Moonsteed (20 page)

She struck the ice with the pick about twenty times before she reached the top of the ravine where the scarp proper began. An uneven surface a few yards wide lay between the base of the next climbing area and the edge of the crack in the ice, too rough and narrow to ride a horse this way. Verity crouched on hands and knees, and turned to face back down the vertical wall where Vladimir was still climbing. She cracked the point of her pick into the ice by her knees and reached over to pull him up as soon as he climbed within reach.

Vladimir sat on the ice, pick in hand, breathing heavily. Ice from his breath formed on his helmet. Verity got up and faced the scarp’s base. Sharp crystalline ice formations gleamed all the way up to the summit where the bright face of Jupiter peered over.

She put her foot to the base of the scarp. “Come on.”

“
The way I went was easier
,” said Anthony.

“
If I parked that lander where you landed it, they might go and look there again and find it
.” Verity found a spike of ice to use as a handhold. Her neck began to ache from alternating between craning up for handholds and looking down for footholds.

She reached the summit with Vladimir a long way behind. Out of the shadow of the scarp, she switched off her helmet lamp and disentangled herself from the hang-glider bag. She cleared some rubble from a flat area and took a seat, feet resting on an outcrop below, arching her stiff neck.

As often happened in the dead of night, she found her gaze drawn up to Jupiter’s full circle, the turbulent motion with the oily bands of its clouds barely perceptible, the famous great red spot glaring back at her like an eye inflamed by conjunctivitis. Twenty times the size of the full moon from Earth, the light it reflected cast Callisto in a dirty golden twilight, leaving short dim shadows clustering at the bases of ice protrusions.

After a few more minutes, Vladimir hauled himself up beside her. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars as he got his breath back. “Not bad for a view.”

Verity reached across and switched off the light on his helmet. She wasn’t at all sure the ANT’s surveillance reached this far, but drawing potential attention to their location with lights would be asking for it. She unzipped the canvas bag, revealing the shiny fabric it protected.

“I take it we can’t just walk up there and sneak back in without being noticed,” Vladimir said.

“No. The surveillance isn’t great, but it’s still good enough that we won’t be able to do that.”

Vladimir’s eyes moved behind his visor. “This is a base belonging to the Sky Forces, supposedly the most formidable military organization in the Solar system, on a moon that cost who knows how much money to make habitable, and there’s no proper security?”

“There’re plans to add satellite surveillance and better scanning equipment later. It’s not as if anyone really expects this place to need proper security now. I mean, the nearest place with proper habitation is Mars, and it only comes into conjunction every two years or so.” Verity sighed. “There’s nothing here that’s really worth anything, not for the sake of coming three hundred and fifty million miles to get at any rate. Other than the base and the moon itself, and nobody seriously thought anyone was going to try to steal
that
. Not until now, anyway. Since the Dennis Terraforming Company’s report didn’t show conclusively that Callisto would be able to maintain a solid crust under the current climate management system, the Meritocracy voted against paying for any installations above what was necessary.”

Verity slid the long aperture of the telescope she’d brought out of her bag. She dumped her helmet in her lap and held the lens up to her eye, aiming its sight through the palisade of ice spines at the distant shape of the base out on the dark plain. A grouping of irregular blocks formed the main habitation area with a sequence of domes and connected oblongs making up the research sections. Behind the main complex ranged the exhaust stacks and vast walls of the massive fusion engine that had once worked at full capacity to pollute an atmosphere into existence on Callisto and heat the moon up from its uninhabitable hundred and forty below.

Rotating the barrel in the scope’s midsection switched it to infra red, coloring the fusion engine with a bright bloom. Scanning back to the habitation area and the main gates revealed two bright figures stood like gateposts in the entrance. Guards. Security had been upped since she’d left.

She handed the telescope over to Vladimir without speaking, and turned her attention back to the hang-glider bag. Verity replaced her helmet and peeled the canvas of the bag back over the silvery object inside while Vladimir crouched on his knees and squinted through the telescope.

“What is that?” he asked.

