Boundary 1: Boundary (15 page)

"Well," said A.J. to the empty air around him. "
That's
something you don't see every day."

"And
Seig Heil
to you too!" A.J. snapped.

"Cut it out," Colonel Ken Hathaway said tiredly. "First, I'm not the one slamming the lid down. Second, it's a perfectly reasonable response from the government's point of view." Hathaway's subtle southern drawl was heavier than usual, turning his "I'm" into "Ah'm"—a sure sign of annoyance, which A.J. failed to note in his own anger.

"You can't keep me from calling out! This was my project. You can keep the data, but you can't just shut me in!"

"We can, and we will, A.J. I know it's grating on your free spirit, but you'd better deal with it. Or do we have to take away all your toys just to make sure?"

A.J. got himself under control with difficulty. Ken Hathaway was one of the main driving forces behind
Nike
, and A.J. had worked with him for months now. He knew that the Air Force colonel wasn't really the problem. The truth was, A.J. liked the man.

The whole situation still rankled, however. "No. Okay. Sorry. But send it up the line to whoever came up with this idea—we should be broadcasting this worldwide, not sealing it up tighter than a bank vault!"

"No, I
won't
pass it up the line, and yes, we should, at least for the sake of your funders and mine. Like it or not, there's still politics to consider, and that includes things like national security. What if this turns out to be an alien military installation intact enough for us to learn something from it? Can you tell me there's a single country on earth that wouldn't want that for itself at first?"

Reluctantly, A.J. shook his head. "No, I guess not."

"I guess not either. And speaking as a soldier, I damn well do agree with the idea that if anyone's going to get the first shot at it, it's going to be
my
country."

"I'm not into patriotism. Buncha tribal instincts."

The colonel rolled his eyes, the extra white making them contrast even more with his very dark skin. "A.J., that's just the kind of attitude you
don't
want to express around the wrong people. Me, I don't care what you think, as long as you're not actively working against our nation. But some of the more rigid types have no sense of humor on that subject. Trust me, they don't."

He flicked the display to another page. "Now, they don't want to shut us down. In fact, it's top priority to find out whatever we can. So, if you'll promise me—not some faceless guys out there, but
me
— that you won't try to sleaze around the security, you can have your connection back and return to work. Your Faeries are the only things on-site, and we obviously won't be getting anything else there for quite some time to come. So you are set to remain the top-billed star of this particular show, and I'd like you to keep that billing."

A.J. gave Hathaway a sour look. Despite only knowing A.J. for a few months, the blocky, solidly built astronaut apparently had read him very well. A promise to some disembodied abstraction like the government that was trying to stifle the discovery would mean relatively little to A.J., but a direct promise to someone who knew and trusted him, that was something A.J. would never break if he could possibly avoid it.

"You sneaky . . . Fine. Fine, I promise, I won't smuggle messages out, and I'll keep your silence as long as you say. No one else can run the Faeries like me, and there's no way I'm going to let someone else try. Dammit."

Hathaway smiled. "Good enough. Look, A.J., I'm sorry. But remember—we all want
Nike
and Ares to have their shots. If you pull some stupid crusading stunt, all of us could get screwed."

A.J. nodded unwillingly. "Yeah. Okay, you can trust me. I won't mess things up for your people or mine. Just let me back at the Faeries, okay?"

"In a shot."

Hathaway picked up the phone and called the MPs. "Mr. Baker is cleared to return to work immediately. Aside from the standard comm shutdown, he's got priority on everyone else. Anything he needs, make sure he gets."

After he hung up, A.J. demanded: "What about people who are expecting me to call? I mean, none of my friends would possibly believe I'm not going to call them and fill them in."

"I have no doubt that you'll be given a chance to call them soon— with some really clear guidelines on what to say, and a script if necessary."

"Ugh. You think?"

"I'd bet on it. Until they decide to release this, they'll be making sure no one can give it away. If you need to work with people, they'll find a way to bring them here and under the umbrella of secrecy."

