Portal-eARC (9 page)

“Right away.”

Jackie joined them in
Nebula Storm
’s control room, pushing back the helmet with a relieved sigh; A.J. knew that she was always—understandably!—tense when working near the damaged reactor. “When does Brett start getting anything?”

“Getting stuff now,” Brett said. “Only starting the outline at the entry point, but enough to show it’s working. Don’t get too eager; it’s going to be a couple hours, probably, before we get enough data to give you a look.”

Jackie smiled. “It will take us
days
to take her apart, so a few hours to know whether we have to, or what
way
we have to? Priceless.”

“A.J.,” came Larry’s voice, “You got a minute?”

“Now I do,” he answered, leaning back a little in the seat. “What do you need?”

“We got another quake, about 3.4 on the adjusted Richter, and the dust we spread around the whole area did a lot of recording. Can you—”

“No problem. I actually have a suite of programs designed for deriving data out of that kind of return.” He grinned suddenly. “Helen knows; you could almost say it was the earlier version of that suite that GOT us into this mess in the first place.”

“You mean the analytical program you used that gave us a picture of the Bemmie fossil before we even dug it up?” He could hear the smile in her voice even if he hadn’t seen it in the HUD imagery his VRD showed. “That’s right, you set off little charges or something and mapped the acoustic, along with other signal returns.”

“And the combination almost got me thrown off your expedition as a practical joker,” A.J. finished, with a chuckle. It was one of his fondest memories; a revelation so dramatic that even the people who’d called him in very nearly didn’t believe him—probably wouldn’t have, if Joe hadn’t known him so well. Plus, that was when he’d first met Helen. Not that he’d even imagined at the time…

A second firehose of data started dumping into his systems; this one, however, was for much more familiar analysis, and with even the relatively limited systems available on the
Nebula Storm
and
Munin
was much easier to interpret. In about 15 minutes he was able to call Larry back. “Well, some interesting results for you to look at. Some of it I have no idea how to interpret, but I can tell you that it looks like there’s a general discontinuity about a kilometer down; I’d say we’ve got evidence for the Thin Ice model.”

“A
kilometer
?” Larry’s voice was incredulous. “That’s…almost ludicrous. Unless…lemme take a look.” Several minutes passed, interspersed with Larry and Anthony debating some of what they saw in technical language. Finally Larry said, “Hey, listen up, everyone.” The tone and his use of ‘everyone’ keyed the general broadcast. “Returns from that last quake gave us the data we needed. This whole area’s part of something called the Connamara Chaos, and turns out it’s an apt name below the surface as well as above. Everything’s jumbled, no clear structure—and there’s some really strange returns; I suspect that there’s some subtle interaction of different phases of ice that’s making it very hard to interpret some of what we’re seeing.

“But I think we’ve got good evidence for an impact several thousand years ago; that’s what messed up this part of Europa, and it actually thinned the surface over an extended area; I think we can see the thickness trending up in all directions away from us. It’s probably more like ten kilometers thick normally, but right around us the crust isn’t much more than a kilometer thick.”

“Does that mean that
Athena
may actually punch through?” Jackie asked.

“If we stay here long enough, and keep drilling in the one spot, I’d say certainly. So we’ve got a good chance of actually getting the first sample of a planetary internal ocean. Real science, guys!”

“That’s about three, three and a half months of running
Athena
,” Dan said after a moment. “But then she was meant to run for a long time. If everything else holds out, I don’t see any reason we can’t do that. And we’re not going to be done with everything else before then.”

“Does this have any implications for our safety?” Madeline asked. “I don’t want to lessen the enjoyment of this discovery, but—”

“Completely understood, Maddie. We’re still getting data on the…tectonic dynamics of this situation, so we can’t really say for sure. On the other hand, there’ve been several unmanned probes of the Jovian system in the last thirty years which observed Europa pretty closely, not counting the Europa probe that glitched, and none of them have seen clear evidence of surface breaches even here, so I’d say we should be reasonably safe. Keep everything secured, is all I’d recommend.”

That’s a relief,
A.J. thought to himself. If Maddie decided their current location was too dangerous, they’d have to figure out how to MOVE the crashed
Nebula Storm
far enough to make it safe, and then land it safely again.
NOT something I want to even think about trying.

