Captain Baegess said, “And so your suggestion is that we put the ship into a ballistic orbit, so that we can shut down all engines and overhaul all the separators and plates? I have to agree it would fix the problem.”
“It would certainly be the safest thing to do,” Azir agreed.
I could see the bony plates of Krurix’s shoulders relax, and the hair of his crest lie down. He had clearly been scared out of his mind, arguing with the senior officers at a time like this. I had to admit that I couldn’t be sure I’d have had his courage, or his perception. Well, maybe he was useful after all, even if he wasn’t likable. I resolved to listen to him more.
At least when he wasn’t making terrible jokes about orders.
Streeyeptin climbed in and said, “Is there some delay? Everyone below would like to know what we’re doing.”
Captain Baegess glanced up. “Assistant Krurix has found a major risk to the ship and suggested a fix for it. We’re trying to decide what to do about it.”
The Political Officer gestured impatiently. “We aren’t crashing, are we?”
“Not yet.” Baegess’s voice was flat. “But it’s serious.”
“We’ve got a mission,” Streeyeptin pointed out. “Are we starting our investigation yet?”
“We will as soon as I’m sure we’ve secured our survival,” Baegess said. “Self-preservation and safe return is the first priority—that’s in the orders, too. And this is that serious.”
So naturally it all had to be explained to Streeyeptin all over again, in much simpler terms. Eventually he nodded. “Yes, I see the point. But we will proceed with the original plan. I’m not sure even now, after all that babble, why you give so much weight to that argument—however ingenious, and Assistant Krurix, it does speak well of you that you are constantly thinking—when you consider two obvious points. The People’s Space Exploration Foundation built this ship to make the round trip, with a wide margin of error, and thus we are much less than halfway through the distance it was designed to cover. Therefore, the probability of any serious problem is negligible. Moreover, we’ve just arrived here safely after traveling an enormous distance, and by your own acknowledgment, after the anomalies, the engine is now running normally.
“Therefore the chances that anything is wrong are very slim. That being the case, then our orders are very clear. We are to proceed at once to determine what happened to the crew of Wahkopem Zomos. Once that is determined, we are then to make a brief determination about whether the Nisuan Republic should attempt to plant a colony here, and then to return home. That is all that we are authorized to do; since making sure the engine is working properly is clearly a task for the homeward journey, we will do the maneuver you suggest just before our departure, or sooner if a suitable block of time during which we don’t need regular access to the ship should come along.
“You see, it’s all there in the orders, if you just pay attention to them.” He looked around the room, with a satisfied expression. With a sinking heart, I realized that he had just resolved the matter, as far as he was concerned.
Captain Baegess sighed. “We are also obligated for self-preservation and safe return. We have no experience with catastrophic failure of a zero-point energy laser. For all we know it could happen anytime. If it happened now, my suspicion is that Krurix is right—we’d all die.”
Streeyeptin’s expression was cheerful but not pleasant. “It seems to me that this is the first time, in quite a while, that you have been interested in the original orders.”
Captain Baegess surely understood the threat, but he didn’t let that show. He merely said, “There is no question of Egalitarian Republic’s loyalty.”
Streeyeptin seemed very pleased. “Obviously.” I suppose in his line of work, he’d gotten used to being happy with everyone just quietly acquiescing, with all those expressionless faces that said yes and carefully did not tell him what they thought.
* * * *
3
BEPEMM’S VOICE CAME OVER THE INTERCOM. “CAPTAIN, I HAVE MADE contact with Wahkopem Zomos. It’s right in the orbit where it was supposed to be. The access codes all worked, too. I’m ready to start downloading everything from Wahkopem Zomos’s main computer.”
Before Captain Baegess could reply, Streeyeptin picked up the mouthpiece. “Do it,” he said. “Then search all documents from the landing forward, back-referring as you need to, and see if you can establish what happened.” Technically he wasn’t supposed to be giving orders to Bepemm, or any other crew member, directly, but no doubt he felt that he needed to assert his authority after the dispute that had just ended.
One of the first things a citizen of the Republic learns is that you don’t argue with a political officer. “Right away, sir,” Bepemm said, her voice suddenly crisply obedient.
“And while we’re waiting for Bepemm’s report, Captain, I strongly suggest you have your assistant get the rovers down on the ground and operating. We have a mystery to clear up here, and the people who sent us don’t like mysteries.”
Captain Baegess nodded to me, and I turned around in my seat, powered up the utility console, and configured it to drive the rover. “Krurix,” I said, “I can use your help if Azir doesn’t need you further—pull up a seat.”
“I don’t need him for right now,” Azir said. “I want to run some routine checkouts on the engine.”
“See that they’re routine,” Streeyeptin said.
“Yes, sir.” She went out quickly, as if glad to get away.
Krurix popped out the seat at the utility console next to mine and configured into parallel with me. Streeyeptin and Captain Baegess went to Streeyeptin’s cabin to confer—I was glad to be so busy that I didn’t have much thought to spare for whatever was going on in there. That left Beremahm as the commanding officer in the cockpit; Tisix, the helmsman for that watch; and us.
