Yevgeny laid a hand on his padded box, the meals within busily cooling. “Meal duty is not a worthy contribution? You’ve offered nothing but speculation and theory. Let us get real. Who would be insane enough to try flying an alien ship that is 65 million years old?”
“Well,” Marcus said.
“To maybe save the world?” Yevgeny nodded. “Fair enough.”
Chapter 48
Charmaine Powell was African American, perhaps fifty, petite, and always impeccably dressed. Also Tyler’s protégée, longtime friend, and replacement. Peering out at Marcus from his Agency datasheet, she clearly was not coping well with Tyler’s death. In a sane world, she would have been told to take a few days off. But there was nothing sane about the peril they faced.
She said, “I don’t suppose you have the time to follow current events Dirtside. The Restored Caliphate claims to believe that the cock-up in Florida was our sneaky attempt to surprise them with a decapitation strike. That Allah righteously smote us for our blasphemy. And that the Hammer, if it’s not just a lie, some devious Crusader plot, will slay the infidels and usher in, well, I don’t claim to understand what postapocalyptic paradise they anticipate. They’re messianic enough that maybe they do believe all that. And to judge from activities at their launch sites, they might not care to wait for the Hammer to fall. So, if you called with anything other than a triumphant announcement your computers now speak Titan, maybe this can wait.”
From broadcasts softly streaming as he worked, Marcus had osmosed a few things. That the accident had immediately killed almost a hundred people, from explosion, fire, or plutonium toxicity. That the no-warning evacuation of the Florida Space Coast was a nightmare, roads and airports overwhelmed, cruise ships jammed. That if the wind were to shift as forecast, the entire center of the peninsula, including Orlando and Disney World, would also need to evacuate. That the threat of the Hammer having been sprung without warning on the world, the more imminent danger was suddenly the wrong someone misinterpreting the nuclear catastrophe. As, it seemed, the Restored Caliphate had. And, from an absence of coverage, that the onetime existence of aliens, and their presumed, beyond-the-grave role in the unfolding disasters, remained a closely held secret.
All in all: general, worldwide panic.
“If we’d had that sort of breakthrough, you’d have heard the cheering from here.” A quarter-million miles of vacuum between the worlds notwithstanding. Of course, progress had been just as lacking on Earth, too, and not for the want of trying. It beggared the imagination that half the NSA, and its equivalents in Russia and China, were not also wrestling with the problem. “Still, I may have some good news. A different approach entirely. Call it Plan C.”
“Plan C is well underway: nations around the globe drawing up plans for mass evacuations of people and supplies to places far from any coast. The Company will evac Valerie and Simon to Cheyenne Mountain”—beneath which, deep underground, sat NORAD headquarters—“or to her parents’ place in Illinois, whichever she prefers. And more discreetly, there’s even Plan D. Hundreds of people, and the resources initially to support them, are being ferried to the Moon and even a few to Phoebe. As many newcomers as can be sustained off-world, cost-effectiveness be damned.”
A reflexive and heartfelt “Thanks for that” at the provisions for his family overlapped with the tag end of her update, but Marcus caught the gist. When he was sure Powell had finished, he went on. “Call this Plan E, then.” Because surviving the original blast and tsunami was not the same as surviving. Not even close. There had been inland dinosaurs, too. If he could come up with Plans F and G, he would argue for those, too. “But we’ll need your help.”
She looked dubious. “Go on.”
He gave Powell the nontechie version. Ilya had succeeded in powering up the shipboard reactors. He had doped out a theory of operations for the alien interstellar drive. They might thereby have a spacecraft capable far beyond human achievement—in theory able to reach the Hammer in time to save the day.
She frowned. “The working hypothesis, as I understand it, is that something Yevgeny and his pals did aboard that very ship awakened or riled up the hostile AI in the base. So tell me. What happens when the ship takes offense at having humans aboard?”
