Portal-eARC (6 page)

Joe stared at the mangled vessel on the screen, turning very slowly. “A.J.,” he said finally, “What’s that?”

“What’s
what?
For an engineer, your dialogue is amazingly imprecise sometimes.”

“That…green flickering on the
Odin
.”

“What green…” A.J. trailed off, then froze. “
MADELINE!
Get in here
RIGHT NOW!
”

The suit and ship control systems were not particularly smart by human standards, but they were very good at context-sensitive transmission. Not only did they immediately relay that order directly to Madeline Fathom (Buckley), they recognized the urgency and context and did
not
send it to anyone else. Joe, of course, stayed put. Anything that got A.J. that excited he wanted to know about right away.

The lock cycled and Madeline entered, retracting her helmet. “What’s wrong, A.J.?”

The screen flickered, and suddenly, looking out of it, was a face. A face with a sharply-cut blond beard and a slightly-beyond-regulations haircut, looking at them with startlingly golden eyes. “
Nebula Storm
and
Munin
, please answer. This is General Alberich Hohenheim.
Nebula Storm
and
Munin
, please answer. This is…”

Even Madeline seemed frozen in shock for long moments—though Joe realized later it could only have been for seconds. Then she snapped into action. “Can we reply?”

“Huh?” The question broke A.J. out of an incredulous stare. “Oh, yes. Certainly. He’s using
Odin
’s remaining dust-collecting lasers as a comm beam. Probably homed in on ours once we started them up.” A.J. scratched his head, then tapped out invisible commands. “Didn’t think the General was quite that tech-savvy, though. That was fast response—I’ve only been working these things maybe twenty minutes.” He nodded sharply. “Okay, that should do it. I’ve patched it through for you and you alone to speak, although anyone here—that’s the three of us—can hear you.”

“General, this is Madeline Fathom. We receive you. Over.”

“…and
Munin,
please answer. This is General Alberich Hoh—”

The repeating message abruptly cut off and the living General Hohenheim was on screen. The golden eyes showed hints of tears shed and unshed, but he was smiling broadly. “
Guten Tag
, Agent Fathom,” he said. “A very good day indeed.”

“A
marvelous
day, General! I won’t ask you for the details at the moment, but…are you all right?”

The face paused for a few seconds before responding; A.J. said,
sotto voce
, “He’s only about five hundred thousand kilometers away right now—figure about one point seven seconds each way.”

The general then nodded. “I am, for now. I am afraid that there are no other survivors on board this vessel, however.” His smile faded, as he asked carefully, “Might I ask…how many of my crew survive?”

“Only six, sir. I’m sorry.”

The figure on the screen closed his eyes once enough time had elapsed to send the message back. “
Sechs
…Six.” It was, indeed, a small enough number when his crew had numbered over a hundred in total. “Still, six is infinitely preferable to zero. Then you and
Munin
did indeed join forces. Still…why are you there, on Europa, instead of using your magnificent ‘Nebula Drive’ to sail home?”

Madeline explained the situation. “So we expect to find a way to get home eventually, but we couldn’t do it as things were.”

Hohenheim nodded. “Yes, I see. Excellent thinking.
Munin
has more than enough power to bring both of you back into space, as she was designed to be able to reach Earth orbit on her own, and Europa has scarce an eighth of Earth’s gravity.”

“Pardon me for butting in,” A.J. said, “but—no offense, sir—how is it you were able to lock your beams on ours so quickly? I’m not sure
I
could have pulled it off that fast.”

“Unless,” the General responded with a more natural smile, “you had that trick set up beforehand. Once we had recognized that you had captured some of our dust and were playing with the beam, it occurred to us that you might be planning to somehow interfere with our drive. I accordingly had instructed Mr. Eberhardt to create options within our control systems whereby our lasers—much stronger than your own—would automatically track yours and attempt to overwhelm any signals you sent. That particular application was not difficult to repurpose to using for a transmitter.”

“Speaking of transmitters…General, you haven’t communicated with anyone farther in-system, have you?” Madeline’s voice was tense, and Joe suddenly realized why.

