“Come! Sit down! I’m afraid this may be the only chance we’ll have to get to know each other. After sitting on our duffs forever, we’re now moving very fast, it seems.”
“We’re heading out?”
“The Dutchman is dispatching a corvette that’s now attached to his ship to get us. Ships this size, or even the size of his vessel, would trigger every alarm the Titans might have. It’s by using very small ships like the corvettes and then using small outer system genhole gates that they’re able to get in and out without the energy flare attracting attention.”
“I haven’t said whether I’m in or out on this, you know.”
“Come, come! You’ve come this far out of curiosity! I don’t think you’re the kind of man who can sit back and remain passive when things are going on. I assume you don’t have a family or you wouldn’t have volunteered for that courageous ride.”
“No, nobody.”
“Then, see? That’s really all of us, you know. In addition to the skills involved, everyone aboard, even Captain Stavros, has no close remaining family. The mercenaries and the science people—all orphaned by this point, no known living siblings.”
“Including you?”
Chicanis’s face darkened. “Everyone I held dear was still on Helena when it was overrun. They’re all most certainly dead now. Most probably died in the initial loss of power and the scouring. I see their faces, I hear their voices, every night in my dreams, but they are somewhere else now, in the arms of Jesus. I really believe that, you see. It’s why I can go on and not be consumed with grief. I fully expect to see them again someday.” He paused and stared at Harker. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”
Harker shrugged. “I’m not at all sure, and that’s an honest answer, Father. Sometimes, when I see a beautiful sunset on some distant world or stare into the heart of a spectacular stellar cloud, it’s easy. Other times, looking at starving people, twisted and broken children, blown-up bodies, shorted-out minds—then I can’t find God at all. Let’s just say that I reserve judgment on God, but that I very much believe in evil. I’ve seen evil.”
“Well, that’s more than most people. Half The Confederacy is still trying to figure out what the Titans want and why they do what they do, as if understanding a truly alien race would make the genocide go away. Most people stopped believing in evil centuries ago. In ancient times a majority of good churchgoing types believed in hell. Oh, now they believe in God and Jesus and love and all that, but when it comes to hell—no, not that.”
“I’ve already been to hell, Father,” Harker told him evenly. “That I believe in.”
“You know, there’s some from the start who thought that the Titans were angels,” Chicanis commented. “The Jewish tradition has good angels and bad angels, and we Greeks took the bad and called them by a proper Greek label, daimon. I can’t help but wonder sometimes when I see the beauty of those Titan formations. Satan was always supposed to be the crowning cherub, the most beautiful of all the angels. Beauty and evil are not opposites.” He sighed. “But we’re not here to discuss theology, now, are we?”
“No, we’re not. I was just wondering, though, if you’d thought through what it’ll be like down there. Pardon me, Father, but it’s pretty clear that you’ve lived more realtime years than me, and you haven’t spent them all in situations where you had to be in peak physical condition. I’ve looked at the maps here. If we put in where we’re supposed to, we’re talking a good three hundred or more kilometers walking, both there and back. Running some of the time, I suspect, in a reworked primitive world like nothing any of us have ever experienced before. I’m not sure that Doctor Socolov can hack that, and I’m not sure you could, either.”
“You’re not saying anything I haven’t heard from Mogutu,” the priest admitted. “The fact is, though, from the Dutchman and from Navy files we have aerials of Helena and I can determine the old points from them. They’ve reworked a good deal of Atlantis, but Eden is pretty much left alone save for their replanting. Many of the natural landforms and just about all the distances are still correct. I feel confident I can get us wherever we need to get on the ground. I am not sure that anyone else could. That is, anyone not born and raised there. So, I go, and God will grant me whatever strength is necessary to get the job done. I feel certain of it. I am also prepared, if need be, to die there, or to remain there, if that is what God wants. But I simply cannot accept that He didn’t have a plan for me to be in this position. It explains why I wasn’t there when the Titans came, why I was in a certain company at a certain time when this came up, and why I am here. I believe this is a divine plan. You can dismiss it or not, but I believe it to be so, and faith will carry a person a very long way.”
