Apparently this young fellow is dead serious, thought Adam. His enthusiasm could make up for any lack of skills he might have. Maybe the Project could use a camera and audio man. I’ll have to think about it.
“And your family … ?” Of course he could always be trying to get away from his obligations, like many a settler on Pallas, a century ago.
“My wife’s first name,” Burt grinned from ear to ear, “means ’songbird’ in Mandarin, Dr. Ngu. I don’t know our kid’s first name yet, because we haven’t been formally introduced. I’ll bring them back with me—or stay here and send for them—if you’ll just give the word.”
Adam nodded. “Then I think—”
Suddenly, a dozen harsh klaxons began going off, filling the air with obnoxious and frightening noises. This was the alarm ordinarily reserved—it had never been set off until this moment—for a catastrophic breach of the dome. Adam forgot about Burt, his family, and everything else but the present emergency as he hurried into his office.
Inside, Ingrid’s beautiful eyes were wide with apprehension, but she had already gotten emergency self-contained breathing apparatus out of a closet for them both and was standing at his desk, playing his keyboard like a concert pianist. She moved aside when she saw him arrive.
She said, “Your brother’s onscreen for you, Dr. Ngu.”
“Thanks, Ingrid, will you find a chair for—” He looked back. Burt was long gone, to check on Honey or his 3DTV gear, perhaps both. “Never mind. Let’s see what’s happening. Is there still coffee in that thing?”
Lindsay’s worried visage almost filled the screen. Behind his brother, Adam could make out the interior of one of the Project’s gamera. At the controls, he could see the back of Arleigh’s shaggy head.
“What’s up, Lindsay?” Adam asked. “Was it you who tripped that alarm?”
Lindsay nodded. “Yeah, I asked one of the second shift hands to do that for me. I figured you might want a little time to gather up your possessions and precious souvenirs before you evacuate—if you’re lucky. We’re about a thousand miles from the dome right now, headed away.”
“Evacuated? Why?” demanded Adam.
“Well, we just got word—and pictures—from the factory vessel Herschel that the atmospheric canopy is on fire and burning outward in a circle about three hundred miles in diameter as of ten minutes ago.”
“But—” Adam found himself at a loss for words. “That plastic’s supposed to be completely fireproof. I conducted the goddamned tests myself.”
“Language, brother dear,” Lindsay grinned. “Watch your goddamned language.”
Arleigh turned toward the pickup as Lindsay moved aside. “I hate to say it, Ad, but it looks like sabotage to me. The images that we downloaded from the Herschel show a great big explosion right in the middle of absolute nowhere—one asks why—then a circle of fire going away from Ground Zero, initially at about six thousand feet per second.
Lindsay added, “It seems to have slowed down considerably since then.”
Adam nodded. “So it’s using up something it needs to keep on burning?”
“More likely spreading it thinner and thinner, I think,” Arleigh answered.
Adam nodded again. “A catalyst, then. Think it’ll get to the dome?”
Lindsay was looking at another screen. “The computer says it will, yes, about this time tomorrow.” He looked at Adam. “What’ll we do, Boss?”
His brother had never called him that before. Without hesitation, Adam said, “Each of you take a gamera to opposite positions on the burn perimeter. Station two more of the machines between you. We’ll have to calculate the proper radius as we go, depending on the burn rate.”
“Gotcha,” Lindsay answered. “Then what?”
Adam explained what he wanted them to do. “I’ll leave one gamera here for emergencies, and I’ll take the sixth to the center of the burn.”
“How come?” Lindsay and Arleigh had spoken simultaneously.
“I mean,” he told them, “to find out exactly what sons-of-bitches did this to us. While I’m headed in that general direction, send me every pixel that the Herschel took. Then ask them to do another scan, of the very center of the explosion, at as high a resolution as possible. I’m heading for my transport right now. Ingrid, would you please—”
“Right away, Dr. Ngu!”
He turned to find Honey and Burt right behind him. “May we go, too?”
He started to tell them no, reflexively. Then he shook his head in resignation. “It looks like it’s turning into a party. Why the hell not?”