He checked both sets of processes; the reactor analysis was still running, and the spread-sensor net was still running.
Hm. Another momentary spike of that lethal chemical dihydrogen monoxide.

He’d seen several of these momentary, almost-in-the-noise readings of water vapor, but the net still couldn’t localize them. Which meant he didn’t have much to hand to the others.

It did occur to him that it might just be from the force of a quake, maybe momentary cracks vaporizing some of the ice somehow.

But the others were all busy talking about the ice thickness, so he decided not to bother. Yet. The scientists continued talking about the implications of this latest find while he leaned back and took a nap.

It was a curse that awakened him; the usually polite and cheerful tones of Jackie Secord saying “Oh,
shit
.”

That kind of thing immediately brought A.J. to full consciousness. “What’s wrong?”

He could see by the expression on Jackie’s face that it was even
worse
than he’d thought from the cursing. She pressed a control and the modified model of the interior of the reactor appeared.

It looks almost as jumbled as the damn ice!
“What the hell…?”

“Ricochets.” The word itself was spat out like another obscenity. “That damned bullet penetrated the
Nebula Storm
’s hull, then the reactor vessel, then because the reactor was mounted directly on the lower hull it
bounced
off the hull the second time, and bounced a couple more times inside the reactor before it stopped.”

“I guess that means it’s going to take longer to fix.” Larry said finally.

A.J. winced, and Jackie’s face was grim as she answered. “No,” she said, and took a deep breath.

“It means there’s no way
to
fix it,” she said slowly. “It’s not a matter of one clean hole through; the whole
core
has been…almost scrambled, like an egg.

“Madeline…I’m sorry, but
Nebula Storm
will never fly again.”

Chapter 11.

“Got a minute, Nick?”

Nicholas Glendale looked up to see Walter Keldering standing in his doorway. “For you? Always. Please, come in, take a seat.” He waved towards his coffeepot—the low-gravity device that Joe Buckley had designed for the station a few years before. “Coffee?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Keldering said. “Always time for me? A change since the old days when Maddie would be finding the most
inventive
excuses to head me off.” He inserted the coffeemaker’s spout into the sealed hole in the coffecup’s top, and Nicholas could hear the faint hiss as the air displaced by coffee was vented through the other hole.

“And I find that just as much a relief as you do,” Nicholas agreed with a smile. He noticed that while Keldering smiled, there was a faint tension to the way he moved while injecting a measure of creamer and sweetener into the cup, a wrinkle or two on the now slightly-balding forehead.

“Oh, I do. And between you and me, I never liked my prior boss much either. I’m glad neither of you decided to start playing ball with him.” Keldering swung the chair around and seated himself, folding his hands around the cup as though to keep the heat in. He looked seriously at Nicholas. “Nick, I’ve got a lot of connections in a lot of places. You know that.”

Glendale nodded and said nothing, waiting to see what was on Keldering’s mind.

“Some of those people are in modeling and reconstruction for the government, of course; the kind of after-action analysts that do forensics on the big things, like weapons tests that go badly wrong, stuff like that,” Keldering continued, watching Glendale’s face narrowly.

Oh, my. I suspect I know where we’re going.

After a pause, Walter Keldering shrugged and went on. “Well, I’ve had some of them going over the entire sequence of events with
Nebula Storm
and
Odin
, and things just don’t quite match up.”

“Match up?” Nicholas repeated carefully. “How do you mean that, Walter?”

Keldering gave him a look which said, as clearly as though he’d said it,
so we have to go through the whole dance? Fine.
“Well, you know, the whole bit with the
Nebula Storm
chasing the
Odin
never sat well with me anyway. Sure,
Odin
’s crew had pulled a fast one, but that whole emergency deployment of a ship you couldn’t possibly even be sure would
work
didn’t fit with the profiles we had of your people, at least not under those circumstances, especially given that Ceres base was still recovering from the accident and in the end actually had to give up its own reactor to get
Nebula Storm
underway.

“Leaving that aside, though, in all honesty the whole sequence of events starting with the pass by Jupiter just
stinks
, Nick. It’s one of those barely-plausible sequences of events that no agent at my level can swallow as coincidence.” He looked at Nick carefully. “But if it wasn’t coincidence, then something
caused
it to happen…starting with that reversal of thrust on
Odin
’s final burn. And for that, I have a candidate named A.J. Baker, which would mean the whole thing was
caused
by Ares and the IRI!”