“I hope you’re right, Father,” Gene Harker replied. “I really hope you’re right.” He stood there for a moment, trying to bring up his biggest concern diplomatically. Finally, he decided head-on was best.
“Tell me, Father. If you’re down there, and it’s the difference between one of our lives and one of the poor wretches down there, could you decide? Could you actually act to keep Socolov from death or rape or whatever, or even one of us from having our brains bashed in?”
“The truth? I don’t know, Harker. I don’t think I will know until and unless I face it, and I know I might. None of us truly knows what is within us until an action is forced, do we?”
“Well, at least it’s an honest answer,” the Navy man responded.
“Call it off, Colonel.”
• • •
The big man with the deep voice continued to look over terrain maps on the console in front of him but did say, “Hello, Harker. Glad to have you with us.”
“I’m not with you, or against you. I just think you’re going to do what you wouldn’t do before. You go in, and you’ll kill people—that’s part of the job. But Socolov and Chicanis are liabilities in any ground movement and you know it. Take them, and either they will die or the mission will fail as we keep saving their necks.”
“I note you now said ‘we,’ which makes me correct. And I can’t call it off. I couldn’t even call off the action that got me early retirement. Those people still went in, remember, and they still died. This is even clearer. They are going in with or without us. If they go in without us, they will surely die. If they go in with us, they will probably die, but something might come of the effort. Look on the bright side.”
It was a pretty cold way of looking at things, but it was also hard to argue with. “Is this trip really worth it?”
“Krill thinks so. This Dutchman thinks so. The preliminary examinations of the historical record suggest that they might have had something. We’ll know more once we get into Hector.”
“Hector? You’re going to the little moon?”
“Initially. That’s Krill’s and the two brains’ jobs. The actual weapon is supposed to be there, still hidden away in bunkers. If it’s there, then it is worth going down for the codes. If it is not there, then we all go home—or, more likely, we all get to find out if we can blow the Dutchman before the Dutchman blows us away once he has no use for us. But I’m not going to abandon it if something’s there. Someone with an incredible amount of guts died, probably in a nasty way, to get us that information. Do you know how long the burst was that got all that data out that Krill’s now looking over?”
“No.”
“About six seconds. After that, you can actually see the damping field kicking in to intercept and gobble up the power, and not incidentally target the sender precisely as well. A six-second transmission. We won’t even have that. It’s doubtful whether, now that it’s been done once, the Titans will leave anything with surface access unmonitored. I’m certain they could drain the entire planet of power if they wished; it’s just too much trouble and no profit. Our objective is to bring the codes out without activating them. Once we do, once storage becomes active energy—watch out!”
“Do you really think even the likes of us ca
n hack it down there, Colonel? Give me my combat suit and I’ll take on an army, but bare-handed...”
“I have no intention of being down there bare-handed,” N’Gana responded. “However, there will be both vulnerabilities and limits. You were Commando, right?”
“Yes. A while ago.”
“You’re still a Commando and you know it. It’s in the blood. If you’d quit and gone into the diamond business or started dirt fanning, maybe not, but you stayed in. I think you’re probably very good, Harker. Both the sergeant and I were Rangers. Much the same sort of thing. Each of us, deep down, thinks the other’s training wasn’t quite up to our own, but we know how even we really are. What was the final exam for you, Harker? In individual rather than squad training.”
Harker gave a mirthless smile. “They stripped us down to our underwear and dropped us on a hellhole of a planet with only what we’d have coming out of a lifeboat. The pickup point, the only one on the whole damned planet, was almost three thousand kilometers away by land and sea. We either got there whole and called for pickup or we failed.”
“Fairly similar with us. We dropped as a squad, fully organized, but the problem and objective were the same. Did everyone in your class make it?”
