by Allen Steele
James Massey, the captain of the Percival Lowell, was getting up from his own chair. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you again before launch…’ He turned and graciously extended his hand to Nash. ‘Mr Donaldson, Miho Sasaki. Miho, this is Andrew Donaldson. He’s the new first officer for the Akron. And Miho here is…’
‘Exobiologist,’ Nash said as his memories from his briefing with Control abruptly returned to him. ‘Assistant to Shin-ichi Kawakami at Cydonia Base a couple of years ago. Yes, I’ve heard of you…’
‘You have?’ Sasaki’s almond eyes widened and she seemed to stiffen a little. ‘Dr. Kawakami may be famous, but I didn’t know I had achieved such stature.’
Nash stopped himself before he could blurt out more. Biostasis must have hit him harder than he had realized. First, his failure to automatically remember Sasaki—a key figure during the Cydonia Crisis two years earlier—and, just now, his loss of control, almost motormouthing info which shouldn’t have been at the tip of his tongue in the first place. Unprofessional. All he could do now was to cover for it.
‘Sorry.’ Nash shrugged and looked down at the floor, feigning sheepishness. ‘Didn’t mean to carry on like that. It’s only that…y’know, I’ve been a Face buff for a while now. I’ve read everything about the Cydonia Expedition, so…yeah, I remembered your name. That’s all.’
Sasaki smiled briefly, more out of diplomatic courtesy than real warmth. ‘You’ve got a good mind for minutiae, Mr Donaldson…’
‘Andrew. Most people call me Andy.’
‘Andy,’ she finished with forced informality, her face once more turning glacial. ‘We’ll have to get acquainted later, since you’re going to be on the…ah, what is its name again?’
‘The USS Akron,’ Massey said as he came up behind her; he took her forearm and subtly nudged her toward the hatch. ‘You’ll be on it tomorrow, Miho, so you’ll be able to ask Andy all that you want to know.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘We’ll have plenty of time. Good day gentlemen.’
Nash stepped aside as Sasaki squeezed past him and opened the hatch. ‘See you in a few hours, Mr Donaldson,’ she added, her voice still cool, then she ducked through the hatchway and began to climb up the access-shaft ladder, heading for the transfer chamber in the cycleship’s hub.
Massey shut the hatch behind her; this time, he twisted the lockwheel to dog it shut. ‘Sorry for the surprise, Mr Donaldson, but she insisted on visiting me.’ He smiled as he turned back around. ‘We’re old acquaintances, from when I was the first officer on the Shinseiki. Apparently she recuperated from the zombie tank faster than you did, even though you got out first.’
‘But she wasn’t wearing a catheter, remember,’ a familiar voice said from the other side of the compartment. Lew was half-bent over the navigation table, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses, his right hand cupped around the earpiece of his headset. Still watching the shifting readouts on the broad LCD flatscreen, he peered owlishly over the top of his spectacles and grinned at Nash. ‘I gotta say, man, you had the worst case of the zombie shakes I’ve seen since I’ve been working on this tub.’
Nash said nothing. Massey slid between them, as if he was deliberately trying to position himself between Nash and his first officer. ‘You’ve already met my own first officer, Lew Belotti.’
‘Yes, I have.’ Nash restrained his temper. ‘He’s got an interesting sense of humor.’
‘And I’m available for weddings, company parties and bar mitzvahs,’ Belotti continued, still wearing the same shit-eating grin.
Massey shut his eyes in secret pain. ‘And he’s also available to go down to C-cube and double-check the inertial guidance platform. Right, Lew?’
Lew started to say something else, but a glimpse at Massey’s expression was enough to let him know that he and his lip were not wanted on deck just then; he might have also remembered Nash’s oath to him a few hours earlier in the hibernation bay. Belotti got up from his chair and avoided getting near either man by opening the interdeck hatch and climbing down the short ladder into the logistics deck beneath the bridge. Following an unspoken order from the captain, he shut the hatch behind him, giving the two men absolute privacy.
Massey sighed and shook his head. ‘Sorry about that, Nash,’ he said as he walked back to his chair on the left side of the compartment. ‘Lew’s a little weird, maybe even for this ship…oh, and the coffee is in the beaker over there, behind his chair.’
