“Congratulations.” She kissed him. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.” There had been a list of vacancy announcements around for about a month. The Academy would keep a few of the team on the payroll, and it would try to assist the others. Most, like Karl, would be going back to the classroom. “I want to stay in the field,” she said. “But the waiting list for Pinnacle and Nok are both long.”
“Two years, last I heard,” Karl said. Allegri was a damned good archeologist. With experience. But it would be like the Academy to waste her, to offer her a job teaching undergraduates. “Maybe they’ll make an exception for people here.” The approach lamps came on. “Get Henry to put in a word for you.”
The water began to churn. “Pity about all this,” she said. “Henry deserves better.”
“He may not be done yet,” said Karl. “He wants Linear C. And I’m not entirely sure he won’t get it.”
LIBRARY ENTRY
Like most mythic heroes, Malinar may have had a remote historical basis. If so, the reality is hopelessly entangled with fable. This hero appears in epochs thousands of years apart. This is no doubt due to the extreme length of Quraquat history, and to the lack of technological progress after the exhaustion of the world’s nonrenewable natural resources, resulting in a telescoping effect upon earlier eras, all of which come to resemble one another.
Although Malinar’s time predates the construction of the Knothic Towers by almost ten thousand years, he is nevertheless said to have visited the holy site to consult an aspect of the Deity. The Temple then stood on a rock shelf well above the sea. We possess a tablet thought to depict the event.
Unfortunately, most of the Malinar cycle is missing. We know neither the reason for the consultation, nor its result. We know only that the Quraquat could not bear the thought that their great hero had not at some point visited the imposing shrine on the north shore.
—Linda Thomas, At the Temple of the Winds
Harvard University, 2211
11.
Seapoint. Wednesday; 1418 hours.
“I’m sorry we found the thing, Hutch.” George Hackett was weary, but he managed to look upbeat anyhow. “If I had my way, we’d call the whole business off. I’m ready to go home.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Four years.”
“Long time.”
“Seems like forever.” They were alone in the community room, enjoying coffee and toast. The sea moved against the view panels. “I don’t think I’ll do any more field trips.”
Hutch enjoyed being with him. She loved the glow of his eyes, and his gentleness. Old passions were reviving. When they were together, she had a tendency to babble. But she curbed it, and maintained a discrete distance, waiting for him to make a move. When he did, if he did, she would have to put him on hold until they got home. Anything else would be unprofessional. She knew from long experience that it was impossible to keep secrets on shipboard. “Why not, George?” she asked, in a detached tone. “Your career is in the field, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “I’m not an archeologist. I’m an engineer. I only came out here because the opportunity surfaced, and 1 thought it was a chance to travel.” He laughed.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve certainly traveled.”
“Yeah. That I have.” He looked at her wistfully. “You know, Hutch,” he said, “you’re lovely. It’s been worth the trip just to meet you.”
She, in her turn, glowed. “That’s nice of you,” she said.
“I mean it.”
She could see that he did. “What will you do when you get home?” she asked.
He stared at her. “I’m going to find a place where there are green parks and lots of summer days. And where all the women look like you.” He reached out and stroked her cheek.
Eddie Juliana kept working, kept packing containers. “We’ll get everything up,” he said. “One way or another, we’ll save it all.” He urged Hutch to work harder. “These,” he said. “These go first. Just in case. Forget the stuff that’s down in the bay. In case Truscott decides to drop any more bombs on us.” He stared at the ceiling as if observing her attitude on the space station. “Yes,” he said, “load these.” He indicated a line of red-tags. “I’ll get the others.” He nodded to himself. “Most definitely.”
Hutch worried about him.
“By the door,” he said, as they entered his workshop, oblivious of her concern. He was indicating three containers. “These are weapons. From the lower level outpost.” He went after the first, signaling Hutch to bring over a cart. “Whatever else happens, we don’t want to lose them. They’re invaluable.” Ordinarily she would have grumbled or gone on strike. But she felt sorry for Eddie, and did what she could. “There’s another red-tag next door,” he said.
But the container wasn’t sealed. She looked in. “It needs a dash of poly-6,” she said.
“Take care of it.” He arrowed off toward the washroom.
She picked up the gun, aimed it into the container, and pulled the trigger. A thick white stream gushed over the plastene-wrapped artifacts, and the room filled with a faintly acrid aroma. She watched the foam rise, and shut it off. The poly-6 began to inflate, and Hutch hefted the gun and aimed it at an imaginary Melanie Truscott. Eddie reappeared and looked at her impatiently. She pointed the nozzle toward him, and her index finger tightened slightly on the trigger. “Pow,” she said.
Pow.
He was in no mood for games. He capped the container, and rolled it onto the cart.
And Hutch had the beginning of an idea. “Eddie, how much of this stuff do we have?”
“Poly-6? Plenty. Why do you ask?”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know the chemistry,” he said. “You make it with two barrels.” They were in plain sight, labeled “A” and “B.”
“They’re separate compounds. The stuff is inert until it gets mixed. That’s what the gun does. When they combine, the urethane expands and hardens. It’s been around for centuries. And it’s ideal for safeguarding artifacts in shipment.”