“We”—an ambiguous pronoun that included an utterly exhausted Ekatrina, whose diversion from alien code-cracking Marcus elected to leave unmentioned—“considered that. We disconnected cable bundles to isolate power and propulsion. We unplugged power cables running to the bridge from the reactors and from the ship’s bank of backup batteries. And, as I favor belts, suspenders, and epoxy”—at which she snorted—“we replaced the original airlock motors and controls with our own.”
“Hmm.” For long seconds, Powell had nothing more to offer. “In recent experience, every silver lining has come wrapped inside a big, black cloud. So, this ‘help’ you need. Is it to send you a bunch of nukes? I’ve gotta say, that’ll be a hard sell. Never mind the sterling success of our last improvised transport of nukes. Never mind that the Restored Caliphate, and God knows however many other doomsday cults, is at this point likely staking out every major launch site with surface-to-air missiles. If we dodge those bullets but this vessel you hope to kludge together from ancient alien tech, duct tape, and, apparently, your suspenders goes boom, you’d contaminate half the surface of what may be humanity’s last refuge.”
“Well, no,” Marcus said. “The idea is to land on the Hammer. We’d do something there similar to what’s been done here with the ship. We’d bypass local control over whatever mechanism redirected the asteroid in the first place. Then we’d re-redirect the rock.”
Which was, in truth, Plan F, assuming he had not lost track. Unless and until he got a hold of everything necessary to salvage the alien ship, he had no use for nukes. He could make another pitch later for them.
She said, “If not nukes, what will you need?”
Marcus started down the list. “Shipboard life-support gear. We don’t have the time to dope out the Titan version, much less what supplies that uses, or whether it could sustain a human crew. A full sensor suite to mount on the hull. A high-power radio and matching antenna.” From Earth’s perspective, they would often be almost on a line of sight with the Sun. Even mounting a big dish antenna to the hull, he wondered if they would be heard against the backdrop of solar RF noise. “A flight console. Ideally a high-end computer, though we can liberate one of those from the Plan B team. More food, water, and oh-two than what we have on hand. Ditto an assortment of explosives, drills, and other compact mining gear, in case the entrance into the alien facility on the Hammer doesn’t cooperate. Portable fuel cells. Spare vacuum gear. Both counterpressure and hard-shell suits, because we can’t know what we’ll find. Top-of-the-line 3-D printers, with typical feedstocks. And odds and ends, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed dryly.
“I’ll email the details. And also ….”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
I expect not. “We’ll need lots more people here, and pronto, to pull this off. Technicians, to install life support. Programmers, to tie things together. Heavy-equipment drivers, to clear rubble from the lava tube. Pilots and more drivers, to get everything and everyone—”
“And Kirill? What’s he supposed to contribute?”
“Nuclear physicists and fusion engineers, to help Ilya scale up his testing and preflight calibrations. All the helium-3 that is available.” Because the dollop of helium-3 that Kirill, grudgingly, had provided for Ilya’s initial tests would literally not get the Titan ship off the ground. Neither would the uranium-powered, portable fission reactor the Russians had also flown in from Base Putin, the ship needing lots of power to jump-start fusion and begin producing its own. “Industrial-strength cryogenic equipment to liquefy all that helium. Propellant”—which the alien space drive would heat into plasma, and then focus and
expel with intense magnetic fields—“once the physicists determine what substance will best work. Instruments for studying the Hammer, once we’re close. More odds and ends.”
“Anything else?”
“A security detail. When the helpers and supplies”—hopefully!—“descend on us here, there’ll be no keeping secret that something big is happening. We won’t need uninvited guests.”
“No, I guess not.” Powell grimaced. “Okay, send the wish list, and the list Kirill is getting, and a short explanation, no more than a page, for me to send up the chain. I’ll do what I can. Good—”
The connection dropped, leaving Marcus to guess at her intended sentiment. Good job? Good grief? Either fit, but he chose to believe she was wishing them good luck. They were going to need it.
