by Allen Steele
“Hmm…” Cole slowly nodded. “I expect you’re right. We’ll probably just have to play this by ear, no matter what happens.” Then he inched a little closer, lowering his voice even more. “However, when the time comes,” he said softly, “I’d like for you to be with me in the command center, as close at hand as possible. So that I can consult with you as quickly as possible.”
“Not in the OC?” The other half of Deck A, adjacent to the command center, served as the ship’s observation center. That was where the science team would monitor Galileo’s encounter with Spindrift.
“No. I’d like to have you on the bridge as much as possible. Until we’re sure there’s nothing to worry about, at least.” Cole hesitated. “The captain needs to be reassured that he doesn’t have to take…well, certain emergency measures…if there’s no reason for him to do so. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly.” Like hell!
“Excellent.” Sir Peter patted his knee. “Thanks, Jared. Glad you decided to come around. Always knew you’d be an asset to this mission.”
“Thank you, Peter. Appreciate your confidence…”
“And you’ll say nothing of this to anyone, will you?” Again, Cole’s eyelids fluttered. “I can trust you to keep your mouth shut? To keep this strictly between you and me?”
“Of course.” And that, too, was a lie.
Ramirez located Collins on Deck C just as she was about to enter the access shaft. She looked around when he called her name, and waited as he jogged the toward her. “Lieutenant Collins…just the person I want to see,” he said, coming to a breathless halt. “May I have a few minutes of your time?”
“I’m rather busy.” For some reason, she wore a fleece-lined jacket over her jumpsuit; various tools and instruments swung from a utility belt. “Can this wait till later?”
“It’s rather important, actually.” He glanced back and forth to see if anyone else was in the corridor. A door shut somewhere around the bend; he heard footsteps, going the other way. “If we could speak in private,” he added, softening his voice, “I think it would be for the best.”
Collins was visibly reluctant. That didn’t surprise him; he’d become used to the suspicion in her eyes. Ever since he’d joined the expedition, no one aboard Galileo had been willing to trust him…save perhaps Cole, and clearly he had his own agenda. Yet among the members of the flight crew, Collins was the only person willing to talk to him. She might only be the shuttle pilot, but she had Harker’s ear, and Harker was not only second-in-command, but obviously no friend of the captain. If he could persuade her to listen…
“Well…c’mon then,” she said, with no small reticence. “I’m going down below to check out Maria.” She paused, looking him over. “It’s going to be cold down there. I’d put something on, if I were you.”
“I’ll be fine.” Although his cabin was only a few meters away, Ramirez didn’t want to give her an excuse to leave him behind. “After you.”
Collins nodded, then pressed the button on the bulkhead that opened the access shaft. Ramirez waited until she’d climbed through the hatch, then followed her. Once again, he tried not to look down as he placed hands and feet upon the ladder rungs protruding from the shaft’s burnished-steel walls. Ever since the Millis-Clement field had been activated, this part of Galileo made him nervous; the shaft yawned below him like an empty well, leading straight down through the core of the ship until it reached the sealed hatch leading through the ZPE generator module. It wasn’t so bad from there; it was when he had to climb all the way up to Deck A, twenty meters above, that he had to fight vertigo.
They didn’t speak as they descended the ladder, their footfalls ringing faintly upon its rungs, until they reached the bottom hatch. Collins stopped to enter a security code into a keypad mounted on the bulkhead; Ramirez tried not to notice how she shielded the pad with her left hand to prevent him from observing the sequence. The hatch buzzed, and she bent down to twist the lockwheel counterclockwise. Lifting it open to reveal darkness, Collins reached farther down to push a button just inside the hatch. Lightstrips glimmered to life, and she climbed down through the hatchway.
“Close it behind you,” she said. Then she looked back up at him. “Coming?”
Ramirez hesitated. He’d been this way before, of course; the first time during training, the second when the science team had been ferried over from Tsiolkovsky Station. Then the shaft had been a horizontal tunnel, no more threatening than a crawl space. Now it was a pit even deeper than the one within the hab module, its bottom nearly sixty meters below them. The ever-present hum of the engines was louder now that they’d left behind the soundproofed warrens of the hab module, as though they were entering the ventricle of an immense heart.
