by Ben Bova
“This is a portion of a typical scanning sweep. You can see that it’s cataloging every geological trait it’s been programmed to find. The metals we’ve been looking for, the ones from the crash-and-burn site, pop up occasionally … .” He paused, waiting. “There! There’s one right there. Did you see it? Anyway, although the metals were present, for the most part the scans found them only in the same proportions as they naturally occurred on the planet itself.”
“For the most part,” Anmoore emphasized.
“Right!” Secchi blurted happily, the level of excitement in his voice climbing. Although Adela noted that Lewis’ expression clearly showed his desire for the geologist to get on with it, she couldn’t help but share in the scientist’s delight. “But I found one trace signature …” The picture changed to a still image, similar to the view the descending probe had been sending back. “ … where I didn’t expect to find it. It was still too small to be the one we were looking for, smaller than a lot of other deposits I’d already recorded, for that matter, but it was out of place based on the earlier scans we’d completed of the region.
“So I did a third overhead scan to verify where it was, and found a series of fissures leading out from the impact site of these craters … here.” A yellow circle appeared over the area in question. “Keep in mind that all the survey work to this point has consisted of straight-down scans from directly overhead; that’s normal procedure. But look at the left side of this crater, the big one in the center.” An oblong circle appeared at the indicated depression, starting at the center of the crater and tracing an area to the rim; then another thin line, not quite connected to it, snaked far out along the featureless surface. It looked like a tadpole shedding its tail. “There seems to be one large fissure, mostly in the lower portion of the crater wall, that extends several kilometers to the west. It goes underground, though, as soon as it crosses the crater wall, then reappears on the surface only periodically.”
“I see,” Adela said, realizing what he was getting at. “You think you managed to get a brief reading through the fissure itself?”
“That’s it. But it was just dumb luck, honestly. Past the crater wall the fissure is only a few centimeters at its widest—on the surface, that is.”
The playback changed yet again, but this time it was an angular shot that allowed the horizon to scroll beneath the sensorsat, the view a pilot might see from the front of an aircraft, versus a passenger’s downward view. As before, there were the scattered color flashes and their associated spectrographic readings.
“We programmed five separate passes over the site, the scan set for the angle you see now, with no luck. But, on number six …” The view showed the gently rolling landscape, the big crater dotting the very edge of the horizon. The surface scrolled by, bringing the eastern rim of the crater closer until it passed beneath them, slowly revealing the interior. There wasn’t much to see—the deep shadows inside hid half the crater floor and the entire inside portion of the western rim wall. But as the angle increased, there was a sudden brilliant flash of white light at the base of the rim wall that sent a veritable avalanche of numbers cascading down the screen. Then, as the image neared the rim wall, the flash disappeared, as did the readings. The center of the holoframe returned to the overhead view of the descending probe, still in the final stages of its landing phase.
No one in the crowd spoke, leaving only the sounds of the vehicular traffic wrapping up work on the far side of the work area, and the steady drumming of the rain on the surface of the dome.
Lewis nodded thoughtfully, understanding the implications, while Brendan hurriedly tapped at his handheld, undoubtedly checking the numbers that had just flashed on his screen aboard Scartaris.
“If I got the numbers right …” The academician started under his breath. “No, wait a minute. This can’t be accurate.”
“Ninety-eight thousand, five hundred metric tons, Imperial standard.” Secchi positively beamed. “I’ve run the numbers ten times.” He waited as long as he could, then, looking like he was going to burst, blurted, “Can I go down?”
“I say yes,” Adela offered firmly, then looked to Anmoore. He, in turn, regarded the two men aboard the flagship, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
Brendan set the handheld aside and leaned back into his couch, hands steepled in front of him.
“Well?” Lewis said. “It’s your call. Is this the proof we were looking for?”
“I think so,” Brendan said finally, evoking a not-quite-silent “Yes!” from Secchi, whose portion of the holoframe immediately winked out. The man couldn’t move fast enough to get ready.
“All right, then.” Lewis leaned forward. “You have my authorization, Captain.” Brendan rose from his own couch and said a few words into his brother’s ear. Lewis nodded. “I agree,” he said to Brendan, who promptly left the image. Then, to Anmoore, “Academician Wood, along with an assistant of his choice from here, will accompany you to the surface, and will act as team leader. What he says, goes. Is this satisfactory?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Let’s keep this one small. No more than eight people for this first trip. The Academician and whoever he brings make two—”
“I’m going,” Adela said excitedly. “I won’t miss out on this.”
Lewis knew better than to argue with her. “Choose the remaining five members of the party as you think best, Captain, but I’ll insist that two of them be from security.”
Adela bristled. The motion did not go unnoticed by her grandson.
“If it makes you feel better, Dr. Montgarde,” he said formally, “you may decide the security personnel.” He stood, signaling that there was nothing more to discuss. “Select your team and get going. By the way, it may surprise you to know that I’m as anxious to find out what’s down there as you are. Good luck.” He nodded encouragingly, but his eyes lingered a moment on Adela as the right side of holoframe faded, a hint of worry behind them. Only the probe landing sequence remained, and now expanded to fill the entire frame.
