Portal-eARC (7 page)

Maddie smiled. “Excellent. So we believe we can keep General Hohenheim alive long enough, we can get to him, and we can keep ourselves alive while we do it. That leaves just one more problem: why are we going out to
Odin?
”

Everyone, A.J. included, stared at her. “Er…what?” Joe said after a pause. “We’re going there to rescue the General, Maddie. Wasn’t that what we were all just talking about?”

She shook her head. “Yes, and of course that’s what we’re doing. But what do we want
everyone back home
to think we’re doing?”

Now
A.J. got it. “Crap. Of course, we’re trying to keep the General a secret. So we need a reason to go out there that makes sense but
doesn’t
involve rescuing someone.”

“Well, couldn’t we be trying to salvage something from the wreck?” Helen asked.

“Maybe,yes,” Horst said, frowning, “but it would have to be something
very
valuable—crucial for our survival. Look at how much we are risking. To help another survivor, it makes sense, yes, people will often do things that are very risky for that; but if we’re not admitting that this is our reason, then we need a motive that’s very,
very
strong.”

“What about superconducting cable?” A.J. suggested. “We could say that a big chunk of
Athena
’s got heated too high during the landing.” As with many other materials, heating the Bemmie-derived room-temperature superconductors too much could destroy critical parts of the metamaterial structure that made it work.

Maddie looked thoughtful, but Horst shook his head. “Never work; there’s only one place on
Munin
that
Athena
would have been stored, and for it to get that hot, we’d have had a lot more problems. Ones probably ending with us all dead.”

“Why not just say we’re going to look for survivors?” Brett asked. “We didn’t know there was a piece of
Odin
intact before, now that we do we feel obligated to check.”

It was Madeline’s turn to shake her head. “That one unfortunately fails the strength-of-motive test. Oh, it could be assumed we had that discussion, but anyone would know that I would be against it—and, not to waste our time with false modesty, I’m fairly certain that I could make sure we didn’t go down that road if I felt it was a bad idea.”

No one seemed inclined to argue; the
Nebula Storm
crew had worked with Madeline Fathom for years and knew exactly how formidable she was, and of the former
Odin
crew, several knew that Madeline was the only person who had worried Security Chief Richard Fitzgerald.

There was a short silence as all twelve castaways tried to think of something that met the stringent requirements.

A rippling chuckle suddenly broke the quiet. Startled, all heads turned to the source. “What’s so funny, Doctor?” Dan asked.

Petra Masters smiled. “Well, it’s a tad trite, that’s all. But why not medical supplies? I used up quite a bit of ours,” her face was momentarily shadowed, “trying to save David and Titos. We’re going to be working on a damaged nuclear reactor, on a moon—let’s be honest, actually, a planet that just happens to be going ’round an even larger planet—that might be unstable enough to get us injured rather directly. And we still could get ill in other ways—that old hackneyed standby appendicitis could rear its head, to name one.
Munin
was supplied with the assumption that
Odin
would be orbiting overhead in case of any real emergency, at least in terms of medical supplies. Now we have twelve people and a
real
state of emergency.”

A.J. found himself nodding along with Madeline; the delicate-looking blonde said, “I like it. Yes, I think that’s excellent. Most of the experimental medications for low-gravity exposure are on
Odin
as well. That’s really a very good idea, Dr. Masters.”

“Well, we do tend to think of our own specialty first.” The English doctor tried not to look overly pleased.

“All right then, people. Let’s get to it. Keep the General breathing, get the tanks refilled, and prepare our stories to withstand any questions.” Madeline said briskly.

“Concocting stories to mislead and confound the enemy?” Joe inquired as everyone stood up. “And I thought you gave that up for Lent.”

“Oh, don’t spoil her fun, Joe.” Helen said, and gave a delighted chuckle herself as she saw a touch of pink on Madeline’s cheeks.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Joe answered. “She’s never quite happy if she doesn’t have SOMEONE to confuse,” he continued, with a fond look at Madeline, “and I’m just too easy a target to be worth it.”

