Portal-eARC (27 page)

“Dammit—” A.J. restrained himself with great difficulty.

The hardest part is knowing that we don’t have that far to go. That we could have
been
there by now if
Athena
didn’t decide that it had to do a stop and go every few meters!

There was little communication from Maddie and Larry now. They were conserving their energy and food as much as possible, and it was running low.

Two and a half days getting
Athena
set up. Two more days getting us down here, setting up a motorized winch that allows us to do shifts downstairs and then go back up. Now
four and a half days
drilling through this crap a meter at a time!

It didn’t help that they had to make
Athena
do what amounted to a wiggle up and down constantly, in order to allow enough space for them to follow, slide through the rails, and so on.

“I do not understand,” Horst’s voice came up above in
Munin
, where he was resting. “The hydrophobic coating should exclude the ice. Why is it not working?”

“That stuff was studied at milspec tolerances, not cryogenic,” A.J. answered absently, staring with both fury and longing at
Athena,
willing the massive melt-probe to start moving again. “Lots of stuff that works at a mere minus forty goes screwy at minus one hundred fifty. Plus it wears off with that much mass on it.”

“A.J.,” Mia said, “can you check the integrity of all seals again?”

“Okay,” he said, “but I doubt I’ll find anything.”

The Faerie Dust worked passably here…most of the time. If he didn’t demand too much of it, or could channel a lot of power to it with a transmitter. He’d brought down a portable transmitter and tuned it to one of the frequencies they could receive acceptably, so the dust on
Athena
should be working reasonably well.

Based on the signals, the Dust was doing its job. But the data coming back insisted that there was nothing at all wrong with
Athena
—other than that she was stuck and having to wait until enough heat could be built up to melt the ice. Then they’d have to deploy Athena’s lower side anchors as jacks, slide out the rails, dry them, coat them again, and slide them back.

We don’t have
time
for this.
“Nothing, Mia. Everything’s intact, not even a pinhole in any of the connectors, the pipes, the flexible hose, even the forward nose seal. All intact.”

He was about to shut off that view when some anomalous data came in.
What the…

There was Faerie Dust on the rail. Dust he had not put there, as there wasn’t any particular reason to instrument the metal. As the Faerie Dust was capable of its own (slow) movement, it tended to stay where it was put even in the face of significant vibration.
So where the hell…

A.J. connected to his main control and data collection system back on
Nebula Storm,
through
Munin
’s link, and had the individual dustmotes send back their UID—Unique IDentifier—codes.
Now, track their history. Where’d I put those motes originally? Is there any commonality?

Slowly, an image built up in his VRD—the tiny dots, a fogbank of lightmotes, crawling backwards in time…

To all converge on the upper edge of the forward nose seal.

He stared for a moment, then felt a tiny thread of understanding starting to work its way through.
Data history for that period…

Sure enough, they had all showed a quick spike of humidity and pressure when they were suddenly thrown from their position to end up on the rail. Checking, he found quite a few more motes scattered all over the place, trying rather unsuccessfully to make their way back to their assigned locations in the mobile network.

“Mia…I take it back. There’s a tiny, tiny, intermittent leak in the upper portion of the nose seal.”

“I thought you said it was intact.”

I did. And it still is.
“Yeah, and it
is
intact. So I don’t quite know what’s happening to—”

“Gravity,” Brett said suddenly.

Mia froze. “
Uff-da,
” she said with exhausted realization. “
Athena
is meant to be working vertically. The pressure evenly distributed—”

Now
it made sense. “—but we’ve put her kinda on her side, so the pressure’s less at the top. And so every little bit, when it goes over something that’s not quite perfectly smooth, a tiny bit of water vaporizes past it.”

“Yes.” Mia frowned. “That leak is very small compared to the amount of water, yes?”

“Tiny. So small that we weren’t noticing the loss in what was going upstairs.” Refilling
Munin
was proceeding along with this operation; they weren’t about to waste the water right now. “Hell, its small enough that we weren’t noticing the mist. Playing back the video and enhancing, I can
just
make it out in a couple frames, but you’d have to be staring at it just the right way.”

