Waypoint Kangaroo (10 page)

“Not even the kitchens?” I ask, attempting to make a joke.

Ellie raises an eyebrow. “You wouldn't want to cook with this stuff. Not unless you like your meat fused into charcoal.”

“It ain't pretty,” Jason adds. “We had a plasma conduit rupture on the
Maitland.
Vaporized two spacemen—”

“What happens if there's a rupture here?” Gemma asks Ellie.

“The whole system is designed for safe shutdown in the event of failure,” Ellie says. “If the exterior of any conduit overheats by even a single degree, it's shut off and flagged for inspection. If the ionwell is damaged—even if the shielding goes out of alignment by as little as one centimeter—the reactor will scram automatically.

“The ionwell reaction itself requires a delicately balanced environment. We have personnel on duty twenty-four hours a day, monitoring to make sure nothing goes wrong. In the unlikely event of an emergency, our backup batteries and solar panels can provide full power to the whole ship for thirty-six hours.”

Jason and Arnold have been muttering to each other this whole time. I don't really care to know what they're saying.

“If this is just the top part of the ionwell,” Gemma says, pointing at the metal sphere in the floor, “and it's a ball shape … How large is it, exactly?”

“Including shielding, the reactor sphere has the same circumference as the ship's beam, or width,” Ellie says. “If you look at a diagram of
Dejah Thoris,
all of deck twenty-five is the full diameter of the ionwell.”

“That seems awfully exposed,” Gemma says, frowning. “If one tiny dent can shut down the reactor, shouldn't it be more protected? More inside?”

She is truly worried about this. I can see it in her face. So what's important enough to get this nice old lady onto a ship that she thinks might kill her?

Ellie nods. “Very true, Gemma, that is a concern. Though outer space is mostly empty, we do sometimes encounter debris in our flight path. And because we travel at such high velocity, even a small object striking the hull can cause serious damage.”

“Like birds hitting aircraft,” I say, hoping a familiar analogy will help put Gemma at ease. Her face tells me that probably wasn't the right analogy to make.

“Right.” Ellie smiles at me.
Just part of the show,
I remind myself. “Although out here, it's more likely to be frozen human waste that's been dumped out by other spacecraft.”

Everyone laughs, including Gemma.
Nice save, Chief.

“Fortunately,” Ellie continues, “
Dejah Thoris
's navigational deflector system mitigates any potential impacts. Radar sensors detect any approaching objects of a size and speed likely to cause more than cosmetic damage to the ship, and then flash-lasers blast those objects until they're no longer a threat.”

“You worked on NAVDEF, didn't you, Arnie?” Jason bellows.

“Yeah, I have,” Arnold says. “Um, Chief, is the
Thoris
using EP to drive those lasers?”

“
Dejah Thoris,
” Ellie corrects, with a smile and a hard stare. “And yes, we do route electroplasma directly to the exterior laser pods. But those lasers are all mounted in the nose of the ship, or around the lower, engineering decks.” She nods at Gemma. “Nowhere near the passenger sections.”

“But you gotta get the plasma from down here all the way up to the nose,” Jason says. “You can't do that without moving it through the passenger decks.”

Ellie turns to me. “Those power conduits run through the cargo section. If you saw
Dejah Thoris
from Sky Five, before you boarded, you may have noticed a large number of cargo containers on one side of the ship.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Like a block carved out of a hard-boiled egg.”

“That's a good analogy. I'll have to remember that one.” She taps the side of her head and winks at me, then turns back to Gemma. “In addition to passengers,
Dejah Thoris
transports several thousand metric tons of cargo on every sailing. Some of that is supplies for the cruise—food, drink, and other consumables—but a large portion of it is commercial freight. After loading the cargo, the ‘cut-out' section is covered with solar panels, and we fly with that side of the ship always facing the Sun to collect additional power.”

“Wouldn't it be more cost-efficient to move cargo by other means?” Gemma asks.

