by Hogan, James
"It fits with the way they think," Massey agreed.
Zambendorf walked slowly between the two tiers of bunks and turned when he
reached the far wall. "So what does all this mean?" he asked. "What's behind it
all? Have you any theories about that?"
"Well, I don't know that it's anything especially new," Massey replied. "But the
first step toward reducing a nation to colonial status in order to exploit it
has always been to dehumanize its inhabitants in the eyes of your own people
and—"
The call tone from Zambendorf's personal communicator interrupted. "Excuse me,"
he said, taking the unit from his pocket and activating it. The miniature screen
showed the features of Otto Abaquaan, calling from the team's quarters. "Yes,
Otto?" Zambendorf acknowledged. His choice of phrase indicated to Abaquaan that
Zambendorf had company.
"Have you got a moment?" Abaquaan asked.
"Go ahead."
"Um, do you know where Joe is? Need to talk to him."
"I'm afraid not."
"Got any idea where he went?"
"Sorry."
"Oh, hell. Too bad, huh? Send him back if you see him. We need to talk to him.
Is that okay?"
"I will if I see him."
"Okay."
Zambendorf frowned for a second. Abaquaan wasn't interested in locating Joe
Fellburg. His utterances had been structured according to a magician's code in
which the mood of each phrase—interrogative or indicative—along with its initial
letter, conveyed an alphabetical character. What Zambendorf had read from it was
CMLT URGNT, which he interpreted as "Camelot. Urgent." Abaquaan was telling him
that something had come in over the line from Arthur, and it couldn't wait.
Massey and Price were looking at each other suspiciously. They were magicians
too.
Zambendorf stared from one to the other and bit his lip uncertainly. Were Massey
and he on the same side now? Now that Massey had taken Zambendorf into his
confidence, did he owe it to Massey to do likewise? His instincts were to cement
the alliance, but a lifetime's experience urged caution.
And he saw that the same question was written across Massey's face. Their
differences were trivial compared to the things they now knew they shared.
Zambendorf had to give some tangible sign that he felt the same way. Zambendorf
looked down at the screen of the communicator in his hand. "I'm with Gerry
Massey and Vernon Price," he said. "A lot has happened that would make too long
a story to go into now. But you can speak plainly, Otto. The team has just
acquired two more members."
The surprise on Abaquaan's face lasted for just a fraction of a second. He was
used to adapting to new situations quickly without having to ask questions.
"We've had a call from Arthur and Galileo," he said. "It's bad news—real bad
news."
Massey gasped disbelievingly. "Arthur—the Taloid? But how? Where did you—"
"Oh, we also have a private communication line that you don't know about,"
Zambendorf told him. He looked back at Abaquaan. "What's happened, Otto?"
"Those fundamentalist fanatics out in the hills—the ones that Arthur's soldiers
are always having trouble with," Abaquaan said.
"The Druids. Yes, what about them?"
"They wiped out a whole Genoese patrol and then massacred a larger force that
was sent after them," Abaquaan said. "Putting it mildly, Arthur's pretty upset."
Zambendorf looked puzzled. "That's terrible, Otto, and of course I sympathize .
- . but why is it such serious news? How does it affect us?"
"Because of how they did it," Abaquaan replied. "They did it with Terran
weapons. Someone has started shipping Terran weapons down to Henry and the
Paduans, and the Paduans are passing them on to the Druids to stir up trouble in
Genoa. Arthur says he's had enough of promises and words. He wants something he
can defend himself with. If we can't deliver, he'll take the deal that Giraud's
bunch has been pushing."
27
THE FEATURELESS RED-BROWN BALL OF TITAN GREW LARGER AND flattened out into what
looked like a solid desert surface from the twelve-man flyer Hornet skimming
above the aerosol layer, where it had leveled out after its descent from orbit.
Zambendorf, clad in a helmetless EV suit, was sitting in the rear cabin,
brooding silently to himself over the latest events, while opposite him Vernon
Price gazed spellbound through one of the side ports at the rainbow-banded orb
of Saturn beyond Titan's rim, seemingly floating half-submerged in the immense
plane of its ring system viewed almost edge-on.
Sgt. Michael O'Flynn had reacted with a singular display of imperturbability and
composure when Zambendorf asked for his advice on the best way to go about
stealing a vehicle to get down to the surface. "Now, they're not exactly the
kind of thing you'd expect people to just walk away from and leave lying around
for anyone to help themselves to," O'Flynn had said. "And besides, even if you
did get your hands on one, there's nothing you could do with it. A surface
lander needs a minimum crew of four, all highly trained, and it couldn't take
off without a preflight preparation routine by a regular ground team."
"I'm not talking about a full-blown orbital shuttle, for God's sake," Zambendorf
had replied. "But what about a medium-haul personnel flyer—one of the small
ones? Couldn't you pull one of those out of service and list it as being
withdrawn for maintenance or something?"