“No, not yet. I very nearly did, I admit, but just before I was prepared I detected radio activity and realized that it was coming from Europa.” General Hohenheim looked grim. “I was going to transmit a detailed account of this entire affair—a completely honest account. But once I realized that your people might have survived, I decided to at least try to contact you and find out what your intentions were.”

Maddie sighed with relief. “Thank you for that, General. As we proposed before Mr. Fitzgerald mutinied, we wish a co-operative venture—previously for the exploration of Enceladus, now in getting us off of Europa and home. Sending an unvarnished account would completely destroy that co-operation. Understand,” she continued in a harder voice, “we have
every
intention of bringing this home to those who were behind Fitzgerald…but not in such a way as to make all of the E.U. our enemies by embarrassing them publicly.”

After the pause, they saw Hohenheim nod slowly, his lips tightening for a moment. “As you wish. Mr. Fitzgerald himself is dead; while I cannot claim to have killed him—he was a terribly capable man, as I am sure you are aware—what little data I could wring from the computers indicates that in his attempt to reach the location on
Odin
where I had sent
Munin
, something happened which either killed him directly or, possibly, ejected him into space. Either way would be most certainly his end—and one far too good for him. But his backers…I assure you, we are of one mind on this.”

Madeline was smiling narrowly, the kind of smile that sent a slight shiver down Joe’s back; it always meant trouble. Trouble for the people Maddie didn’t like. “And I think you, General Hohenheim, are going to be our secret weapon.”

“I believe I have an idea of what you mean,” the General said after a moment.”But you may only have me for a short time.”

“What?” Maddie looked concerned. “Don’t tell me the
Odin
is headed for a crash?”

“
Nein
, nothing so dramatic, I am afraid.” General Hohenheim gestured to the ship around him. “The
Odin
is too damaged to work forever. In particular…she is leaking. In a few weeks—maybe a few months—there will be no air left on her that I can breathe.”

Chapter 7.

“We have to rescue the General.” Horst Eberhart said the words emphatically, ending with a challenging glance at A.J.

“Damn right we rescue him,” A.J. responded. At Horst’s raised eyebrow, he continued, “Yeah, I raised the necessary question about the funeral, but that was about people we couldn’t help any more. If it weren’t for the General, none of you people would’ve gotten off
Odin
—or if you did, Fitzgerald would’ve been on board. I can’t see
any
way that could’ve worked out well.”
And that’s an understatement. That guy was someone who worried
Madeline Fathom
, and he damn near got everyone on
both
ships killed.
“So we all owe him big, since we’d never have landed alive without you people. We can’t just let him drift out there and die if there’s anything we can do about it.”

“But…
is
there anything we can do about it?” Joe Buckley asked, reluctantly. “We’re just starting to figure out how to save ourselves.”

“I think there is,” Larry Conley answered. He brought up a diagram of the inner Jovian system. “Here’s big daddy Jupiter and his big kids Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Odin
was originally scheduled for a grand finale hard landing on Io, but the General pulled off a genuine miracle and managed to shift his orbit to avoid that. The combination of his shift and the encounter with Io put him into
this
orbit.”

A.J. watched as the dot representing
Odin
cycled through an obviously elongated orbit while the Galilean moons performed their effectively circular orbits around Jupiter. “He’s orbiting between Io and Europa!”

“Exactly, and that’s what gives us an excellent chance, if we can get everything working soon enough.” Larry paused the animation. “Here, he’s at maximum distance from Jupiter, and just a tiny bit outside Europa’s own orbit. Here, he’s at his closest, almost exactly on Io’s orbit. Relative to us, he’ll go through periods where he’s really going quite slow, comparatively speaking. If we can rendezvous with
Odin
at those times, we can transfer people or equipment pretty easily without crowding
Munin
’s safety margin.”

“Right,” Dr. Masters said, “but I think the earlier bit there is the sticky one.
If
we can get everything working soon enough. Can we? The General said that he could be out of air in a few weeks.”