***
The airlock light turned green. Not knowing who was up front, he shouted toward the bow of the craft, “I got the back door sealed and locked!”
Lindsay reentered the new gamera they’d sent out to him, his heavy duty industrial hand laser beginning to smoke a little once it was out of the vacuum and the utter cold of the Cerean surface. His brother Arleigh had gone ahead with the original machine taking a crewman who had arrived at the arranged spot with this one, and would be running through a similar routine to this, several hundred miles away.
Conferring with Adam by radio, they’d figured the whole thing out on the fly. What they had to handle here, basically, he’d told them, was a forest fire, and they’d agreed. Lindsay had spent his teenage years smokejumping in the deep, endless forests of Pallas. Arleigh had once been a volunteer fireman in Curringer. All three of the brothers understood that they were trying to save the future of an entire world.
“I’ve made the initial cuts, and set the hooks,” he informed the individual in the lefthand seat, as he set his laser aside and belted himself into the other seat. This was the individual who’d brought him the gamera from the dome, but the hadn’t had time for introductions, and he wasn’t even consciously aware of whoever was beside him, now, except in the present context. It didn’t really matter. His brother didn’t hire unreliable individuals. Lindsay’s eyes remained glued to a screen to his right, showing the fire’s inexorable progress around the asteroid.
His mind was having more than a little difficulty trying to absorb the bizarre fact that he and his brothers were fighting a fire in a vacuum.
He ran his fingers over a keyboard, then peered at the results on the screen for a moment. Outside, the sky seemed crowded with fliers of various designs and types, sweeping their lights over the surface, to all appearances at random. It didn’t require much reaction mass to keep machines like these aloft at one-tenth of a gee, but occasionally he could feel the gamera shudder in their backwash as they passed overhead.
“Let’s start warming up those forward lasers,” he told the pilot. “Give us about twenty feet of altitude to get the right spread between them.”
He peered out through a side port, wondering if they’d see the fire coming. From the tone of the reports he was receiving, it wasn’t a spectacular thing to behold, simply a smoldering line of stubborn, slow destruction, gradually eating up everything that everybody on Ceres had accomplished out here over the past several years. Suddenly he knew how farmers must feel about hail—or the Mormons about grasshoppers.
Anonymous in a virtual reality navigation helmet and a pair of VR gloves, the pilot of the machine nodded, pushed forward on two big invisible levers, and the gamera rose smoothly to the altitude he’d specified. Lindsay liked the feel of real controls in his hands much better.
A pair of heavy lasers in the craft’s chin, much larger and more powerful than Lindsay’s, began cutting through the tough plastic just ahead of the gamera, continuing two of the cuts Lindsay had started by hand. A third cut was perpendicular to the first two, and a fourth, actually the first he’d made, and also perpendicular, lay ten miles ahead.
As the machine moved forward, now, a pair of big titanium hooks trailing behind it lifted a strip of canopy behind them, leaving a fifty-foot swath of bare rock that they hoped the burn couldn’t get across.
Meanwhile, the ‘comm system was full of c
urses and exclamations, rude suggestions, and discussions of various people’s ancestry. He could see Arleigh on a screen and wondered briefly who was bossing the other two rigs. That didn’t matter, either. The other vehicles were out here, now, doing exactly the same thing as his own gamera was, creating a wide firebreak that was intended to isolate the strange burn, saving the remainder of the atmospheric canopy—the computer said possibly two thirds of it—if they could only work quickly enough.
Twenty miles along the line, ten miles ahead of the original cut, the gamera began to labor under a load it had never been constructed to bear, even at a tenth of a gee. The limit had been calculated in advance. The gamera now had a ten-mile strip of canopy plastic in tow.
The pilot brought the craft down to within a few feet of the ground again, and Lindsay, who had never even bothered to remove his envirosuit, rehelmeted, hopped outside, and cut across the plastic again with his laser. He watched as the gamera pulled the stuff—he was not the first to observe it was like working with flexible glass—to the non-fire side of the break for possible salvage later on.
