by Ben Bova
There was a popping depressurization as the hatch opened, the sudden movement bringing to Eric’s ears the sound of countless weapons being armed and pointed at the shuttle entrance. The door fell down smoothly to become a short set of steps extending to the ground. Rihana was waiting in the opening and stepped down the ramp the moment the hatch touched the dew-laden grass.
“Five minutes,” he said.
She nodded. “I’ll make it worth your while,” she replied, and as she did two more figures appeared behind her in the shuttle’s entrance hatch. One was human; the other, wearing a shiny, protective E-suit and bubble helmet, was Sarpan. “And as a show of good faith, I’ve brought along some friends of yours.”
“Temple?” Eric managed to say. “Is it you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Hello, Eric.” He smiled broadly, and started down the ramp, helping Oidar negotiate the narrow steps. “Can we get him into the House? It’s been a long ride.”
Eric waved behind him, but Master Fleming had already ordered several of the guards in his direction to give the two newcomers an escort inside.
Eric watched them in silence as they helped Oidar up the steps to the main entrance, then turned back to Rihana.
“Now that that’s been taken care of,” she said, her trademark arrogant smile back in place, “would you like to know who Jephthah is?”
The Emperor of the Hundred Worlds was nervous, for the first time in his life since accepting the office on the death of his father. He sat rigidly in his chair and straightened the Imperial sash across the front of his full dress uniform, and wondered how Javas would have handled what he was about to do. For that matter, would his father—an Emperor in a different time, with different expectations of himself—have even considered the actions he was about to take?
There was only one other person in the room with him, and at this moment he would have wanted no other. Master Fleming stood off to one side of the study, well out of range of the pickup lens.
He carefully reviewed in his mind what he wanted to say. The time had come to set the record straight regarding the so-called mutiny at the sunstation on Mercury, as well as to clear Templeton Rice’s good name. Now that he and Oidar were on board a starship, headed toward a rendezvous with the Sarpan flagship as his personal emissaries of goodwill to the Guardian of the Waters, perhaps at least some of the anti-Sarpan sentiment could be allayed. And with the information provided by Rihana, he would announce that an Empire-wide warrant had been issued for the man Rapson, although he also planned to admit the truth—that the chances of finding Rapson anywhere but at Tsing appeared remote. All this, and more, he would tell in this address.
“Ready.” The softly feminine voice of the House system informed him that the recording was set. Through the integrator, he activated the sequence.
“Citizens of the Hundred Worlds,” he began. “I have news both grave, and hopeful.” He looked into the lens, his eyes never blinking.
“But first, I wish to announce that I have decided to go to Tsing 479.”
26
FISSURE
The landing craft touched down gently, Gareth Anmoore’s steady hands on the controls.
“Stay strapped in for a minute,” he called back from the flight deck on the other side of the bulkhead from the passenger cabin. His voice was tinny over the intercom speakers set into the ceiling.
“There’s even more fissuring on the surface than we thought, and I want to be sure our footing is secure before I initiate shutdown.”
The so-called hopper shuttle they had used for the trip down from the survey ship was one of the most basic means of short-range transport, and Adela marveled that even after two centuries, the hoppers had changed little. Although this particular craft was a “working craft” as opposed to one dedicated to tourist transport, the passenger cabin was both spacious and comfortably appointed with everything from a self-contained entertainment system to a small galley. Two rows of plush seats ran the length of the forward portion of the cabin, five in each row. Each seat featured a viewport flatscreen that simulated a window, as well as a program screen recessed into the back of the seat in front of it. The only thing that set this hopper apart from strictly passenger craft were the equipment lockers behind them, also arranged in an orderly row down each side of the cabin.
“Not bad,” he said over the descending whine of the engines as they shut down. “Not bad at all.”
“Yeah,” Secchi countered jokingly to Adela over his shoulder, leaning across the surprisingly wide aisle. “Not bad for an old guy who hasn’t actually flown in years.”