A.J. opened his mouth but it was Mia Svendsen who spoke first. “General Hohenheim’s managed some miracles so far, but he isn’t an engineer. I would be very surprised if the engineers we have here can’t give him some better guidance to stretch out his survival. Dr. Baker—”

“Call me A.J., please,” he said reflexively.
I’m not
quite
as bothered by the title I haven’t really earned as I used to be. But habit stays with you.

“A.J., then. A.J., would any of your Faerie Dust still be operative on
Odin
?”

“Yes,” he answered promptly. “I was going to say something about that just a minute ago. I’d concentrated a lot of the Dust into the control systems of the neo-NERVA drive and the drive spines—as you know. Some of it got lost in the disaster, but once we started talking to
Odin
I was able to focus some comm lasers on it and then use both
Munin
and
Nebula Storm
’s RF antennas to pick up some pings back from the Dust. Problem is that in all the hash of interference Jupiter likes to throw out, it’s
really
hard to get anything decent out of the things at this kind of range.”

“Would it help if you could have an onboard control node?”

“Well of
course
it would, but—” he broke off and then whacked himself on the head in reprimand. “Of course, there’s got to be onboard comm and programming nodes for the drive dust. Maybe real simple—”

Mia shook her head and smiled. “Not very simple, no. We assumed that various types of nanodust might be used, including in the future some quite complex ones. All we need to use them as interfaces are your protocols and security codes.”

A.J. hesitated, instinctively unwilling to hand control of his Faerie Dust over to anyone else—even if, as was true here, it was likely that all he was doing was just letting someone else
talk
to it so he could control it more efficiently. “Er…Yes, of course, you’re right.”

“What will we get out of that, Mia?” asked Anthony LaPointe.

“
Lots
more information, that’s what,” said Dan Ritter. “We had a lot of built-in sensors throughout
Odin
, but the whole system was pretty much destroyed by the accident, and for all I know some of what Fitzgerald did might have wiped other parts by accident. We stopped getting any significant updates from the main PHM systems onboard once the main net went down. If we can get A.J.’s much smarter smart dust spread through the crucial areas, I’m
sure
I can figure out where the worst leaks are, help the general plug them, and maybe even find how to activate some of the backup air supplies that still have to be on his chunk of
Odin
.”

“All right,” Madeline said. “Let’s assume we can help General Hohenheim seal
Odin
better and preserve enough air so that he has several months instead of weeks. We still have to get
Munin
filled with reaction mass, and we can’t just detach
Munin
from
Nebula Storm
without losing our shielding.”

“We’re about ready to deploy
Athena
,” Horst spoke up. “She was designed with piping to help dispose of water as it was melted, and Jackie and I have put together fittings that will take that water and put it directly into
Munin
’s tanks—and another set that will do the same for
Nebula Storm
’s tanks. Water is not the very best reaction mass, but it is the best compromise we have—abundant, stable, noncorrosive, easy to handle, no need for high compression or any of that trouble.” As usual, only a slight hard edge on some of the consonants showed that German was Horst’s mother tongue.

“Athena does a roughly one-meter bore,” Larry said, “which means that you’ll get a metric ton of water for every meter or so she goes down.” He grinned. “Which is what Maddie meant about doing science while we rescue ourselves; we’ll be cutting a deep bore into Europa’s crust, studying this cross-section of the moon, and getting our reaction mass at the same time.”

“That’s…a long bore.” Hundreds of tons of water would be needed, A.J. knew—500 tons or maybe more for each ship.

“But actually pretty short compared to what we were looking at on Enceladus,” Anthony pointed out. “Sure, where the vents are seen, there the crust must be very thin, but if we wanted a place thick enough to stay on without it cracking apart, we might have to find a place with kilometers of ice crust.”

“Good enough,” Madeline said, “but what about the
Nebula Storm
and the fact that we need to maintain a radiation shield? Those of us left behind
could
just retreat inside
Nebula Storm
’s main hull, I suppose, but…”

“Not necessary, Maddie,” Joe answered. “Given the problems we’ve already had, Brett and I have been modeling various changes to the Nebula Drive interface, and there’s ways of running a reasonable-sized shield version of the drive with a lot less power. If
Munin
fully charges our ring batteries before leaving, I think we can keep everything going a lot longer than we used to.”