by Wil McCarthy
He consoled himself with one thought: that the Sabadell-Andorra Earthquake had been an accident, an act of God. Inevitable, really, and buried back in an age when death—especially by accident—was still the norm. These more recent deaths were something else entirely: caused. He glanced up: Mercury was fully visible, already as large as a mottled gray apple in the view, and growing visibly.
He sat up and tried wanly to bring some of the iron back into his voice. “Do … forgive me, please. The loss of so many, including Her Majesty, has … well. Yes. You know as well as I. But of course we’ll be to the planet in a few minutes, unbalanced or no. An unfortunate property of time is that it can’t be made to wait.”
Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said, “Our enemy, of course, has the same problem. Things are moving quickly. If we’re as quick, we may very well land safely. Visually, Marlon will be looking straight into the sun for us, which ought to confuse even quite sophisticated sensors. And gravitationally … well, let’s just say this ship has an unusual—and decidedly minimal—signature. And if he really isn’t looking, if he does presume us dead, we may be able to slip right in.”
“He’ll see us in orbit,” Shiao protested, “if we’re forced to scour the surface for signs of him.”
Bruno, still sniffling a bit, pinched himself on the chin. “Hmm. Well. We needn’t search the entire planet, surely. He must have his energy converters on the daylight side right now, after all. And his beam weapons as well, since they can’t fire through the planet.” He sat up straighter. “In fact, he must have had collectors on the daylight side continuously for the past several weeks. Either that, or very, very large batteries, and since the former is much easier …”
“What’s to say the power source is near the base?” Shiao asked skeptically.
“Efficiency,” Deliah said, ticking the answers off on her fingers. “Safety. Cost. Time. Light-lag. Marlon may be a good faker, but in private he is—demonstrably!—not a very patient person. He’s gone to a lot of trouble over this, but I doubt he’s gone to any extra trouble, or put up with any suboptimal equipment, or otherwise made things harder on himself than they absolutely need to be.”
Fighting dizzy nausea, Bruno nodded. “Indeed. I quite agree.”
Muddy was huddled at one of the hypercomputer interfaces, tapping figures in madly. “Mercury completes a revolution every fifty-eight days, an orbit every eighty-eight. Daylight lasts eight and a half weeks at the equator, so we’re looking pole to pole in an arc from the eastern terminator to thirty degrees west of the noon line. But to be consistent with observations, the g-gravity lasers couldn’t be within, er, thirty degrees of the north pole, whereas from the south …”
Bruno looked up again, saw the planet there in the bow window, fully illuminated from edge to edge like a full but strangely altered moon because they were flying toward it almost straight up out of the sun, their grapples locked on the planet’s equator. Indeed, the planet was as wide as a dinner platter, and widening rapidly.
“The base should be s-s-somewhere in here,” Muddy said, and on the window a green, crosshatched area the shape of a kidney bean appeared, covering less than a fifth of the planet’s sunward face. “Initiating telescopic survey.”
Shiao glared up anxiously through the window. “How long will this take? Should we think about plotting an orbit solution?”
“I am still experiencing widespread malfunction,” Sabadell-Andorra answered. “Gravitational stresses have fractured millions of my wellstone fibers.”
“Oh, God,” Deliah said. “Is hull containment in danger?”
“Not imminently. Unless there are further stresses. But my computing power and reliability are markedly degraded.”
“Oh, well, no problem about that.” Deliah’s voice dripped irony.
Then Muddy spoke up. “Survey complete. There are a number of reflective prominences right here, surrounded by a bank of s-s-superabsorbers.”
On the window, superimposed over the planet’s surface and the bean-shaped highlight, a red X appeared.
“Yes? Goodness, lock the grapples to it,” Bruno said, his blood rising. Part of him hadn’t really expected to find anything—their chain of suppositions was rather long—and another part had expected, long before now, to be burned out of the sky by some silly weapon or other. But logic existed for a reason, because it carried you inexorably toward truth. When properly applied, of course, but by now that was a matter of long habit.
