Boundary 2: Threshold (10 page)

"Precisely. Undoubtedly they will be expecting something of the sort. I want you to select the right crew—engineers, scientists, and security—to ensure that anything they do, we can counter, all while maintaining civil relations."

"If we take their information—especially on the location of some other installation—and use it to beat them to the site, civility may not be possible."

The commissioner shrugged. "At that point, civility is not the issue. It would of course be nice if everyone could remain happy, but I am sure that harsh words will be said. Once you have a clear target, however, you may disregard the need for civility, as long as the indications are clear that the target will be a
valuable
one. We do not want a crater with a few traces of old ruins, as I am sure you understand."

"I understand perfectly, Commissioner. I also understand that I did not hear such instructions from you."

Bitteschell grinned. "Always a pleasure to work with such thoughtful men as yourself, General Hohenheim. As you are commanding
Odin
, everything you need is easily authorized under that budget."

The big man rubbed his beard thoughtfully. "Given the nature of this mission, I hope that we might be able to authorize additional, hmm, research equipment?"

"Oh, undoubtedly. Our scientists and engineers should not be completely dependent upon our prospective partners. I would recommend you allocate significant cargo to whatever additional equipment you, or your selected personnel, think might be helpful. I will authorize all reasonable expenditures."

"Then," General Hohenheim said, standing, "I will begin at once. If we are to leave for Mars soon, I have little time to waste."

They shook hands. "Good luck, General."

After Hohenheim left, Bitteschell resumed his seat behind the desk and stared out the window at the city vista beyond.

Which was that of Brussels, unfortunately. While the capital of the E.U. was an interesting city from a professional standpoint—even an exciting one, at times—there was no denying it lacked much in the way of scenic splendor. That was especially true for someone like Helmut Bitteschell, who'd been born and raised in the very picturesque Bavarian town of Bamberg.

But the commissioner had never regretted his decision. He hadn't come to Brussels many years ago for the scenery, after all. He was today one of the most powerful and influential figures in the European Union; which, if it still lacked the political cohesion of the United States and had only a small portion of its military power, had a larger population, the largest gross domestic product in the world, and a currency which rivaled the dollar and occasionally surpassed it.

Good luck.

Bitteschell had no great faith in luck, actually. But he was a strong adherent to the old saw that one creates one's own luck, with the proper preparations.

Should he employ Fitzgerald or not on this expedition? True, there were potential risks. Judging from the extensive files that the commissioner had studied, Fitzgerald was prone to . . . Well, not recklessness, exactly. That would be too strong a term. But there was no question that the mercenary from Belfast tended to take an expansive attitude toward his instructions.

On the other hand, that might very well be what was needed. There would be no way to micromanage—even to manage at all, really—an expedition such as this one, from such a great distance. And Hohenheim's weakness was the opposite. The man was undoubtedly capable, but prone to . . . 

Well, not timidity, precisely. That would be a rather silly term to use with regard to one of the most experienced and accomplished members of Europe's Astronaut Corps. Still, in Bitteschell's opinion, Hohenheim was not the man to place in charge of
Odin.
He'd have preferred Joachim Blücher, or even the Frenchman Duvalier.

However, there was no point in fretting over the matter. Hohenheim was popular with the public—always a major concern when dealing with an expensive project—had strong support in the German government, and unlike Blücher had not aggravated the French and the Italians. Even the British thought well of him.

Bitteschell's decision, in the end, came down to the need to keep Europe's powerful industrial corporations satisfied. That was always a major political concern also. One of those corporations, the European Space Development Company, had strongly recommended Fitzgerald. The ESDC was centrally involved in Europe's space program, one of its few truly critical players, and their recommendation had come with the support of several other important corporations as well.

He pressed the button which communicated with his personal assistant. "Francesca, please get in touch with Richard Fitzgerald and ask him to come for an interview tomorrow."

Best to err on the side of caution. Bitteschell didn't think the risks were that great, anyway.

