by Eric Flint
The door chimed.
Muttering something which was probably rude enough that it was a good thing no one else was there to hear it, Joe went to the door and opened it.
Madeline stood there, looking up at him with huge blue eyes. For a moment he just stared at her. Then he turned away. "Look, I'm not ready to talk right now. Please go."
After a moment, the door shut. He sighed and turned back to the case near the door, where he kept his spacesuit—and nearly ran over Madeline, who was standing just inside the door. "Madeline, what the hell—?"
The blonde security agent still hadn't said a word, but from behind her back she produced an enormous bouquet of flowers— roses, irises, daisies—and a box of chocolates.
The ironic inversion of the approach did not immediately strike Joe, as he was focused more on the utter impossibility of fresh flowers on board a ship nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.
"Where in the universe did those come from?" He reached out and took the bouquet.
Immediately he recognized that—as he should have assumed— the flowers were artificial. Yet he was still pretty sure that artificial flowers weren't among the cargo manifest for Nike. Atomic powered or not, every ounce of her cargo space had been allotted to useful things; even the decorative items brought on board had been selected for flexibility and long term use, not for casual ornamentation.
There was a faint perfume to the flowers, though not, as far as he could tell, that of any one flower. A scent Madeline sometimes wore, now that he thought of it. He studied the flowers more closely, still trying to make sense of their presence. At very close range, he could see they were handmade, and from the oddest things. Stems from sections of tie-down cable, petals from various types of shrink-wrap and packing seals . . .
He looked up slowly, incredulously. "You made these?"
"Yes," she said softly, almost shyly. "I know it's kind of silly, but— "
"How long did it take you to do this?"
"Not all that long. Well, about a week. I spent my off hours working on them."
"A week?" He glanced down at the chocolates. Those he knew were real, as he'd selected them himself. He also knew that on the Dessert Points scale that the crew had to abide by, that box represented about a full week's worth of desserts for Madeline—and she was someone who doted on chocolate.
He looked from the box to the flowers to her face. Her gaze was calm, serious . . . yet very intense.
"Why?" he asked, finally.
"There isn't a standard ritual to make amends to a man that I know of. Some things haven't changed much in a hundred years, despite all the other advances. But this gets my point across. Can I talk to you now?"
He gestured her further inside. "Sure, sure. Sit down. Um, have a chocolate."
"Not right now, thanks."
If she was turning down chocolate, she was serious. "Okay. Well . . . go ahead, talk. I'm kinda bad at this, and I wasn't ready."
Madeline settled herself into one of the chairs across from Joe's sofa, where Joe had sat down, and then looked into his eyes. "Joe, you've always known that I was an intelligence agent. This job was given to me the day A.J. discovered this base, and that job was to control information. An agent doesn't allow her personal feelings to affect her work. In fact, smart agents don't allow themselves to have personal feelings at all during a mission."
She gazed down at her hands, "I did, anyway, even though I knew it wasn't a good idea. But . . . oh, let's just say that mine is a lonely life. That didn't bother me for years. I'm still not sure why it started bothering me now. I think it's because all this time on the Nike project, especially since we left Earth, made me feel like I had something of a family. For the first time in my life, really."
Her shoulders seemed to twitch. "But whatever the reason, I did start having feelings for you that went way beyond anything an agent should have, for one of the people she is—I'll be blunt—assigned to watch over. I guess I'd hoped, somehow, I wouldn't have to do anything, so it would never get to be a problem." She shook her head. "A stupid hope. Either way it would have had a bad result—I have to intervene, and become the enemy, or I don't, because the entire mission finds nothing worthwhile.
"And that's what I don't want my life to be, Joe. Finding nothing worthwhile."
Joe stared at the small woman, trying to put his thoughts in order. As ever, Madeline was persuasive. Sincerity seemed to drip from every word. But Joe also knew that her professional skills made her a superb liar. A master of deceit, capable of convincing anyone that she was on their side, while she calmly worked against them. Or, if not against them, certainly not for them.
Could be a superb liar, he corrected himself. The ability to do something didn't automatically mean it was exercised. And . . . did he really think she'd been lying to him all along? Or any of them, really?
No. He knew the answer the moment he asked himself the question.