“I heard that, Vito … .” The door to the flight deck opened, admitting Anmoore into the passenger section. Behind him, through the opened door, Adela could see the copilot going through standard postflight routines. “You feel like walking home?”
“Oops! Didn’t know this thing was in two-way.” Vito rapped on the flatscreen with his knuckles and laughed, the pleasant sound almost a giggle. The man was so excited about this trip that his good humor had been irrepressible. “Sorry, boss.”
The cabin broke into laughter and good-natured ribbing at Vito’s expense, with everyone joining in except Hannah Cee. The xenoguide, occupying the seat in front of her, did not like to fly, and looked positively green. Vito reached into a shirt pocket and produced a small vial of pills, handing them to her. “You left these in the ready room upstairs before you got inside,” he said under his breath. “I saw them sitting there and thought you might need them.” She accepted them and smiled a silent thank-you, and he turned back to the merriment as everyone unstrapped, stood, and stretched. Hannah downed a couple of the pills, then, noticing that Towsen, the academician/geologist Brendan had brought along, looked as bad as she felt, offered the vial to him.
“The more time I spend around these people from the survey ship,” Adela said to Brendan across the aisle as she unstrapped herself, “the more I find myself liking them.”
“They’re hard workers,” Brendan agreed, fumbling with his own belt. “They not only seem to take genuine pleasure in what they do, but they really care about each other and enjoy each other’s company. That’s rare.” He finally managed to unclick the catch on his restraining strap, and nodded in Anmoore’s direction as he added, “He’s a good man, and a good leader to inspire such a combination in those under his command.”
“All right, people, listen up.” At Anmoore’s words, the laughter died away and all gave him full attention. The cabin now quiet, Adela could hear a metallic thrumming: From what she had been told, the sound would be that of the hover platform being lowered to the surface beneath the hopper.
“As far as the actual exploration of the fissure is concerned, Hannah’s in charge; what she says goes. For anything involving safety, Mike and Waltz are in charge and what they say goes. Got it?” There were sounds of assent all around, and he nodded at the two security people. “You two want to go ahead and get everything unlocked and do an initial check of the suits? Thanks.”
Kent Waltz and Michaela Cannin, or “Mike” as everyone seemed to call her, headed immediately down the aisle, opening each of the equipment lockers as they moved aft.
“No one leaves the platform without Hannah’s permission. In fact, I want all of you to try to stay on the platform unless you have to go on foot. But if Hannah says it’s all right, you travel in the following order: Hannah and Mike will take the lead, followed by Vito, Dr. Montgarde, Academician Wood and Academician Towsen. Then Lan in the worksuit, and Waltz bringing up the rear.” He lifted his chin, trying to see Waltz as he dug noisily into the interior of one of the lockers. “You hear that, Waltz?”
“Waltz brings up the rear.” The security man’s voice echoed hollowly in the locker.
Anmoore walked down the aisle and sat on the armrest of one of the middle seats as he addressed Brendan, Towsen and Adela. “These hard suits are pretty standard, and aren’t much different from anything else you’ve used, but watch it out th
ere. The suits are heavy, but remember that even with the extra weight you’ve still got only point-two g out there, so be extremely careful about jumping and bouncing around if you do go any distance on foot. I’ve seen more than my share of people take a jump and turn over in ‘midair,’ only to land on their head or back. Try it and you’ll find out why they call these ‘hard’ suits. You’ll have bruises for a week—if you don’t break something.” He looked from side to side at the others. “And the rest of you—no showing off,” he said soberly. None of them laughed; the time for joking around would come later.
“Anyway, if you should fall don’t worry about it. The suits have a skin-shield emergency system, so even if the suit does breach you should be in good shape. Even if you do lose your balance, just make yourself comfortable on the ground until Mike or Waltz can check out your suit and help you back up. Don’t even bother trying to stand up on your own.” He looked around at the six of them, then at the two by the lockers. “Any questions? Good, let’s get going.”
