Cold as Ice (25 page)

The attack itself. It had been . . . half-hearted. A box of that size could hold enough explosive to vaporize Bat, Gobel, and everything in Bat Cave. Instead, a weapon had been used that was neither fatal nor physically harmful. Not even, according to the medics, permanent in its mental damage.

Bat raised himself from the padded seat and ambled across to his communications terminal. He canceled all funding requests for anything connected with the
Pelagic
or with the period close to the end of the Great War. He generated two memoranda to Magrit Knudsen, one making it clear that his recent investigations of the Great War had been fruitless, the other stating that he could waste no more time or funding on them. Finally he purged from his files all information about the
Pelagic
, Mandrake, the Pallas data banks, and survival-pod trajectories.

And then he dropped into the "Megachirops" file, hidden by seven layers of intrinsic pointers and designed to resist the most ingenious, powerful, and persistent ferret. All of his
Pelagic
files were already copied there, and heavily read-and-write protected.

Bat was not finished with the
Pelagic.
Not anymore. If nothing else, he owed that to Yarrow Gobel.

But it was time to go deep, deep underground.

14
Camille Takes a Test

Money and influence, influence and money; with them you could walk on water, breathe vacuum, raise the dead—even get a priority high-drive ship from Abacus to Europa, when all of the standard manifests showed there was nothing available for weeks.

In her twenty-seven years of existence, Camille Hamilton had never possessed either money or influence. She'd never even realized that such power
existed.

But now she sure liked the feel of it.

She flourished at the scheduler her unlimited credit rating from Cyrus Mobarak and her stamp of approval from Hilda Brandt, and watched the walls of bureaucracy come tumbling down.

Traveling to Europa in service to
both
Mobarak and Brandt? That's a first. "But certainly, ma'am, a ship can be made available to you in three days—no, make that two days."

One day, if Camille could accept the discomforts of a single-passenger ship. And if she was ready to travel
now
? Then how about eight hours—would that be soon enough for her needs?

If it hadn't been such a power trip, it would have been embarrassing. And, of course, when the ship schedule was approved and the vessel was on its way, Camille was suddenly not ready to leave. A surprise signal had beamed in to her personal ID on Abacus, coming all the way from DOS Center.

It seemed that her hidden experiment, the one she had left in deep-background mode, was producing results, and they were odd enough that the DOS computers, even assisted by her Level-Three Fax, did not know what to make of them. Nor did Camille. She took a quick look, saw that the far infrared observation program was picking up data spikes that matched no signature in the book, and decided that she was as mystified as her Fax. What the world needed was a Level-
Six
Fax—smarter and more complete than a person was herself.

She dumped the data just as it came in onto a high-density storage device. It could go with her to Europa, and on the way she'd do some honest-to-God data analysis.

That's when the ship arrived, and she had her second shock. She had agreed to a single-passenger ship, expecting it to fly out to Abacus on autopilot. Then she'd take it on to Europa herself.

But no. That wouldn't do for the high-level Belt potentate who apparently had pull with both Cyrus Mobarak
and
Hilda Brandt. There had to be a special service.

So the ship arrived with its own, quite unnecessary, crew: Pilot Husky, matching the name—big, breezy, all torso and teeth. Ready, Camille was sure after the first few words, to do anything that she needed or wanted. It gave her an idea of the sort of trip that some of the high officials in the Jovian General Assembly preferred.

It wouldn't have been so bad, maybe, if Pilot Husky had been a man.

Camille clutched her data pack to her chest, wriggled away from a too-friendly arm that tried to help her aboard, and headed into the cabin. "How long is the trip to Europa?" she asked over her shoulder.

Husky laughed. "As long as you want it. Six hours, or sixty."

And after they reached Europa? The pilot would still be around, an unwanted extra pair of hands, and no doubt other body parts as well. Camille nodded at the port, where Callisto's scarred surface filled four-fifths of the sky. "I need to pick up a few things. Any problem if we drop in for a quick stop before the main trip?"