“No. I understand that, out of twenty-five who were eventually dropped, six never checked in.”
“Well, my losses were a bit worse,” said N’Gana, “That’s why we volunteered. Nobody had to do it. Even down to that last drop, anybody could have said ‘No!’ and nothing more would have been said about it. They’d have simply rotated back. But we went. By that point anybody who’d freeze had already been pressured or threatened out. We did it then. This will be no different.”
“Maybe. I was nineteen real at the time and I thought I was immortal and, after that full course, some kind of superman as well. I’m a lot older now, and I’ve been shot up a lot of times and scraped up a few more.”
“Well, I’m nearly fifty real, and I believe I could do that course again. I have yet to be defeated by Doctor Socolov’s simulator program, and I see nothing so far that would suggest that this is not doable. I would agree that the odds are almost nil that we will all survive, and slim that any, let alone most, of us will make it back to be picked up. But I don’t see anything here that skews the odds any worse than the Ranger examination course.” Harker sighed. “Colonel, I had an electronic direction finder, I had a small sidearm, a medikit, and a few other things when I did my exam. No matter what you say, I know you had similar as well. I’d love to try the Doc’s sim, but it’s only a guess. Nobody’s come back from being down there.”
“The Dutchman has people who have managed the trip, or so he says. It is not easy, but if it can be done by pirates, then it can be done by me.” He paused. “I do wish that you could try the sim at a high level, if only for me to judge how out of practice you might be, but there will not be time. We are to board the corvette in just over three hours. Since there is a great deal of risk simply activating a gate—let alone coming in-system—near Titans, this will be the start of it. Hector first, then, if it’s all there, we go down and the rest remain on Hector. You are in, or you remain right here. You have one hour to decide. After that, there will not be time to allow for your supplies.”
“An hour!”
“I think you would be most useful to us, Mister Harker,” the Colonel said quite smugly. “And I think having come this far uninvited, you could not resist going the rest of the way. Not someone with your service record and awards.”
Harker didn’t have to think too hard on this part. “I’ll go, at least as far as the moon, just to see what the hell this is all really about. But going down there, on a Titan world—that I won’t promise.”
“Fair enough. Oh—you really should stop by supplies and get yourself a decent pair of pants. In fact, I’ve already arranged for an entire kit to be prepared in your size. Just pick it up and sign for it.”
He was certainly predictable, anyway, Harker thought, as he got and checked through the kit. There were two complete outfits in there, each with the same nondescript black pullovers that the priest, the colonel, and the colonel’s long-time partner and aide fancied aboard. In fact, when he answered the page to go to the lower docking bay, he found that it was the uniform of the day.
He was surprised to see that they’d brought his suit down as well. It looked the worse for wear on the outside; the smooth gloss was off it, and it had some minor fading and beading that made it seem less awesome and more seedy, but he knew it was still in top shape inside.
“We think the suit will be quite handy,” the colonel told him, seeing his surprise. “Not on the surface of Helena, of course, but on Hector. The same low power modes that allowed it to stick undetected by us to the outer hull of the Odysseus should be sufficient for work there without drawing an unwelcome crowd, or so this Dutchman says.”
“Anything on him yet? Anything other than what we already knew?” Harker asked.
“Nothing. Every transfer’s been by computer and robotics. It’s almost like he really is his namesake. A cursed captain who cannot be in the company of humans, served by a ghost crew.”
“Surely he’s coming with us!”
“I don’t think so,” Father Chicanis answered. “I think he’s staying right where he is. What he needs is in the computer navigational and piloting system on the corvette. He’s not going to risk his own neck. Not when he can get us to risk ours.”
One by one they gathered there. Only Madame Soto-ropolis and Captain Stavros would remain aboard the Odysseus for this leg. Neither could offer anything more to the expedition than they had by financing and assembling it.