“All right, people!” Anmoore shouted, clapping his hands to get their attention. “That’s all the excitement for now, so let’s get moving here.” He had a headset hanging loosely around his neck, which he pulled over his ear; then he spoke into his collar pickup. As he talked, he watched the general milling-about as everyone returned to what they were doing before the three-way conversation, occasionally waving and pointing directions to one group or another.
Presently, he pulled the headset off and let it dangle from his neck again, and turned to Adela.
“Vito’s probably already waiting in the shuttle bay, I suspect,” he said pleasantly. “I’m sending Hannah with you, of course; and a vac tech named Lan Heathseven. He’s had years of experience working in hard-vacuum environments, so pay attention to anything he tells you. With his knowledge of equipment and engineering he should be able to handle any of your physical needs. Besides, if this metal you find turns out to be something like, say, a working spacecraft, I want his opinion on it. Security’s up to you.”
“Lucky me.” Adela turned, scanning the ID badges of the personnel nearest them for bright orange. She spotted one, pleased as she recognized the face of the man who wore it. “Kal—Kal Hanson! Can you come over here for a moment, please?” He waved back, and as he approached she glimpsed another orange badge. “And you,” she called to the woman. “Yes, with the short red hair.”
“Hello, Doctor,” Hanson said, coming up. “Good to see you again.”
The woman also greeted her politely. Adela had never seen her before, and assumed that she must have been one of Anmoore’s people.
Adela explained what she wanted, much to the delight of both of them. Admittedly, there had not been much for security to do down here other than accompany the occasional trip to the observation deck or to one of the remote dig sites. Even then, their responsibilities usually leaned more toward their paramedical and evac training—used, so far, in only
a few rare instances on this gentle world—than to outright armed protection. These two were clearly anxious for the opportunity to go along.
“Wait a minute,” Anmoore said, looking Hanson over as he pulled the headset on again. “We may have a problem.” He spoke a few words into the collar pickup, then asked, “How tall are you, Hanson?”
“A hundred ninety-one and a half,” he replied, just the slightest suggestion of concern on his face. He stood straighter, a bit more tense. “Is something wrong?”
Anmoore spoke again to his unseen listeners, thanked them, and pulled the headset off again. “Yeah, I’m afraid so. Normally, standard issue, shield-reinforced pressure suits are fine for vacuum work, but I’m not taking any chances. Hard suits only this trip.” He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. You’re too big for what we have on hand.”
“Oh, well,” he answered agreeably, his features relaxing. “Maybe next trip. Good luck, Doctor; hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“Thanks. Me, too.”
He nodded politely, then headed off in the direction he had come.
“Actually, I’m a little disappointed,” Adela confessed, once he had disappeared into the crowd of workers. “He’s one of the few people in security I knew I could trust.”
“That’s understandable. Well, you can trust Cannin here,” he said, confirming that she was from the crew of the Paloma Blanca. “I’d trust her with my life. I have, in fact, on one or two occasions. Right, Mike?”
She laughed at his reference. “I suppose so … if you consider shore leave a life-threatening situation.”
“Anyway, if you’d like, I can pick the last team member.”
“That would be fine,” Adela replied. “I appreciate it.”
“Well, that’s it then. Mike, why don’t you go see if Waltz is doing anything tomorrow afternoon, and if not tell him to give me a call as soon as he can. Oh, and Lan will be going with you, too.”
Cannin’s face brightened. “I was hoping the two of us could get away for a while.” She nodded a wordless thank-you, then headed to the far side of the dome in search of the other security tech.
Anmoore looked around, and noticed that the interior of the work area had brightened considerably: With the bay doors opened wide at either end of the dome, the rays of diffused sunshine that were just now beginning to sift through the cloud cover told them both that the storm had broken.
“Off the record …” he said soberly, turning back to her. There was a stern, no-nonsense look in his eyes she had never seen in him before. “I won’t allow an IPC on any survey team I send out.”
Adela stared at him in abject shock. “Wha—You mean Hanson? But how did … ?”
“It’s not important.” Anmoore’s voice was filled with anger, and he stared away, not wanting to meet her eyes. “Look, I know you had nothing to do with it; and I’ve only known about him for a short time, or I’d never have allowed him to accompany us—armed!—to the observation deck.” He lowered his head, checking his anger, and a shout from a woman driving a cargo lifter caught his attention. He walked in her direction, and although Adela couldn’t hear their conversation, she saw him point to a group working at one of the shuttles making the run to the western dig site.
“I didn’t know,” she shouted over the whine of the lifter as it pivoted away. “I thought he was all right. I mean, I thought he was just normal security. I only knew the IPCs were here, following me; I didn’t know who they were. I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.” He waved his hand, dismissing the whole episode, but Adela couldn’t help but feel that she had lost some measure of Gareth Anmoore’s respect. “You’d better take care of whatever you were working with before the interruption.” He nodded over his shoulder at the holoframe. “We’re heading up to the ship in an hour. I won’t be going on the trip with you—I can’t fit into our hard suits any better than he would—but I do want to pilot the shuttle down to the surface of Big One.”
