Shield of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Chapter Two

  “Have you ever used a cutting blaster before, Lando?” Lobot asked with concern.

  “Lots of times,” said Lando, bracing himself between the inner bulkhead and the equipment sled. “But don’t ask me for a list. The statute of limitations hasn’t run out on all of ’em. Artoo, can I have a little more light in here, right in front of me?”

  The dome-topped droid drifted up and forward on tiny puffs of thruster gas, changing the angle of the light slightly.

  “That’s good, Artoo—hold right there.”

  “Be careful not to cut too deeply,” Lobot said. “There may be mechanisms behind the wall—”

  “If Artoo’s right, there’s nothing behind this part of the wall. The sonogram showed a thin bulkhead and another compartment beyond, five meters in diameter.”

  “I know. But a ship this size could have waste ports five meters in diameter. Or fuel conduits.”

  “You know, Lobot, when you’re cut off from your databases, you’re almost as much of an old lady as Threepio here,” Lando said, but not without affection. “Threepio, any change?”

  “No, Master Lando. There has been no response to my first nine hundred sixty-one thousand, eight—”

  “Save it for the log,” Lando said. “Lobot, Threepio, I know how much you want to watch over my shoulder while I do this. But if I were you, I’d move around to where my contact suit is between you and the blaster. That way, if I make a mistake, you might still be around to learn from it.”

  “If Artoo would give me a link to his video processor—” Lobot said.

  “Do it, Artoo.” Lando held the cutting blaster up before his face with his right hand, and with his left set the selector for hairline and depth for shallow. “Maybe we’ll finally get a response to this message,” he said, and activated the cutter.

  Under Lando’s steady hand, the blue-white energy blade drew a straight line down the face of the bulkhead. But when Lando pulled the blaster away to inspect his work, he found that the blaster had left no mark—the bulkhead was intact.

  “Guess I was a little too careful,” Lando said, frowning. “Move the sled in just a little for me, Lobot.”

  When he-had finished adjusting his position, Lando reached forward and drew the blaster blade slowly down the face of the bulkhead once more.

  “What the—”

  “What is happening?” Threepio asked worriedly. He rose from behind Lando to peer over his shoulder at the wall.

  “A lot of nothing,” said Lando in disgust. “I can’t even scorch it.”

  “I think you are mistaken, Lando,” said Lobot. “Please try again, and this time move the cutter more quickly.”

  Lando slashed the cutter downward across the face of the bulkhead. The brilliant glare of the blade left a thin black line in its wake—a clean, straight cut that closed up and vanished a fraction of a second later.

  “Self-sealing bulkheads?”

  “It would appear so,” said Lobot.

  “Well, that’s just dandy,” Lando said, shutting off the cutting blaster. “I can’t cut us a door, because it hasn’t the manners to stay cut.”

  Lobot tapped Lando on the helmet, then gestured at the blaster. “May I try something?”

  “Be my guest.” Lando surrendered the blaster and moved aside, pulling himself hand over hand toward the aft end of the equipment sled.

  Lobot studied the selectors on the blaster for a few moments, then opted for the medium drill setting. The blade appeared this time as a pointed cone, which Lobot pressed against the wall until half its length had disappeared. When he withdrew it, there was a hole a few centimeters across in the bulkhead.

  The hole began to close at once, but it took noticeably longer to vanish than the cut had—long enough for Lobot to pull himself down to eye level and catch a quick glimpse through the breach.

  “Very clever, Lobot. Very interesting. Between one and two seconds, I think,” Lando said.

  “I was hoping for this result,” said Lobot, turning toward Lando. “Whatever mechanisms are involved, substantially more material must be transported or replaced to fill a hole than to seal a cut.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Nothing useful. An open space of some kind, dimly lit. Everything had a yellowish cast.”

  “Let’s try a bigger hole,” Lando said. “Artoo, do you have some sort of remote sensor you can stick through this time?”

  “The limpet,” Lobot suggested. “We could reach through and attach the limpet on the other side of the bulkhead. Both Artoo and I are capable of receiving its sensor data.”