The bridge coffee pot rested on a jury-rigged hot plate beneath the emergency lockers; the bulkhead above it was plastered with Hawaiian surfing scenes and Playboy pin ups. Nash found a plastic mug, stenciled with the Buck Existential cartoon characters, which looked reasonably clean. ‘Apparently you’re aware of my real name,’ he said as he poured the thick, iron-black brew into it. ‘I trust that hasn’t become public information.’
The captain shook his head. ‘I didn’t know myself until about three weeks ago, just before we went around the solar farside. We received some E-mail for you on the Huntsville uplink, and that’s when I was briefed…don’t worry, it was eyes-only for me. Jodi and Lew didn’t read it.’
‘If you say so.’ Nash wasn’t entirely convinced. Belotti was a little too cunning. ‘If you ask me, captain, your first officer’s wound a little too tight for this sort of work.’
‘He’s a good navigator, he knows enough about biostasis to help Jodi out with the zombies, and he can bring down a lander in thirty-knot winds.’ Massey leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s all that counts with me. After that, I don’t care if he knows every Groucho Marx gag by heart and beats off once a day.’ He shrugged. ‘You work this job, you get used to weird people. After working the Shinseiki for three years, Lew’s a relief. The Japs had no sense of humor. Hey, the beard looks good on you, by the way.’
Nash had decided not to shave off the beard he had grown during biostasis. It was still uncomfortable, but it was one more bit of assurance that L’Enfant wouldn’t recognize his face. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he murmured, not interested in Massey’s opinion of his grooming. He brought his coffee over to the seat which Miho Sasaki had just vacated and settled into it, then sipped his coffee and winced. It tasted like a mixture of pure caffeine and hot grease. Even crew-mess coffee from his Navy days had been better than this, but if it was intended to put a jolt into him, it did the trick. ‘You were on the Shinseiki? During the Steeple Chase operation?’
‘Sort of. I piloted the Shinseiki’s lander down to Cydonia, when they still allowed direct flights to the base, so I was on the ground during the raid. I didn’t have much to do with it, though…up in the bleachers for most of the game, so to speak.’ Massey’s lips tightened. ‘And I don’t mind telling you that I’m not crazy about handling home base for another covert job, even if it is Skycorp’s show.’
‘It’s different this time.’
‘Sure it is. Just another variation on the same old shit. All because of these stupid dead aliens and their stupid dead city.’
Nash raised an eyebrow. ‘Pardon me, captain?’
‘Never mind.’ Massey sighed again as he kneaded his eyes with his knuckles. ‘Jesus, I’m beginning to sound like one of those Back To Earth yahoos back home. Forget it, Nash. It’s been a long trip up. Let’s run this through again before I put you and Miho and the rest of the zombies on that lander, okay?’
The Lowell’s two landers—the unmanned cargo pod and the Carl Sagan, the personnel lander—were scheduled to be dropped from the Lowell at 1500 hours MCM. However, neither lander would descend directly to Cydonia Base; since engine-powered landings and lift-offs disturbed the sensitive seismographic instruments that monitored pseudo-Cootie activity beneath the City, spacecraft were prohibited from making planetfall directly to Cydonia, save for the occasional parachute-drop of a cargo pod from orbit.
Instead, Nash would accompany the Lowell’s three-person crew and the three relief scientists to Arsia Station, over four thousand miles away from Cydoni
a Base. The following day, at 0800 hours, Nash was scheduled to leave Arsia Station aboard the new Mars airship, the USS Akron. Two days later he would arrive in Cydonia.
‘That gives you seven days to complete your job and get back to Arsia,’ Massey said. ‘Two days to get up there, three days at Cydonia, and two days for the return trip. That’s an inflexible, drop-dead deadline.’
‘Sure. I understand…’
‘No, sir, I don’t think you do.’ Massey hunched forward and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘Listen to me, because I don’t want any misunderstandings. This has to do with our available launch window for the return flight. After we get our shore-leave…the AFs will be minding the ship while it’s parked in orbit, so we can stretch our legs a bit on the ground…we’ve still got to refuel at the Phobos fuel depot and check out the boat for the ride home, and seven days groundside is the longest I can stretch it. At eighteen-hundred hours on nine-three GMT, Jodi and Lew and I climb back into the lander for launch to orbit…and if you’re not back at Arsia by then, you’ll have to wait until the Korolev arrives in another nine months.’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘Believe me, Nash, you don’t want to be sitting around Arsia Station for almost a year. It’s real boring down there.’