"Not with me. I'll add it to the programmed flight plan. My wish is your command."

So take a space walk.
Except that none of this was the pilot's fault. Husky was only doing what she was expected to do and paid to do. Camille made up her mind. Pilot Husky could do one more thing to earn her salary.

During the fifteen-minute hop from Abacus to the Callistan spaceport she invented a quick list of personal items that she would need on Europa. After they touched down and were sitting snug at their mooring, she went across to the hatch, stood there, and looked doubtful.

It took only a few seconds.

"Problems? Anything I can do to help?" Husky was at her side, their shoulders touching.

"It's nothing much, only that I don't know my way around this spaceport." Camille tried to look frail and helpless, but suspected that she managed only one out of two. "It might take me a long time before I can find what I need. And all I want are these few little things."

Camille held out the scribbled list and watched, thirty seconds later, as Pilot Husky grinned a farewell and headed off across the surface toward the spaceport building complex.

It took another five minutes, and one more invocation of the magic names of Mobarak and Brandt, before Camille was cleared for takeoff.

She felt bad about what she had done to Husky. But not very.

When she wanted a sleep-in pilot-companion, she'd damn well ask for one.

* * *

The trip to Europa was more like nine hours than the six on the flight plan that Pilot Husky had filed. But even with the extra time, Camille had no chance to examine the infrared data sent to her from DOS. There were too many other things on her activity list. She had to get ready for her main task: Moby-fitting a world.

She notified the Mount Ararat spaceport of her entry into Europa's sphere of influence but indicated no intention to land. Not yet. First she wanted to take a look at the world below. She dropped the ship to fifty kilometers, placed it into a precessing orbit that would eventually carry her over the entire surface, and settled down for a session of observation.

Donkey-headed she might be. Of all of Cyrus Mobarak's fine words to her back on DOS Center, that was naturally the phrase that came again and again to her mind. Impulsive, too? He'd accused her of that. At times, without a doubt. Camille tried to imagine Pilot Husky's face when she returned to find both ship and Camille gone.

So donkey-headed
and
impulsive. But when it came to straight thinking and the solid, hard grind needed to get a job done, she wouldn't take second place to anyone in the system. She adjusted focus and set to work.

The globe below had two noticeably different types of terrain. One was dark and rough, mottled with the faint splotches of old impact craters of all sizes. The other was brighter and more uniform, but crisscrossed by long, narrow ice ridges. These ridges were hundreds of kilometers long, but only a few tens of meters high. They were also piled one on another in a tangled, reticulate pattern, like strands of thread randomly added to a ball.

Both types of Europan terrain had one thing in common. They looked very smooth from a distance, but travel across them on the surface would be hell.

Camille understood now the lack of interest in detailed surface maps of Europa. They would be useless. She imagined driving across the terrain on the ground. Your path would be interrupted every few kilometers by sharp drops, fissures, or vertical walls of ice. No one would do much ground travel on Europa, except close to Mount Ararat or in a few other places where the going happened to be unusually smooth and easy.

Detailed surface maps were a waste of time for another reason, too. The systems of fissures in the ice were prominent enough, and easy to map from orbit. But what about their permanence? They must move around slowly, under tidal forces. Only the seabed, far out of sight beneath the frigid shell, should be unchanging over long periods.

After four hours of observation she had seen enough. Camille made a decision. All of the Moby siting would have to be done in terms of seabed locations. Another "detail" job that Mobarak hadn't bothered to mention, and one that implied access to Europa's hidden ocean, access that Hilda Brandt had specifically denied to Camille.

However, those seabed maps might be available in Europa's data banks, and so might other information on ice depth and upwellings that Camille needed. One thing was sure: orbiting, she would never get what she wanted.

She called down for landing permission. On the next orbit, a blue communication beam reached up, took over control of the ship, and routed it for a gentle touchdown at the center of the Mount Ararat spaceport. "A flux-diversion suit must be worn before you exit," said a firm voice from the ship's control console at the moment of contact. "The external environment is presently unprotected. A ground vehicle is waiting."

