Boundary

by Eric Flint

  So the decision wasn't to be made casually. She'd gotten excellent intelligence from them so far. But was the chance of getting more such information worth the risk that A.J.—suspicions already aroused by finding the back doors—might decide to sweep the ship for other unauthorized activity?

  "No," she answered herself aloud. She was already tap-dancing on land mines. The monitors she had in place to maintain surreptitious surveillance of Nike's personnel were already stretching the letter of the law. Even the military members of the crew would be furious, if they found out. The civilian members would completely blow their stacks, negating at one stroke all of Madeline's long and careful work to build up their trust and cooperation.

  There was no point in keeping around extra ways of detonating the mines if she didn't really need them. She sent out the signal which caused the motes to move into the air system and allow themselves to be filtered out with the rest of the dust.

  Then, was surprised at the relief that swept over her. It was disconcerting to realize just how uncomfortable she'd become with her role in this mission. She hadn't gotten the usual satisfaction seeing how neatly Ken and A.J. had followed her script. It had been almost painful to listen to them voicing their suspicions about her.

  Jesus! I'm actually feeling guilty about this whole thing!

  She shook her head and sighed. She still believed in her mission, even if she'd slowly come to detest it from a personal standpoint.

  The worst aspect of the situation was that if she wanted to avoid the eventual confrontation, she had to hope that nothing particularly exciting or revelatory was discovered on this trip. Which meant that either way things went, her friends were going to end up disappointed—either in what they found in Phobos, or in what they found in her.

  And this was the first time in her life that Madeline Fathom had had real friends.

  Even possibly—she started to shy away from the thought, but forced herself not to—a romantic involvement that went beyond a brief and casual sexual liaison.

  Madeline couldn't conceal from herself that the worst part of that whole conversation was the thought of them telling Joe, and the relief she'd felt when they decided not to tell anyone. For the first time in her life, she had an impulse to just get it over with—go to Ken, tell him the situation, and drop the whole thing in his lap. She sat in the chair, feeling one-third of a gravity pulling on her more heavily than anything she'd felt on Earth since she was nine years old.

  What am I going to do about Joe?

  She had no answer. Or, at least, no answer she liked.

  Chapter 34

  "All rotation stopped. Habitats secured and locked. All personnel report ready for acceleration."

  "Understood." Captain Hathaway surveyed Nike's bridge to make sure everyone was properly seated and strapped in. While they wouldn't be taking extreme acceleration, "up" and "down" would no longer be in their accustomed directions. And there would be varying levels of acceleration; enough to be anything from inconvenient to dangerous for the unwary.

  He hit the PA button. "Attention all hands."

  That sounded sort of pompous, but he couldn't resist. It also sounded proper.

  "We are about to begin deceleration in our approach to orbit. After the main burn, there will likely be two or three minor burns to match us with Phobos and then bring us to rest with respect to it. Following that, work crews will begin preparations for landing. We expect to land the first people on Phobos sometime tomorrow or the day after. Unless there's an emergency, please do not move around until the main burn is completed. We don't want any accidents. We're all healthy and ready to get to work, and we don't need anything getting in the way of that."

  The presence of a number of humans in the bridge area was more a security blanket and backup than anything else. The precise burn durations and vectors had been calculated and recalculated dozens of times, and were updated daily to account for any departure from the original assumptions. Nike knew exactly when to turn, exactly when to fire her mighty engines and for precisely how long. Unless something went wrong, neither Hathaway nor anyone else on board would have to lift a finger during the entire process.

  The only expected partially-manual work when it came to flying Nike was going to be closing the distance with Phobos. The automatic orbit-matching was deliberately designed to leave a considerable distance between the ship and the little moon, just in case something did go wrong. Like the tiny Faeries before her, Nike would use ion drives to close the distance after matching the basic orbit.

  Unlike the Faeries and Pirate, however, Nike had the fuel and power to match orbits through its own efforts, rather than requiring atmospheric braking. That was necessary, because the design challenges involved in making a spacecraft the size, shape, and complexity of Nike able to survive atmospheric braking were something to give even modern computers major, major headaches. Dr. Gupta didn't think it could be done at all, in the absence of science-fictional deflector shields or unobtainium hulls.

  A faint vibration ran through the ship, and suddenly a deep-throated roar thundered through Nike. The nuclear engines had awakened for the first time in months. Six columns of nuclear-powered fire now blazed astern, pitting themselves against the miles-per-second momentum of the huge ship.