Once the entire ten mile strip was well clear of the firebreak, the pilot picked him up and they rode back ten miles to where Lindsay restarted the long cuts with his laser and reset the big hooks in the plastic.
Hot and thirsty, he climbed back aboard again.
He removed his helmet—his hair was soaked as if he’d just come out of the rain, although the suit’s nanites had kept the inside of the helmet dry—and shouted at the pilot. “Hey, you got any beer aboard?”
The pilot pulled her flimsy VR helmet off and turned to face him briefly. “You look more like you need a towel than a beer, Lindsay Ngu. I have just heard from your brother Arleigh—between the four gamera crews, we’re already more than ten percent done. There’s some Gatorade, and a whole bunch of meal packs. No beer for us until we finish!”
Lindsay blinked. “Ingrid? What the living hell are you doing out here?”
The girl grinned. “Saving my home, sir, just like you’re saving yours. Now if you’re ready, we’ll cut and pull up the next section of plastic.”
CHAPTER THIRTY: THE ADVENTURES OF SAM O’VAR
Visitors from Earth often ask me why Pallatians have no flag. We have no flag for the same reason West America, the Moon, and Mars have no flag, for the same reason Ceres never will. Flags are the calling-card of plunderers, rapists, and murderers in funny hats and clown-suits, pretending to be benefactors, protectors, and healers. If history demonstrates anything more clearly than that, I don’t know what it is.
We would no more have a flag than we would have a king, a President, a Prime Minister, or any of the stuff that comes with them. If you ever hear that Pallas has adopted a flag, you will understand that Pallatians are no longer a free people. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
The whistle blew.
Outside the wet-streaked window, the empty miles lashed by, gray, bleak, rainy, and above all, cold. Springtime had come to the English countryside.
The two men sat opposite one another in a semiprivate compartment of the night train to Liverpool, one dressed in an enormous gray woolen greatcoat and matching deerstalker cap. He was both tall and broad, with the bearing and gait of a bear, and affected sideburns in the current “muttonchop” fashion. His hands appeared small and graceful, however, their long, slender fingers best suited to delicate tasks.
The other man was taller and thinner, with the manner of a natural aristocrat. He wore a stylish London tweed suit, brand new—over which he had thrown a vaguely military cape—and a felt hat with a broad brim. He had bushy red hair and eyes that were almost Asian. When he spoke, it was with the very voice and breath of the Russian Steppes.
Across his long lap, the man in gray carried an elegant stick with an elaborate silver handle and ferrule, and a subtly tapered ebony shaft that almost certainly concealed a sword. In the deep pocket of his coat, he carried the latest .45 caliber revolver from Webley & Scott.
At the same time, the distinctive “dog-bone”-shaped handle of a kindjal—that great curve-bladed knife or short sword of the Cossacks—thrust from under the cloak of the redheaded man, but the hand under his jacket lay upon the plowshare grip of a different sort of revolver, the Colt’s Peacemaker Model of 1873, its chambers cut for .44 Winchester Centerfire.
They had established that the man in gray was a physician, on his way to Liverpool at the moment, at the invitation of the constabulary there, to examine a dead body and look into a possible case of murder. The redheaded man had told the doctor that he would take ship in that port city for Ireland, in pursuit, he said, of something resembling justice.
“Heretofore,” said the man in gray, whose broad face was known far and wide, not only in the Kingdom of Great Britain, but in the world, “and despite my surname, I have endeavoured not to involve myself in the Irish Question, and I should strongly advise you to do likewise, Mr.—”
“O’Var, Dr. Doyle,” replied the redheaded man. “Colonel Sam O’Var, late of the Imperial Army of his Majesty the Czar. It is, I confess—and as I suspect that you suspect—merely a nom de guerre. I left his Majesty’s service, my dear sir, because I could no longer bear to sweep down on horseback upon unarmed peasants in their fields, to deprive good women of their husbands and innocent children of their fathers.”