  “I don’t want to make quite that big a hole,” Lando said. “Not this time. Every time we cut into that bulkhead, we’re reminding this ship we’re here. I don’t know how many times we can bite before we get swatted. Artoo, what about it?”

  Artoo tootled pridefully as a small equipment panel on his body popped open and a slender wand topped by a small silver ball unfolded from within.

  “You needn’t be snippy about it,” Threepio chided.

  The response from Artoo sounded like an electronic raspberry.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s not his business to keep track of those details,” Threepio said, bristling. “I’ve been in your company for longer than I care to remember, and I certainly don’t keep track of every gadget in that ugly little chassis—”

  Lando whistled sharply. “Whoa, you two—save it for later. Threepio, was there any part of that I need to know?”

  “Master Lando, Artoo says that astromech droids must frequently inspect systems which are located in confined spaces,” Threepio said curtly. “He apparently believes that R2 units are important enough that this should be common knowledge. He has quite the little ego, you know.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve often thought it’s a shame he doesn’t have your modesty, Threepio,” Lando said, flying himself back to the middle of the equipment sled and reclaiming the cutting blaster from Lobot. “Have you made any new pen pals since we started cutting?”

  “There has been no response whatever from the masters of this vessel since I began trying to hail them,” said Threepio. “I suggest you proceed with whatever you are planning.”

  Lando changed the selector to medium drill and activated the blaster. “Artoo, come in close—I want that sensor wand through the hole as quickly as possible. But don’t let yourself get caught when it closes. And Lobot, Artoo, between the two of you, I want to know exactly how large a hole I make and exactly how long it takes it to close. Is everyone ready? Let’s do it, then.”

  The medium setting allowed Lando to open a hole that was nearly large enough to admit a man’s clenched fist. Switching off the blaster, Lando pushed off from the wall and did a backward somersault, floating out of Artoo’s way. The droid moved smoothly and surely into position, extending the wand through the very center of the opening and snatching it back at the last moment as the hole disappeared again.

  “Show us, Artoo. Holoprojector,” Lando ordered. The droid chirped an acknowledgment and offered up a fish-eye perspective of a round-walled passage that seemed to bend around or through the ship in both directions. There was no sign of life or machinery, nor any response to the cutting of the hole and the invasion of Artoo’s scan probe.

  “Looks promising,” said Lando. “Whatever it is, it could give us access to at least part of the ship. Artoo, Lobot, what’s the verdict? How big a hole do I need to cut to get us all through?”

  “I am afraid there is a problem, Lando,” Lobot said. “Artoo’s measurements show that the larger hole closed faster, per unit of area, than the smaller one.”

  “It looked that way to me, too,” Lando agreed. “Bigger holes probably get higher priority from the ship’s systems. What, don’t you think we can get through?”

  “The short dimension of the common wall between that passage and this chamber is approximately one-point-seven meters,” Lobot said, pointing. “My estimate is that a hole th
at size will take only six or seven seconds to close down to the point where it will be impassable for any of us. That is not enough time to move the sled and the four of us into the other chamber.”

  “It might be enough time. Jump troops go out the drop chute of an assault boat at a rate of one per second.”

  “Jump troops have the benefit of training and gravity. I have modeled it with Artoo’s nav processor. At best, one of us would not make it through.”

  “Well—that is a problem,” said Lando. “Because I have a sneaking suspicion that when we cut a hole that size, this ship’s going to get fed up with us and try to spit us out again. I don’t think we’ll get a chance to do it twice.” He thought hard for a moment, then waved the blaster in the air. “Everything off the sled. I need to make some modifications.”

  The equipment sled was an uncomplicated device. Its thick rectangular frame contained the gyros, fuel cells, and thrust stabilizer system, and also provided cutout handholds at regular intervals. The standard diamond-pattern metal grid that filled the frame provided a wealth of lockdowns for gear kits and tools. Both sides of the grid on the team’s sled were heavily loaded.

  “Modifications?”

  “Yeah,” said Lando. “I think we need a frame for our door.”