Mia stared at the nose of
Athena
for a moment, then went through a series of gestures and muttered commands that reminded A.J. of himself. “The nose seal material is a smart seal—it can be adjusted. But it has no fine control and direction.” She looked up suddenly. “A.J., do you think—”

He felt a broad smile starting, as an immense weight seemed to lift from him. “Oh, I very
much
think, yes! I can embed enough Faerie Dust in there to tell you exactly what to do. Hell, if you need it I can have enough of it embed itself into the material so that it will act as a
conductor
for the signals.”

“That might work. Brett, we need a model right now, tell us, optimum distribution to assure sufficient control of the seal, prevent more leakage?”

“Have it for you in ten minutes,” Brett said promptly.

“Without the leak,” A.J. said, “Mia, it won’t freeze anymore, right?”

“I would be very surprised if it did,” she said. “If we can keep any significant amount of ice from being available to adhere to the rails, we should be able to progress much more quickly.”

“I sure hope so.”

He wasn’t religious—never had been. But knowing that Helen was so near, yet so utterly out of reach, in so much danger…he was tempted to pray, but he had no idea what
to
.
Just…let us save her, somehow.

“Here’s your model,” Brett said suddenly, and he realized he’d been standing there for some minutes, doing nothing.

“Got it!” he answered.
Okay…whoo, that’s going to take a fair amount of the Dust I have left. But who cares, if it works?

“All right, Mia—try it!”

Athena
lunged forward, eating its way through ice as fast as they could drive her.

And this time, it didn’t stop.

Chapter 35.

Not with a bang.

“But not with a whimper, either,” Madeline Fathom-Buckley whispered to herself. She’d cut out the microphone and transmitter for now; there was no need of it and even the relatively small power drain could add up over hours.

Not in
that
bad shape.
The last time she’d checked,
Athena
was chugging its way through the ice, with an ETA not long from now. If they didn’t encounter any more problems.
Which I have to assume they won’t, if I want to live to see Joe rescued. And I do.

So if they didn’t encounter any more problems, and she stayed still, kept the power usage minimal, she figured she’d have at least an hour, maybe two, left. Plenty of time.

As she thought that, she felt Larry’s hand squeeze her suit. At the lowest power level—range only a couple meters—she activated the radio. “What is it?”

“Having…trouble…breathing.” Larry spoke slowly, but she could hear the incipient panic.
And I can’t blame him. Suffocating in a human-shaped coffin is a damned terrifying way to go.

But why? We had the same charge at the same time, so—

Madeline would have kicked herself if it would have done any good.
Larry’s twice my mass. Efficient or not, the suit’s using more power to keep him going than mine does, and he’s probably on his last reserves.

“Control, Larry. I’ll see what I can do, just hold on!”

She grabbed the recharge pack.
It shows empty, but maybe there’s a tiny bit left, enough to give him a few more minutes while I think.
She linked it to the coupler on Larry’s suit. “Anything?”

“A…little.” The big astrophysicist’s voice was tense, but he tried to relax, visibly sagging back down. “The charge needle twitched. But I guess that might have gained me, oh, four minutes before it goes back down.”

Not nearly enough. Need more time, lots more time for him.

The charge packs on the cameras were integral, and there was no way to connect them to either of their suits. She stared at the pitiful collection of useless objects: cameras with unusable powerpacks, explosive spikes only good for last-ditch suicide, multitools that couldn’t conjure air or power from nowhere, and a completely compatible and compact recharge pack that was now utterly empty.
Any more empty and it’d suck the power
out
rather than put it…

And the answer was there. If it was possible.

She almost made the mistake of activating the radio to ask A.J. or Joe the question, but realized in time what a stupid error that would be.
We’d spend all the time Larry has left arguing before they’d answer. I need to spend that time
finding
the answer.

