by Eric Flint
Two hundred meters farther along, the tunnel reached a branching. One side turned deeper into Phobos, while the other stayed roughly level beneath the surface.
Tinkerbell was starting to show a clear drop in signal strength from its sister drone, but both A.J. and Ariel calculated that at least another three hundred meters would be possible before it would be time to decide on whether Ariel would have to go totally solo or not. Once more Ariel selected the path with the strongest H2O concentration—this time continuing along the original passageway.
Two hundred meters more, and the signal was starting to show some signs of interference. Suddenly the walls fell away on three sides, leaving only one—the side towards the surface—relatively level with respect to the prior tunnel. On Earth, this would be the equivalent of entering a large room in a cavern, with the relatively level side being the "floor." Ariel began a surveying drift around the dim, airless space, which seemed to be huge, something like a football field across. Its light began picking up other cavern exits along the "floor" area.
A.J. realized how stiff his neck was. He'd been leaning forward, watching tensely, despite the fact that on a VRD leaning forward was just useless. Amazing what instinctive reactions will do. For what must have been . . .
Two hours? It was heading for six in the morning! He got up, stretched hugely, and slugged down the rest of his now-warm soda.
Something nagged at the corner of his vision, which had been concentrated on the mundane for the past couple of minutes. He refocused on his VRD screen and sat down. It had seemed that there'd been a flicker of slightly different color . . .
Ariel had noticed it too, apparently. The probe had many subroutines for analyzing images, noticing anomalies, and returning to them. It was slowing and turning around now. Using gyros, it spun in place. Something flicked across the field of view, then stopped and was centered. Slowly it began to grow, with slight flickers of interference across it, as Ariel approached.
A.J. was barely aware of himself standing slowly, his mouth half-open, hand stretching towards the virtual screen, his hindbrain trying to reach out and touch the image glowing before him.
Inset into the wall, perhaps a meter from the nominal "floor," was a massive...
Something. It shone with a brownish-gold luster, undeniably metallic. It was symmetrical, a generally triangular shape with rounded sides and smaller, round-sided triangles at each corner. Across its surface, in curved sequences like waves, mysterious black and silver symbols marched in organized ranks.
Ariel had stopped with the object just filling its field of view. This target lay entirely out of its search parameters, and it was now waiting to be told what to do.
"Well," said A.J. to the empty air around him. "That's something you don't see every day."
Chapter 15
"And Seig Heil to you too!" A.J. snapped.
"Cut it out," Colonel Ken Hathaway said tiredly. "First, I'm not the one slamming the lid down. Second, it's a perfectly reasonable response from the government's point of view." Hathaway's subtle southern drawl was heavier than usual, turning his "I'm" into "Ah'm"—a sure sign of annoyance, which A.J. failed to note in his own anger.
"You can't keep me from calling out! This was my project. You can keep the data, but you can't just shut me in!"
"We can, and we will, A.J. I know it's grating on your free spirit, but you'd better deal with it. Or do we have to take away all your toys just to make sure?"
A.J. got himself under control with difficulty. Ken Hathaway was one of the main driving forces behind Nike, and A.J. had worked with him for months now. He knew that the Air Force colonel wasn't really the problem. The truth was, A.J. liked the man.
The whole situation still rankled, however. "No. Okay. Sorry. But send it up the line to whoever came up with this idea—we should be broadcasting this worldwide, not sealing it up tighter than a bank vault!"
"No, I won't pass it up the line, and yes, we should, at least for the sake of your funders and mine. Like it or not, there's still politics to consider, and that includes things like national security. What if this turns out to be an alien military installation intact enough for us to learn something from it? Can you tell me there's a single country on earth that wouldn't want that for itself at first?"
Reluctantly, A.J. shook his head. "No, I guess not."
"I guess not either. And speaking as a soldier, I damn well do agree with the idea that if anyone's going to get the first shot at it, it's going to be my country."
"I'm not into patriotism. Buncha tribal instincts."
The colonel rolled his eyes, the extra white making them contrast even more with his very dark skin. "A.J., that's just the kind of attitude you don't want to express around the wrong people. Me, I don't care what you think, as long as you're not actively working against our nation. But some of the more rigid types have no sense of humor on that subject. Trust me, they don't."
He flicked the display to another page. "Now, they don't want to shut us down. In fact, it's top priority to find out whatever we can. So, if you'll promise me—not some faceless guys out there, but me— that you won't try to sleaze around the security, you can have your connection back and return to work. Your Faeries are the only things on-site, and we obviously won't be getting anything else there for quite some time to come. So you are set to remain the top-billed star of this particular show, and I'd like you to keep that billing."