  Clinging to the sled with one hand and wielding the cutting blaster with the other, Lando slashed away where the grid joined the sled frame. When he was finished, the sled was in two pieces. Lando pushed the wobbly, heavily loaded grid toward Artoo. “You tow that through to the other side.”

  The droid’s grappling clamps appeared and latched onto the grid securely.

  “Give me a hand here, Lobot?”

  Lobot eased forward and grabbed a handhold at the opposite end of the gutted sled frame. “I am remembering something I accessed earlier,” he said. “The chief designer of the Ma’aood funerary temples directed his draftsmen that all obvious passages should be booby-trapped, and all traps should be made as inviting as possible.”

  “Thank you for that uplifting thought,” said Lando. “If we get out of this, you should think about a new career as a morale officer. Everyone ready?”

  “Master Lando, what should I do?”

  Lando checked his combat blaster in its holster, then slid the selector on the cutting blaster to WIDE. “Add this to our apology,” he said, and pointed it at the bulkhead. “Hang on.”

  The brilliant flare of the cutting beam momentarily dazzled the viewscreen of Lando’s contact suit, and the vaporized material from two and a half square meters of bulkhead filled the air as a gray cloud. Before Lando could even see clearly, the hole began to close.

  “Let’s go, let’s go—get it lined up!” Lando shouted. The two men maneuvered the frame into position, and the bulkhead closed around it as though it were a tailored fit.

  But as they did, they heard a deep, rumbling groan from the ship, a sound that had no direction. Though the surroundings were alien, the sound was familiar—the signature of a form of stress that aged large vessels’ hulls and led to the spectacular form of self-destruction known as an exit breach. It was the exit growl, the characteristic sound caused by portions of the ship emerging from hyperspace nanoseconds before the rest as the jump field collapsed.

  “I hate it when I’m right,” Lando said, gesturing with his free hand. “Move it, Artoo. Now!”

  The little droid jetted quickly toward the opening, towing the heavily loaded grid behind it. For a moment Lando thought the frame looked too small for Artoo to pass through it. But the droid retracted his treads as far as they would go, turned his body, and cleared the opening by bare centimeters. The equipment grid smoothly passed through behind him.

  “Wait for me, Artoo!” Threepio called, flailing his arms and legs in midair.

  “Go ahead,” Lando said to Lobot, passing him the cutting blaster and waving him on. “I’ll get Threepio.”

  Lobot didn’t wait to be told twice, swinging himself feetfirst through the improvised doorway as neatly as a gymnast taking a turn on the parallel bar. Meanwhile, Lando clipped the safety line from the contact suit’s belt to the handhold of the frame and launched himself toward the droid, his gloved hand extended to him.

  “Oh, thank you, Master Lando,” the droid said relievedly as he grabbed hold of Lando’s arm. Then Threepio saw Lando’s eyes suddenly widen in alarm. “What is it, sir?”

  Watching from the inner passage, Lobot saw the same thing Lando had seen when he looked past Threepio toward the outer bulkhead: a small opening appearing and quickly irising into an airlock that revealed a stark, starry blackness beyond. Moments later the external mics on the suits picked up the hiss of out-rushing air.

  Lando did not take the time to answer Threepio’s concerned inquiry. “Heads up—incoming!” he bellowed, and swung Threepio by the arms toward the inner doorway. Bracing himself against the frame, Lobot reached through, caught Threepio’s right foot, and dragged him into the inner passage.

  But the rush of air through the inner passage and out through the wound kept building, and it was all Lobot could do to keep himself from being sucked through.

  Nor was he the only one in trouble. Artoo’s thrusters could not hold against the screaming wind, and he squawked loudly as he was dragged inexorably back down the inner passage toward the opening, clinging determinedly to the equipment grid.

  Meanwhile, Lando dangled helplessly at the end of his safety line, his feet banging against the edge of the outer airlock as the air grabbed at him on its way into the vacuum beyond.

