Waypoint Kangaroo (39 page)

Galbraith gives me the frequency and scrambler code for the transport, and I switch over my suit radio. I'm drifting toward the boat slowly—at precisely half a meter per second, according to my suit radar. The pilot must have one hell of a good instinct for motion vectors.

I reach my arms behind my head and feel around for whatever struck my backpack and reeled me in. I'm guessing it's some kind of grappling claw. I see the cable going slack between myself and the front of the X-4 boat. Pulling on the cable until it goes taut again, I use it as a tether and rotate to put the boat below me.

“That was one hell of a stunt,” says a voice over my radio.

“Speak for yourself, Colonel.” I can see the detachment commander's stripes through the cockpit window. I do my best to salute him, trapped as I am in a bulky spacesuit. “Did Chief Jemison give you the idea to harpoon me?”

He snaps back a salute and says, “No, Major. You've got friends on board.”

“You can say that again.”

“Spaceman Kapur will meet you out on the hull. We're going to maneuver the boat underneath you now.”

“Go for it,” I say.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see their thrusters firing, and the boat glides below me. It's almost dreamlike, moving in complete silence. I can see
Dejah Thoris
in the distance, what must be several kilometers away now.

Spaceman Kapur turns out to be a woman with an angular face and large, round eyes visible through her spacesuit helmet. She gathers up the cable that's been harpooned into my backpack, pulling me the rest of the way to the transport and grabbing my spacesuit when I get within arm's reach. She yanks me down hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I feel a click as she attaches a lifeline to my belt.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” she says, spinning me to face her.

“Thank you, Spaceman,” I say.

“If you'd like to engage your mag-boots, sir?”

“Right.” I release my death grip on the jetpack controls and tap my suit wristpad, activating the boots. My feet hit the transport's hull with a thud.

While Kapur helps me detach the spent jetpack, I stare at
Dejah Thoris
in the distance. From here, it looks almost tranquil. A marvel of technology: a giant, manmade egg, carrying over six thousand souls.

And if that egg breaks against Mars, all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to stop the Solar System from erupting into open warfare.

Things have changed since the start of the Independence War. There are more planetary and sub-planetary colonies. Everyone's space fleets are bigger. How many simultaneous asteroid bombardments aimed at Earth would we be able to stop? How many ships could OSS commit to patrolling Jupiter's moons? How many civilians in the outback would get caught in the crossfire?

We need to stop this.

“Do you have control of the tug?” I ask Kapur.

“Yes, sir.” She raises her arm and points off to her left. “Eleven hundred meters out. We'll be alongside in just a few minutes.”

I switch my eye to radio sensing and find the tug's nav beacon. “I see it.”

“Good eye, sir.” She doesn't sound convinced.

“You know the plan?” I ask.

“Yes, sir. We were briefed on the way in. I'll deploy our canopy after the tug is in range. Do you need any assistance with the wormhole device?”

“No,” I say. “My controls are implanted.”

“Very well, sir.”

“What's your security clearance?” I ask. I need to know which version of the “wormhole device” cover story to feed these spacemen.

“Everyone on this boat was read into TS/SCI Silver Sunflower, sir.”

That's something I don't hear very often. My ability is not just Top Secret, it's “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information,” and that particular code phrase means the X-4s are authorized to know everything about the pocket except the fact that it's not tech.

“May I ask something about the device, sir?” Kapur asks.

“Go ahead.”

“Our briefing said there's a … parallel universe on the other side of the wormhole?”

“That's what they tell me.”

“Is that why we built the device in the first place?” she asks. “For exploration?”

“We weren't trying to build it at all,” I say. “It was an accident.”

Kapur frowns. “So how do we know it's not just some distant part of this universe?”

“The cosmic background radiation on the other side is different. And there are no stars.” It's nice to be able to talk about this with someone new. “As far as our scientists can tell, that universe is completely empty, except for whatever we send through the portal.”

“Crazy.” Something lights up in Kapur's helmet HUD. “Okay, here we go, sir.” She points over my shoulder.

I turn around, and it's a good thing the mag-boots prevent me from jumping with surprise and launching myself off the hull. The tug has matched velocity with the X-4 transport and is now hovering barely a meter away from me, rockets blazing. Of course I didn't hear it approach; we're in hard vacuum. I can't feel the heat from its engines, either.

These remote mass drivers are only used in outer space, so it's not in the least bit aerodynamic. It looks like a big metal box the size of a small aircraft, with a giant shovel on the front and sensor pods bulging haphazardly from every surface.

“Um, how wide across is the tug?” I ask.

“Twelve point eight five meters across the diagonal, sir,” Kapur says.

This part is going to be tricky. The largest I've ever been able to open the portal is fifteen meters in diameter. And I can't open the pocket facing away from me. The portal also moves and tilts with my body—my head, specifically—so I can't actually get out of the way. But I can position the portal off-center with respect to my body. I can move
it
out of the way.

When the tug is centered, it'll be just over one meter from my head. And that's where it'll come shooting out later, at about a thousand meters per second. If I can't open the pocket to the same size in a split second, the tug will take off my head, and possibly part of my torso.

Did I say this was a bad idea? I was wrong. This is probably the worst idea ever.

On the bright side, I guess that makes it a new personal record.

“Range is clear.” Kapur taps her spacesuit controls. “Zeroing delta-vee and engaging stealth canopy.”

The tug's rockets go dark, and the transport's hull vibrates gently as its engines stop. A metal stalk extends from the nose of the boat, and a matching stalk emerges from the stern, in between the main drive rockets. At the end of each stalk is a small gray ball. Once the stalks are fully extended, both balls pop open, revealing crumpled gray sheets that unfurl into two domes at the front and back of the boat.