“It’s a chameleonic skin.” Verity had the hang-glider loose from its bag and tried to ease it open, an awkward maneuver given the lack of room on the narrow summit of scarp where she and Vladimir crouched. Before the wings would open, she had to pull out the telescoped central handlebar to full length and extend the main rods that supported the frame down its length. Now she could see the control unit in the centre of the handlebar with its fiber optic cables running up the triangle bars to the wing fabric. It had interface, but she wouldn’t be able to sync to it without removing her electromagnetic blindfold and making herself detectable to the base ANT. She would have to rely on manual instead.

The slight up-draught from the scarp’s face pushed against the hang-glider’s fabric, the bar lifting against her hands. She pressed the button to boot the computer. A pattern flickered on the screen, and the patchwork scales of the wing fabric flushed subtly as the computer calibrated itself. Dark colors spread over the sail’s underside, transforming it into an image of the sky overhead.

“
Will this thing carry two
?” Verity thought.

Anthony replied, “
Air’s thin, but gravity’s weak. I’m fairly sure it will
.”

“What happened?” Vladimir got to his feet, squashing the telescope back up. “Does it go transparent?”

“It transmits the light falling on one side out from the other side,” Verity explained. “Like holovision. It makes it hard to detect using visual scanning systems, and it’s about as close as you can get to radar invisible.” She moved closer to him. He was taller than her, with longer arms, so he would have to go behind. “Can you reach around me and hold on to the bar?”

While he stood, much as the well-behaved horses back on the base did, and held the glider in position, Verity secured the straps to both of them and fixed the bottom shield--another sheet of chameleonic fabric to obscure the glider’s passengers from below--over the handlebar, shielding her chest and legs. She would have to hope bits of Vladimir wouldn’t poke out from behind it.

When she got into position in front of him and put her hands on the bar, she saw starry sky projected above, and a projection of the edge of the scarp and the dark plain below from the inner surface of the shield. Vladimir’s body pressed close against her back, his arms over her shoulders and his hands outside hers on the bar, although she could feel little of the shape of his body and no warmth through two layers of armor.

“You ready?” she said.

“Ya.”

“On the count of three, jump. Just let the harness support your legs once we’re airborne.”

“Okay.”

“One, two, three.”

The spikes of ice jutting from the edge of the scarp slid out of view, and Verity’s legs tangled with Vladimir’s inside the harness. The bar vibrated in Verity’s hands as the craft hit the up-draught from the scarp face. A jolt of vertigo sent fear racing up through Verity’s chest and into her throat.

“
Anthony, how do I
--”

“
Lean into it
!”

A buffet of air rocked the glider, and the handlebar quivered as she tensed against it, fighting the motion. Behind her, Vladimir’s shoulders stiffened, his arms straightening against the length of the bar and nudging the glider back into control.

Verity relaxed her grip as the glider rose.
How the
? “Do you know how to fly this thing?” she shouted back at him.

Vladimir laughed in her ear. “Of course I do.”

“
What
? How’d you learn that?”

“You were in the Magnolia Order in your time at Torrmede. Let’s just say I was in the hang-gliding club.”

Verity had to resist the urge to turn to face him.

“
There you go. Never judge a book by its cover
,” Anthony chided.

The hang-glider’s nose swung steadily toward the distant base, air currents rippling the fabric that only showed as a faint outlining of seams where the patchwork of chameleonic fabric had been joined. Wind shrilled over Verity’s helmet, and tremors from the motion of the wing ran through the handlebar and into her hands. Lift came like a lessening of gravity in a centrifuge.

“Where do you want this thing put down?” Vladimir said.

“
It needs to be beneath the watchtower, so surveillance won’t notice when we get off it
.”

Verity repeated Anthony’s reply to Vladimir. The hang-glider dipped steadily, the base growing larger ahead as Vladimir’s hands guided it on either side of her own.

They approached the base fast now, the white tower of the observation deck standing out dead ahead. The repeating shapes of the prefabricated roof raced below.

“Put your feet down.” Vladimir told her.

She tripped over on the impact, and the glider’s left wing grazed the roof with a loud scrape. The nose tipped forward and crashed into the surface, throwing Vladimir on top of her.