“Yeah…sure. Right behind you.” Carefully lowering his feet over the edge, he slowly climbed through the hatchway, the palms of his hands moist as they grasped the ladder rungs. He somehow managed to reach up and shut the hatch behind him. Collins patiently waited for him, and he earned a brief smile and a nod from her once that task was complete. Then they began to make the final descent.
Don’t look down, he told himself. Don’t look down. Ramirez stared straight ahead, concentrating on placing his hands and feet on the rungs one at a time, not releasing his grip until he was sure that he had a solid foothold on the one below. It wasn’t until they finally reached the bottom of the shaft that he noticed how much colder the air had become, the sweat on his back and beneath his arms suddenly turning to ice water.
“You’re right,” he murmured. “I should’ve worn a jacket.”
“Told you so.” Standing above the hatch to the docking module, Collins again entered a code number into a keypad, then crouched to twist another lockwheel. “Last bit of the way,” she said, glancing up at him. “Think you can make it?”
“Sure.” He tilted his head back to peer up the shaft; it rose above them like the chimney of a factory smokestack. “Might even stay a while, if you don’t mind.”
“You wanted to talk privately. Can’t get more private than this.” Collins raised the hatch, then reached down again to switch on the lights. “All right, let’s go.”
Below them lay the primary airlock: a spherical compartment with round, vaultlike hatches on four sides, its bulkheads cramped with suit lockers and storage bins. Collins peered through the small, round window of the Dock 1 hatch, then reached to the panel beside it to flip switches that would initiate the pressurization sequence. “So,” she said, turning to him, “what do you want to discuss?”
“I had a chat with Sir Peter just a little while ago, and he said something…well, I’m not sure what to make of it. He seems concerned that Spindrift may be hostile.”
“You’re the alien expert. You tell me.”
Ramirez smiled at this. “You know what they used to call astrobiology? Science without a subject. Oh, we’ve found microfossils on Mars and extremophiles on Europa and Titan, but aliens? No one’s an expert, because…”
“We haven’t found any. Right.” She checked the pressure gauge. “So I take it you don’t know either.”
“That’s what I told him. And he seemed to accept that. But…” He hesitated. “Apparently he’s not the only one who’s concerned. The captain is, too.”
“Why shouldn’t he be? This is his ship.” The gauge reached the green line; she flipped another switch, then reached up to grasp the lockwheel. It was more resistant than the others; she grunted as she hauled at it, and swore under her breath when it refused to budge.
“Allow me.” Ramirez took hold of the lockwheel and put his arms to work. Three years of hard labor in the prison farm hadn’t been for nothing; the wheel squeaked, then turned counterclockwise. “There we go,” he murmured, as the hatch wheezed with escaping air. “Must have frozen.”
“Thanks. I’ll have Marty look at it.” Collins pulled the hatch open, revealing the low, narrow tunnel of the air-lock sleeve. “You were saying?”
“Well, c
ertainly it’s his business, but there was something else…”
Collins no longer seemed to be paying attention. Ducking her head and shoulders, she began crawling on hands and knees down the tunnel, the tools on her belt clinking together as they dangled from her waist. Watching her, Ramirez found himself thinking about how long it’d been since the last time he had been with a woman. He’d shut down that part of himself a long time ago; although there had been female prisoners in Dolland, sexual relations had been forbidden among inmates, and rape was punishable by spacing: a one-way trip out the airlock. He looked away, took a deep breath. It was not the time…
“Go on. I’m listening.” Collins glanced back at him. “We can talk in the shuttle.”
Lowering his head, Ramirez followed her down the tunnel. Collins stopped to use a power screwdriver to open a cover on the shuttle’s fuselage. She pressed a couple of buttons; another hiss, and the hatch popped open. Again, he saw only darkness. Collins crawled through the hatch; squatting at its edge, she turned herself around, then carefully descended within the craft, as if climbing down a ladder. Her head disappeared from sight; a moment passed, then interior lights flickered to life.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Sure.” Her voice came to him from the other side of the hatch. “Just be careful. Everything’s sort of upsy-daisy in here.”
