Rogue Powers (42 page)

"I've been assuming that I'd go back. You'll need an interpreter, Mr. Gesseti."

/
need a drink,
Pete thought, but said nothing.

"Very well. Krebs, you get them organized after we're done here. But now we must move on to your other news about this Guardian officer, Gustav Johnson. Can he be trusted?"

Lucy opened her mouth to speak, shut it again, played with a pencil for a moment. "Johnson is a good and honorable man, but you must understand his viewpoint," she said finally. "He is a citizen of Capital, and his planet is at war with us. He makes a very clear distinction between the planet Capital and the political association called the Guardians. He hinted to me once or twice about an illegal opposition group called Settlers, but I don't know much about them. He doesn't want the League here. I don't think he actually
wants
the League to win. But he has concluded that those persons in power, the Central Guardians, have gotten Capital into a hopeless situation. Capital
will
lose. He sees that as inevitable. He wants to make that defeat as painless as possible. He believes that the use of bioweapons can only make the League more eager for revenge.

"I should emphasize that Johns—that Gustav—is in a very delicate situation. I have had no contact with him for months. He may be dead. He may have been drugged and tortured into revealing every plan he and I made. The CIs on
Ariadne
might be dead by now, or simply transferred to another posting. So the
situation
cannot be trusted. But, if he lives, Gustav Johnson
can
be. If we receive any transmissions from
Ariadne,
you must judge for yourself who is sending them."

"And at this range, we can't possibly be certain that a laser link would be secure," Robinson said thoughtfully. "We can't risk talking back to them. Somehow, this seems like a very new land of war, and a very old kind, both at once.

"Meeting adjourned. We all have a lot to think about."

' Lucy has a point," Joslyn said. "A ship needs a name."

Mac grunted and stared up at the thing. The covert lander was an ungainly arrowhead, a dingy gray aerodynamic lump. It looked like a blob of clay some giant had half formed into an airplane shape before he got bored and went away. She had been pulled in from her usual outside-of-hull docking to be checked out. Mac slapped his hand on the hull and it felt like crumbly concrete mixed with Styrofoam. "How about the
Sick Moose?"

"A real romantic, that's you, Mac," Lucy said. "A true sense of history. How's
Sick Moose
going in the books side by side with your name to the unborn generations?"

Joslyn laughed and twined her arm through her husband's. "I was on your side until you said that, Luce. Think of all the school kids that are going to have to write dull reports about the First Contact for history class. Let's make it
Sick Moose
and give them some comic relief."

Lucy shrugged, grinned, and kicked the lander's hull.
"Sick Moose
it is, then. I must say that I expected a little more sense of awe and wonder and fewer dumb jokes from you two on the subject of meeting aliens."

"I don't think either of us really quite believes it all yet," Mac said softly. "You've had a long, long time to get used to it. We found out an hour ago, when Pete said he had volunteered us to pilot this thing down to Outpost. I want to laugh and cry at the same time and then hurry there to meet C'astille. I'm scared to death—not just for me personally, but with the idea that
I'll
be the one to make the dreadful mistake that wrecks our relations with them for all time. And dumb jokes are the best cover we have for all that. But let's change the subject before we bog down for hours discussing the Wonder of It All. George, you're the only real engineer here. Is this thing really going to work? Can we get through without being spotted?'

George Prigot shrugged. "I'm not going along, so I don't have the same stake in the answer you do. But it should. Their radar isn't going to be geared to watch for an all-ceramic ship, and even if it was, it'd be hard to get a decent echo off it."

Joslyn snorted. "They won't be looking for it because no one has ever been enough of a damn fool to make a glass ship before."

"It's not glass," George objected. "It's more like a clay pot, though it should be a lot tougher."

" 'Should be' are the very words I'm worried about," Joslyn said. "And I say she's a glass ship because radar will see right through—and she'll shatter if you drop her hard. I'd love to know more about the propulsion system, though. Supposed to be some sort of cross between magneto-hydrodynamics and a linear accelerator. Extremely secret. She uses straight liquid oxygen for boost-mass. Not as efficient as fusion, but just try spotting the thrust plume."

George walked to the stern of the
Moose
and looked up into the engine bells. "Neat. It must jet the oxy at only a couple hundred degrees. Very hard to detect if you're watching for fusion plasmas."

"Neat it is. But I'd trade it for a hull you couldn't smash with a hammer."

Pete came through a hatch into the hangar bay and wandered into earshot as Joslyn was speaking. "Say, you're just the sort of pilot that inspires confidence in a passenger."

"Hello, Peter," Joslyn said with a smile. "What's the situation?"

"Well, this is a top secret operation, so I only had to clear it with ten departments instead of twenty. They dug up a biologist, a South African kid by the name of Charles Sisulu. Civilian kid who knows a lot about bio-engineering. They brought him along to work on the bioweapons, so he might as well go straight to the source. So with Mac, Joz, Lucy, this Sisulu character and me, we have five and this crate can carry six. Any suggestions for the empty slot?"

"I've got one," Joslyn said. "Madeline Madsen. She's a Royal Britannic Navy second lieutenant, a pilot. I know she's checked out on the covert lander, and she's a big outdoorswoman."

Lucy sounded unconvinced. "She have any ground-combat training?"

"Standard RBN basic training, I guess. Why do we need combat for this trip?"

"Because Outpost is a very nasty place. Any animal that sees us is likely to try eating us. And Mr. Gesseti, with all due respect, we're going to be in armored pressure suits for that same reason, for long hours at a stretch. Are you up to that?"