A.J. gave Hathaway a sour look. Despite only knowing A.J. for a few months, the blocky, solidly built astronaut apparently had read him very well. A promise to some disembodied abstraction like the government that was trying to stifle the discovery would mean relatively little to A.J., but a direct promise to someone who knew and trusted him, that was something A.J. would never break if he could possibly avoid it.
"You sneaky . . . Fine. Fine, I promise, I won't smuggle messages out, and I'll keep your silence as long as you say. No one else can run the Faeries like me, and there's no way I'm going to let someone else try. Dammit."
Hathaway smiled. "Good enough. Look, A.J., I'm sorry. But remember—we all want Nike and Ares to have their shots. If you pull some stupid crusading stunt, all of us could get screwed."
A.J. nodded unwillingly. "Yeah. Okay, you can trust me. I won't mess things up for your people or mine. Just let me back at the Faeries, okay?"
"In a shot."
Hathaway picked up the phone and called the MPs. "Mr. Baker is cleared to return to work immediately. Aside from the standard comm shutdown, he's got priority on everyone else. Anything he needs, make sure he gets."
After he hung up, A.J. demanded: "What about people who are expecting me to call? I mean, none of my friends would possibly believe I'm not going to call them and fill them in."
"I have no doubt that you'll be given a chance to call them soon— with some really clear guidelines on what to say, and a script if necessary."
"Ugh. You think?"
"I'd bet on it. Until they decide to release this, they'll be making sure no one can give it away. If you need to work with people, they'll find a way to bring them here and under the umbrella of secrecy."
"Aaaaugh. Well, hell with it, I'll go deal with my machines. They make sense and keep no secrets from me. You guys realize how lucky you are? I only told your people first because it was on your nickel. If you hadn't pulled the lid down right away, I'd have told half a dozen people by now. And if the data wasn't proprietary at this point, the transmissions wouldn't have been encoded."
A.J. paused. "By the way, I wasn't using the very top-level encryption on this stuff. It's possible someone will decode it eventually. I'd warn whoever's in charge of this circus that eventually—and that's a sooner rather than later 'eventually'—there will be a leak. From someone who received and decoded the transmissions, if not from someone inside."
Hathaway nodded. "I'm sure they know that already. It's a constant concern in security—you can't keep any secret forever, so the question is w
hether you can keep it long enough to matter."
"Okay. Anyway, I'm going to go to sleep first. I haven't had any rest since I started this whole thing . . . damn, forty-three hours ago."
"Yeah, you'd better go get some shut-eye. You'll have a long day ahead of you whenever you get up."
A.J. nodded and walked out, his gait already showing some of the flatness of the truly exhausted.
Jackie Secord tapped her foot as the system hesitated in opening the door. The guards nearby were unfamiliar.
Guards? Why two of them? Never had any need for them anyway, the system's automatic.
One of them was studying a screen in front of him. His partner was watching Jackie. The gaze didn't look hostile, but it wasn't friendly either; a neutral look that unnerved her more than a glare. Only when the guard at the screen nodded did the door to the operations area slide aside.
Jackie thought of commenting on the situation, but decided it wasn't worth it. Someone upstairs had probably gotten a bug up their ass about security, so now they needed some new tin soldiers and procedures. At least no one was asking for a strip search.
Reaching the main mission control area, Jackie glanced around. The golden mop of hair she was looking for was immediately visible, just slightly to the right of center.
"A.J.!"
A.J.'s face lit up as though someone had shone a searchlight on it. "Jackie? Jackie!" The slender, wiry arms hugged her close and then swung her around before setting her down. It was always a little startling to realize just how strong A.J. was.
"Whew! Nice to know I'm wanted around here, but you're getting a little overexcited, aren't you? I mean, it's not like I don't work for NASA. You could expect I'd drop by operations, once in a while."
A.J. grinned, but there was an edge to that grin. It looked almost like a sneer in some ways. "So you don't know yet? Damn, they're good."
"Don't know what? Who's good?"
Jackie looked around. It was odd, now that she thought about it. Things seemed a little restrained here—aside from A.J., for whom the word "restraint" would only apply when used in conjunction with the word "heavy."
Even the displays weren't showing the usual multiplicity of views. Most of them seemed to show some kind of movie set in an underground cavern.
"Where is everyone, anyway?"
"Briefing, I think. There's been a lot of . . . stuff going on here lately."