Camille was already wearing her suit. She headed for the hatch, then at the last moment turned back and grabbed the DOS experiment records. She stuffed them into an interior suit pocket. There might be no chance to look at them for a while, but she didn't want them lost. Someone else might help themselves to this ship and take it away as easily as she had.

Her first ground view of the surface belied the impression from orbit. She stepped out onto a smooth plain of rock, concave and sloping up to a circular lip maybe a kilometer away. There was no sign anywhere of broken, icy ridges. As she climbed into the empty ground vehicle, she realized why. She was at the exact center of the smooth bowl of the spaceport; the rest of the moon lay hidden beyond its wall.

No matter, she would see it soon enough.

Within two minutes she learned that she was wrong about that. The ground car registered her presence and trundled off, but it did not head up the slope to the rim of the modified crater. Instead it rolled along for maybe half a kilometer past a jumble of deserted staging areas and bright-painted storage tanks, then started down a descending tunnel in the rocky wall. "Flux-diversion suits may now be removed," said the same emotionless voice. "Ambient radiation levels are satisfactory."

Camille puzzled over the absence of checkpoints. With all of the Europan worry about contamination, she had expected to be met, questioned, and maybe even examined. But there was less red tape for this arrival than for an arrival on Ganymede.

The answer came to her as she was removing her suit. Control here was guaranteed by planetary structure. Solid Ganymede was riddled with caverns and tunnels and elevator tubes, and it had hundreds of possible entry points to its interior. But Europa had just one spaceport, and just one settlement. With the reception vehicles preprogrammed, every visitor could be funneled through a single entry channel. Unless you were crazy enough to head away on foot from your arriving ship, you could not get anywhere but here.

And the absence of people waiting to meet her made sense for quite a different reason. Mount Ararat was a
research
establishment, and few scientists or engineers were interested in policies and procedures. Camille knew that attitude very well, and she sympathized with it. Anyone who had to spend time worrying about new arrivals would do so grudgingly, considering it time stolen from his or her own theories or experiments.

Except that the man who was waiting at the car's final stopping point seemed to deny her speculations. He was short, solid, and muscular, with the battered face of an unsuccessful thug. But there was a definite smile on that scarred face—not exactly of welcome, but of—what? Almost of
relief
?No matter. Anything was better than the accommodating leer of Pilot Husky.

"My name's Buzz Sandstrom. I'm deputy director of Mount Ararat Base." The man offered a hand that swallowed Camille's.

"Camille Hamilton."

Sandstrom nodded. "I expect that you're tired after your trip. I suggest you start with food and a rest." He led the way further along the tunnel. The walls became smoother, and soon Camille saw that there were metal doors set into it, but the floor and ceiling remained bare and undecorated rock. Camille nodded to herself in approval. A research station
ought
to look like this, simple and functional, a place for hard work and plenty of it.

They went on and on, until Sandstrom finally entered a small cubicle containing a cot, table, and single chair. "All yours. Make yourself at home. I'm sure you're keen to join your buddies right away, but just now that's not possible."

He caught Camille's puzzled glance and misinterpreted it. "They're still in the submersible, below the ice. Don't worry, they're quite safe. They have enough supplies to stay down in the water for weeks if they want to."

Buddies. Submersibles. Trips below the ice.

"
Who
is down in the water?" Camille sensed a screw-up.

"Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer. No one told us she was a qualified Jovian pilot. Do you know what those two jokers did to me?" Buzz Sandstrom wore an expression of remembered irritation.

"Wait a minute." Camille couldn't let it go any further. "I know Wilsa Sheer's name, she's famous. But I've never even
heard
of Jon Perry."

"But aren't you part of the same . . ." Sandstrom stared at Camille. "The arrival record shows that you came here with approval from Dr. Brandt, just like the other two."

Camille fished the printed stamp from her pocket and held it out. Buzz Sandstrom examined it.