"Aaaaugh. Well, hell with it, I'll go deal with my machines. They make sense and keep no secrets from me. You guys realize how lucky you are? I only told your people first because it was on your nickel. If you hadn't pulled the lid down right away, I'd have told half a dozen people by now. And if the data wasn't proprietary at this point, the transmissions wouldn't have been encoded."

A.J. paused. "By the way, I wasn't using the very top-level encryption on this stuff. It's possible someone will decode it eventually. I'd warn whoever's in charge of this circus that eventually—and that's a sooner rather than later 'eventually'—there
will
be a leak. From someone who received and decoded the transmissions, if not from someone inside."

Hathaway nodded. "I'm sure they know that already. It's a constant concern in security—you can't keep any secret forever, so the question is whether you can keep it long enough to matter."

"Okay. Anyway, I'm going to go to sleep first. I haven't had any rest since I started this whole thing . . . damn, forty-three hours ago."

"Yeah, you'd better go get some shut-eye. You'll have a long day ahead of you whenever you get up."

A.J. nodded and walked out, his gait already showing some of the flatness of the truly exhausted.

Jackie Secord tapped her foot as the system hesitated in opening the door. The guards nearby were unfamiliar.

Guards? Why
two
of them? Never had any need for them anyway, the system's automatic.

One of them was studying a screen in front of him. His partner was watching Jackie. The gaze didn't look hostile, but it wasn't friendly either; a neutral look that unnerved her more than a glare. Only when the guard at the screen nodded did the door to the operations area slide aside.

Jackie thought of commenting on the situation, but decided it wasn't worth it. Someone upstairs had probably gotten a bug up their ass about security, so now they needed some new tin soldiers and procedures. At least no one was asking for a strip search.

Reaching the main mission control area, Jackie glanced around. The golden mop of hair she was looking for was immediately visible, just slightly to the right of center.

"A.J.!"

A.J.'s face lit up as though someone had shone a searchlight on it. "Jackie?
Jackie!
" The slender, wiry arms hugged her close and then swung her around before setting her down. It was always a little startling to realize just how strong A.J. was.

"Whew! Nice to know I'm wanted around here, but you're getting a little overexcited, aren't you? I mean, it's not like I don't work for NASA. You could expect I'd drop by operations, once in a while."

A.J. grinned, but there was an edge to that grin. It looked almost like a sneer in some ways. "So you don't know yet? Damn, they're good."

"Don't know what? Who's good?"

Jackie looked around. It was odd, now that she thought about it. Things seemed a little restrained here—aside from A.J., for whom the word "restraint" would only apply when used in conjunction with the word "heavy."

Even the displays weren't showing the usual multiplicity of views. Most of them seemed to show some kind of movie set in an underground cavern.

"Where
is
everyone, anyway?"

"Briefing, I think. There's been a lot of . . . stuff going on here lately."

"You're being evasive, A.J., and that's about as unlike you as I can imagine. And what the hell is wrong with the publicity machine, anyway? I'd have thought by now pics from the Faeries would be on every space site in the country. But instead, aside from a few external shots that don't tell anyone anything, there hasn't been a peep out of you guys for two days."

She suddenly looked concerned. "A.J., the Faeries didn't, like, crash or something? They didn't die on you?" She knew that a disaster at
that
level would have left a hush for a while, and certainly put a sour look on A.J.'s face for weeks. But . . .

"Go ahead and tell her, A.J."

Jackie turned and saw that Colonel Hathaway was standing in the doorway that led to the central offices. "She's going to be up to her neck in it anyway," he added.

Jackie thought A.J. seemed to relax slightly.
So there was something he wasn't allowed to talk about? That explains his tension. Telling A.J. he can't talk is like telling Santa Claus he can't go "Ho, Ho, Ho."

"Well . . . I guess it all starts right there." A.J. pointed to the screens with the slowly moving cave scenery.

"What does that have to do . . . with . . ."

She trailed off as she realized the symbols in the corner of the image denoted material being received from Phobos. From ISM-4, what A.J. called "Faerie Princess Rane."