“Grapples may harm the base,” Deliah said excitedly. “Disrupting local gravity, interfering with his grav-projection mechanisms … It could be just the edge we need.”
“A double edge,” Shiao cautioned. “It’ll alert him to our presence, and in fact pinpoint our exact location.”
“Irrelevant,” Muddy said. “Unless we mean to d-destroy the base using ourselves as a projectile, we must begin deceleration at once.”
Indeed, moments later the gravity switched off, and everyone went flying into the air as the Sabadell-Andorra wheeled around them, orienting its grapples toward the sun. Above, the window dimmed again to prevent the sunlight from searing them all. Then gravity returned, and they all came crashing back down in an assortment of uncomfortable ways.
“Blast,” Bruno said, pointing vaguely. “Everyone into your couches, please. Unfold those, yes. We now have—alas!—enough seats to accommodate everyone.”
“Are we still heading for this ‘base’?” Tusité asked.
“We are,” Muddy confirmed. Then, in a rare display of manners for a de Towaji of any sort, he stuck out his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, by the way. I’m Muddy.”
“Tusité,” she returned quickly, accepting his hand into her own dark fingers with a reflexively dainty, ladylike grip. “No last name.”
“Me either,” Muddy said.
She looked puzzled by that—clearly she thought he was another Bruno, or at least another de Towaji. But what she said, albeit somewhat brusquely, was, “Charmed. I … apologize for screaming, a minute ago. It’s frightening, all this running and fighting and dying. But I do owe you my life.”
“Oh, none of that,” Muddy clucked. “We’ve all had our share of b-bad moments on this trip. Anyway, you owe him.” He nodded sideways at Bruno.
Tusité looked in Bruno’s direction and inclined her head. She looked as if her fright were only barely contained, but she nonetheless turned back to Muddy. “Mercury is hostile wilderness, true?” she asked. “So hot it’s full of molten metal? If we come down in the wrong spot, it could mean our deaths.”
“Indeed,” Muddy agreed. “But we’re aimed right for the center of the Declarant’s base. As we approach, I’ll be scanning for dangers. I’ll look for hollows beneath the rock, too—natural or otherwise—because that’s where we’ll find him. I’ll do my b-best to set us atop one of them.”
“Steering how?” she pressed anxiously.
“The guidance algorithm adjusts its course by sliding the grapple target to different parts of the sun.”
“I’ll bet we’re disrupting that, as well,” Deliah noted. “It’s illegal to grapple the sun because it can whip up flares and proton storms which affect the entire Queendom. I doubt anyone has ever given our poor photopause the sort of thrashing we’re giving it now.”
“Indeed,” Bruno said, “we have much to answer for.”
Everyone burst out laughing at that. Tight, anxious laughter, it was true, but still it surprised Bruno—he’d been serious. All week, he’d been tearing up the solar system as if he owned the place, grappling to anything handy regardless of consequence, helping mainly his own friends … But even Hugo, strapped as ever to the cabin’s floor, made mewling noises that were quite a good imitation of amusement.
“I’m sure we could all use a rest,” he grumbled, and everyone laughed at that, too.
“You’re planning to melt through solid rock?” Shiao asked. “He could be buried quite deep, couldn’t he?”
�
��Unlikely,” Deliah said. “For the same reasons already cited. His equipment needs to be on the surface—or to stick up through the surface, at any rate—and he’ll want to be close to it. It’s the same reason your eyes and ears are up next to your brain—so the signals don’t have far to travel.”
“So how deep should we expect to burrow?”
She shrugged. “Less than fifty meters, at a guess. Of course, at the rate this ship tunnels that could still take a pretty long time.”
“Three minutes to touchdown,” the ship noted.
“There’ll be a-a-access ports at the surface,” Muddy said, finally climbing onto his acceleration couch. His hands and voice were shaking, Bruno saw. He was going in to face his personal Satan. Was there ever a better reason to be terrified? “He never uses his ports, but they’re always there. I’ve seen his secret f-facilities elsewhere in the solar system, and I doubt he’d deviate much from pattern. We should be armed, by the way; we can expect a stiff resistance from robot guards. Captain Shiao?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Can you recommend some hand weapons to our fax machine, please?”