Nash glanced at the image of Mars on one of the overhead monitors. ‘I can imagine.’
‘I guess you can.’ Massey drained the rest of his lukewarm coffee, made a sour face, then placed his cup on the floor. He pushed himself out of his chair. ‘C’mon. I’ve got your E-mail disk and something else to give you.’
Nash stood up and followed the captain to a wall locker behind the navigation table; Massey pulled a keyring out of his vest pocket, selected an Allen-wrench from a dozen others, and slipped it into the hole. ‘This has been in the locker since we left Earth orbit. You’ll have to trust me when I tell you that nobody’s messed with it. Neither Lew nor Jodi have this key. I guess it has something to do with your assignment, whatever it is.’
‘Maybe,’ Nash said. ‘And you’re not even curious? About the assignment, I mean.’
Massey opened the locker and reached inside. ‘Listen, sport, I just drive the bus. It’s not my business to know or care what you’re up to.’ He pulled out a small steel attaché case and handed it to Nash. As Nash took it, Massey reached into a breast pocket, pulled out an unmarked CD-ROM diskette, and handed it to his passenger. ‘And that’s your mail from home. Don’t worry about it, okay?’
Nash eyed the diskette thoughtfully. The copy-protect tab was in place, but that didn’t mean much; a good cracker wouldn’t have forgotten that detail after reading the file. ‘If you say so, captain.’
‘Yeah, I say so.’ Massey closed the locker and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Okay, now get out of here. I’ve got a ship to run. Be at Airlock Two at fourteen-thirty hours and your buddy Lew will fix you up.’
‘Right.’ Nash started to turn, then thought of something else. ‘Just one more thing…’
‘There always is. What is it?’
‘Sasaki.’ Massey seemed to tense up a bit at the mention of her name. ‘She left Mars almost two years ago on this ship after the Steeple Chase incident. People who leave Mars don’t usually come back for a second tour.’
Massey’s face remained impassive. ‘Yeah. So?’
‘So what’s she doing back here?’
‘Like I said before, Nash…I just drive the bus.’ He smiled a little. ‘You want to know what Miho’s doing here, ask her yourself. I’m minding my own business.’
Nash knew a half-dozen ways of extracting the information from Massey, most of them painful; he doubted, though, that any one of them would have worked on the captain. Instead, he turned to the hatch and undogged it. ‘Okay. Be seeing you,’ he said.
‘Fourteen-thirty, Airlock Two. After that…’ Massey held up an open right palm and two fingers of his left hand. ‘Seven days. Believe it. Live by it.’
‘I won’t forget.’
The captain nodded his head. ‘Make sure you don’t. And good luck…Mr Donaldson.’
9. Final Briefing
NASH’S TRAVELLING COMPANIONS IN DECK 3D, two members of the relief crew which was bound for Arsia Station, were having dinner in the wardroom by the time he got back to his niche, thereby leaving him alone in the Lowell’s passenger quarters. Nonetheless, Nash took the precaution of closing the accordioned door to the closet-sized compartment before he placed the attaché case on his bunk.
His thumbprint unlocked the case; as he expected, it contained a notebook computer, along with accessories which had been provided by Security Associates’ armory. Nash unfolded the clamshell screen, switched on the computer, and slipped the diskette Massey had given him into the disk-drive.
The first page of the screen contained a file directory with a single entry: Mes / 8-01-32-1500 / Donaldson. Next to it was printed: 1st read / 8-25-32-1137. Nash let out his breath. So far, so good; no one had entered this file since it had been transmitted from Security Associates by means of Skycorp’s deep-space communications network. Nonetheless, it was a one-way message; Earth was out of radio-contact until Mars emerged again from the other side of the Sun.
