Delta Blue

by William H. Lovejoy

  “Which means?”

  Pearson ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, trying to erase the traces of pepper. She unlatched the sipping tube on her coffee. “Which means that something about those wells makes them important enough to require the services of top echelon commanders.”

  “Intriguing, Amy. You do a good job.”

  She nodded slightly to acknowledge the compliment. “I’m still trying to track all of the vessels attached to the Third Naval Force, but at the briefing, I’ll also give you a rundown on the pilots we think are assigned to the Twentieth Special Air Group. Believe me when I say they’re all hot dogs and aces.”

  “I always believe you, Amy.”

  “Do you? Why don’t you like me, McKenna?”

  His eyes widened, and he grinned. “Not like you? Damn, my dear, I think you’ve got it all backward.”

  “Don’t call me ‘dear,’ please. If you had any respect for me, Colonel, you’d treat me as the professional I am.”

  “You want me to treat you differently than I treat Brad Mitchell or Polly Tang or Frank Dimatta? I can give you the prima-donna bit, if that’s what you want, or I can be a brass asshole, or I can be me.”

  She just stared at him for a moment, then gathered her empty pouches for the trash vacuum. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “Put it off. We’ll talk.”

  “Talking with you is too exasperating,” she said. “And I’ve got to check on the civvies.”

  Releasing her lap belt, Pearson pushed off the chair, dumped her breakfast remnants in the receptacle, then kicked her way toward the blue hatchway door leading into Spoke Sixteen.

  Traversing the spoke, she passed the four lifeboat stations, one of the reasons Spokes Sixteen, Ten, and Fourteen were off-limits to civilian personnel. Sight of the yellow hatches emblazoned with the black letters, “LIFEBOAT,” was not considered morale-maintaining for the civilians. The lifeboats were not very complex and could not survive reentry into the atmosphere. They were just simple capsules with food and air that would last thirty days. In the event of a catastrophe that consumed the entire station, each boat could sustain life for ten people while it drifted in space, waiting for a MakoShark or a Mako or, if necessary, a HoneyBee to rendezvous with it and retrieve the inhabitants.

  The engineers had absolute faith in the structural soundness of the station, but just in case …

  Keeping the civilians ignorant of the possible need for lifeboats was just another morale, as well as security, problem. Pearson thought the visitors ought to know about them, but somebody in DOD thought the clients should not have unnecessary worries.

  Lt. Col. Amelia Pearson was also the security officer aboard Themis. Brad Mitchell was in charge of the station’s environmental and structural integrity, but Pearson was responsible for containment of the less tangible, more slippery commodity of secret intelligence.

  She maintained the security clearance files on all enlisted personnel and officers except for General Overton, McKenna, and herself. Those were monitored by General Thorpe at Space Command. Pearson supervised the security clearance investigations for any potential replacement of personnel aboard the station. Replacements were rare, however, since those aboard resisted rotation back to an earth side assignment, and most had extended their one-year postings to Themis one or more times. Outside of war, there weren’t many situations in which the officer/enlisted distinctions virtually disappeared. Station personnel were selected strictly on the basis of competency in a given field.

  There was a large backlog of applicants for duty on the space station, from the army, the navy, and the marines, as well as the air force. The 1st Aerospace Wing was air force-operated, but the personnel complement included all services. Maj. Brad Mitchell was a marine. Polly Tang was army. No matter where they came from, though, the military people had never given Pearson much trouble. They understood the importance of the knowledge they accumulated, and when they were earth side, they did not spread it around.

  More troublesome to her brand of security were the civilian scientists on two-or three-week stints for companies that had contracted with the Department of Defense. Being scientists, they were naturally curious. Nosy, Pearson termed it. They might well defend to the death their right to protect the secrecy of an industrial process they personally developed in space, but they were less circumspect about revealing military secrets.