“Certainly.” From his folding couch, Shiao rattled off a series of model numbers, technical specifications, magazine sizes and battery capacities, piezoelectric coefficients and physical dimensions. Beside him, the fax hummed and glowed.
“Acknowledged, sir,” Sabadell-Andorra replied a few moments later. “Weapons are ready.”
With shaking hands, Muddy snapped his couch harness in place. “Right. Well, everyone should pick one up on the way out. I don’t suppose we have sufficient mass in the reservoir to make s-spacesuits?”
“Only two complete ones,” the ship replied apologetically. “We are low on certain key elements, notably oxygen.”
“We could send two of us ahead in full armor,” Cheng Shiao suggested. “I will, naturally, volunteer.”
It took Bruno a moment to realize the suggestion was aimed solely at him. He was the commander of this expedition, in every conceivable sense. Such a decision was clearly his. He considered it. Would dividing their forces leave them vulnerable? Would the ship be safer with people aboard to guard her? Did it matter, two people, or four, or six? He wanted no more deaths on his conscience, but wasn’t at all sure how to accomplish this under the circumstances.
He did know, in a low, cold-blooded way, that Shiao was the one person here—other than himself—that he’d be most willing to sacrifice, if such sacrifice could not be helped. Shiao was the person most willing to sacrifice himself, and also the one most qualified—far more qualified than Bruno—to break into the fortress of a mad genius.
The sun moved out of the bow window, which turned clear again, showing stars and a few wispy tendrils of solar corona. Their little ship could be anywhere, really; looking up there gave no impression that they were about to land on a planet.
“All right,” Bruno said finally, “Shiao and I will don space suits and attempt to seize control of Marlon’s study, wherever it may be. I’m not sure whether we can reverse the damage he’s done, but if so that will be the likeliest place from which to accomplish it. The rest of you stay with the ship.”
“I object,” Vivian said immediately, from her little couch beside Shiao’s own. “I am a Commandant-Inspector of the Royal Constabulary.”
“Also a sixteen-year-old girl,” Bruno and Shiao said together.
“I didn’t have any heroics in mind, thank you,” she said, with a cool stiffness that belied her age. “I’m thinking of Declarant Sykes’ household control systems. There must be an interface somewhere, and if I can find it I may be able to issue law-enforcement overrides to the resident intelligence. If not, I may at least be able to sabotage it in some way.”
Bruno thought about this. In no way did he wish to further endanger Vivian’s life. There was danger enough, without sending her off to the mercies of armed robots and other household security systems.
“None of us have backup patterns we can rely on,” he reminded her. “Our actions here carry the sting of permanence. If you die, you’ll die.”
“I’m aware of that, Declarant.”
“Hmm. Yes. Well, I leave it up to Shiao. He seems quite protective of you.”
“I—” Shiao began, but was immediately interrupted.
“I order you to agree,” Vivian said.
Shiao reddened; his protective instincts were suddenly frustrated, bottled in. He didn’t like that one bit.
“Cheng,” she warned, her copper eyes flashing angrily, “this won’t look good on my report. Physically, I’m sure you could prevent me, but you do not want to refuse a direct order. Nor would you want, in any way, to endanger this mission. Would you like to be the cause of our failure?”
“I … would not,” he said, with visible effort.
“I’ll take every precaution,” she said, softening. “I have no desire to upset you.”
He slumped back into his couch. “I’ll agree, Commandant-Inspector, on the sole condition that you not go alone.”
“I’ll go with her,” Deliah said. “I’ve dealt with some balky intelligences in my time.”
Hugo, strapped right where it had been for the past several days, started up an urgent mewling. “Me! Me! Me!” it seemed almost to be saying.
“Steady, old thing,” Bruno said in his best tone of reassurance.
“Thirty seconds to touchdown,” the ship informed them.
Muddy, eyes on his sensors, worried at the hypercomputer interfaces with badly shaking hands. “We appear to be d-directly over the central complex, with several access ports nearby. The habitable area consists of four main chambers plus assorted closets and conduits, eighteen meters below ground. Optimal landing site … identified.”