"You're being evasive, A.J., and that's about as unlike you as I can imagine. And what the hell is wrong with the publicity machine, anyway? I'd have thought by now pics from the Faeries would be on every space site in the country. But instead, aside from a few external shots that don't tell anyone anything, there hasn't been a peep out of you guys for two days."
She suddenly looked concerned. "A.J., the Faeries didn't, like, crash or something? They didn't die on you?" She knew that a disaster at that level would have left a hush for a while, and certainly put a sour look on A.J.'s face for weeks. But . . .
"Go ahead and tell her, A.J."
Jackie turned and saw that Colonel Hathaway was standing in the doorway that led to the central offices. "She's going to be up to her neck in it anyway," he added.
Jackie thought A.J. seemed to relax slightly. So there was something he wasn't allowed to talk about? That explains his tension. Telling A.J. he can't talk is like telling Santa Claus he can't go "Ho, Ho, Ho."
"Well . . . I guess it all starts right there." A.J. pointed to the screens with the slowly moving cave scenery.
"What does that have to do . . . with . . ."
She trailed off as she realized the symbols in the corner of the image denoted material being received from Phobos. From ISM-4, what A.J. called "Faerie Princess Rane."
Rane was traveling down a tunnel inside Phobos. Ariel was apparently sitting somewhere else inside the fast-orbiting Arean moon, serving as a relay for Rane.
"The cavern looks awfully smooth on that side," she began uncertainly, "but I . . ."
Her mouth fell open. "Oh . . . my . . . God."
Looming up on one side of Rane's field of view was a door. There was no other possible word for it. It was half-open, showing clearly the track or groove into which it was meant to fit. Shreds of some unknown material—probably a door seal—were still clinging to one edge.
"Ohmigod." She heard herself running the words together. "Ohmigod, ohmigod, A.J., that's a door, a door on Phobos for crissake, what's a door doing there?"
She whirled, about to put some pointed questions to the blond engineer, then stopped.
"No, you'd never do this kind of joke. That's real? Someone—or something—was on Phobos before us?"
Her mind was racing ahead of her words. That explained the guards at the door, A.J.'s comments, and why she hadn't heard updates on the Faeries' progress. Someone had clamped the lid down hard on the project.
"No joke, my fave NASA engineer. I'd say more something than someone if I were guessing. We haven't found any remains yet, or if we have I haven't recognized them as bodies, and I think I would. Then, there's several doors we need to open. This one's partly open, but I'm not sure I can squeeze one of the Faeries through."
"So, if you haven't found any bodies, why do you say 'thing'? No, wait, let me guess—the designs."
"Right in one. The corridors aren't shaped the way we'd do them. At least, not where they were clearly cut instead of just adapted from cracks and caves already present inside Phobos when whoever or whatever they were took it over."
He pointed to the screen. "That door—look at it. It's more a semicircle, or a half ellipse. Either they were really short but liked very wide doorways for some reason, or they were shaped low, kinda wide, and fairly big. We've come across plaques and things set in the walls in places we might put signs—you know, 'Engineering that way, Life Sciences to the right'—and they're all set much lower down than we'd put them. Almost a meter lower down."
"So you have closed doors? Do you think . . . maybe . . .?"
A.J. shook his head. "Not unless they have some super-miracle materials and no need for power. There isn't any significant source of energy left on this rockball. If there was, the Faeries would have picked it up. And without some kind of energy, nothing's going to be alive here for long. But there might be some other stuff in the closed rooms."
Hathaway joined in. "We've had some of our other engineers going over part of the data A.J.'s been feeding us. It looks to us like something violent happened to the base—maybe a collision with something else, maybe some kind of internal cataclysm. But whatever it might have been, there's been a lot of damage to various areas. Explosive decompression, shockwaves, the whole nine yards. If this was on Earth, there would probably have been cave-ins. As it is, there are places we can't get to easily."
"So," Jackie said, "maybe the doors that are closed got jammed during the disaster?"
A.J. nodded. "That's kinda what we're hoping. Yeah, it'd be pretty grisly for our alien friends who got stuck, since they'd have run out of whatever it is they breathed once the main base power went down. But it would also mean we'd have a good chance of finding something intact in there—bodies, maybe even equipment."
"Intact?" Jackie asked,
"Well . . . intact enough so we have a chance of figuring it out." Hathaway replied. "I doubt anything will work. But first we have to get inside."
A.J.'s grin was smug. "At least we actually do have a chance of getting inside."
Hathaway rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay, okay, yes, A.J., you were right and we were wrong. There was a point to putting manipulators on the Faeries. It was still a waste of resources. There was no way you could possibly have known what you were going to find."