“Not necessarily,” Ellie says. “I won't bore you with the math, but the nature of the ionwell reaction dictates how large the reactor sphere has to be in order to move a ship of this size. And though we don't have to worry about aerodynamics in the vacuum of space, we do want a symmetric hull structure for the engine to push against. The accountants at Princess of Mars Cruises have also done the math, and they've determined that carrying both cargo and passengers is cost-efficient.”

“That's one word for it,” Jason scoffs. Arnold elbows him. “What? I'm just saying. The Reds wouldn't hesitate to blow a cargo drone out of the sky. They'll think twice about shooting at a few thousand civilians.”

“Cool it, man,” Arnold says, giving the rest of us an apologetic shrug. “The war's over.”

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, pal,” Jason says.

Gemma whirls to stare down the two men. “Why the hell are you even going to Mars, if you hate them so much?”

The two men blink at her for a moment. Then Jason says, “It was my wife's idea.”

“Me too,” Arnold says. “Our anniversary is next week.”

“Happy anniversary,” Gemma says, her voice shaking. She turns back to Ellie and a somewhat ashen-faced Parvat. “I'm sorry. I have family on Mars. I was very happy when the war ended. I didn't really care who won by that point.” She looks at me. “You're probably too young to remember any of this.”

“No, I remember.”
I'm sure I know more about it than you do.
The agency refused to put me in the field when I first joined, and while Paul wrestled that red tape, he put me to work sanitizing military footage from the invasion. I saw a lot of things that no teenager—no human being, really—should ever have to see. “I'm very sorry for your loss, Gemma.”

Her hasty smile threatens to twist her face into something else. “I didn't say anyone had died.”

“You didn't have to.”

She blinks wetness from her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to completely derail the tour like this.”

“It's okay,” Ellie says. “The war was difficult for all of us. But that's why Princess of Mars Cruises built
Dejah Thoris
so soon after the conflict.” I can tell she's reciting this bit. “We feel it's important to maintain commerce between our two worlds, to share the best of our cultures with each other and remember what we all have in common.”

“The desire to get really, really drunk right after this?” I say. That gets at least a chuckle from everyone. Parvat seizes the opportunity to retake control of his tour.

“Okay, thank you, Chief Engineer Gavilán!” he says, clapping his hands. We follow his lead in giving her a short but at least fifty percent enthusiastic round of applause. “Now if you'll follow me, please, our next stop is one of the ship's power generators, where plasma energy is converted into electricity…”

I let Jason and Arnold lead the way, then wave Gemma ahead of me and bring up the rear again. I don't like it when strangers walk behind me. As we start exiting down the main hallway toward the elevator, I feel a hand on my shoulder.

I turn around. It's Ellie.

“Hey, thanks for doing that, Evan,” she says. “I'm pretty good with machinery, but not so much with people.”

“No, you were great,” I say. “Thanks for the tour. Sir.”

She smiles. “How did you know about Gemma, by the way?”

“Lucky guess,” I say. “Like you said. The war was tough on everyone.”

Ellie nods. “You're a pretty good guesser.”

I put on my innocent face again. “Thanks. I deal with some difficult people in my line of work.” It's not a lie. “I've learned to ‘read the room,' as they say.”

“Well, thanks for your help,” she says. “Enjoy the rest of your tour. And the rest of the cruise.”

She shakes my hand and walks away. I don't move for another second, mesmerized by the sight of her ponytail swaying back and forth.

I'm not complaining about the attention, but there's no reason she should be personally interested in me. Is there? Why else would a spaceliner's chief engineer be curious about a guy who claims to be a deskbound researcher, but seems to know quite a bit about interplanetary spacecraft drive systems and military power implants?

She turns and waves at me over her shoulder, still smiling.