"I dunno, but I'm sure as hell in better shape than the other diplomatic types along for the ride. I'm fifteen years younger than any of 'em. One reason I volunteered.'

Lucy grunted. It was a motley crew, a hurry-up job, but maybe that was the best she dare hope for. "All right, Mr. Gesseti. That'll have to do. Any word about when we launch?"

"As soon as possible, they said, so I guess it's in your hands. Mac, how soon can we be ready?'

Mac hesitated for a moment, figuring loading and checkouts and a little extra for glitches. "We'll go in eighteen hours."

*
      
*
      
*

Lucy was ready long before that. Aside from getting fitted for a pressure suit, there really wasn't much for her to do.

The
Eagle's
purser put her up in a VIP cabin for her one night aboard. It was a kindly gesture, a welcome-back to the ex-prisoner who had to depart at once for a harsh and dangerous field assignment. A huge bed, plush carpeting on the deck, books she'd have no time to read, recorded music and films she'd have no chance to run—but still, it was good to at least be near such things again.

Lucy thought of C'astille and decided that she had to bring a gift back for her friend. Even as she had the idea of bringing a present, her eyes fell upon the perfect thing. A book, a great big, old-fashioned picture book lying on the coffee table of her stateroom. It was called
Works of Our Hands: Humans Shape the Solar System.
It was full of pictures of grand buildings and structures, old and new, and each was set against a glorious background. C'astille would love it.

Lucy felt only mildly guilty as she tucked it into her carrysack.

The long-range cameras tracked the great shape, brought it more frighteningly close than it truly was. "That's
Nike,"
Lucy whispered. "She's big."

"That much we already knew," Mac replied in a whisper of his own. Logically, they could all be shouting at the top of their lungs and it wouldn't make any difference. But under the very nose of the huge military orbital command station, sneaking in past their radar, the desire to keep quiet went past the logical.

"Maddy, what can you see on passive detection?" Joslyn asked.

"Plenty enough," Madeline said, "and I've got everything cranked down to minimum power. But it looks to me that we should have
Nike
and
Ariadne
below our horizon when we hit the atmosphere."

"A bit of luck running our way," Joslyn said. "Even if this flying teapot is supposed to be invisible, I don't see any reason to experiment."

"Well, for what it's worth, we have now sailed through at least six different radars without being spotted."

"Mac, how are we, as far as the beacon signal?"

Mac was riding the comm station, which left him without much to do
besides
watch the beacon. He had gotten caught up on his reading this trip. "Right on the money. No change in its position since we picked it up. So do your bit and land us right on top of it."

The
Sick Moose's
one small cabin was crowded with six people forced to sleep and eat in each other's pockets for several rather long and uneventful days, but the two civilians had managed to carve out a small corner for their own. Charles Sisulu had taken advantage of the long trip and methodically skinned Pete Gesseti's hide in four kinds of card games. Now Pete was grimly trying to win it all back in chess, fifty Kennedy dollars a game. Even with chess, his strong suit, Pete was just about holding his own. If he was even managing that, he thought, as he sadly watched his second bishop join its ancestors. "Charlie, isn't there any game you're not good at?"

Charlie grinned as he collected the bishop. He was a short, pudgy young man, perfect white teeth set off against his dark-skinned face. His hair was trimmed very short, and his rounded features and alert eyes suggested a quick and clever mind working behind the laughter and smiles. "If there was, why should I tell you? I figure you've paid for a month's vacation on Bandwidth already."

"And on what a diplomat makes. You should be ashamed of yourself. Seriously, though, how'd you get so good?"

'Easy. It's how I worked my way through college. My part of South Africa used to be one of those phony homelands. Technically not under South African law, which banned gambling among other things. The Afrikaaners'd come in to make a killing at roulette and we'd skin 'em alive. After the Rebellion, a hundred years ago, we got pulled back into the nation, but we had the smarts and the luck to hang onto our special exemption to the gambling laws. The marks might come in a different color but they still come, and we still clean 'em out and send 'em home. During the southern winter, that is the northern summer, I stayed home with the folks and played poker for a living. Or played anything. I'd just learn the odds and bet with them. When September rolled around I'd fly to America and live off my earnings while I studied at the University of California. If I got short of money, I spent a weekend at Las Vegas. Later on, when I started research at Wood's Hole, I'd go to Atlantic City."

"That's the last time I play with anyone before I check their resume," Pete said, pulling his queen back into what looked like a safer position. "So how do you like our odds here?"

Charlie shrugged. "No way to calculate them. But I'm a
biologist!
The stakes are so high. When they waved the foam worms at me, I signed every security agreement in sight—I
had
to work on that, top secret or no. And now I'll get to talk to someone who
designs
living things, from scratch! For a biologist, that's like a chat with God." Charlie moved in his own queen, took Pete's, and grinned. "Check. Mate in two moves. I'll take an IOU."

When they were about two hours from atmosphere, Mac called a meeting of all hands, which simply meant that everyone turned around in their chairs and faced the center of the tiny cabin. "All right," Mac said, "let me go over the situation one more time. So far the Guard radars haven't picked us up, but that could change at any time. This ship might be invisible to radar, but she's slow, she's hard to maneuver, and she's unarmed. And I don't care if she's made out of special-purpose ceramics or prune danish, when she hits the atmosphere, the light and heat of atmospheric entry are going to be detectable. We're going in on the daylight side, at a time when the bigger stations can't see our entry window. But we still might get spotted.