* * *
Charmaine was Marcus’s easy conversation.
“Fly a scavenged, ancient, alien derelict to the Hammer.” Valerie’s face was ashen. She had bags beneath her eyes, deeper and darker than ever. Her checks quivered. Her shoulders slumped. “Assuming you get there, and land without crashing, somehow you need to override other ancient alien equipment to make the rock veer away from Earth. And then fly home.”
“That’s the plan.”
“No, that’s madness.” She rubbed her eyes, fighting back tears.
“It’ll be fine.” That was a stupid thing to say, and he knew it. But it was the sort of inane thing people said.
“I raised one son alone. Damn it, Marcus, you’re not leaving me to raise a second by myself. Another son who won’t even know his father. Do you hear me?”
If we can’t divert the Hammer, it won’t be a problem. Marcus couldn’t bring himself to say that. But …. “Wait a minute. Another son. Little Toot is a boy?”
“That’s what you focus on?” She half laughed, half cried. “Yes, a son. You are the strangest man.”
“I love you. And Simon. And Little Toot. And that’s why I’m doing this. For all of you.”
“And I love you, damn it. So let someone else be the hero for once.”
He chose silence over argument.
With a sniffle, she asked, “So are there other volunteers for this suicide mission?”
“Pretty much everyone who knows.” Marcus forced a grin, going for devil-may-care. “We prefer to think of this as an adventure.”
“Fools. All of you.” But for all that, however unwillingly, she returned a flash of a smile.
“Yevgeny will be our pilot. I couldn’t keep him away if I tried. Ilya in the engine room. Katya for the computers. And as often as I tell her it’s unnecessary, Donna insists. Says we’re too clumsy to gad about the Solar System without medical support.”
Sniffle. “She may be right.”
“And one crew member yet to be identified. A navigator.” Because this flight would not be anything as routine as a jaunt to Earth orbit, or between Earth and Moon.
Softly, Valerie said, “This is it, then? It’s going to happen?”
“It’s going to happen. But I promise you”—somehow—“this isn’t it for us.”
* * *
Yevgeny stood, in theory, at a safe distance. The lunar landscape had never seemed so barren. So bleak. But what did his sense of foreboding matter? The clock was ticking. “Shall we?” he radioed.
Marcus, standing at his side, offered the detonator. “You do the honors.”
“And why me?”
His face blue by Earthlight, Marcus grinned. “Because this was your choice.”
Some choice! The power and responsiveness of the ship’s main drive and its auxiliary thrusters were alike unknown. The alien bridge controls—in theory, bypassed, and possibly not—had to be assumed hostile. The controls still being hastily retrofit were, of necessity, untested and uncalibrated. So, yes—again, in theory—he could fly the ship hundreds of meters down a narrow, meandering lava tube to the surface.
Yevgeny accepted the detonator. “Sound off, people.”
One by one, everyone did. With their much expanded workforce, that check-in took awhile. But in the end, everyone was accounted for.
“Fire in the hole,” Yevgeny warned. “In three. Two. One.”
The shock wave, when it reached him, was a faint, anticlimactic tremor through his boots. A cloud of dust made an appearance over a nearby hill. And on his HUD, an inset window cycled among relayed vids of much denser dust. Of ten cameras that had been positioned around the ship, six had survived the blast.
Their explosives had been placed above where a rubble mound, since bulldozed out of the way, had once trapped the ship. Logic—validated by a survey with ground-penetrating radar—indicated that that spot was thinner and weaker than where the lava-tube roof had not caved in. Indeed, the Chinese geological engineer from Ice Blossom had exuded confidence. Yevgeny would have been a lot happier if it were Nikolay giving the assurances. For many reasons.
It felt like an eternity, but within seconds of the blast enough dust settled for the belowground cameras to begin showing debris. Now new rubble clogged the tunnel.
And the ship itself? The surviving cameras offered only partial views. What Yevgeny could see of it appeared undamaged.