Moving to the aft section of the cabin, the eight of them slipped into the EVA undersuits from the lockers, with Waltz and Mike checking them all—and each other—for proper electrical connections and hose placement. They then grabbed what other gear they would need and descended a narrow ladder into the suit room in the lower level.
There were ten hard suits here, all mounted front-to-back along each side of the lower chamber in a way that reminded Adela and Brendan of the ancient metal armor that lined the Grand Hall back at Woodsgate. But where the old battle regalia on Earth carried with it a sense of foreboding and lethality, these looked more like a double line of comically parading snowmen, a perception enhanced by their shiny white plastic coating. The only color adorning the suits, in fact, was a series of painted rings around the knee and elbow joints of each one—red striping on the left arm and leg, and corresponding green rings on the right. Each featured pinspotlights mounted on either side of the helmets, and yellow lenses studding the perimeter of the upper and lower sections of the suits to make everyone in the party easier to spot from any direction in dim lighting conditions. Save for hookups for the snap-on life-support packs on the rear torso, and emergency air and power input jacks on the front, all but one of the suits were otherwise identically smooth and unadorned.
The oddball suit was mounted in front of the others and must have been the “worksuit” Anmoore had said Lan Heathseven would use. On inspection, Adela assumed it must have been the one he always used, because unlike the other suits with their tape-strip name tags, his was the only one with his name permanently stenciled on the plastic in large, black letters. Also, where the regular suits got their snowman look from a system of interconnecting spheres that made up the helmet, upper torso, lower waist, and arm and leg sections, the helmet and torso of his suit were a single ovoid that made it look like a walking egg as much as anything else.
Despite the whimsical appearance, it was easy to see why it had been called the worksuit: All manner of tools and implements were set into recessed niches across the front and sides of the torso, as well as on the upper thighs; he might look like a walking egg in the suit, but Heathseven would function as a walking toolbox. And, according to what the vac tech had told her on the trip down, it was filled with electronics designed for everything from diagnostics to field measurements. Even the segmented sleeves of the suit were bulkier, allowing him to withdraw his arms into the torso itself to operate the instrumentation located there. Fortunately, Heathseven was not a large man; all the equipment in the suit didn’t leave much room for the occupant. The five members of the group from the Paloma Blanca, familiar with procedure and apparently used to having a “regular” place in the suit lineup, went directly to their own gear as they chattered among themselves. Adela, Brendan and Towsen, meanwhile, were forced to look for the hastily applied name tags that had been affixed to the front and back of the hard-suit helmets to identify the ones that had been sized and selected for them back up on the survey ship.
“Everybody in,” Anmoore said, starting an odd display of strenuous climbing, grunting, and stretching as eight people donned the surface gear. Just before pulling the upper portion of the suits down over them, Adela saw Mike and Lan steal a quick kiss.
With everyone helping each other, getting into the protective gear took the better part of ninety minutes, even with the added assistance of the captain and the copilot. At last, however, the eight of them stood in a semicircle and allowed Anmoore to conduct a final check of the hard suits and the suit-to-suit and suit-to-ship comm links. That done, the pair scrambled back up the ladder and sealed the upper level, preparing the suit room for pressure purge.
Adela watched and familiarized herself with the readings of the heads-up display in the lower front of the helmet—matching the readings with those appearing on the display screen near the hatch—as the atmosphere was pumped out of the room.
While they waited for the room to cycle, she noted that unless their name tags were visible or the angle was right to see through the helmet visors, it was going to be difficult to recognize anyone but Heathseven once outside, so she made a point of studying what little telltale differences she could find among them. Heathseven was obvious. Secchi’s bright orange gear bag looped around the waist of his suit made him stand out, as did similar equipment pouches carried by the others. There was a long, dull scratch on the torso of Brendan’s suit. Towsen carried nothing that would distinguish him from the others, but that in itself made him stand out, she realized, just as the depressurization procedure completed and the hatch fell gracefully, noiselessly open.