“Do you have an extra dispenser? A gun?”
“Sure.” He frowned. “Why?”
She was calculating storage space on Alpha. “Listen, we may have to cut down the size of this next shipment a little.”
“What?” He sounded wounded. “Why?” he asked again.
“Because I’m going to take two barrels of poly-6 with me.”
Eddie was horrified. “There isn’t room.”
“We’ll make room.”
“What on earth for?”
“I’m going to use it to say hello to Melanie Truscott.”
An hour later, Alpha climbed toward orbit, carrying Hutch, Janet, Maggie, Karl, and Maggie’s number one analyst, Phil Marcotti. Also on board were twenty-nine containers filled with artifacts, and two barrels of poly-6 components.
Maggie Tufu turned out to be younger than Hutch had expected. She’d heard so much about the woman’s accomplishments, that she was startled to discover Maggie was probably still in her twenties. She was tall, taller in fact than either of the men. Her black hair was full and luxuriant, worn in a twist that was probably designed to make her look older. Her eyes were also black, and her features retained much of the Micronesian cast of her forebears. If she’d been able to loosen up, to smile occasionally, she would have been lovely.
She tended to set herself apart from the others. Hutch did not sense arrogance, but rather simply a preoccupation with work. Maggie found people, and maybe everything except mathematics and philological theory and practice, boring.
Her colleague, Phil Marcotti, was a beefy, easygoing extrovert. About forty, he enjoyed his work, and was among those who would have preferred to stay until they’d recovered what everyone was now referring to as “George’s printing press.” He confided to Hutch that, if he’d had his way, nothing short of armed force would have moved the Academy team. Curiously, this amiable, happy man was th
e most militant among Henry’s true believers.
Maggie took Hutch’s right-hand seat. During the ascent she tied into the auxiliary computer and busied herself with rows of alphanumerics. “In one way, we’re very lucky,” she told Hutch. “We don’t get as many Linear C samples as we’d like to. Of course, you never have enough samples of anything. The language is just too old. But a fair amount of what we do get comes with illustrations. We have the beginning of a vocabulary.”
“Really,” said Hutch, interested. “Can you show me some examples?”
“Sure. This”—a cluster of characters appeared on the screen—“is ‘sun.’ They were letters, not ideograms. And that”—another group—“is ‘moon.’” She smiled, not at Hutch, but at the display. “This is ‘hoe.’”
“Hoe,” said Hutch. “How did you arrive at that?”
“The group was used to illustrate an epigram about reaping what you plant. I think.”
Karl stared moodily out at the clouds. His eyes were distant, and Hutch wondered whether he was thinking about his future.
Janet fell asleep within minutes after their departure. She was still out when the shuttle nosed into its bay on Wink.
Hutch calibrated the B ring spin to point one gee. They unloaded the artifacts, now only a tenth of their planetary weight, and carried them through double doors into Main Cargo. Here, Hutch passed out footwear that would grip the Teflon deck. The storage area was wide and high, spacious enough to play basketball. They crossed to the far bulkhead, and secured the containers beside the two earlier shipments.
Main Cargo had been designed to stow heavy excavation equipment, large quantities of supplies, and whatever the Academy teams deemed worth bringing back. Except for the shuttle bay, it occupied the entire ring. It was compartmented into four sections, each equipped with outside loading doors.
When they’d finished, Hutch conducted a brief tour. She took her passengers to A Deck, pointed out their cabins, showed them the lounge and rec facilities, demonstrated how the food dispensers worked, and joined them for dinner. They drank to their new home. And they seemed to brighten somewhat.
After they’d finished, she took Janet aside. “Are you interested in a little payback?” she asked.
Janet looked at her curiously. “What are we talking about?” Then she smiled. “You mean Truscott?”
“I mean Truscott.”
She nodded. “I’m willing to listen.”
“There’ll be a risk.”
“Tell me what you have in mind. I’d love to see her get hers.”
“I think we can arrange it.”
She led the way back to B ring. Full ship’s gravity, which was a modicum over point five, had been restored. The outside loading doors were located in the deck. In each of the four cargo sections, they were of different dimensions. She’d picked the No. 2 hold, where they were biggest, large enough, in fact, to accommodate an object twice the diameter of the shuttle.
Hutch inspected the doors, satisfied herself they were adequate to the task, and explained her idea. Janet listened skeptically at first, and then with mounting enthusiasm. By the time Hutch had finished, she was grinning broadly. “I don’t think I’d want you mad at me,” she said.
“If we get caught at it, we’ll both wind up out on Massachusetts Avenue with tin cups.”
“Will they be able to figure out who did it?”
“Maybe. Listen, I owe you. And I wouldn’t want to be responsible for your getting into trouble. I’ll understand if you want to keep clear.”
“But you can’t do this alone.”
“No. I can’t.”
“I wouldn’t miss it. The only real problem I can see is that we won’t be able to brag about it afterward.”
Hutch was feeling pretty good. “It’s a small price to send Melanie Truscott a message from the downtrodden.”
“Can we really do it?”
“Let’s find out.”