He stood up and paced to the window, but ended up looking at her instead. "Madeline, I'm the kind of person who gets committed to things. And I guess what bothers me is that I don't know how I'd handle getting personally committed to someone who might well end up on the other side—the way I see it, anyway—of the life's work I've also committed myself to. You haven't gotten a response from your superiors yet, have you?"
She shook her head. "Nothing concrete, one way or the other yet. There must be considerable arguing going on."
"And what if they tell you to crack down?"
"Then I will. Unless what he—they—define as 'cracking down' goes beyond what I'm willing to do. In which case"—the brilliant smile came, in full flashing force—"I guess I'll be the first case of interplanetary unemployment. Maybe I can get a job washing bottles for the chemists."
The dazzling smile was a weapon, too, Joe understood. This was a woman who had devoted her life since she was a child to turning herself into a weapon—and in every way possible.
Could be a weapon, he reminded himself again. The fact that a good kitchen knife was kept sharp didn't automatically make it a weapon for murder. The problem was simply that a good knife had to be sharp, or it wasn't much use. Worse than that, actually. As an experienced chef, Joe knew full well that the most dangerous knife to the user was a dull one. It could slip when you applied the extra force you needed to make it work.
He stared out the window.
Phobos came. Phobos went.
Can I live with that?
Again, the answer came to him the moment he posed it.
Don't be stupid, Joe. And stop being so self-righteous, while you're at it. Every knife in your kitchen is as sharp as a razor.
He couldn't help but chuckle softly. "Leave it to a gourmet to fall in love with a razor blade," he murmured. "Serves me right for being such a snob."
"I'm sorry, I didn't hear that," Madeline said.
"Ah . . . never mind. I was just thinking to myself that if I insisted on a woman who didn't use ketchup on steak, I had a lot of nerve whining about the rest."
He turned and smiled at Madeline. The slight frown on her face made it clear she still didn't understand what he was talking about. No way she could, of course.
"Never mind. Let's just start with the basics. What do you want, Madeline? Concretely, I mean. Sorry, I know that doesn't sound very romantic. But I think like an engineer."
Her frown cleared immediately. "Oh, that's easy. I want to go back, Joe. At least for us. I want to sit down with you and talk food, watch bad action movies, and . . . whatever else we would do together. Even though I know my job isn't going to make that easy."
He looked at the flowers, which seemed to glow in the light of the cabin. She'd spent a week making them, using her ingenuity to design it out of completely unsuitable elements. Knowing, of course—God, the woman was sharp—the emotional impact it would have on him. Manipulating him, if he wanted to think about it that way.
And so what? Naturally she'd use the same skills she'd learned for h
er profession on a personal matter. Did Joe pretend he wasn't an engineer—forget everything he knew—whenever he repaired a personal item?
What was important was the end, not the means. She'd spent that time for herself, and for Joe, not for her mission. She did it because it was that important to her.
Finally, he felt something inside loosening, opening up almost like a flower itself.
"You know what?" he mused out loud. "I've been in absolutely rotten shape ever since this happened. My work's been crappy, I can't concentrate on recipes—hell, I can't even watch a damn movie because they keep reminding me of you. Like being a dull knife, myself. I don't think I can function without you around any more, Madeline."
She looked up at him with sparkling eyes, maybe a hint of tears. Probably something of an act there, too, but that didn't mean it wasn't sincere.
"So please stay here, eat my chocolate, and watch a movie with me. How's that sound? I have five hours before I go on shift."
"Sounds wonderful."
She sniffled happily, wiping her nose.
Naturally, it was a good sniffle. Even a great one.
"Finally," A.J. said to the uninhabited room around him.
He looked with justifiable pride at the image in front of him. It showed one of the noteplaques with a map of a section of Mars on it.
The thing to be proud of was that this particular plaque did not exist any more—it was the one that Joe had accidentally wrecked a few days before. As they'd suspected, the plaque covered a part of Mars for which they had no other Bemmius-made maps, and was thus the only source of information about what Bemmie and friends had thought about this particular area.
He immediately set the system to processing the data on the plaque. "Hey, Rich, Jane," he called, his system patching into the communication net as he specified the people he wanted to talk to. "Got something for you."
"Don't tell me you actually got it back?"
"Jane, Jane, how could you ever doubt me? I said I could do it, didn't I? So let it be written; so let it be done!"
"So," Rich said, "is it Mars?"
"Yep. Looks to be a goodly section of the Valles Marineris. And I've got targets on it, too. Catalogue them as targets thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine."