Goddammit. I really hope she's not in the loop.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dejah Thoris
—Deck 6, Stateroom 6573

7 hours before I start causing trouble

My job is to gather information. When I'm not in the field actively collecting it, I'm sitting at a computer, trawling the electronic communications that connect nations and planets and distilling meaning and intent from the noise. Even when there are no specific questions to answer—like hey, why is that satellite seeing heavy neutrino emissions characteristic of nuclear fission inside a three-thousand-year-old structure deep in a Mesoamerican jungle?—the agency's always on the lookout for things that break normal patterns.

Unusual isn't always bad, but
interesting
is always worth a second look. And I've definitely discovered two persons of interest on this ship.

First of all, there's Captain Santamaria. Obviously he's ex-military, probably OSS, maybe even intelligence. How did he end up working for the agency? What is he doing for the agency while captaining a civilian cruise ship? And why did Paul put
me
here, on Santamaria's ship?

Then there's Ellie Gavilán. Also possibly ex-military; where else would she have worked on ionwells before
Dejah Thoris
? The technology was only declassified on Earth after the war. And there's no way an Earth corporation would make a Martian citizen chief engineer on their newest flagship.

My interest in both of these people is purely professional. Absolutely professional. I am clearly in the middle of something here, even if it only turns out to be Paul pulling a prank on one of his old drinking buddies, and I will get to the bottom of it. It has nothing at all to do with Ellie's shapely body inside her form-fitting jumpsuit. Or her sparkling personality. Or the way she squeezed my shoulder.

This is business. I'm a spy. This is what I do. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the Kangaroo loves legwork.

The most efficient way I know to get the best information is to plug into the agency's data warehouse. If you've ever passed through the sight line of a security camera in a public place anywhere in the Solar System, we know about it, and I can look it up and tell you to the millisecond when you were there.

Unfortunately, I didn't board
Dejah Thoris
with most of the special equipment I would carry on a live op. I don't have the long-range antenna relay I need for my shoulder-phone to bounce a secure signal off military navigation relays. And hacking into the cruise ship's telecom system is sure to attract unwanted attention.

Fortunately, I do have a few items in the pocket that I always carry for emergencies.

I spend the next few hours planning my own little operation. I need the time because I don't have my usual tactical support team of Equipment and Surgical in my ear, telling me what to do and how to do it. I don't want to screw this up.

After I've figured out the shift changes for ship's security and found the blind spots in their camera coverage, I sign up for one of the scheduled after-dinner spacewalk excursions. I pretend to be nervous and flustered as a crew member helps me into my spacesuit. I ask about all the different parts of the suit and all the “funny-looking equipment” so I can surreptitiously scan everything, find the locator beacon that's hidden in the radio, and measure its broadcast frequency. I also note the length of my tether cable when I'm outside, and go as far as I can around the circumference of the ship without arousing our chaperone's suspicions.

Theoretically,
Dejah Thoris
could do passenger spacewalks all the time. There isn't day or night when you're hurtling through the void. But the human body evolved in a diurnal cycle, and it gets first confused, then sick, if you disrupt its natural rhythms for too long. So all passenger vessels operate on a twenty-four hour day, and
Dejah Thoris
's meal times and activity schedules reflect that.

The last spacewalk of the night ends at 2100 hours. It's two hours later when I sidle up to the excursion area, bypass the door lock, and step inside.

It's dark. I leave the lights off and blink once, then look right, left, right, and blink three times. The night vision implants in my left eye come to life, magnifying the dim light sneaking in through cracks in the doors and walls and showing me the spacesuit storage locker.

I set my shoulder-phone to jam the suit's locator beacon. I know from my earlier scans that it won't start transmitting until I power up the suit, so I don't need to worry about interfering with other, expected radio traffic. If any crew are outside, they're on an entirely different frequency.

It takes me almost fifteen minutes to put on the suit by myself. While I'm doing that, I scan the airlock again, to confirm that it's not connected to any external monitoring system.

I can feel my heart beating faster. I'm scared, but also excited. I feel like a kid riding his bicycle without training wheels for the first time—and preparing to ride the bike off a ski jump ramp, over a cliff, and into the ocean. Maybe not a great idea, but it's sure going to be
fun.