“Are you all right?” Vladimir asked as they lay tangled up in the harness.

“I think so.” Verity flexed limbs, checking everything still worked properly. “Let’s hope no one heard the noise on the roof.”

After unfastening the harnesses, they switched off the hang-glider and folded it back up. They left it under the observation tower.

“That way, I guess.” Vladimir turned to the exhaust stacks lurking on the far side of the base.

Verity nodded. “Keep in the shadows and try to stay out of sight of the tower. It’s not designed to scan the roof, but better safe than sorry.” She picked her way over the roof and climbed down into a recess where two blocks of the base had been joined, creating a short wall she could crouch in the shadow of. Vladimir followed.

Their course brought them over the research precinct, where they had to clamber between the chimneys of the fume cupboards in the lab block below, and where unpleasant chemical smells pervaded the air. Past this, they crossed the stable block roof, and skirted around the dome that roofed the experimental paddock. When Verity crouched beside the glass and peered through, she saw several horses loose in the paddock within. They’d ripped all the grass up and ruined the paddock completely. It would all have to be re-seeded now. And the stallion was in there with them. Putting him with that many mares in that confined a space, and with no one supervising them, as it would appear, was stupid. Those horses were going to get hurt if they were left like that. Had Sergeant Black done this? Was she trying to mate them? Was she being lazy and using this as a substitute for proper exercise, without Verity and the Commodore around to question her? A surge of hot anger hit Verity. Those were her horses. She wanted to be there to see when the first wet, bedraggled foal dropped to the stable floor to rise on shaky knees. She didn’t want them to be treated like this, by idiots who didn’t understand what they were.

“Let’s keep going,” she told Vladimir, continuing around the paddock’s roof perimeter.

At the end of the next block, the base’s habitation area ran out. A stretch of empty ice divided the blocks from the fusion engine. Verity knelt on the edge of the roof to check the ground below. “Make sure you don’t jump down in front of a window,” she warned Vladimir. “And make sure you wait until I get out of the way so you don’t land on me.”

Vladimir rolled his eyes behind his visor. “It’s only three-twenty-fifths-something g out here. It’s not going to hurt much if I fall on you from that height.”

Verity dropped down, crawled under a window and bounded over the ice to the base of the fusion engine. She quickly put one of the blast walls between her and the base, and after a few seconds Vladimir appeared beside her.

The fusion chamber was raised from the ice on stout metal pillars, Verity supposed to prevent heat from it melting the ice crust and sinking it. The pillars had been driven deep into the terrain beneath, and a slight bowl-shape to it showed where the heat radiating from the engine had sublimed the ice away in the early stages of terraforming.

Peering into the shadows beneath the fusion block, Verity could make out what looked like machinery, roughly in the center. As she walked toward it, her eyesight resolved it as a double steel cable, running through a pulley system suspended from girders above. The cables descended into a twenty-foot wide circular hole in the ice.

Vladimir switched on his headlamp. The light revealed a furrowed wall to the shaft, the sort a drill might make. When he moved his head to aim the light down the shaft, it slid away into nothing. He moved the light sideways, illuminating a thick pipe running up the side of the shaft and heading up into the engine.

“That must be the pipe for the hydrogen supply for the fusion engine,” he said.

“
Liquid
hydrogen?”

Vladimir considered. “Probably supercritical hydrogen. They’d have to pressurize it too much to make it liquid. Those pipes are strong stuff. They’re made of single-molecule polymer alloy in sections, but it doesn’t make sense to pressurize gas any more than necessary. It looks as though they put the storage tanks for it in the holes they made extracting the ice.” He stood staring down the shaft for a moment, the light from his helmet vanishing into oblivion. “When you think of all the matter you’d need to create an entire atmosphere...it must be a
labyrinth
down there.”

Verity pulled off her helmet, her breath frosting on her lips. She drew back her head and lunged forward to add force to an expectorant spit, which froze midair, ricocheted off the far wall of the shaft, struck the near wall and disappeared into the darkness below.