  Pearson had devised the color scheme used on Themis. All interior surfaces were painted a typical, uniformly military gray. Hatchways to absolutely dangerous areas — primarily the undeveloped spokes and the air locks — were finished in red. Hatchways to spaces accessible only to particularly authorized personnel were orange and were also protected by keypad-operated locks. The nuclear reactor, communication, computer, ordnance and fuel storage areas, and the MakoShark hangars were behind orange hatches.

  Areas to which a civilian might be invited, but only under escort, were identified in yellow. The Command Center, the Mako bays, and the Honeybee docking facilities qualified for yellow.

  Blue was utilized for the spaces open only to military personnel, such as the military laboratories in Spokes Ten through Fourteen, and green was the predominant color used for those regions accessible to visiting civilians. Some compartments had blue/green hatchways, denoting combined usage. Various corridors in the hub had a green stripe running along the bulkhead. If an unescorted civilian didn’t see green somewhere, he or she knew the territory was forbidden. Not that some of them cared one way or the other. Military people were always reminding errant civilian people of the distinction.

  Of the sixteen spokes, seven were open to civilians — three of the residential modules and four of the dedicated laboratory modules, Spokes Two through Eight. The nuclear reactor power plant was located at the end of Spoke Nine. In the hub, civilians could visit the exercise room, the medical clinic, a communications space set aside for corporate contractors, the laundry, and a few other specialized spaces.

  At some time during her workday, Pearson made it a point to visit various spaces in the civilian areas. She made her visits randomly, and frequently she sent M. Sgt. Val Arguento in her place. Arguento was an army communications specialist who manned one of the shifts in the Radio Shack, but who also served as the security NCO. He had had extensive experience with the Defense Intelligence Agency and with the National Security Agency.

  This morning, Pearson chose Spoke Six. She followed the curving outer corridor, Corridor Two, around to it, passing a number of people emerging from the residential spokes, headed for their assigned tasks. Everyone spoke to her, and she returned the greetings with a smile.

  Spoke Six had a green hatchway, and was therefore out-of-bounds to most of the military contingent. The corporate contractors often had secrets they wanted to keep to themselves. And even if they did not, the experiments taking place in the labs were often sensitive, and the scientists didn’t want to be subjected to high traffic.

  She tapped the green square and waited while the door unlocked and swung open. This spoke was forty feet long, and along its length, four accesses were provided, leading to small modules attached to the side of the spoke. These were hydroponic farms, where food and other flora were raised in special solutions. Artificial light was normally used, but one of the modules had a sliding shield that allowed direct sunlight to enter. It was all experimental. One of the military spokes had hydroponic farms growing wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans that were actually consumed after Sergeant O’Hara performed his magic.

  After her Texas Omelet, Pearson thought she might revert to O’Hara’s bland bean concoctions.

  The laboratory on the end of the spoke was huge, eighty feet long by sixty feet in diameter. Its interior bulkheads were partially movable in order to create differently sized spaces, based on the needs of the contractor.

  The contractor was responsible for providing the equipment necessary for the particular experiment, and the equipment arrived at the station by
HoneyBee.

  Spoke Six was currently under contract to Honeywell and to Du Pont and was therefore divided into two separate laboratories. She passed through Honeywell’s space, which wasn’t currently inhabited, and opened the hatch to Du Pont. Honeywell smelled of ozone, which she didn’t like, and she made a mental note to mention it to Brad Mitchell.

  Dr. Howard Dixon was upside down to her when she pulled herself through the hatchway She performed a half flip.

  He smiled at her. “Ah, Colonel. Welcome.”

  “I hope I’m not disturbing anything, Doctor.”

  “Not at all. I’m boiling some oxides, if you’d like to watch.”

  Absolutely fascinating, she thought. “I’ll pass, thanks. Are you being taken care of? Is there anything we can do for you?”

  “Not a thing. I’m perfectly happy.”

  In the immense space, he looked like a miniature, hanging onto the workbench fitted to the outer wall. But he did look happy.