"What
is
that, Helen?"
A.J.'s disembodied voice asked over the suit radio.

"I'm not quite sure," she answered, staring at the objects in front of them.

Ceres Base was big—probably as large as Phobos Base—and undoubtedly they'd be finding new weird stuff in both of them for years. A.J.'s Locusts were demonstrating the advantages of a few years of design improvements plus Maelstrom's superconducting batteries, gaining them access to the interior of the base and opening even severely stuck doors with levering components similar to the old "Jaws of Life" design; even so, it would be a long time before all of the base was mapped.

There had been signs that parts of this base had been evacuated in a more orderly fashion than Phobos, which appeared to have been "evacuated" mostly in the sense of "suddenly exposed to vacuum." While the areas where the house-sized holes had been punched through had clearly lost their atmosphere instantly, other areas had apparently maintained pressure. But Ceres Base hadn't been cleaned out, like the Mars Base. It appeared that the conjectures were correct: whoever ran the Mars installation had won, and their opponents kicked out with barely the clothes on their backs or whatever they could drag out in a few minutes. Why the winners hadn't felt it worthwhile to rebuild or loot these bases, however, remained a mystery.

The tubes in front of Helen were another mystery. They were behind walls of glass, or a glassy substance, which had gone rather milkily translucent over the years; the tubes seemed to be made of the same stuff, so that all they could make out were tantalizing hints of shapes inside the tubes. Helen shivered as she suddenly remembered an old sci-fi movie with similar tubes.

A.J. apparently thought the same way.
"If anything down there looks like an egg, I'm sending a Locust in to stomp it."

"Shut up, A.J.," Helen said, repeating one of the constant phrases of the universe. She turned slowly in place, surveying the whole huge room. "See all that? This is a major control center, or something. There must be a dozen of those computer stations with the ramps that we found in Phobos control. And a bunch of noteplaques."

"It's a lab," Larry said firmly. "Chem or bio, maybe. Bio, if those fuzzy shapes in the tubes were living. Can we get a better look at them?"

"One thing at a time."
A.J. said. He was sitting comfortably in
Nobel
, watching through telemetry, as he had another task to help with.
"Bruce and Jackie are coming up on the reactor placement. Helen, Jake, Larry, you guys keep looking around, but follow protocols, okay? I have to pay attention to this."

"Understood, A.J.," she said. The idea of Bruce and Jackie having an accident at this point wasn't a pleasant one. The nuclear reactor, a twenty-megawatt design, massed seventy tons and was derived from a combination of nuclear technologies, including the "town-sized" reactors manufactured by Toshiba in the early part of the century, and the thorium breeder design used in the
Nike
-style reactors. It would provide power for almost thirty years before needing a core replacement, and the core itself could be sent back for reprocessing to recover fuel and cleanse the reactor of waste products. Ares and the IRI had a total of five of these reactors on Mars, one on Phobos Station, and one in Phobos Base. They were as safe and reliable as any such design could be, but anything could be broken by accident . . . and this was to be their main power source for Ceres Base.

She continued to cautiously circle the oval room with its curved window—containment area, perhaps? Larry was carefully imaging the noteplaques as they lay before attempting to move them aside, very gently, so as to look at the ones underneath. Like those on Phobos, the plaques were locked in whatever their last display state was, and were probably very vulnerable to impact—as Joe had demonstrated once. The fact that A.J. had been able—just barely—to recover the apparently lost data from some of the incidental imaging scans had led to the current requirement to thoroughly image all finds before even attempting to move them. There'd been a general requirement like that in the original expedition notes, but there'd been some fuzziness as to what constituted proper imaging.

Now there was no such debate, especially after Jake Ivey got through lambasting the prior expeditions for their criminal sloppiness. Jake had grudgingly agreed to certain shortcuts when compared to normal Earth fieldwork, acknowledging that even with modern gear there were a lot of constraints on safely exploring an airless rockball with an average temperature of –106° C.

