drones,
Hopper,
to ease the tension on the all-too-vital cable.

“No need to
snap
,” Dan Ritter said mildly. The dark-haired former environmental systems tech for
Odin
spoke English with only a trace of his native Germanic accent.

“Sorry. But
snap
is exactly what we’ll get if we’re not careful. We’re crossing a hundred meters of ice frozen to minus one-seventy, and the cable’s dropped a LOT of flexibility.”

A.J. felt his hair sticking to his forehead, barely kept himself from trying—futilely—to wipe sweat away.
That doesn’t work when you’re in a spacesuit.

He stood between two spaceships—the
Nebula Storm
, half-embedded in a huge ridge of ice that had stopped her final slide after Madeline Fathom had, impossibly, managed to land her on Europa—and the
Munin
, one of
Odin
’s two explorer/lander vehicles, which had joined them after Richard Fitzgerald’s ill-fated mutiny led to
Nebula Storm
’s main reactor being shut down and
Odin
being crippled and most of her crew dead.
Six people on
Nebula Storm
, six on
Munin
; the only survivors of this whole disaster.

Of course, on
his
side that meant that
Nebula Storm
hadn’t lost anyone (yet), while the survivors of
Odin
had lost a hundred of their friends and colleagues.

“Run the sheath heaters again?” Joe asked over the radio.

So close now. Four meters, maybe five…but…
“Yeah, you’d better. If we break this we may be totally screwed.” A.J. heard his voice shake slightly and realized that he was far from recovered from the tensions of the last few days.
Running on a few hours sleep for days on end will do that to you, especially when you’re not twenty anymore.

The cable he was helping string from
Munin
to
Nebula Storm
was, quite literally, the lifeline for the entire expedition. The superconducting coil batteries on
Nebula Storm
had been heavily drained for the landing—since her reactor was down—and the remaining energy was being quickly consumed by maintaining the dusty-plasma “Nebula Drive” over the two crashed vessels as a powerful radiation screen, diverting the thousands of rems of lethal radiation that screamed down onto Europa every day from Jupiter’s hellish magnetosphere.

Had
Munin
not been equipped originally as the lander and exploration beach-head for the expedition to Enceladus, they might have been out of luck already. Fortunately, that
was
its intended function, with last-ditch lifeboat a distant second, and that meant it had
Athena
on board. The independent nuclear-powered melt-probe was meant to penetrate the icy shell of Enceladus and reach the presumed Bemmie base beneath—and for that it had a
lot
of superconducting cable.

So it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the breaking of the cable that would be the problem; it was the fact that they didn’t have time to do this over before the
Nebula Storm
and her barely-visible pearlescent shield shut down and let invisible, deadly hellfire in again.
If that happens, we’ll have to splice cable and try to manipulate it almost all by remote, and I really don’t know how well the Locusts will do in
that
kind of environment.

“Activating sheath heaters,” Mia Svendsen said cheerfully.
She’s doing well,
A.J. thought. Possibly because she’d become so sure she was going to die at Fitzgerald’s hands that she was still riding on relief. A.J. hoped she stayed that way, at any rate; they were going to need all the engineers they could get, and it was an incredible stroke of luck that they’d ended up with not one, not two, but three—four if you counted Eberhart, who was technically an engineer but focused more on computer software/hardware than the heavy gadget sort.

He set the cable down gingerly and waited; his suit’s imagers showed the progressive glow of infrared marching down the length of the cable with its embedded heaters, and his other sensors reported the slow but steady rise of its temperature. He chuckled slightly.

“What’s so funny, A.J.?” asked Helen.

“We’re busy trying to
heat
a superconducting cable above the temperature that we used to have to cool them
down
to just a few years ago, so that we won’t break the damn thing like a stick.” The cable was considerably warmer already, but nowhere near room temperature yet. His smile faded as he looked to the side, at a counter projected in the upper left corner of the suit display; it showed the steady and inexorable drop in
Nebula Storm
’s power.

That’ll have to do.
“Mia, cut the power. Joe, Horst, I’m ready to pay it out again, you guys pull it through slow and steady on the count of three until you reach the interface. We don’t have time to wait anymore, it’s going to take you at least ten minutes to mate the adapter and get it linked in and then another ten to test before we can really throw the switch.”

“Understood, A.J.” Horst Eberhardt’s voice was steady as a rock, betraying none of the tension A.J. knew he had to be feeling.

“On three. One…two…
three!
”

A.J. felt the pull begin and the cable began to move again. Behind A.J., inside
Munin
, Dan Ritter and Anthony LaPointe were feeding the cable through the ship. Outside it was just A.J. and his three Locusts—
Hopper
,
Kwai Chang
, and
Jiminy
. The sensor and exploration probes multiplied A.J., synchronized with his movements so that all four could feed the cable across the gap between the two ships with minimal chance of snags or miscoordination.

Now the cable rippled smoothly from
Munin
’s hatchway, through the manipulators of
Kwai Chang
and
Jiminy
, through A.J.’s hands, and thence from
Hopper
into
Nebula Storm
. One meter. Two meters. Three. Four.

“That’s got it!” Joe’s voice was triumphant. “We’re starting to attach the adapter now. The rest of you lock down the cable and put the pads around it. Mia, I’ll give you the go-ahead for the heaters as soon as soon as we get them connected and grounded—that’s priority one in the adapter.”

A.J. breathed a sigh of relief and told the Locusts to stay steady as he slowly released the cable.
One bullet dodged.

But this far away from home, there’s a lot more bullets on the way.

Chapter 3.

“All right,” Madeline Fathom said, her voice just slightly amplified by the walls of the common room of
Munin
. “Now that we’re all reasonably safe for the next few days, we need to evaluate the entire situation and come up with a real schedule of action.”

“Were you able to contact Dr. Glendale, Madeline?” Horst Eberhart asked.

“I was. He relayed a quick acknowledgement of our message through the secure channels, thanking us for bringing him up to date, and saying that he could delay a couple—but
only
a couple—of days to do a press release all of us can live with. So that’s part of our agenda today, but I’d like to leave it for a bit later.”