  The lab was a jungle of specialized instruments, consoles, and work tables to which were attached intricate lacings of tubing, vials, and bottles.

  On her circuit of the lab, Pearson was careful to not touch anything. She looked primarily for things that might seem out of place, for paperwork that shouldn’t be there. There wasn’t much paper, of course, since most work notes and reports were kept on computer.

  Computer disks leaving the station, or data and voice transfers from the client communications room, were scanned by Sergeant Arguento’s computer for information that should not be included in industrial and scientific reports. The computer sought out key words and phrases in computer documents and sounded the alarm when something was amiss. Usually, when they discovered classified information being transmitted, it was unintentional on the part of the scientist. A trivial piece of scientific curiosity, a measurement of the nuclear plant output, a suspicion that Themis stored ordnance aboard. One nuclear physicist, who also happened to be an antinuke activist, had convinced himself that nuclear-tipped missiles were stored aboard the station. He had made a nuisance of himself searching the station’s compartments for them, and had eventually been deported.

  When such incidents happened, General Overton was called on for a stern lecture, and the appropriate corporate headquarters was notified. Companies like Du Pont or Honeywell or Martin-Marietta did not want to lose the privilege of experimenting in space and tended to take immediate corrective action with their employees.

  Completing her inspection, she said good-bye to Dixon and passed back into Honeywell’s lab. It was mostly taken up by three large, reinforced, and interconnected boxes that contained the components of a computer memory. It had been explained to her that the difference was that the memory chips were in complete vacuum. They were playing with artificial intelligence, Dr. Monte Washington had willingly explained to her.

  She made a quick trip around the lab, then headed back to the spoke, reaching the hatchway just as it opened. Washington and his assistant, a bespectacled and bald man named Kensing, floated through the opening.

  “Hey, Colonel Pearson,” Washington said. “You’re early today.”

  “That’s because I have a full day ahead, I’m afraid, Mr. Washington.”

  “Ah, that’s too bad. I was hoping to buy you lunch or dinner. Take in a movie.”

  “Maybe another time,” she said, for perhaps the tenth time. Washington was persistent, though not grabby. He poked with his eyes.

  She felt his eyes on her backside as she darted down the spoke.

  Monte Washington might be one step worse than McKenna, she thought. At least McKenna seemed honest.

  And she wondered at the question she had asked him. She didn’t really think that McKenna disliked her.

  *

  Bahnsteig Eine appeared to be solid as a rock when Eisenach’s helicopter settled onto the landing pad at two o’clock. The appearance was something of a deception.

  The platform bases actually floated. While the platform itself stood some fifteen meters above the surface of the sea, the three legs extended downward only as far as the subsurface unit. That massive, donut-shaped structure was twenty meters below the surface, providing flotation as well as stabilization with extended, winglike stabilizers and internal, motor-driven gyros. The seabed, a crevice in this location below Bahnsteig Eine, was some 520 meters deep, and the platform maintained its position by means of four anchor lines.

  Heavy seas were running, the troughs a meter below the white-capping tips of the waves, but the platform was steady when Eisenach, his adjutant Oberlin, and Oberst Albert Weismann, exited the helicopter.

  Four crewmen from the platform ran out to tie the helicopter down, and the pilot descended from his cockpit to light a cigarette.

  The wind was strong, forcing the three officers to grip their service caps as they made their way across the flight deck to the dome entrance. The small door was set deeply into the wall of the dome. The walls were three meters thick, solid insulation sandwiched between aluminum skins in each of the five-meter triangular pieces that made up the dome. Next to the small door was a section of wall, four meters tall by six meters wide, which was removable so that heavy equipment could be transferred in and out of the dome.

  When Oberlin closed the door behind them, they stood in a wide, high corridor leading to the back side of the structure. The deck was steel-plated in an antiskid diamond pattern. At the back of the corridor, an insulated fiberglass wall had been installed, to isolate the corridor from the drilling compartment that was located to the back of the dome.