Krurix and I had operated robot probes by remote control, together, many times in practice, and as long as I worked fast enough, he wouldn’t talk and irritate me, so I put myself to the pleasant task of getting the probe checked out and readied as quickly as possible. I had outfitted this one with a more powerful power plant than usual—an antimatter cell with a heated-gas rocket—so that it could run fast and hard if it needed to.
As a side benefit, we wouldn’t need to descend by parachute; I could fly it all the way down on its engine, by remote control. Krurix sat backup on me, ready to take over if something distracted me, or if I asked him to. At least he knew enough not to do anything annoying at a time like this.
“Ready for me to launch you?” he asked.
“Launch on my mark,” I said. “Three. Two. One. Launch.”
There was a faint shudder through our feet as the tail-end catapult tossed the rover out, dropping toward the planet, and as it all fell away from us, I checked its controls; response was excellent, almost as if we were in it.
The job was nothing like flying down from orbit; Egalitarian Republic was hovering on its laser exhaust far above Setepos’s atmosphere, stationary relative to the surface, but nowhere near as high as geostationary orbit—Tisix was flying us sideways, using positioning jets, at a pace just enough to keep us above a constant point in the sea between Big and the Hook. So the probe I was operating had almost no velocity parallel to the surface of Setepos—it was more like dropping off an impossibly high building.
I set the probe to fire a burst every time its speed of approach toward Setepos got too high, bringing itself to an all but complete stop each time. Thus, as we looked through the probe’s camera, we approached the ground in a series of leisurely jerks until we were almost down into the troposphere, without ever reaching a speed high enough to heat the probe’s skin much. “Like operating an elevator,” I said.
“Nice flying,” Krurix said. “Do you want to try for the desert northwest of the village? I’ve got a position for you.”
“Give it to me,” I said, letting the little probe hover where it was, still far above t
he ground but now well down into the atmosphere. At once a green dot appeared on my down-view camera, far off to the side. “Got it,” I said. “I’m going to go almost straight down on it so we don’t accidentally draw attention by flying low over anyone.” I angled my thrust very slightly, throttled up a bit, and moved the probe toward the green dot, watching the landscape crawl by underneath. I spun the probe around so that the thrust vectored the other way, let it drift to a stop, so that I was back to hovering. The dot was, as nearly as I could tell at the scale, directly under me.
“That is nice flying,” Krurix repeated, “you got it in one pass.” More softly, he added, “And thanks for getting me out of that one. I was afraid the Political Officer was going to give me a full-fledged grilling and all, to see why I was interfering with the mission.”
“He praised you,” I pointed out.
Krurix looked at his feet and muttered, “Everyone knows that’s when they’re dangerous.”
I had to let that pass because it was true. “Anyway, I wasn’t rescuing you, I was keeping the heat off all of us.”
“I’ll take my rescues any way I can get them,” he said. “If you’re ready, let’s set the probe down and work out our next step.”
“Sure,” I said, and cut the throttle back just a little. The probe drifted downward, gaining only a little speed before I opened the throttle a bit so that finally it hovered just a finger-thickness above the grainy desert soil. I let the throttle drift down quickly to zero, and the probe settled on the surface of Setepos.
A quick camera scan around us showed low hills and dunes on most sides, with a range of high, rocky, forested hills rising to the east. “Okay,” Krurix said, next to me, “I’ve got a fix on the lander and the village, and I’m getting a decent radar topo of the area between. As you move toward those hills, you’ll encounter a series of low ridges, and between the ridges you’re going to find a lot of stuff that looks like cultivated fields, with little canals running through them. Those will probably have people working in them, so what we want to do is follow ridgelines, just low enough to not be silhouetted against them, cross from ridge to ridge wherever there’s cover, and eventually reach one of the ridges that looks across the river into the town.”
“Good plan,” I said, because it was. “If you’ll jock the extra cameras and the instruments, that will leave me free to fly close and low.” We reconfigured for that. I lifted the probe a bodylength off the desert surface, far enough so that the little jet wouldn’t be at risk of setting any fires, and we sped off toward the line of ridges, Krurix calling off results as we went. “Temperature, pressure, gravity, humidity, all of that is just what we’d expect from all the other probes. The bio sampler is getting what looks like pollen and bacteria, mostly, plus a couple of insects. Still nothing different from what we’ve seen on any other probe. Certainly looks like we can walk around without any special suits. That should make the senior officers happy—we can get right into the next phase.”
“They’ve got their orders too,” I reminded him, “and getting on with it will make their lives a lot better when they get back.”
“What are you two muttering about over there?” Beremahm asked. Maybe she heard enough to know it wasn’t completely appropriate—at least not with our political officer acting up—or maybe she just distrusted assistants whose voices got too quiet.