"Lowering . . . Support and locking plate is holding well. Keep her centered, Bruce. . . . Jackie, keep an eye on line 3. . . ."
She heard A.J.'s instructions dimly in the background.

"Hey, Helen, take a look at this one." Larry flashed an image of one of the plaques before her. "Is that Bemmie?"

She studied the semi-streamlined, tri-armed creature. "No . . . no, definitely not. That looks like one of the creatures they'd left as a model in the Vault, the section clearly showing their homeworld's native species." She activated her data retrieval. "Hmm . . . Yes, here it is. We named it
Bemmius symmetrius minor
, the small symmetrical alien creature. See how it's rounder in cross section and more symmetrical than Bemmie? And it's about the size of a housecat."

Scientific naming conventions for the species of another world was a subject that was going to be hotly debated eventually, she suspected. Right now they were using
Bemmius
as an overarching tag meaning
alien creature from Bemmie's home ecology,
but if they managed to learn enough about the taxonomy of the creatures, they'd probably have to develop a much more detailed and discriminatory nomenclature. For now, though, the only agreed-upon change made to any of the names was to the original: no longer merely
Bemmius secordii
, he was now
Bemmius secordii sapiens
.

"Yeah, now that you mention it, I can see that. Did Bemmie actually have that third eye?"

"In a somewhat degenerate form. It's there, but much less developed than the other two."

"In the hole now. . . .
 
Going smoothly . . . Okay, Bruce, detach. We have impact . . . well within tolerances . . . Triggered the locking clasps, all on cue. . . . Lockdown. Jackie, if you want to go and start her up, I think we're good to go. Start laying your cable, and pretty soon we'll be in business."
She heard A.J. give a sigh of relief.
"Okay, I'm back. What do you need?"

"The tubes?"

"Right. Let me see. . . . Oh, screw them! It's some of that damn composite stuff that eats a lot of the wavelengths I scan on. I'll have to make do with enhancing the visible. Hey, can you find a way into that glassed-off area?"

"I'll take a look." There were two other doors leading out of the room, one of which seemed to be closer to the side of the sealed location. She pointed the Locusts in that direction; a few minutes later, the door ground slowly open. "Yes, I think this goes around the side."

She bounced with dreamlike slowness down the corridor, her suit's lights reflecting a rippled gold and gray pattern from the walls. The corridor ended in a rounded door with a familiar long bar arrangement in the center. "Pressure or seal door. I think this
is
a containment facility."

Having already made his little joke earlier, A.J. managed to resist making a similar remark now. Clearly he was getting older and more responsible. Possibly, she mused, he'd reached high-school–level maturity by now.

"Well, after sixty-plus million years of vacuum, plus your being in a suit capable of withstanding small-arms fire, I don't think we need to worry about whatever they were containing. Nothing showing on the sensors I've got around you, Helen."

"Okay. Try the door?"

"You can try, but I think you'll be waiting for the Locusts. Readings show it's vacuum-cemented at points around the door seal."

"How long, A.J.?"

"Hard to say. I'll give it a quick try, but I think I may have to make several attempts to commit a Lara Croft on this one." She heard a growl of protest from Jake.

"That bad?"

She could see A.J. grimace in the miniature screen. "Yeah. Remember how well these buggers built, and with what. I don't think I'm going to
quite
have to call up Maddie for advice on demolitions—this isn't as bad as the first Vault door, but it's close."

"Then I won't just hang around."

"If you want to help out,"
Jackie's voice broke in,
"you and Larry can come join me and start laying down cable. The reactor's powering up beautifully. The more of us who get cracking on this, the sooner we'll be able to set up our real Ceres headquarters!"

"On our way, Jackie," Larry said as Helen emerged from the tunnel. "Jake, you're staying?"

"Well, first of all she didn't invite me, and second, there's plenty for me to sort through here without the amateur bulls in the china shop around." Jake's tone wasn't as hostile as the words could have sounded. "I'll keep my lines open and keep an eye on the Locusts when they arrive. I might as well supervise the vandalism if I can't prevent it."