Sweet CHRIST
. “Walter, you can’t possibly believe that I, or Maddie, would try to kill a hundred people just because they stole a march on us? Or that we’d let A.J. do so, even if he was crazy enough to try, which he certainly isn’t?”

“I would very much like to not believe it, Director,” Keldering said, very formally, “but the fact is that there are multiple layers of redundancy built into the controls of
Odin
—and I would presume any spacegoing vessel—to prevent such mistakes, or to cancel or stop them if they were to begin. Such an inverted burn implies either a fundamental flaw in the embedded software—a flaw which never showed itself throughout all the prior uses of their drives—or, much more likely, a very carefully calculated subversion of the systems, so that even direct abort commands from the command deck and the core computers in the engineering section were ignored.”

Glendale thought for a moment. “Before I make any comment on this, even unofficially, do you have anything else?”

“There’s quite a bit more, Director.”

He stood and paced to the window, then looked back at Keldering as Mars spun past. “I would think the whole destruction of
Odin
would be even more of an anomaly.”

Keldering’s narrow smile acknowledged the point. “It is. A most
interesting
anomaly in several ways.”

“Let us suppose—purely unofficially and theoretically—that I were to say that it is possible your theory on the reversal of
Odin
’s drive is correct, but that if it were correct then there would have to have been considerable excuse, if not justification, for the actions.”

“An excuse,” Keldering said quietly, “such as an assault on Ceres Base by a coilgun cannon?”

Nick looked back at him sharply, but said nothing.
Where is he going?

“Nicholas, the idea that coincidence destroyed both ships stretches to the level of the ridiculous. My people can’t model any reasonable, or even reasonably unreasonable, scenario that would cause part of the
Odin
to explode with even a fraction of the necessary force, and the only sources of energy onboard which could have done that much damage were the neo-NERVA reactor and the
Odin
’s main power reactor—both of which are still perfectly functional, according to infrared signatures from the remains that are being tracked through the Jovian system. Even if we assume a high-velocity meteoroid impact that shattered a large portion of the
Odin
, it’s very difficult to create a scenario that results in
any
fragments moving fast enough, on the right vector, to puncture
Nebula Storm
’s Bemmie-made hull.” He stood and walked closer to Nicholas. “But it’s not hard at all to model the possibility of a covert coilgun in the drive spines that could have had, to use a mundane sort of parallel, shotgun loads.”

“The
Odin
was inspected by your own people, Walter. Do you mean to tell me that the United States’ own inspectors couldn’t find a weapon—no, if you’re right,
four
weapons—a thousand feet long, right in front of them?”

Keldering’s face darkened momentarily, but he smiled wryly. “If this was the case, I assure you there will be several heads rolling. But of course we’re talking a covert weapon, one that would be designed to
look
like a perfectly normal part of the vessel. The EU and its contractors are quite good, you know, and the fact is that there isn’t that much
reason
to have major armaments in space.”

Nicholas sighed, turned away from the window, and faced Keldering. “Walter, to be honest the point is moot. The
Odin
—and any covert weapon it may, or may not, have had on board—is a wreck, almost its entire crew is dead, and if your scenario is correct their arming the vessel cost them all their lives somehow. What matters isn’t—”

“Nicholas.” His name was spoken in a tone that cut him off instantly, something Glendale was not used to at all. “I think I know what you’re doing, and I understand. There’s no profit for the IRI in antagonizing the EU, and—if I’m right about what happened—right now you’re potentially in a position of huge advantage with respect to them. But politically you’re skating a lot of thin ice, and you’re playing with the very, very big boys. If my scenario’s correct, the EU—or, more likely, some private concern, the ESDC or one of their divisions or subcontractors—not only got that psycho Fitzgerald assigned as
Odin
’s security, they put a hypersonic cannon into his hands, in direct violation of the Mars Treaty and Accords. Maybe the EU itself was utterly blameless—I’d sure as hell like to
think
that even Bitteschell wouldn’t be that stupid—but you
know
that we simply can’t let this kind of thing slide.”