Rane was traveling down a tunnel
inside
Phobos. Ariel was apparently sitting somewhere else inside the fast-orbiting Arean moon, serving as a relay for Rane.

"The cavern looks awfully smooth on that side," she began uncertainly, "but I . . ."

Her mouth fell open. "Oh . . . my . . . God."

Looming up on one side of Rane's field of view was a door. There was no other possible word for it. It was half-open, showing clearly the track or groove into which it was meant to fit. Shreds of some unknown material—probably a door seal—were still clinging to one edge.

"Ohmigod."
She heard herself running the words together. "Ohmigod, ohmigod, A.J., that's a
door
, a door on
Phobos
for crissake, what's a door doing there?"

She whirled, about to put some pointed questions to the blond engineer, then stopped.

"No, you'd never do this kind of joke. That's
real?
Someone—or something—was on Phobos before us?"

Her mind was racing ahead of her words. That explained the guards at the door, A.J.'s comments, and why she hadn't heard updates on the Faeries' progress. Someone had clamped the lid down
hard
on the project.

"No joke, my fave NASA engineer. I'd say more some
thing
than some
one
if I were guessing. We haven't found any remains yet, or if we have I haven't recognized them as bodies, and I think I would. Then, there's several doors we need to open. This one's partly open, but I'm not sure I can squeeze one of the Faeries through."

"So, if you haven't found any bodies, why do you say 'thing'? No, wait, let me guess—the designs."

"Right in one. The corridors aren't shaped the way we'd do them. At least, not where they were clearly cut instead of just adapted from cracks and caves already present inside Phobos when whoever or whatever they were took it over."

He pointed to the screen. "That door—look at it. It's more a semicircle, or a half ellipse. Either they were really short but liked very wide doorways for some reason, or they were shaped low, kinda wide, and fairly big. We've come across plaques and things set in the walls in places we might put signs—you know, 'Engineering that way, Life Sciences to the right'—and they're all set much lower down than we'd put them. Almost a meter lower down."

"So you have closed doors? Do you think . . . maybe . . .?"

A.J. shook his head. "Not unless they have some super-miracle materials and no need for power. There isn't any significant source of energy left on this rockball. If there was, the Faeries would have picked it up. And without some kind of energy, nothing's going to be alive here for long. But there might be some other stuff in the closed rooms."

Hathaway joined in. "We've had some of our other engineers going over part of the data A.J.'s been feeding us. It looks to us like something violent happened to the base—maybe a collision with something else, maybe some kind of internal cataclysm. But whatever it might have been, there's been a lot of damage to various areas. Explosive decompression, shockwaves, the whole nine yards. If this was on Earth, there would probably have been cave-ins. As it is, there are places we can't get to easily."

"So," Jackie said, "maybe the doors that are closed got jammed during the disaster?"

A.J. nodded. "That's kinda what we're hoping. Yeah, it'd be pretty grisly for our alien friends who got stuck, since they'd have run out of whatever it is they breathed once the main base power went down. But it would also mean we'd have a good chance of finding something intact in there—bodies, maybe even equipment."

"Intact?" Jackie asked,

"Well . . . intact enough so we have a chance of figuring it out." Hathaway replied. "I doubt anything will work. But first we have to get inside."

A.J.'s grin was smug. "At least we actually
do
have a chance of getting inside."

Hathaway rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay, okay, yes, A.J., you were right and we were wrong. There
was
a point to putting manipulators on the Faeries. It was
still
a waste of resources. There was no way you could possibly have known what you were going to find."

"How can you call it a waste when we're using them? Besides, it was my grant money to spend. I was sure I'd have an occasion to use them for
something
. I'll admit, I didn't expect it to be something this big."

"You think the Faeries have the ability to move doors like those?" Jackie asked doubtfully.

"Not sure, really," A.J. admitted. "Maybe not. The systems were set up to be maximally configurable, and I'm going to be selecting the highest mechanical advantage. And using three of them at once, if I need lots of force."