  In space there was no sound. But vibration at that level transmitted itself through the main hull and reverberated in the atmosphere of the bridge. There was certainly sound in Nike herself. Ken was pressed back into the cushions of his seat at nearly half Earth-normal acceleration—which felt much greater to a body used to Martian levels of gravity after many weeks in space.

  Displays showed the decrease in velocity, the approach of the vessel toward its intended orbit, Phobos approaching in simulation. Another showed the approach of Nike as seen from Phobos itself, a blaze of light from what had been something barely more than another star a moment before. A.J. had two of the Faeries positioned to record the entire approach and eventual landings for posterity.

  The live view from a rear-facing boom camera, projected on the main window's active display, showed Phobos swelling. Starting at the size of a misshapen Luna from Earth, by now the moonlet was nearly twice that size.

  The sharp gray-black shadowed surface suddenly looked menacing to Ken. Twenty kilometers was miniscule on the astronomical scale, but when compared to Nike it was immense. From that perspective, Phobos was a mass of rock nearly fifty times Nike's length. It was a flying mountain the size of ten Everests mashed together, where an alien race had built a base—and had then died from an unknown catastrophe sixty-five million years before.

  Perhaps Phobos had devoured them. The moonlet made Ken think of a gigantic sea beast, rising from the black depths.

  He dismissed the grotesque notion. There were enough genuine hazards without inventing fantastical ones. "Engine status?"

  "All engines showing green," Jackie answered. "Not that you needed to ask, really. If anything goes wrong, about a dozen alarms will scream their heads off."

  "Will you at least let me pretend to be a real captain?"

  "Aye aye, sir." Jackie got a false-solemn look on her face. "We're approaching the alien base, Captain. Should we raise shields?"

  "Very funny. How are we tracking?"

  "Well within tolerances. About four hundred seconds of burn left to go. Relative velocity has dropped below two point five kilometers per second."

  The freight-train roar continued, the nuclear engines hurling more than three tons of fuel into space every second at an exhaust velocity of nearly twenty thousand miles per hour. Phobos was enormous and still swelling, now a hulking presence more than ten times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth. Even more than before, the satellite reminded Ken of a monster—with the five-mile-wide crater of Stickney being its single, glaring, off-center eye.

  "How big is that going to get before we stop?" Ken wondered idly, trying not to sound at all nervous.

  The problem with Phobos was that it was on
a scale that the human mind could—just barely—grasp, as opposed to the Earth or the Moon. Something like that approaching touched a very primal chord.

  "About seven point one six degrees—more than fourteen times wider than the Moon looks," A.J. answered, from his own console. "Being a hundred miles away is pretty far, sure, but that thing is twenty kilometers wide. It looks a hell of a lot bigger than it did in the photos back home, I can tell you that."

  He turned his head and flashed Ken a wicked grin. "Lives up to its name Fear, doesn't it? Especially with that crater staring at us! Reminds me of some sort of gigantic Cyclops."

  "Shut up, will you?" Hathaway growled. "I was trying not to think the same thing."

  The blaze of Nike now covered measurable width on Rane's image; six separate tiny jets were visible.

  "Sixty seconds left . . . thirty . . . ten . . . five, four, three, two, one, ze—"

  The rockets cut off as Jackie was in mid word. Ken felt a momentary disorientation as free fall returned. Phobos loomed before them, but no longer did the barren miniature moon swell like a slowly inflating balloon.

  "Relative speed with respect to Phobos?"

  "Waiting on verification . . ." A.J. answered. "Okay, near zero. Very near zero. Let's just say that if we were staking Nike out in the yard like a dog, it'd be a week before she reached the end of her chain. Not bad for a shot across a hundred million miles. Starting closing calculations now."

  Ken hit the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have stopped relative to Phobos. We have successfully completed the first interplanetary voyage in the history of mankind. Congratulations!"

  He didn't need the intercom to hear the cheers.

  PART VI: PHOBOS

  Surmise, n: a matter of conjecture; an idea

  or thought of something as being possible or likely,

  often coming unexpectedly or by surprise.

  Chapter 35

  "One . . . two . . . three!"

  On three, Joe and Harry Ingram pulled hard on the levers, each held from moving by the bracing they were strapped into. Jobs like this could be done using automatic machinery, but automated drones were much better for doing the more controlled and predictable gruntwork of sealing, insulating, and making livable portions of Phobos. If human muscle and mechanical advantage couldn't do the job here, they could always use some of the fancier powered equipment.

  No need, Joe saw with satisfaction, as the alien doorway ground partly open for the first time in over sixty million years. Ingram, who'd done more work of this sort than Joe, unsnapped part of his harness expertly and rotated his body around, shining a bright LED flashlight into the room.