"But those are just surface flyers. They don't make descents from orbit."
"They could here, at a pinch," Zambendorf had insisted. "With Titan's low
gravity you could use one as a miniature lander ... if you were to ignore
certain sections of NASO flight regulations and allowed the International Space
Transportation Regulatory Commission's safety margins for wing loading and
thermal stress to slip a little."
"Hmm . . . you seem to know what you're talking about, I see. Now, where would
somebody like you have found out about things like that, I'm sitting here asking
meself."
"Never mind. The question is, can you do it, Mike?"
"Well, maybe I can, and then again, maybe I can't ... But supposing for the
moment that I could, it would have to be for the hardware only, you understand.
I'm not in the headhunting business. You'd have to find your own pilot."
"I think I can take care of that."
O'Flynn had sounded surprised. "Oh, who . . . and with what qualifications?"
"Former combat maneuver instructor with the Air Force Suborbital Bomb Wing; two
years specializing in high-altitude attack and evasion tactics. Is that good
enough?"
"Begorrah, you're kidding! Someone on your team?"
"Yes."
"Let me see now ... it would have to be Joe, the big black fella. Is that who it
is?"
"No."
"Who, then?"
"Don't worry about it," Zambendorf replied, his eyes twinkling. "Anyway, you
wouldn't believe me if I told you. You'd be surprised at some of the talent
we've got between us in our little outfit."
It had taken little imagination to see that supplying Terran weapons to the
inherently belligerent Paduans would completely destabilize the situation
between Padua and its neighboring states, and before very much longer the more
distant ones too. Other Taloid nations would seek similar weapons to secure
themselves against the threat of Paduan aggression—as indeed Genoa desired to do
already—and then others would feel threatened as those that hadn't reequipped
their forces found themselves being intimidated by the ones that had. Eventually
all the Taloid states would be forced to follow suit, and in the process they
would be progressively reduced to a condition of vassal-dependency on Earth,
which would thus be able to negotiate separately with each on terms of its own
choosing. It was an old, familiar pattern, which earlier centuries on Earth had
seen repeated many times over.
Massey had composed a message summarizing the main points and had it transmitted
to Conlon via his private NASO channel. Eight hours later a reply stated that
Conlon had confronted some of the senior NASO officials with the allegations,
but their version of the facts, as advised from GSEC's political liaison office
in Washington, was very different. It said, in effect, that Padua was a peaceful
nation whose leaders aspired toward Western democratic ideals, and that the
limited aid being given by the mission had been requested by the Paduan
authorities to combat incursions upon their territory from Genoa—an illegally
imposed rebel regime—and to relieve Paduan religious minorities who were being
persecuted within the Genoese borders. The decision to grant the request was
seen as a goodwill gesture that would help establish cordial and cooperative
future relationships. The situation back on Earth was still confused,
apparently, and would take a long time to resolve itself, especially in view of
the long turnaround of communications to Saturn. Zambendorf had not been
prepared to wait. "We're not going to get any sense out of them for days," he
had told Massey. "You'd better stay on the line here and keep in touch as things
develop. I'm going down to Titan to talk to Arthur."
"What do you think you're going to do, even if you manage to find some way of
getting down there?" Massey had asked.
"I have no idea, Gerry, but there's no way I'm going to sit up here with this
kind of thing going on."
Zambendorf's thoughts were interrupted by Clarissa Eidstadt's summons over the
intercom from the forward compartment. "Karl, can you get up here a minute?
We've got problems."
Price turned away from the port and watched uneasily as Zambendorf stood up,
stepped carefully round the team's recently completed second transmogrifier box,
and moved forward to the open doorway at the front of the cabin. Clarissa
glanced back at him from the captain's seat, while in the copilot's position
Otto Abaquaan was flipping switches frantically in front of an array of data
displays and readouts that were obviously unfamiliar to him. "It's no good,"
Abaquaan said, shaking his head. "I can't get the midrange to scale, and the
monitor recall has aborted. This isn't making any sense."
"What's wrong?" Zambendorf asked.
"We're losing it," Clarissa said. There was a problem in fixing the flyer's
position from the electronic navigation grid transmitted from the satellites
that the Orion had deployed shortly after arriving at Titan. Clarissa had warned
that it might happen without an experienced copilot-navigator to calibrate the
on-board reference system to the shifting satellite pattern as the flyer
descended. "We know we're somewhere near where we need to go down through the
muck, but we don't have a fine-tuned fix."
"No go?" Zambendorf asked, looking at Abaquaan.
Abaquaan spread his hands. "Sorry, Karl. I thought I had it down okay when we
went through the routine up on the ship, but I guess it needs more practice."
"It was worth a try," Clarissa murmured.