“All right,” she answered. “I’ll see you on the pad, then.” They smiled at each other, a certain degree of tension still between them; then she turned away and headed in the direction of the temporary office suite they had set up for her in the working section of the dome.
“Hey!” He called after her, waving. “You have worked a hard suit before, haven’t you?”
Adela waved back, pretending that she hadn’t heard what he said, and continued on her way.
25
THE LAST EMPEROR
Eric, Emperor of the Hundred Worlds, knew nothing of Adela’s preparations.
The jamming net in place, and now made even stronger with the assistance of the Sarpan ships at Tsing, he had no idea what was happening there. A means had been devised, at Lewis’s suggestion, to channel information back to the Imperial Court; but it involved a complicated series of coded, hand-delivered missives sent through the wormhole. Once through the wormhole and outside the area of quarantine he had prescribed, the scrambled reports could then be sent through the tachyon dish, but they would still be dated. In the meantime, then, he waited.
However, the reports he was receiving, those from elsewhere in the Hundred Worlds, were not good. Not good at all. Jephthah might have been silenced for now, but his last broadcast had been much more effective that even he could have hoped. Unrest and anti-alien sentiment was increasing on a score of worlds, demands for full dissociation from the Realm had been sent by the governing bodies of a score more; there had even been scattered incidents of violence on a few worlds against visiting Sarpan scientists, scholars and diplomats. Everything hinged on what was happening at Tsing. And all he could do was wait.
Just like when my father used to wait, he thought, experiencing for the first time some of the pressures that surely must have affected Javas’ rule. On reflection he realized that he felt useless, unnecessary—almost impotent as he anticipated some word, any word from Lewis on what was happening at Tsing since the jamming net was closed.
He was at Woodsgate, on Earth, on one of the balconies adjacent to the study that had been used by so many Emperors before him. No sense in sitting on some figurative throne up at Luna, he’d reasoned, when there was little to do but … just sit. He stood now on the west balcony looking out over the Kentucky hills that blended gracefully, mistily into the blue mountains in the distance. The Sun was just now setting, the sky streaked in brilliant hues of crimson, scarlet and orange, and he watched the brightly burning orb as it slowly dropped behind the wooded mountains.
A bright, square outline appeared in the air high above him, and he looked up to see a controlled entrance gate opening in the shield dome that protected the estate. A tiny shuttle appeared, easily maneuvering through the opening before it touched down lightly on the receiving pad in front of the house. A familiar round form waddled out to the craft and, after a few moments, trundled back to the house with a long, narrow bundle as the shuttle lifted off again and disappeared through the opening.
“Billy told me once that he stood on a beach and cursed you,” he said ruefully under his breath, returning his attention to Earth’s bloated, sinking daystar, “for bringing this all upon us. How much different would our lives have been had you not decided to die?” Eric stood there, leaning with both hands on the elegant carved railing. “Was he right to curse you?”
Eric felt/heard a signal in his head and turned his back on the waning brightness. Walking slowly, deliberately back into the study, he closed the double doors behind him as if to shut out the Sun, and in that single, trivial gesture imagined that he had some small power over the damned thing.
He took his customary seat behind the enormous wooden desk that his grandfather, Emperor Nicholas, had commissioned, built from golden oak taken from the backwoods surrounding the family estate in all directions. He played his hands across the polished surface. This is real! he thought, tracing a fingernail along the deep grain of the wood. This simplest of nature’s creations is more real to me now than any of the trap
pings of this … this ‘Empire.’ As he ran his hand along the desktop, he spied the flower. The intensely red blossom was embedded in a solid block of plastiglass, and had belonged to Javas. He picked it up and stared at it—the magnificent petals magnified by the curved surface of its crystalline container—marveling at nature’s design. It was from a firebush, a flowering shrub native to his grandmother’s homeworld, Gris, but his father had never told him the significance of this particular bloom, nor why he had asked on his deathbed that it always remain a part of this study, for however long the Emperors of the Hundred Worlds used it. As he stared at it, Eric wondered, not for the first time, what the fragrance of this flower smelled like.
The thought was interrupted by another summons somewhere in the back of his mind. The integrator signal, as always neither quite heard nor felt, had been automatically issued by the monitor system built into the richly carpeted and appointed corridors of the old estate to alert him that someone was approaching the study.
“Come in, Fleming,” he called out, not waiting for the Master to knock. The door opened, and the ruddy, jowly face of the House Master peeked timidly into the study.
“Sire,” he said, waddling his considerable bulk into the room. He carried a long object gingerly in both arms and approached the desk respectfully, holding it out in front of him once he stood before the Emperor’s desk. The cylindrical parcel had been wrapped in old-fashioned brown paper, secured with a length of rough, stringy twine. “It has arrived.”
“Thank you, Master Fleming.”
“Sire.” The House Master bowed so deeply that anyone who did not know him intimately might have expected him to topple over under his own weight. He turned to leave.
“Wait.”
Fleming turned tentatively to face the Emperor, a look that wordlessly, plaintively asked “Is there some way in which I have displeased you?” evident on his round face.
“Do you know what this is?” Eric asked as he noisily peeled back the paper to reveal a length of dark wood.