  Eisenach wrinkled his nose at the sulfur-tainted air that wafted through the corridor. A deep hum of machinery vibrated through the floor.

  On his right were the living quarters, ten floors of dormitory rooms, kitchens, and recreation rooms to house the 140 men who worked on Bahnsteig Eine. The living spaces took up about a third of the dome.

  To the left, taking up four floors, was the gigantic collection and distribution room. The heavy machinery was located in the drilling section.

  Eisenach had no interest in seeing either area on this visit.

  He led the way down the corridor and arrived at the elevator just as it opened.

  Oberst Hans Diederman smiled widely as he emerged from the car. “Herr General Eisenach, how good it is to see you!”

  Diederman was an army engineer with a widely respected mind. He was tremendously overweight, and the fat bulged his fatigue uniform. Eisenach had spoken to him repeatedly about his weight, but the engineer continued to enjoy the well-stocked pantry included in his command.

  Eisenach treated the man with some deference because he was instrumental to the VORMUND PROJEKT. He was in charge of all twenty-four platforms, and the process had been developed by Diederman and his army subordinate engineers. Some navy and air force engineering officers, who happened to be partially knowledgeable of the project, were jealous.

  Diederman did not bother with a salute, but held his callused hand out.

  Eisenach shook it. The hand was hard and firm, contrary to his appearance. “Hans. How are you?”

  “Wonderful! Come, come, gentlemen. Let us go up to my suite.”

  Diederman stepped back into the elevator, and Eisenach, Oberlin, and Weismann followed him. The engineer’s bulk made the car very small.

  Diederman pressed the button for Level Five, and the car rose silently. He had designed the elevator also.

  When they exited on the fifth deck, the vibrations and humming of the platform were considerably reduced. The sound-deadening insulation imbedded in the walls of the control center was quite thick.

  The center itself felt spacious. It was two stories tall, and the interior walls were about thirty meters long. The outside, third wall curved to the radius of the dome. In one wall was a door to the residential section. In the other straight wall were doors to several private offices.

  An electronic grid map on the wall identified the immediate area, with the wells, the ice
shelf, and ships in the area clearly marked. Alongside the circles signifying each well was a rectangular box displaying sets of numbers. To Diederman, and to others as well versed as he, the numbers provided pertinent and current information about each well. Temperatures, pressures, output. Eisenach had long before given up trying to interpret them.

  The floor of the control center was lined with electronic consoles. There were forty consoles, with thirty-two of them currently manned.

  Oberst Albert Weismann stopped by one console and peered over the shoulder of the operator. He appeared as puzzled by what was displayed on the computer screen as Eisenach had been, the first time it was explained to him.

  “Now, this way, gentlemen.”

  Diederman led them into his office, which was spacious, and closed the glass door. The office did not have a desk. It had a computer terminal, a bank of six television screens, two sofas angled into one corner, and a huge round table with eight chairs spaced around it. The table was littered with computer printouts, diagrams, and schematics. Near one chair was a slanted control panel similar to a switchboard.

  The chief engineer poured the coffee himself, drawing the strong black liquid from a large urn into ceramic cups. He passed them around as everyone took seats at the table, but did not offer cream or sugar. He placed a platter piled high with pastries in the center of the table. He swept piles of documents to one side, then plopped into the chair next to the switchboard.

  “Well, then, General Eisenach. You are here for a progress report?”

  Though that was not the primary purpose of his visit, Eisenach said, “Please, Hans.”

  Diederman pressed two buttons on his control panel and one of the TV screens came to life, showing a view from above of a drilling compartment. A swarm of men moved over the floor and along the ribs of the rig, dismantling steel beams and lowering them to the deck with an overhead crane.

  “That is Platform Twenty. The well has been completed successfully, now, and we are disassembling the heavy drilling rig. It will be moved to Platform Twenty-Two.”