Ramirez crawled to the hatch, put his head and shoulders through it, and looked down. Below him, he saw what appeared to be a narrow manhole leading down to the shuttle’s cockpit; recessed rungs within what was usually the floor of the central aisle made descent possible within a cabin that, under normal circumstances, would be in a horizontal position.
Collins had already made her way down to the cockpit, passing four seats arranged on each side of the aisle. Clinging to the ladder with one hand, she pulled a pair of elastic straps from her belt and, using her other hand, hooked them to floor rings on either side of the center aisle. Once she secured their other ends to her belt, she was able to move freely, like a mountaineer rappelling down a vertical slope.
“Come on down, if you want,” she said, craning her neck to look up at him. “Just be careful not to fall on me.”
“No thanks. Think I’ll remain here. Let the pro take care of this.” He gazed down at the wraparound control panels of the cockpit, arrayed below and above a set of teardrop-shaped windows. “What are you doing down there, anyway?”
“Tucking Maria away for the night.” Planting her feet against the floor, Collins leaned over backward to switch on the instruments. “I could do this from Deck A, of course, but I never trust the comps. Besides, I also need to do this…” She unsnapped a pocket on her left thigh and withdrew a data disc. As Ramirez watched, she arched her spine even more to insert the disc within its slot in the main computer. “Backup flight recorder,” she explained, gasping slightly with the effort. “From here on out, everything that happens aboard Galileo gets relayed here via comlink. Log entries, scientific data, voice and video communications, the works. That way, if we had to abandon ship…”
“You’d have a record of what happened,” Ramirez said. “Wise precaution.” It was hard to ignore the inherent sexuality of her position. In a conscious effort to get her off his mind, he gazed upward. Another compartment lay on the other side of the passageway: suit lockers and equipment racks, for the most part, along with what looked like the hatch of a belly airlock, yet something else caught his attention: four large cylinders, each two meters in height, arranged on either side of the aft compartment. He immediately recognized them for what they were.
“Lieutenant?” he asked. “Why are there biostasis cells aboard?”
“Same general idea…just in case there’s an emergency. God help us if we ever have to use them.” Without looking up from her work, Collins continued to use the main comp to run diagnostic tests of the shuttle’s primary systems. “Maria’s designed for long-term sorties, but her air and water supplies are limited to only a few days. Five at most. If something were to happen to her…say, she had to crash-land somewhere…then the idea is that we’d activate the homing beacon, go into biostasis, and wait for someone to rescue us.”
“Yes, but…”
“How would they rescue us if we’ve only got one shuttle? Yeah, I know.” Collins tapped another command into the keyboard, watched as the screen above it changed. “We had problems with the Arcangela during the shakedown cruise…the airframe wasn’t quite stable…so it was taken off for a complete refit. If Galileo hadn’t launched so quickly, we might have had a second shuttle as well. But since our launch window was so narrow, we had to leave without it.” She glanced up at him. “That’s why I say we better hope that—”
She suddenly stopped. Looking down at her again, Ramirez saw that she’d been distracted by something she’d spotted through the starboard cockpit window. “Well, well,” she murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“What? See something?”
“You might say that, yes.” Twisting herself upright, Collins grabbed hold of the ladder and unsnapped her harness. “Come down and look for yourself,” she added. “Just be careful where you put your hands and feet.”
Ramirez turned himself around within the sleeve so that he was feetfirst to the hatch. Grasping the handrails, he carefully lowered his legs through the hatch. After a few seconds of blindly searching for a foothold, he finally managed to locate one of the recessed floor rungs. Slipping out of the airlock, he eased his way down to Collins. Clinging to the ladder with one hand and bracing the soles of her shoes against the edge of the console, the shuttle pilot moved aside to make room for him.
“There,” she said, pointing through the window below the copilot’s seat. “See?”