Nash typed in his code-number; as an afterthought, he then pulled out a pair of lightweight headphones and jacked them into the computer. He switched the playback mode to Vox so that the message would be verbally communicated through the speech synthesiser. He had a few other things in the attaché case to check out, and having the E-mail read to him would save a few minutes.
The company’s logo appeared on the screen, accompanied by a sterile androgynous voice: ‘Good day, Mr Donaldson. The following message was transmitted to you at 1500 Greenwich Mean Time, August 1, 2032. An extra-high baud-per-second ratio was used during transmission to prevent its being read. It is preprogrammed to play only once, then erase itself from this diskette. You are further instructed to destroy this diskette after use. When you are ready to receive, please touch any key…’
Further proof that the message had not been tapped. He should have known that SA would take such precautions. Nash randomly tapped the letter J on the keyboard; there was a brief pause, then the voice continued. ‘Thank you. Your message will now commence…’
Again, another pause, although the screen remained static. The same AI voice continued, but the delivery, the choice of words, was unmistakably that of Robert Halprin; all that was lacking was his Oxford accent. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Donaldson. This is a final briefing before commencement of your present assignment and an update of the current operating environment. You will be receiving this message shortly after you are revived aboard the USS Percival Lowell en route to Mars. Since extended biostasis has been known to trigger spontaneous lapses in long-term memory, this briefing will commence with a review of your assignment…’
Leave it to Control to cover all the bases, even when it was redundant. Nash smiled to himself as he reached into the case; his hand found a small, bubble-celled plastic packet, which he pulled out and unzipped as he listened.
A digitalized photo of an unsmiling man—mid-fifties, craggy face, narrowed sharp eyes, thinning blond hair—appeared on the screen. Nothing about him showed any trace of warmth or humor. Nash felt something tighten in his chest as he studied the familiar face.
‘This man is Commander Terrance L’Enfant,’ Control’s AI doppelganger unnecessarily explained. ‘He is currently the American co-supervisor of the international scientific research base at Cydonia…‘
Almost involuntarily, Nash touched the Pause key on the computer. Gazing at L’Enfant’s face, he rested his arms on his knees, remembering a night long ago when he watched his former captain snuff out the lives of almost fifty men and women…
In 2019, Nash had been enlisted in the US Navy, serving as a seaman aboard the USS Boston. The Boston was a Seawolf-class attack submarine, assigned to duty in the South Pacific; at the age of twenty-five, Nash was around for the short-lived India-Japan Crisis
…and for the Takada Maru incident.
When the government of Japan announced its intention of importing as much as one hundred and fifty tons of plutonium, extracted from spent uranium fuel rods from Eastern European nuclear power plants, to power its own domestic nukes, the United States, Great Britain and Germany had led a protest in the United Nations against the proposal. The plan called for the plutonium to be transported by rail from Eastern Europe and the CIS to the Indian port city of Madras, where it would be loaded aboard Japanese commercial freighters and sailed along principal shipping routes in the Indian and Pacific Oceans to the Japanese port city of Osaka.
Japan was in desperate need of plutonium for its nukes; the country was still heavily dependent on civilian nuclear energy, but it had lost its principal suppliers of uranium and plutonium, the United States, Australia and South Africa, due to the Green Revolution. The CIS, along with Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had no such environmentalist scruples, however; they had already sold the reprocessed plutonium from their own dormant nuclear plants to India, with the Indian government anticipating a tidy profit from the subsequent resale to Japan. Although both Japan and India unofficially conceded that there was an inherent ecological danger in shipping so much plutonium across the high seas—not to mention the threat of Third World terrorist groups either hijacking a train as it made its way across the Middle East or pirating a freighter in the Indian Ocean—neither country was willing to abandon their agreement in the face of political fire. Too much money was at stake for India, and Japan’s government was under public pressure to relieve the periodic blackouts in its major cities.
When both Japan and India refused to cede to binding United Nations resolutions against the shipments, push finally came to shove. Under the accords of the UN Environmental Protection Treaty, the General Assembly voted in favor of naval blockades of both India and Japan. The USS Boston was assigned to the blockade of Osaka; its primary mission was to stop any Japanese freighters bound for the Japanese seaport, search their holds, and place under arrest the crews of any ships found to be carrying plutonium.