  "Clear on the near side, nothing in the way. Looks interesting— not a duplicate of any of the other rooms we've seen so far. Let's get the door open a little further."

  Joe nodded, noting to himself that it was a lot more comfortable doing stuff like this when you could use the best equipment. The Ares Project had planned on using the best spacesuit designs it could afford, of course, but when you are strapped for cash, what you can afford isn't the same thing as what a government agency with a top-level mandate and effectively unlimited credit can afford. The spacesuits worn by Nike's personnel were lighter, thinner, tougher, more efficient, and more versatile than anything Ares could possibly have managed.

  The suit's main advantages came from its incorporation of a carbon nanotube–derived fiber weave manufactured (at currently ruinous cost and mostly for military applications) by the Tayler Corporation. The "carbonan" reinforcement layers made the suits virtually impenetrable by any accident short of being struck by a meteor or shot by a heavy-duty firearm. The integrated electronics, "smart" sensors, recycling systems, and other bells and whistles had even forced A.J. to grudgingly admit that he couldn't have programmed their suits to be as effective; the integrated processor power simply wouldn't have been there.

  Similar top-end designs were being tested by the military as powered battlefield armor. Due to a strong preference for saving power in space for other functions, however, there were no provisions for boosting the user's strength in the Tayler spacesuits. But there were ports to connect the suit to various other devices to control and even power them, as well as distributed sensors to track conditions around the wearer.

  The suits were as well shielded as such mobile objects could reasonably be. The helmets were light and felt open, rather than cramped and claustrophobic as prior models had been. In addition, the suits incorporated an integrated exterior weave of electroactive pigments which varied the reflectivity of the exterior to assist in heating and cooling. Another layer of piezoelectrically-active fibers was able to stiffen the suit against detected impacts, distributing the force across the entire body of the wearer instead of permitting blunt trauma to be done to one area.

  With the toughness of the suits a given, Joe and the rest of Nike's crew were better able to concentrate on their jobs. It might not be quite as easy as working on something back home, given microgravity and other factors. Still, it was orders of magnitude easier than it would have been a couple of decades earlier.

  Locked back in, Harry nodded to Joe and the two began working on getting the door to open wider.

  "Hey, did anybody figure out why these doors got locked up?" Harry asked to the invisible audience at large. "I mean, it can't just have been the power loss—only idiots would design doors that couldn't be opened in case of power failure, at least for most of their base. And we've found things that look like manual opening mechanisms."

  "Well," A.J. answered, "it's impossible to be sure until we find out exactly what caused the disaster. But based on models Dr. Sakai and some of the other people in the astrogeological specialties have done . . . you remember the lines on the side of Phobos?"

  "Yeah," Joe said, adjusting the grip of the lever arms. "Fracture zones, right?"

  "Yep. No one was sure how far down those things went, or how intact—or not intact—Phobos was. The moonlet might have been just a ball of stone fragments that hadn't quite broken up. As it turns out the fracture zones aren't nearly that bad, but they are significant. If what happened to them involved a big explosion, or an impact, it might have shifted the geometry of the caverns slightly, changing angles just enough to cause the doors to lock up in their tracks."

  "Makes sense," Joe said. "And with the seals shrinking through outgassing over the years, that would have given them enough space to move again. Okay, we're ready. Harry, let's open this thing up wide."

  The door protested stubbornly, occasionally allowing the two to hear its dissatisfaction by transmitting a vibration through the equipment that sounded like a groan inside the suits. But, in a few minutes, the door was open wide enough for them to enter.

  "Captain, we're going in now. And I think it's something new."

  "Be careful."

  "We will be. But, look, this place is dead. There's nothing dangerous here, aside from vacuum."

  "That's what we think. Let's not assume."

  "Right."

  Joe drifted into the room cautiously after shining his own light around. The room was about average-sized, from what they'd seen so far. It was a bit over two meters at maximum height, which was too low for human comfort but still easy to move through. Fifteen meters long and about ten to twelve meters wide, the room's interior was clad in the metal-composite material they'd come to expect, with varicolored circles and lines on the walls that seemed to be a common theme.

  Despite the similarities, though, it wasn't like anything they'd seen thus far. First, this room's long axis lay parallel to the corridor. They'd entered at one end, from the side. At the other end of the room was another door. That seemed to indicate a room bordering that side of the corridor but which had no direct entrance or exit in that wall, as they knew there weren't any other doors for quite some distance.