"Nearly forty sites on Mars, more than on any other body we've found designated. They must have either been very interested in Mars, or had some reason to live there for a while."
"Well, I'm about to put all our target designees into my system and start seeing what correspondences I can find. I'll let you know if anything comes up."
"Thank you, A.J. Are you—ah, I see the file. Thanks again. We'll be studying this ourselves."
"My pleasure."
Turning back to the data, A.J. set up the simple general problem for the far more complex statistical analysis package: find correspondences and anomalies in the data. He had to do a lot less gruntwork than would have been needed decades before, when he would have had to explicitly enter not only the domains of "correspondences and anomalies" with considerable detail, but would also have had to explicitly point to what associated data would be needed. As currently set up, the system could make what amounted to "common sense" assumptions about both the domain and about what sort of data would be needed for this problem, and then go out and find that data on the network—or request the data, if it wasn't available.
He then went out to get a snack package, one of two he had allotted for the day. To his surprise, while he was choosing his snack, the system sent him a notation. This was way earlier than he'd expected anything.
"Target 37 Anomaly. No Crater Corresponds. Huh?"
As he walked back to his room, A.J. called up images of Mars and keyed them into the corresponding location for Target 37. "Well, I'll be damned. It's right. No crater. Other craters somewhat near it, but none of them anywhere close to a bull's-eye."
He wondered if he'd somehow screwed up his reconstruction. But a quick examination of the other targets—thirty-four through thirty-six, and thirty-eight and thirty-nine—showed that he hadn't. All of them had corresponding craters dead-on.
A.J. decided that he needed more information. It was possible that there was a crater there, which had just gotten filled in. It was, after all, at the bottom of an ancient watercourse. Maybe the impact had liquified fossil ice, the melted water filled in the crater, and then it got covered over by dust and whatnot.
"Dr. Sakai."
"Hai? A.J., what is it?"
"You're sort of in charge of the main orbital satellites. Can I steal one that's being used for areography?"
"Planet-facing? Yes, certainly. Which one?"
A.J. consulted the orbital schedules and the sensor resources for the satellites. All of them had been launched from Nike shortly after they arrived, along with Babel, the much larger and more powerful satellite that allowed them to communicate with all the satellites as well as Earth.
"I think MGS-Three. The Migs have the sensors I want and Three looks to be coming up on the right area soon."
"Understood. I will take MGS-Three off the active roster until you say otherwise."
There were advantages to being the guy everyone looked at as "Mr. Sensors." When you wanted something, they usually didn't object unless they were really using it at the time. MGS-Three would eventually go over all the same areas again, so it wasn't as though any data lost here couldn't be replicated later.
A.J. fired up the GPR and multi-and hyperspectral imaging arrays to their maximum resolution and detail settings. He wanted to get the best data he could on the target location, which was in the Melas Chasma area.
While he waited, he remembered that he'd promised to tell Jane and Rich as soon as he found something. "Yo, Jane! I found something. Or, rather, I didn't find something."
"Which exactly do you mean?" Jane responded, a bit nettled.
"I mean that Target 37 hasn't got a crater associated with it. Which means either they didn't shoot at that one, for some unknown reason, or the crater they made shooting it was obliterated later. I'm checking into that possibility right now."
"Really? That is interesting. We have over fifty targets found in the entire system and all of them have been associated with craters until now."
"I'll call you back once I get some more info from the Migs about that site."
"Please do! Anything unusual means more excitement."
"Don't want you getting overexcited. Maybe I'd better not call you."
"If you fail to call me as soon as you learn something, I shall complain to Helen about your cold, unfeeling heart. I shall also drop hints—very broad ones, I warn you!—that male chauvinism must be involved."
"Okay, okay, threat understood. Talk to you later."
An hour later, a mass of data streamed into his waiting analysis systems. Images in multiple spectra, hyperspectral data, ground-penetrating radar, filtered, spectroscopic, the works—so much data that MGS-Three had had to buffer the torrent and was still streaming it back to Nike several minutes after passing over the target site.
Finally the download was complete. "Time to start crunching. Give up your ancient secrets, I say! And reveal . . . well, probably nothing."
A.J. sat back and picked out a book from the rather large number still remaining on his read someday list. No matter what was found or not, it'd be a bit before the crunching gave an answer.