“Just some tricky technical stuff,” I said. “We’re flying right above the dirt and there’s a lot of fussing to do, and besides there’s more relevant data at the altitude.”
We swept up the first ridge, avoiding staying on the two footpaths that we crossed. The more broken ground and thicker brush meant I had to bounce higher, but Krurix said there was no one to spot us, at least no one he had seen in any camera. We popped up for an instant, and through a distance lens Krurix saw two Seteposians hoeing a field, so we dropped back and glided along till we found a patch of broken woods and country that seemed to be unobserved. Weaving between trees, we made the next ridge, climbed a gully in its side, and began to repeat our little game of creeping along behind the ridge, looking for a suitable place.
It took a good sixteenth of a day to cross the several ridges until Krurix assured me that the town would be over the very next one. “Well,” I said, “taking a peek is getting more and more dangerous.” As it was, we were sitting in a low depression on one side of the gully, hoping not to be noticed, but since three footpaths ran into the hollow, it seemed unlikely that we could be unnoticed for long. “Let’s make sure we take one really good peek, anyway. I’m going to just pop over the ridge—get all the cameras and instruments ready for quick high-resolution shots, in case that’s all we can do. As soon as I do this I’m going to have to start improvising.”
I made the probe creep forward, a quarter-bodylength off the ground, until we got into a grove of trees that extended almost to the top of the ridge. Then I popped up out of an open spot in the canopy, dove over the ridge, and brought us to a fast hover two bodylengths off the ground on the other side. Beside me at the other console I heard Krurix’s little grunt of effort as he shot more pictures in less time than any of us had ever managed in a practice run.
I had just looked around once when a sudden motion caught my eye. It was a Seteposian, and he was throwing a spear at the probe. I slammed the side jet on and lurched out of the way; the Seteposian turned and ran.
“Let’s chase him,” Krurix said. “Our cover is blown, we have plenty of juice to get out if we need to, and we might learn quite a bit by seeing who, if anybody, he reports to.”
It sounded good to me. I vectored thrust and we sailed down the foot trail after the fleeing Seteposian as he charged down the badly eroded path straight down the hillside. Out of the corner of my eye I was aware that Krurix was getting many good shots of the town: the stone-walled inner part with its big buildings and tower, and the outer huddle of huts surrounded by a wooden palisade. In forty years or so it had grown far beyond what the single cryptic picture had shown us; most remarkable of all, right at its center, apparently attached to the largest building, was the burned-out hulk of one of Wahkopem Zomos’s landers.
The figure in front of us continued running downhill, and I kept pursuing, trying to keep an eye on my side and rear cameras in case any friends showed up to help him. They wore more clothing than we did, I noticed—the fabric in which he wrapped his body was flapping madly as he ran. Probably this was the fastest he had ever run. I could hardly blame him.
“Don’t let me distract you, Thetakisus,” Krurix said, “but there’s a really astonishing array of things in that town. That’s a full-fledged stone-age city, like they found back home on Nisu, twenty years ago, when they finally found First Dynasty Kratareni.”
I glanced over at his screen, since we were now chasing our lone spearman across fairly flat planted field and I could trust the collision avoider for a few instants. The picture looked like it had come out of a historic motion picture back home. I went back to chasing my Seteposian.
He was running up on a small wooden palisade by the trail; I didn’t know what might be inside it, but I figured I could—
There was a sharp scream on the probe’s internal audio. I clicked for a fix on it and switched the cameras to scan the probe’s own outside; there was a decorated stick protruding from one external audio pickup. It took me a moment to realize that must be a projectile fired by a Seteposian weapon of some kind.
Two more of the sticks shot by—they were miniature stone-tipped spears with something tied to their backs to make them fly straight. I jigged around to spoil their aim. Now I could see other Seteposians, advancing across the field we had just crossed, fitting the small spears to bent sticks, which they clearly used to launch them somehow. Then twenty more came rushing out of the little fort in front of us; they were carrying spears.
“I suggest we get the probe out of there before we lose it,” Krurix said.
I hit the preprogrammed command, and the probe
boosted at four gravities. The down-pointing cameras showed a flock of spears, large and small, rising after the probe, then falling back. The field and fort blended into the green around them, then the town and ridges disappeared into the land as well.
“Not completely friendly, are they?” Krurix commented. “I think we want to be pretty careful about approaching them. And I don’t like the fact that Seteposians were all there was in that fort. It kind of suggests to me that it wasn’t our side that ended up in charge. I’d have expected a Nisuan officer if the Wahkopem. people had won out.”
I logged off from the probe, leaving it to find its own way back up to Egalitarian Republic, something it could easily do. Free now to just talk, I grinned at the other assistant. “Would you say we have a good handle on what happened to the robot probes?”
He gestured agreement. “It has to be. I couldn’t swear to it from that encounter, but you know, I think they knew what they were doing. Did you see how quickly they moved to surround the probe? The robots are programmed to move away from anything big that moves toward them. I think our friends have worked out how to confuse a probe’s program so that it runs out of ideas.”
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