“I should love to see my beautiful Helena one more time,” the old diva said wistfully. “But I would be as a stone to the expedition, and I would be dead in an instant if the Titans sapped energy. I will have to say ‘Good luck and Godspeed’ from here. Take care, all of you.”
A gloved, shaky hand grasped Father Chicanis’s and squeezed hard. He looked down at her and said, “If we can do it and it is God’s will, we will. That much I swear.”
“Do you—do you really believe that anyone is still alive down there?” she asked him.
“Not anyone who remembers us, surely,” he responded, and clearly not for the first time. “Still, someone is there. God would not bring us to this point with these fine people and let us fail. I do believe the road will be one of the hardest anyone has been asked to take in centuries. God bless you, Anna Marie. Sing joyfully of me, for I am going home.”
The airlock slid open, and they all turned and walked single file through the tubelike connector and into the small corvette. The suits and other supplies were handled by the Odysseus’s automatic cargo and servicing robots, which took them out and slid them into the cargo section in the corvette’s underbelly.
Katarina Socolov hadn’t been in the assembly, and for a moment he’d hoped that she’d come to her senses, but now here she was, taking a seat next to Father Chicanis in the front row.
The Pooka slithered in and curled up in the back. Being the unexpected added passenger, Harker took the only seat left open, the one next to Krill, just behind the priest and Socolov.
“I see that had I elected not to come I wouldn’t have had your company after all,” he noted.
“I decided that the old security codes and devices might be more of a problem than we think. I’ll not be going to the surface, though. Any encounter with a Titan field will kill me, you know. But I could not allow this to proceed without verifying that it exists and that we can get in and out,” Krill replied.
“That fellow whose brain scan you deciphered got in and got information,” he noted.
“Yes, but he did not get what we needed and he did not make it out. Even as he died, he could not have truly known if there was anything to this more than a failed project and a set of contingency plans. That’s what we find out first.”
Harker nodded and looked around. Nine o
f them going into Titan territory pretty well blind and untrained as a true military team. How could this possibly work?
“I’m still surprised that the Dutchman, or a crony, isn’t along,” he noted. “Mighty trusting of him after all this.”
“What’s to trust?” she asked him. “His program is taking us in, his programmed AI unit is handling all the ship’s piloting and navigation, and it’s the only way to or from. He’s got the Odysseus and the only exit. What else does he need?”
The corvette powered up, the airlocks closed and then hissed, and finally the lights came on stating that there was a valid seal and that pressurization was accomplished.
They pushed off, then they could feel the ship come about. When the engines came up to normal, though, all sensation of movement stopped and they just had the steady hum of the engines.
“I forgot to ask,” Harker said. “How long is this little jaunt?”
“Just a few hours, or so we’re told,” Father Chicanis called back.
Harker sighed. “Well, then, I’m going to dial up a real meal and a decent drink and then get a little sleep. It seems I’ve been a very long time between meals.”
The food didn’t have much taste, but it filled him, which was what he needed. After that he really did recline and nod off, but he kept having the same dream, of a star-filled universe being overrun by cockroaches.
And he was one of the roaches.
• • •
There was curiously little conversation on the way, even when they were awake, and then it was entirely about practical things like eating and drinking and power consumption.
Emerging back into normal space from the very small genhole and into the Trojan system was done very quickly, and they knew it from the sudden drop into red warning lights and the sudden and complex maneuvering of the craft.
On the screen, though, came a sun and four very distinct planets.
“Save for a trickle charge that keeps it from imploding, the small genhole is inactive inside the orbit of two of the moons of one of the larger gas giants in the system,” Krill explained to him, knowing that he alone would not have been fully briefed. “The amount of surge produced when it powers up and allows us through is masked by the magnetic field and electrical storms in the upper atmosphere of the giant, so unless we literally run into a Titan ship or patrol they won’t be able to pull us out of the muck. That’s how they move these little ships in and out.”
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