Hiking over the ridge behind which he and Marcus had sheltered, the pockmarked landscape seemed unchanged. Not until he superimposed onto his visor, over the real-time scene, a translucent image of before did Yevgeny register a change. But change there was: a new, yawning pit.
What do you think?” Marcus asked.
“It’s a start,” Yevgeny said.
* * *
Construction crews and heavy equipment flown in from around the Moon, working around the clock, spent two days removing the new-fallen rubble. Most of that work was accomplished by bulldozer, with the largest chunks hoisted up the rough chimney by crane. They used a third day, and a half dozen small shaped charges, expanding and smoothing the chimney, from lava-tube floor to the surface, into a more-or-less oval cylinder of about forty-five meters by twenty. Meanwhile, aboard the alien ship, engineers and technicians continued installing equipment, filling tanks, and loading other supplies.
On the fourth day, they jacked up the ship. They set a custom-made rolling cargo platform beneath each landing leg and painstakingly towed the ship forward. They left it centered below the gaping chimney.
Ready for a test flight.
Chapter 49
Ship awakened.
The diagnostics automatically initiated at startup reported … madness. At its most recent reawakening, those same diagnostics had encountered no faults more serious than depleted supplies. Since that time, somehow, entire subsystems had become unresponsive. As far as telemetry could determine, it no longer had fusion reactors, main propulsion, or attitude control. And the nearby servant mind it had attempted to repair? For all Ship knew, that, too was gone: the connection it had had via umbilical had vanished.
But it still had a partial sensor suite.
Beings labored throughout its interior. The two visitors attendant to its prior awakening had been indistinct within their protective gear: childlike in stature though they had been, they were of an appropriate shape to be masters. But now atmosphere had been restored, and the newcomers had shed their vacuum suits. These creatures were not the masters.
The interior cameras which had disclosed the intruders’ alien nature also revealed that its reactors and other unresponsive subsystems, rather than removed, had been severed—often crudely—from its sensory apparatus and control. An action of these intruders, Ship inferred. And while telemetry no longer reported the status of its many tanks and reservoirs, hints of frost and vapors around the liquid-helium and liquid-oxygen tanks suggested that those essential supplies, at a minimum, had been replenished.
From bow to stern, octets of cabinets, equipment frames, and storage vessels, of unfamiliar design and unknown purpose,
had been deployed. Unfamiliar wire bundles ran everywhere, most terminating in the engine room. And in that engine room, strange devices—by inference, measuring instruments and controls to bypass its own—had been affixed to its key subsystems.
A stew of alien secretions and exudations tainted the restored atmosphere. Odors aside, the gas mix and partial pressures would have sustained the masters, no matter how oppressive they would have found these levels of carbon dioxide and water vapor.
Its audio inputs, meanwhile, registered a cacophony of incomprehensible speech and the clangor of metal on metal. Several intruders wore acoustic apparatuses on their belts; each of these devices emitted a different odd, multisource warbling: replete with complex harmonics, underlain with rhythmic patterns, and sometimes also speech-like elements. For these intricate, compound noises, Ship lacked any referent.
And outside its hull? There, too, much had changed. Unfamiliar wheeled and tracked vehicles waited nearby. Rude barriers of tumbled stones no longer entrapped it. A separate passage, far more direct, now gaped in the lava-tube roof. And Ship, it realized, had been moved to a spot beneath this new opening.
All of which raised questions in its mind. Who were these intruders? Why had they done these things? And most basic of all: What would the masters expect it to do?
* * *
Seated at a standard-but-tweaked flight console shoehorned onto an alien bridge, Yevgeny held down the intercom button. “Status check. Report.”
“Engine room, go,” Ilya said.
“Supernumerary, go,” Marcus said. “Cozy here in my stateroom. A little disappointed I didn’t rate turndown service.”
“Super what?” Yevgeny asked, even as he found a definition with the datasheet magneted to the console shelf. An extra person or thing.
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