The key was the suits’ configurability. The circuitry had been made adaptable for numerous tasks, and she thought she recalled that the gloves specifically were used to induce low-level electrical flow in things like the multitool. She called up the suit’s technical references.
I wish I dared ask A.J. but I know I can’t. And I’m no slouch at this.

Larry sat quietly while she worked. She guessed that he realized that if there was nothing she could do, she’d have said something.
He’s been with us since the first days of the project; he knows me pretty well by now. He’s not going to jog my elbow if he can help it.

Voltage regulators…charging circuit…microcontroller, code.
Warning! Do not tamper with these settings!
She cancelled the warning with one of her override codes, grateful that she’d made sure there
were
override codes for just about everything, with A.J. supporting her in the argument. “There may be a reason to do just about anything,and if someone’s willing to ignore the warnings and override, I’ll assume they
have
exactly that kind of reason. The override will be logged, of course, so we know what was done and by whom…”

Well, let it be logged that I overrode the warnings and deliberately messed with the microcode running the entire power system of my own suit.

Time was running out, but now she was into the editor, looking for the flags she needed to set.
One chance at this.

For a moment she was back on Earth, staring at a maze of wires and circuits, blinking ominously in rhythmic red and blue, knowing that she had only moments to deactivate the bomb; it had a timing circuit which would certainly go any second, and a movement sensor so she could not move it from where it lay.
Lucky it doesn’t have a motion sensor, or I’d be dead already
.
But I have to choose right the first time…
“Sir…”

“Don’t you think it, Madeline,” her boss’ voice came, calm and certain. “You’ll be working for me for a good long time. Just take a breath, and do what you think is the right thing, and it’ll work.”

Do what you think is the right thing
.

All right, sir. Let’s do it.
She didn’t feel at all embarrassed for holding her breath as she set the revised code running.

Her suit’s lights flickered for just an instant, then steadied.
Please, please—

Madeline grabbed up the recharge pack, plugged it in.

“What…are you doing?” Larry asked faintly. “Nothing left in that…”

“There
will
be.”

And she saw the indicator light on the pack glow green.
Charging.

Of course, along with that, she saw the indicator of her own charge dropping swiftly.
He’s still going to burn through this faster than I will. No good data on that—but I’ll give him two-thirds of what I’ve got. At least the transfers are efficient, we won’t lose more than five percent in the trade.

“Wait a minute, Maddie—”

“Do not even
think
of arguing. There’s a reason I didn’t try asking the others how to do this.”
That’s it, as much as I dare transfer.
“Stay still.”

Unlike someone like A.J., Larry apparently knew when not to argue. Silently he let her recharge his suit. “Did you leave yourself any?”

“I’m not trying to commit suicide, Larry. Now, we have to lie down and be as calm and quiet as we can. One way or another it won’t be much longer.”

Larry nodded, and they both cut their radios.

Madeline lay there, staring into inky blackness.
Had to dim indicators and telltales to minimum, no suit lights. I’ll bet Larry’s thinking he’s been panicky, but he’s doing better than he knows; plenty of people would be unable to even
try
to relax in this situation.

Of course, she had to admit that this group of people was probably unique. Larry, herself, A.J and Joe and Helen, Horst and Andy and Hohenheim, all of them were used to conditions in space, living in small spaces, working in tiny suits for hours.
If anything could have prepared us for this…well, it’s the lives we’ve led.

Time had little meaning in darkness where nothing moved. Occasionally she did see a glow, a flash from the center of the room, where Joe was signaling his presence. But he must realize now that they had no energy to spare to communicate with him.
Poor Joe. He must be frantic. And there’s nothing I can do to help him feel better. Just…hope.

A faint chime sounded, and her heart sank.
Into my reserves now. And if Larry isn’t yet…he will be in a few minutes.

Slowly the air became heavier, sharper.
Joe went through this back on Ceres. And he never panicked, never even let us know how terribly close he was to dying.