The man in gray sat up. “But what has that to do—”
“Nor, I find,” the redheaded man continued, “can I bear any longer to witness—even at a distance, through the newspapers—what is being done to your poor serfs in Ireland, in the name of the Czar’s cousin—”
“Serfs?” The gray man’s eyebrows rose, and his nostrils flared. His voice was enormous. “Have a care, sir, for you are speaking of my Queen!”
“No, no, Dr. Doyle, I am speaking of her victims, of the Irish people, who have been wrongfully deprived of their land and of their sovereignty, both national and personal, as the Scots and the Welsh and countless others before them. They have not yet been stripped of their great-hearted spirit. I go now to assist them in any way I can to achieve not only their lost independence, but their individual self-ownership.”
By now, the man in gray was purple in the face. “Why, nonsense! Balderdash!”
The redheaded man was placid. “We shall see, Dr. Doyle, we shall see.”
“Indeed we shall, Colonel O’Var.” Doyle refilled his short-stemmed Dutch clay pipe and lit it. O’Var lit a cigarette. Both men relaxed. “Self-ownership, you say? I confess I am somewhat intrigued at the concept.”
The redheaded man grinned. “Let me tell you, then, what I know of it.”
***
“Hey, that was pretty neat!” Wilson exclaimed.
The girl stepped from the shower, toweling her copper-colored hair.
Fallon (her name was so lovely he had never thought of trying to shorten it, even affectionately, as her coworkers did) was a slender and willowy creature, with a tiny waist, narrow hips, and breasts—delightfully enough—technically a couple of sizes too large for her little frame and shoulders. Over the past several weeks Wilson had more than satisfied himself that they were perfectly natural. They hung beautifully, though, and the gravity of the Moon is kind to females.
In the sallow bathroom light, Fallon’s skin looked as pale as ivory. She was also covered from head to toe with freckles, which he sometimes made a game of counting—although she preferred to call it tickling. She had hips like a boy, he thought, but Fallon’s bottom, although rather small, exactly like the rest of her, was utterly and charmingly female, a perfect valentine-shaped heart, arranged upside- down.
At the moment, Wilson was still lounging in her bed, half covered by a brightly-colored sheet, his attention divided between the wall- sized 3DTV screen across the room—which was presently occupied with a commercial message about surgically implanted telephones—and the far more lavish display in the bathroom as a beautiful female dried herself.
It was a spec
tacle that he’d enjoyed dozens of times before, of course, both here and aboard Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend (Fallon was at least a twelve on that scale, he calculated, maybe even a fifteen) but at this point, the bathroom was defeating the 3DTV handily. (She had the cutest little feet, he thought.) Wilson still felt slightly body-shy around her (although he didn’t like it and would rather have died than tell her so) but she seemed to have no modesty at all around him.
Which, Wilson thought, was extremely generous of her.
“What was pretty neat?” she asked, grinning at him from under the towel she’d wrapped around her head. There must be at least fifty ways to dry your hair these days, he mused, including gadgets with lasers and microwaves. But women—Wilson’s study of the topic included five laboratory subjects: his mother, his sister, her coach, Fallon, and Amorie.
Amorie.
For about the hundredth time this week he realized all over again that it no longer hurt to think about Amorie. He felt as if Fallon had somehow cured him of a deadly affliction. Maybe he even loved her. His sincerest wish was that she wouldn’t turn out to be his “rebound girl”.
In any case, they all seemed to prefer the ancient terrycloth turban, especially if it also happened to clash horribly with their bathrobes.
“What was pretty neat? You, of course,” he winked at her. “But I was also channel-surfing while you were in the shower just now, and I happened to catch the last part of the first episode of something called The Adventures of Sam O’Var. I wish you’d been able to see it with me. It’s all about this renegade Cossack, see, who runs away from the Czar and ends up fighting with the Irish Republican Army against the—”
Fallon’s grin became a great big smile. “How wonderful! I know that series, very well! That was a rerun. The handsome hero is played by Maurice Gallatin, who used to be in Tales of the Lost Fifth Force, and not-Sir-yet Arthur Conan Doyle—who eventually becomes Sam O’var’s reluctant companion and ally—is played by Phineas May. I have the first two seasons in my computer, if you’d like to have a copy.”
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