  Only Threepio was relatively secure, his metal body braced across one end of the sled frame, blocking part of the opening. But he was waving his arms wildly like a shell-spined mud crawler that’d been flipped on its back. “Oh, Artoo, we’re doomed!” he cried. “I never did like space travel. Look where your adventuring has led us—”

  “You have to cut the frame,” Lando was shouting into the comlink. “Cut the frame and it’ll pull out—the rest of the hole will close. Do it!”

  “Not with you on that side,” Lobot said, climbing across Threepio to where the safely line was attached. “There’s a take-up crank on that belt line. See if you can pull yourself up that way.”

  “No good,” said Lando. “Too much load. Just cut the frame, will you?”

  Lobot glanced sideways down the corridor to see if he and Threepio were in danger of being knocked through the hole by an out-of-control Artoo and his cargo. But to Lobot’s relief, he saw that Artoo had made his way to the edge of the passage, burned a small hole with his arc welder, and let the hole close around a repair arm. So far, the anchor was holding against the current—which seemed to Lobot to be weakening.

  “Forget it,” Lobot directed, reaching down between his braced legs and catching hold of the thin safety line. He began hauling on the line hand over hand, reeling Lando in like a great white fish. The cyborg’s wiry body concealed surprising strength, and soon he had hold of the tow ring on Lando’s suit, at the back of the neck. “Use your thrusters now—full vertical.”

  “Full vertical,” Lando echoed.

  With one smooth, powerful motion, Lobot pulled Lando up between his widely spaced knees, lying straight back to drag Lando’s legs clear and hurl him free down the passage.

  Quickly sitting back up, Lobot pulled out the cutting blaster and slashed the frame in two places. There was a shower of sparks each time, then a puff of D20 propellant from the broken lines as he kicked out the section between the cuts. It spun free and tumbled out through the airlock on the breeze.

  The bulkhead groaned under Lobot, and the rest of the frame began to collapse, twisting sideways as it did, until it, too, was carried away. Seconds later the hole had closed under them, the pitch of the roaring air rising to a shrill note before it cut off entirely, leaving them in silence.

  “I guess we only get to use that doorway trick once,” Lando said. The inside of his faceplate was fogged with sweat. “Where’d you learn that?”

&
nbsp; “I learned it wild-water rafting on Oko E,” Lobot said. “It is the preferred method for getting a raftmate out of the river before the sulfur ice pulls him under. That was my last vacation,” he added.

  “You have unexpected depth, Lobot,” said Lando. “Is everyone all right?”

  “I am certain that several of my circuits are overheated,” Threepio pronounced. “With your permission, Master Lando, I would like to perform a self-diagnostic.”

  “Go ahead,” Lando said. “While you’re doing that, we’ll get Artoo free. And then we can start figuring out what to do next.”

  “That should not prove too taxing,” said Lobot. “The choices appear to be to go that way”—he crossed his arms over his chest, pointing a finger in each direction—“or that way.”

  “Shhh,” Lando said, craning his head. “Wait. Listen.”

  They listened in silence, with sinking hearts. In the mysterious hollow spaces of the vagabond, the fading rumble of the entry growl echoed for a long time.

  “Blast.” Lando sighed. “She’s jumped again.”

  “Something interesting here,” said Josala Krenn.

  Kroddok Stopa bent forward over the surface scanner. The false-color image mapped the undulations of a great glacier as it crawled its way along a widening, steep-sided valley toward a frozen sea. “Where?”

  “Here,” said Josala, pointing out a string of small blue blotches scattered along the northeast edge of the glacier. “The side-scanning radar pulled these up—they’re sitting anywhere from eleven to nineteen meters down in the ice.”

  “Rock from the lateral moraine?”

  “No, for two reasons. First, they’re awfully regular in size, oblong, between one-point-five and two meters in the long axis. And second—do you know anything about the flow lines in the accumulation zone of a glacier?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Something that falls on the surface of a glacier moves down-valley with the ice and down into the body of the glacier as more snow falls on top of it,” Josala said. “The lateral moraine running through that part of the glacier is made up of rock coming off this cliff face.” She pointed at a side valley well back along the path of the glacier.