Ramirez peered in the direction she indicated. They were looking toward the ship’s stern; he could see the bulge of the main fuel tank and, beyond it, the gold-plated shield surrounding the fusion engine. In the foreground, less than fifteen meters away, lay the service module. He could see Larry and Jerry, Galileo’s two probes, resting within their respective ports, and between them…
“What’s that?” he asked. “I didn’t notice this when you showed us the ship.”
A cylindrical object, tapered at one end and broad at the other, with small fins running along its sides. No more than six or seven meters long, it was enclosed by a small cradle attached to the hull, with bundled cables leading from it to a nearby port.
“That’s because it wasn’t there when we came aboard.” Collins’s voice was low. “But I know a torpedo when I see it.”
Ramirez felt cold, yet the chill didn’t only come from the trapped air within the shuttle. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said softly. “Sir Peter told me that if it turned out Spindrift was hostile, the captain was prepared to take emergency measures. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but…”
“I think we do now.” Collins’s voice was an angry murmur. “Those goddamn idiots…”
“You can’t tell anyone we found this.” Ramirez darted a look at her. “If Cole finds out I told you…”
“Quiet.” Reaching into her breast pocket, she pulled out her headset. Putting it on, she tapped at its wand. “Harker. Private channel.”
“Commander, please…”
“Hush.” Collins cast him a warning glance, then glanced away. “Ted? Emcee. Meet me in my quarters in fifteen. Urgent.” She paused. “Yeah, I found it. I’ll meet you there. Go.”
She tapped the wand again, then pulled the headset around her neck. “Go back to the airlock and wait for me,” she said to Ramirez. “I’ll finish up here, then take you back upstairs.”
“Sure.” Ramirez started to climb back up the ladder. Then he stopped and looked at her. “You and Ted…Commander Harker, I mean…”
“I think he’d let you call him Ted.” She favored him with a brief smile. “I’m Emily.”
“Thank you, Emily…and please, call me Jared.” He paused.
“You two know what’s going on, don’t you?”
“We didn’t until now.” Again, the smile, more warm than before. “Thank you, Jared.”
“You’re welcome.” Despite the danger, he felt a surge of relief. “Nice to know I have friends.” Collins gave him an uncertain look, and he felt like saying something else. Yet words failed him, so he continued to scale the ladder back to the hatch.
SEVEN
JUNE 3, 2288—EASS GALILEO
Climbing the last rungs of the ladder, Emily pushed open the Deck A hatch and stepped into the command center. For the first time since Galileo came through the starbridge, all the flight officers were at their stations; the only exceptions were Nick and Werner, who were down in Deck B getting the biostasis cells ready. Hands quietly tapped at keyboards as comps beeped and purred, but otherwise there was little sound save for the occasional murmured comment. At T-minus 00:49:39 to main engine ignition, the crew was busy preparing the ship for departure from Eris. Once Galileo was under way, only the most dire emergency would cause them to abort the mission.
At the center of the horseshoe, Captain Lawrence was seated in the command chair. Legs casually crossed, he studied status reports on his lapboard, looking up only when Arkady or Simone or Martin said something to him. To all outward appearances, he seemed calm, yet Emily couldn’t help but notice that his right foot, propped up on his left knee, twitched like the fretful swish of a cat’s tail. As if feeling her eyes on his back, Lawrence peered over his shoulder at her. She said nothing, only gave him a nod, and the captain looked forward again. Yet his ankle stopped jiggling as he self-consciously uncrossed his legs and placed both feet flat upon the floor.
Nervous, Captain? Worried about the countdown? Or perhaps it’s just your guilty conscience? Emily smiled to herself. She’d find out soon enough.
On the other side of the compartment, Ted stood next to Antonia, hunched over her console as he quietly discussed some matter with the XO. Looking up, he caught Emily’s eye. A brief nod, then he finished talking to Toni and moved away, slowly walking toward Lawrence. Emily felt her heart flutter. Time for the mice to put the bell around the cat’s neck…and suddenly, it was as if her own tail had begun to twitch.