The domes expand to sixty meters across—nearly twice the size of the transport—then stiffen and join together amidships, forming a sphere around the boat—like a drink bulb around a martini. But this ball is opaque, and it seals us inside total darkness. The lamps on our spacesuits provide just enough light for Kapur and me to see what we're doing.

“Confirm loss of signal,” Kapur says. The stealth material absorbs energy emissions, hiding everything inside but also cutting us off from the outside universe. “Your show, sir.”

“Are we at all concerned about how this is going to look?” I ask. The canopy will conceal my use of the pocket from peeping telescopes, but everyone will see the tug when it comes crashing out again.

Kapur smiles. “If I understand correctly, sir, this tug's going to be moving faster than a speeding bullet when you deliver it. Let anyone watching think we're carrying the most compact railgun in existence.” Railguns, which use electromagnetic force to accelerate metal projectiles to ridiculous speeds, generally require hundreds of meters of superconductor track. “They'll drive themselves crazy trying to figure out how it works.”

I nod. “The wormhole opening is going to look like a white ring. I need you to send the tug through dead center, exactly perpendicular to the portal. Got that?” I hope the X-4 reputation for aiming very precisely is not undeserved.

“Yes, sir.” Kapur taps at her wrist controls.

I think of a painted wooden shield—a reference object with two distinct sides, so I can rotate it later—then open the pocket as wide as I can and as far off-center from my body as I can. It takes more concentration than usual. A lot more.

A gaping black hole ringed by a white shimmer appears in front of me and above me, just inside the stealth canopy. I can already tell I'm going to have one hell of a headache after this.

“Kapur?” I say, staring into the pocket. I can't move my head, or the portal will move too.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have the—ah!” I move my eyes to look up, and am startled by the sight of the tug directly above my head, even closer than before. I'm sure she's doing that on purpose.

I reiterate to Kapur the importance of having the tug centered in the “wormhole” and moving it forward exactly perpendicular to the plane of the opening. Then I stand very still while she walks around me, taking measurements with a rangefinder.

I've never held the pocket open this large or for this long before. Just as my neck starts to cramp up and my vision starts to blur, she finishes and gives me a thumbs-up.

“Good to go, sir,” she says.

“Well, yes, go, then!” I say. “Now! Okay?”

“Firing tug thrusters in three, two, one, mark.”

The tug glides forward into the pocket. I try not to think about how large the vehicle looks from here, or how quickly it's going to be moving when it comes out again. I can only worry about one thing at a time.

Once the tug is all the way through the portal, the main rockets light up, pushing the tug away from us at full throttle. It becomes a twinkling star in the void. I count down from thirty, to give myself some tiny margin for error later on, and close the pocket when I reach zero.

“Now we play the waiting game.” I hope I'm not trembling too much. “Unless you'd rather play Hungry Hungry Hippos.”

“I can check to see if that's in our database, sir.”

Nobody gets my jokes.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

X-4 transport, shadowing
Dejah Thoris

25 minutes after I thought I was going to die in a fire

Kapur and I enter the boat through the dorsal airlock. Two other spacemen help us out of our suits, bumping pretty much every part of my body in the process. After a week on a luxury cruise ship, it's going to be tough adjusting to these cramped quarters. Not to mention the smells. All spacecraft scrub carbon dioxide when recycling their air, but organic odors are harder to remove. And X-4s are loath to waste their precious liquid water on a luxury like showering.

Kapur leads me through the inner hatch to a narrow passageway. I'm so surprised to see a familiar face, I forget to address him by rank.

“
Oliver?
”

He looks like he hasn't slept for days. Come to think of it, that might very well be the case—if he was still in the office during the audit, when I spoke to Jessica, Paul would have needed to put Oliver on a high-gee military spacecraft to make this rendezvous. And it's hard to sleep when your chest feels like it's being crushed by an elephant.

“Good to see you, too,
Major,
” he says, emphasizing the last word, probably to remind me that we're still under cover.

I check the stripes on his rumpled OSS uniform before responding. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I just wasn't expecting to see you here.”

“We weren't expecting to be here,” Oliver says.

“‘We'?” Did he bring some kind of robot with him?

He shifts aside, and I nearly have a heart attack when I see Jessica standing behind him, also wearing an OSS uniform and looking exhausted. Or irritated; sometimes it's hard to tell.

She fixes me with a stare and gives her head the slightest of shakes, what seems like barely a millimeter from side to side. I get the message:
EQ doesn't know about the nanobots.

“Commander,” I say. “This is a surprise.”

“Yeah. Funny story,” she deadpans.

Suddenly, all the things the spacemen were saying make sense.
You've got friends on board. We were briefed.

I actually want to give Oliver a hug.

“You saved my life,” I say.

His face remains impassive. “It would appear so.”

My urge to hug him disappears. “You shot a
harpoon
at me! At my
head
!”

“Just
behind
your head. And there was no danger. Your thrust vector was constant. The math was easy.” He shrugs. “Besides, if it hadn't worked, you would have been unable to complain.”

I make a mental note to kill him later. “Where's the radio?”

“Belay that,” Jessica says. “Spacemen, clear the deck.”

Kapur and the two other X-4s slide past us and out of the compartment. Jessica closes the fire door behind them.

“We're incommunicado,” she says. “Lasher's orders.”

I frown. “We need to talk to
Dejah Thoris.
”

“You're fine, Kay,” Oliver says, “but Surgical and I have to stay off comms. Nobody else can know about us being here.”

“Why not?”

“It's a security issue.”

“Sakraida's in the wind,” Jessica says. “We don't know how far his conspiracy extends. One lucky missile shot and the agency loses three-quarters of our department.”

“Fine,” I say. “I'll do the talking. Anything else you want me to not say?”

Oliver shrugs. Jessica says, “Just don't be an idiot.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”