"It's not your fault there wasn't more time, Otto," Zambendorf said and turned
to Clarissa. "How serious is it? Can you take care of it?"
"Sure, but not while I'm flying this thing too. The easiest thing to do would be
to put down someplace and reinitiate the full sequence on the ground, without
the added complication of having to compensate for being on a moving platform.
Once we're locked into the grid at a fixed point, I can update the inertial
system so that it will supply the drift onsets automatically."
"How long would you need?"
"To get everything right and double-checked, aw . . . say, an hour. But we need
to land now, while we still know we're roughly in the right place. If we leave
it much longer, we could wind up coming through the blanket anywhere over Titan,
in the dark, without a ground datum. Then the way to Genoa would be anybody's
guess."
"You'd better take us down, then," Zambendorf agreed.
"Okay. Go back, sit down, and buckle up."
Zambendorf ducked back into the rear cabin and lowered himself into the seat
opposite Price. "We're going down."
"Trouble?"
"An unscheduled stop to synch the on-board nav system with the satellite grid."
The red-brown desert outside began rising to meet them, and as it came nearer it
was transformed slowly from smooth, rounded hummocks into jagged peaks of muddy
cloud, bottomless canyons of darkness falling away between. Cliffs and
precipices of vapor reared up ahead, then were towering above on either side and
flashing past at greater and greater speed . . . and then the stars vanished
from the overhead ports as the flyer plunged into darkness. Zambendorf felt the
seat pressing against him as Clarissa flattened the craft against Titan's
thickening atmosphere to shed velocity. The structure vibrated and pounded in
protest as the stresses climbed above the limits it had been built to endure.
"Wing sensors reading nine-twelve, to ten-three, with orange-two on six,"
Abaquaan's voice shouted through the open door up front. "Belly and underwing
skin temperatures rising fast."
"Forward retros, five degrees out and down sixteen both, ramp to three thousand
and sustain," Clarissa snapped. Zambendorf was thrown forward against his seat
harness; loud juddering noises came from somewhere under the floor. Across the
aisle, Price was tightlipped and saying nothing.
"In at ten, ramp factor five," Abaquaan's voice reported. "Coming up to eleven
over glide."
"Gimme plus-three on dive—easy."
"Dive brake increased three degrees."
"Are we going to make it?" Zambendorf called out.
"What a question!" Clarissa shouted back. "You have to learn not to put up with
any nonsense from these machines. If those guys up there can get a flying
eggbeater all the way to Titan, I can sure-as-hell get this thing the rest of
the way to the surface."
Then they were losing height rapidly again, and the flyer banked as Clarissa put
it into a long, sustained turn that would slow them down without altering their
general position. They were now well below the aerosol layer, and the view
outside was black in every direction, with a few ghostly streaks of methane
cloud showing faint white
below. "See if you can get a ground radar profile,"
Clarissa said to Abaquaan. "I don't want to go too low in that mess on visual.
Try and find us somewhere high and flat—a plateau or something." Abaquaan
fiddled with a console to one side of him, muttered a few profanities beneath
his breath, and tried something else. "Set the HG centerline to blue zero,"
Clarissa said, glancing sideways. "Then use the coarse control to lock the
scanbase and select your profile analysis from the menu on S-three."
"What? ... Oh yeah, okay . . . Got it." Abaquaan took in the information that
appeared on one of his screens. "Looks like we're at altitude thirty-five
thousand meters, ground speed three-zero-eight-five kilometers per hour,
reducing at twenty-eight meters per second. Mountainous terrain with highest
peaks approximately eight hundred meters above mean surface level."
"Any flat summits?" Clarissa asked.
"The higher ones all seem pretty grim. There are some below five hundred that
look better."
"Gimme a slave of your scope on screen two."
"You've got it."
The flyer's circling became tighter as it continued to slow and lose altitude.
"Okay, prime a couple of seventy-FV-three flares and set them for
proximity-triggered airbursts at fifty meters. Then activate the underbelly
searchlight and give me a vertical optical scan on screen one," Clarissa
instructed after studying the display for a few seconds. "I'm going to have a
look at that big flat-topped guy between the two thinner ones. See which one I
mean?"
"I see it," Abaquaan said, looking at his own screen. "Flares primed for
proximity bursts at five-zero and five-zero meters; belly light activated;
vertical optical scan selected and routed to pilot's screen one."
The flyer slowed to hover motionless in the gloom, and a few seconds later two
brilliant white lights blossomed a short distance below it revealing the squat
hilltop that its radar fingers had probed invisibly. The summit was reasonably
smooth, free of cracks and fissures, and uncluttered by boulders or loose
debris. The searchlight came on to pick out a landing spot and hold it in steady
illumination, and then the flyer began to sink slowly downward once more to
complete the final few hundred feet of its descent.
"What manner of omen is this?" Groork whispered fearfully to himself as he sat