Chapter 8.

“So why
Athena?
” Madeline asked, watching the melt-probe’s interface and pre-start prep screen.
So far, all good.

In one corner of the HUD, she saw Helen, who was helping position one of the anchor sections, grin. “My
goodness
, Maddie, I think this is the first time you’ve ever managed to surprise me by
not
knowing something.”

She returned the smile at the gentle dig. “My publicity greatly exceeds my only very slightly superhuman abilities. I know the
name
of course, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, sprung full-grown from her father Zeus’ head. And I can I suppose see that a probe of any sort gathers information and so could be named
Athena
, but it seems quite a stretch.”

“Very true,” Mia Svendsen put in from her position directing the assembly of the anchoring structure for
Athena
’s deployment, “but as you very accurately stated,
Athena
was also a goddess of war, and it was she who, during the war with the Titans or Giants, plunged her spear directly into the Giant Enceladus.”

“That
does
make it a much more appropriate name. But you had the probe onboard long before we even discovered Enceladus would the target.”

Helen blinked. “Oh…yes, of course, they had to. They didn’t have any opportunity to go back and get one built.”

“That’s right,” Mia admitted, “And so the probe was originally just MP-N-1, Melt Probe, Nuclear, #1. We knew that there were several major bodies in the outer system which had icy surface layers which might require melt-probe operations, so such a system was included on
Odin
’s manifest as a matter of course. Once the destination was determined, a name became a priority and that one was an obvious choice.” She raised her voice slightly. “Horst, Jackie, the support deployment is on schedule. How’s the startup check going?”

“Everything looks good so far,” Jackie answered. “Maddie hasn’t seen any alerts, so
Athena
seems to have come through without any damage.”

“How long before the support framework is ready?” Horst asked. “Pre-start checkup on
Athena
will be done in a few more hours.”

“Longer than that,” Mia answered. “We are in very low gravity, which makes support less of an issue than it would be on Earth, but we cannot afford any level of preventable risk. Based on Anthony’s analysis I’ve expanded the support radius considerably, with more anchor points. We’ll be able to start
Athena
in two days or so, I would say.”

Maddie nodded to herself. Anthony, with some input from Larry and modeling by Brett, had determined that there was a small, but significant danger from the quakes, and that they certainly should be bracing everything for potential shocks. A probe trying to tunnel into the depths of Europa was, obviously, one of the things most at risk, even though it
was
designed with that possibility in mind and could, in fact, tunnel backwards if it had to in order to get back up a partially-collapsed shaft. But it
did
need to retain a good connection to the surface to do that. “Good enough. Horst, I’ll keep an eye on the interface, but I’m switching over to team two on the comm.”

“Understood.”

“Dan,” she said, knowing the comm system would recognize and perform the switchover even as she spoke, “how are you coming with the
Odin
?”

“Slowly,” Dan answered. He hastened to add, “There’s progress, and I’m sure we’ll get it all set soon enough, but right now things are going at a snail’s pace.”

“What’s the hangup? A.J., is it the Faerie Dust?”

“Not as such, no. Or maybe yes, I guess. Between Mia and Horst—and me, of course—we were able to get their nodes to talk to my Dust well enough, and we’re getting a lot of good data. But it takes
time
to get the stuff from one point to another, and that’s one huge ship. I have to figure out how much to move, and where, and then it has to work its way, millimeter by millimeter, to the target. And the dust doesn’t move all that fast on its own, even in zero-G.”

“Aren’t there key locations to focus on first, rather than trying to distribute it everywhere? And I thought you
had
distributed it through the systems before.”

“Again, yes and no. When we first compromised
Odin
’s systems we entered through known points on the neo-NERVA drive, and after that I was able to pinpoint other entry locations. But even then, I was focused on one specific set of systems, the drive controls. I wasn’t touching their environmentals, for a
lot
of reasons. So there’s at least three places that I really could use a bunch of Faerie Dust in so it could disperse from there, but I never had anything all that close. So it has to go there, at about a hundred microns a second. And the routes aren’t always very direct.”