She cut gravity, and they went to the shuttle and retrieved the two barrels of poly-6. They hauled them back to No. 2 hold and put them in the middle of the deck, which is to say, centered over the cargo doors. Next Hutch went back for the connector hose and gun.
Now that she was committed, Janet showed no hesitation, had no second thoughts. Good woman to have at your back, Hutch thought.
“We have to have something to start with,” Janet said.
Hutch had the ideal answer. “Sit tight,” she said. She went up to A ring, to the rec locker, and got one of the medicine balls.
Janet broke into a wide smile when she saw it. “The very thing,” she said. She had connected the hose to each of the barrels and to the gun.
Hutch put the ball down and stepped back. She eyed the dispenser. “Would you like to do the honors?”
“Delighted.” Janet pointed the instrument at the medicine ball. “Just what the doctor ordered,” she said wickedly, and pulled the trigger.
White foam spurted out, coating the deck and the ball. The ball rolled away. “This might take a while,” she said.
“Not once we get started.”
The ball lost its roundness quickly, and became an uneven, white chunk of hissing foam.
The object expanded as a natural result of mixing the polymer content in one barrel with a water-activated isocyanate in the other. It was designed, once it had set, to resist extreme temperature changes.
They took turns, and learned to back off occasionally to let the chemical dry.
It got bigger. Even when they weren’t drenching it with fresh spray, it grew.
It grew to the size of a small car. And then to the size of a garage. And they kept pouring it on.
It got so big they could not reach the top, and they brought over a container to stand on. The thing had gone lopsided, long and wide rather than high. Bloated at one end. “It looks like a dead whale,” said Janet.
Hutch fired again. “Born to the poly gun,” she said, laughing.
“The thing’s a monster!”
When the stream finally sputtered and faltered, pride illuminated their features. “It’s magnificent,” said Janet, ceremonially flinging the gun away.
“I wouldn’t want to have to deal with it.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Hutch spoke softly: “Never monkey with the Pimpernel.” They shook hands. “Okay. Phase two. You stay here. I’m going up to the bridge.”
Quraqua floated overhead, hazy in the sunlight. There was no moon.
Melanie Truscott and her space station were on the far side of their orbit. Hutch scanned for Kosmik’s two tugs. She found one. The other was probably down among the snowballs, where it would be hard to distinguish. It wouldn’t matter: even if it was in the neighborhood of the space station, things were going to happen too fast.
Truscott had no means of independent propulsion. No starship was docked.
Hutch fed the station’s orbital data into the navigation console, scanned the “torpedo”—how that word tripped across the tongue—computed its mass, and requested an intercept vector. The numbers came back. With a minor correction, the torpedo could be targeted to complete seven orbits and hit the station on its eighth. In twenty-one hours.
She sat back to consider potential consequences. Last chance for a no-go. Once the thing was launched, she would not be able to change her mind without giving away the show. How might things go wrong? Lawsuit? Heart failure on someone’s part?
She saw again the wave surging in, black and cold. And the last Tower. And Karl and Janet, trailing bags like refugees.
She opened the ship’s intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be making a minor course correction in three minutes. You’ll want to strap down. Please acknowledge.”
“Karl here. Okay.”
She locked in the new course.
“I need a little time.” That was Marcotti.
“Phil, we’re going in three minutes, ready or not.” She checked her power levels.
“This is Maggie. Ready when you are.”
She opened a private channel to Janet. “All set?”
“Yes.” The word had a slight echo; Janet was inside her Flickinger field. “How fast will it be going when it hits them?”
“Seven thousand, relative to the station. Impact will occur at seventeen minutes past eight, Temple time, tomorrow evening.”
“Seven thousand klicks is pretty fast. Maybe even a chunk of foam will do some serious damage.”
“It’ll bend a few things,” she said, “and pop some rivets. But they’ll see it coming, and they’ll either get off the station or button up. They’ll be fine.”
“Okay. What next?”
“Course change.” She switched channels. “Phil?”
“Almost ready,” he said.
“Good. Please strap down.”
Moments later he was back. “Okay,” he said. “I’m all set.”
She activated the intercom. “Movement in one minute.” She engaged the “Execute” function, and watched the seconds drain away.
“Where are we going?” asked Maggie.
“Nowhere,” said Hutch uncomfortably. “It’s just a routine maneuver.” She was a poor liar.
Thrusters kicked in, and the Winckelmann rose to a higher orbit, and changed its heading by a few degrees. When it was over, Hutch issued the stand-down. Then she switched back to Janet’s channel. “Everything all right?”
“So far. It rolled a little, but it’s still over the doors.”
“Going to zero-gee on your deck.”
“Okay. I’ve begun to depressurize.”
The B ring slowed. And stopped.
Hutch watched the monitor. The torpedo rose.
“Good show,” she said. She already knew that she’d break their agreement to say nothing. She would tell Richard. This was just too good to keep to herself. He’d be angry, but eventually it would become a joke between them. And years from now it would be the bright shining moment in this period of general despair. If the Academy was being forced out, it would go down with all flags flying.
“It’s still over the doors. I’m going to open up now.”
The Engines of God Page 16