Suddenly, the space above them was alive with brief, intense, moon-sized flashes of light. They were taking fire again.
“He’s detected us,” Shiao said unnecessarily.
“Centroid of detonations is eighty kilometers above us,” said Muddy. “We’re close to the source—he may not be physically able to aim any lower than that. Ship, probability of a hit?”
“Twenty percent, each second.”
“Time to touchdown?”
“Three seconds. Two. One. Zero.”
The deck thumped beneath them, gently. Paradoxically, the sense of gravity lessened immediately, as if they’d been parked and stationary all along, and now the ground had dropped out from under them. Above, the view still gave no impression of a planetary environment; on Mercury, outer space started a millimeter above the soil. And the blasts of the zero-point field inversion weapon started eighty kilometers above that!
“He won’t hit us on the ground,” Deliah said hopefully. “He might hurt his own equipment.”
“It looks like taking off again will be a bit of trouble, though,” Tusité observed quietly. Her eyes had begun to take on a kind of refugee stare, an unwillingness to be further surprised or intimidated.
Bruno was out of his harness and up within four seconds of touchdown; Shiao was even faster. At the hatchway, the familiar sizzling sounds had begun as Sabadell-Andorra melted its way into one of Muddy’s promised ‘access ports.’
“Time to penetration?” Muddy called out anxiously.
“Ninety-two seconds,” the ship replied.
“Spacesuits,” Shiao said. “Quickly.” He picked up a bundle from beside the fax machine, tossed it to Bruno, then picked up another bundle for himself. Bruno struggled into the garment as best he could, and the suit itself did its best to help him. Still, he’d only worn one of these things once before in his life, and at that time he’d had palace servants to help him into it. It took him well over a minute to get dressed. Shiao—finished in a quarter the time—passed out weapons and then, for nearly a full thirty seconds, tapped a ringing, armorclad toe on the deck.
“All right,” Bruno said when he was finally ready.
Hugo, to his astonishment, stood up alongside him. Had t
he battered old robot somehow struggled free of its restraining straps? They lay on the floor, neatly piled a meter away from the iron rings they’d been strung through. Good Lord, had Hugo actually unfastened all the hasps, with his clumsy golden fingers? It seemed inconceivable.
“Mewl,” the blank metal face said, with what sounded for all the worlds like satisfaction.
Bother it, there was no time for this. “You stay here, Hugo. Guard the ship, with Muddy.”
“Pick a weapon, sir,” Cheng Shiao suggested urgently, pointing at a pile of clutter beside the fax. “His defenses may still be coming on-line. For everyone’s safety, we should be moving along as quickly as possible.”
“Hmm. Indeed,” Bruno said, peering down at the weapons pile through the clear dome of his space helmet. Should he select one of the pistols? The rifle? The vibrating impervium sword? At the very bottom of the pile was a simple wellstone rod, a meter and a half in length and as big around as a stairway banister. Bruno reached for it, pulled it up from the clutter, felt the heft of it in his hand. It was very light, like a toy made of foam. But it was wellstone; currently it emulated a black polymer surface, but it could become almost anything in his hands. Less a weapon than a humble tool, like an oversized hammer, but he took it nonetheless.
Shiao saw this, and nodded. He himself had taken up a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, and waited now by the door with grim impatience.
The sizzling noises stopped.
“Safe to open hatch,” Sabadell-Andorra said.
“I’m scared,” Tusité said, as if unable to help herself.
“We’ll b-be scared together,” Muddy reassured her, in a voice at least as shaky. He threw a trembling arm around her.
Meanwhile, Shiao threw the latches and pulled the door open. On the other side was a simple pressure vessel, a metal cylinder with a door of its own facing off to one side. In that door was a little circular window of some heavily tinted, glassine material, through which a gray-white moonscape was visible. There were two more cylinders nearby outside, their hulls reflecting mirror-bright in the harsh sunlight, and beyond them were some other, smaller glittery things less easily identified.