“Let’s go,” called Hannah’s voice from inside her helmet. “I’ll meet you under the nose. Watch your step, please.” With that, she loped easily to retrieve the hover platform from its position beneath the hopper itself.
They filed out onto the surface, some of them gripping the equipment pouches around their waists to keep the contents from bouncing, and carefully maneuvered to the front of the hopper. Anmoore had been right, Adela noted, in his warning on the difficulties of walking. While the others strode easily under the low-gravity conditions, she, Brendan and Towsen were forced to steady each other as they got used to it. With each step, there was a subdued vrrrrr-click! audible throughout the suit from the servo-assist motors located in each of the suit joints. After a few minutes, however, she grew so accustomed to the subtle noise that it became unnoticeable.
It was beautiful here. She had never, in the whole time she lived on Luna, gone out onto the surface in anything other than a pressurized vehicle. And while she had worn EVA suits before, it had always been only for precaution on a ship, not for surface excursions like this one. Gazing out across the crater, she could see the deep, airless shadows that stretched out from every rock, every rise on the crater floor. Tsing was low in the sky, and the long shadows were so thick as to be impenetrable. There were thousands upon thousands of smaller impact craters everywhere, and as she examined the powdery regolith at her feet, she could even spot some tiny pockmarks only centimeters in diameter.
As the Paloma Blanca regulars spoke among themselves, she pressed the comm bar with her chin to put the open channel on standby and switched to a secondary channel, then held up three fingers to her companions and waited for them to chin their own comms to the proper frequency. “Is that the fissure over there?” she asked, pointing to a dark, angular blotch barely visible inside one of the deep shadows lining the rim wall. “I can’t tell for sure.”
“That’s it,” Brendan assured her. “It’s closer than it looks, too. The brightness, all the shadows—it’s throwing my depth perception off.”
“I can’t believe this,” she breathed, hearing the awe in her own voice. “I never thought it could be this strikingly beautiful.”
“Me, too.” The voice was Towsen’s, and carried with it the same sense of wonder she felt. He waved and signaled that he was switching back to the open channel, then moved slowly off to one si
de to examine an odd arrangement of jagged talus, gingerly placing one foot in front of the other as he bounced toward the pile of rocks.
“I went outside once, back on Luna,” Brendan reminisced. “Father took us on one of those rare outings—the kind where everything is so perfect that you always wish it could last forever.” His pleasant chuckle at the memory buzzed in the helmet speaker. “Of course, when you’re a child you always wish that just about everything can last forever.”
“I remember the same kinds of outings with my father,” Adela said, recalling a similar experience. “On Gris.”
“Anyway, it was just the four of us. I was, let’s see … I was ten; that would have made Lewis fourteen and Cathay six. The whole thing was a birthday surprise for me—I had begged for years to be taken out onto the surface and he finally relented. Cathay was thrilled, and as I recall Lewis put on a show of complaining the whole time because he was missing out on something his Academy friends were doing. He never fooled Father, though; he was just as glad to spend time with him, away from Woodsgate and the day-to-day affairs of the Court.”
“It sounds lovely, Brendan. I wish I could have been there.”
He sighed. “But then it was back to being the Emperor. And while we saw Father regularly, it was more than three years before all four of us did something together again. Oh, well.” Adela couldn’t tell for sure, but somehow she felt he had just shrugged inside the hard suit.
“Sorry to break in, Academician,” said Towsen apologetically. He must have heard the last of what Brendan had said, but if he had intruded on the private moment, he didn’t let on. “They want us all back on the open channel.”
“Pay attention, down there,” Anmoore called from the flight deck above them. He waved once, then pointed to where Hannah was smoothly bringing the platform around, settling it effortlessly to the ground. The hexagonal platform had a low railing that ran all the way around it save for an opening just large enough for them all to climb aboard. Once they stood together on the platform, Anmoore admonished, “Three hours, that’s all I’m allowing for this first trip. Ninety minutes in, and ninety minutes out. I’m setting the time … now. Check your heads-up.”