“Well, you concentrated most of it in Engineering,” Maddie said after a moment. “Why not have it just go into a cup or a bag and let the General carry it to the main dispersal points?”

There was dead silence for a moment, and then the transmitted sound of a glove smacking the faceplate of a helmet. “
DUH! DUH!
Adric Jamie Baker…SOOOOOOOOper-Genius!”

Dan was laughing, but he said, “Don’t beat yourself up
too
much there. None of the rest of us engineers thought of that, either.”

“Sometimes you just need someone on the outside of the problem to show you the solution,” Maddie said, trying not to let herself giggle; A.J. would get over it, of course, but there was no need to rub it in, as he was doing a more than adequate job of it himself. “Taking this into account—”

“—if I have the highly-trained commander of
Odin
act as pack mule for my ultra-advanced sensors, yes, we can speed things up a lot. Duh, again. Brett, can you model the dispersion if we have the General move some to the main areas in question?”

“Just a minute.” In very little more than the named time, Brett Tamahori’s voice came back on. “That cuts a
lot
of time out. We’ll have most of the environmental and integrity monitoring network up within the next day and a half, especially if I assume the General isn’t averse to actually dispersing what he carries in smaller packets to specific areas.”

“I’m sure he won’t be; after all, your initial tests
did
help already.”

“True enough. We found two seals that had subtle leaks and one filter that had failed without tripping its built-in indicators. His air quality went up significantly after that.”

“Brett, on another subject, how long will it take to fill
Munin
’s tanks?”

“That’s an easy one. Assuming no breakdowns—and I think we pretty much
have
to assume no actual breakdowns, just occasional snags—
Athena
can manage about half a meter an hour at this temperature. As we go deeper the temperature may—has to, I guess—rise significantly, until you reach the water layer. It’s got a melting cross-section a little bigger than I’d originally thought, just about exactly one and a half square meters, so you get about a ton and a half of water every meter. So…a month from the time we start melt, and she’ll have gone about three hundred thirty meters, or a thousand feet for the Americans listening.”

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” A.J. said, “and I use metric all the time. I can’t help it that my country insists that it’s better to use arcane systems from the dawn of time.”

“More to the point,” Madeline said, ignoring A.J., “are you saying that we could launch to
Odin
in only one month or so?”

“That depends on how well we get everything established here. We can’t afford to leave until the modifications to the Nebula Drive controls are tested and shown to work—both in reducing the volume and thus power demand, and in maintaining the same shielding effectiveness,” Brett answered. “We sure don’t want
Munin
taking off unless we are one hundred percent certain that we’re not going to need
Munin
to keep us going.”

“We are definitely agreed on that. One thing that we have to also do is check on the supply division; the last thing we need is to discover that while we have enough of everything, all of some vital material or component is on board
only
one of our ships, so that when
Munin
is gone one or the other of us is suddenly short.”

“Food probably won’t be a problem,” A.J. said, “but the vital supply of Joe Dinners may be tight.”

Maddie gave a small chuckle at that. “True, true,” she said, “but if that’s our biggest problem, I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

Chapter 9.

“The E.U., it did not advertise that its astrophysicists were expected to do heavy physical labor,” Anthony LaPointe said with dry humor.

Helen laughed as she tried to position her piece of the huge gray-white mass of material. “I don’t remember them specifying that for their xenopaleontologists, either,” she said.

“Yeah,” Larry said, “but at least paleontologists spend their time breaking rocks regularly. We astronomical types look at computer screens and expend our heavy effort lifting coffee cups.” He pulled perhaps slightly too hard on his piece and it slid up and slightly over him so he had to back up, and tripped, falling in slow-motion. “
Bugger
, as some of our Down-Under friends would say.”