by Terry Mixon
“Indeed. We’re planning for this to be successful and I suggest that we count on them making it back with the ship. If need be, we can send Liberty Station after them. That would take a while, but so long as they stop somewhere in this solar system, we can do it.”
“Right,” Crabtree said. “Then we’ve got a lot of detail to fill in before I make our first appearance in court to file this. Even though the salvage isn’t complete, we’ll want to be ready to make a claim the moment it is. And for our purposes, that includes when you get it back on course into the system.”
He shook his head and pulled out a legal pad. “My sister is never going to believe this one.”
* * * * *
Nathan put in an appearance just after noon. He’d enjoyed an early morning visit with the delectable Vanessa Messina and a private lunch. Both had been delicious in their own way. She had fire. He was going to enjoy breaking her when he had the luxury of time.
She’d be almost as much fun as Miss Cook, when he finally captured her. Maybe he could keep them both as a set.
The lunch on the patio overlooking the hills below had relaxed him. He was ready to make this happen now.
Most people would be intimidated to learn that they needed evidence from the police. Not Nathan. And particularly not in Italy.
The corruption here was legendary. Money could get him as much access as he wanted. Particularly in a group as underpaid as the police. Someone was always unhappy seeing how the criminal half lived.
His team leader had made a few calls overnight and located a source for the documents. The thing about evidence, the police needed to see it to make use of it. That meant it was vulnerable to leaks.
If he’d wanted it destroyed or a physical object removed, that would be a different matter. The controls on evidence might be difficult and expensive to overcome. A copy or picture? Well, that should be simple enough.
As everyone knew, skullduggery took place in the dead of night and deep in the shadows. So, he’d pick up the evidence in broad daylight where anyone could see them.
He’d use cutouts, of course. If the contact had been more trusting, he could have wired the money and had him send the data to an anonymous email account.
Unfortunately, the man knew watchdogs monitored the accounts of police for unusual activity. So cash was a better deal for him. He could put it away and spend it as needed with no one the wiser.
Ah, well. That was sometimes the price of doing business.
They’d do the swap at dinnertime. He’d have one of his men meet the man at a public location. The man could see the cash, but he couldn’t leave until Nathan’s man verified what he had to offer. Otherwise, he’d never get out of the area alive.
Nathan wasn’t going to be completely out of the picture, though. He’d be in a café just across the street. He liked seeing things as they happened.
They showed up an hour and a half early to make sure no one else was watching the meeting place. Everyone that came by got a look from his people.
None of them smelled like cops. And since they had no reason to suspect someone would want copies of the images, there would be no reason to send the kind of talent that could slip in without smelling like pork.
The contact showed up a few minutes early. Probably doing some scouting of his own. He scanned everyone in the area and spotted Nathan’s man. He was the one with the bright yellow handkerchief on the table.
Nathan focused on his earbud as he sipped his tea. The man quickly confirmed that he was the one with the data. He wanted to see the money.
They’d planned for that, so Nathan’s man slid the briefcase partway across the table. It had the agreed amount inside. His man only let the other guy open it wide enough to see. He didn’t want everyone gawking.
The informant nodded. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a large manila envelope. That wasn’t according to plan.
Nathan keyed his radio. “Look alive. Something is wrong. Be ready to evacuate.”
“What the hell is this?” Nathan’s man asked. “You were supposed to bring me a data stick.”
“I couldn’t put the other papers on a data stick,” the informant said. “You wanted all the weird writing. Well, they hadn’t scanned everything yet. Don’t worry! I made sure nobody saw me take them. With all the crap they’re going through, it’ll be weeks before someone misses it. And even then, they’ll just think it was misfiled.”
Nathan saw something out of the corner of his eye and turned his head a bit. A woman behind him and to the side was dropping money on the table. Her jacket was open just enough for him to see the gun on her hip and the badge on her belt.
That by itself meant nothing. Cops had to eat. The wire running up to her ear is what told him things were in the toilet. Others would be moving into place right now to block them in and arrest everyone.
“Code blue,” he said.
His man pushed the case across to the idiot and grabbed the envelope. He turned and went inside the café quickly and without a word.
That brought police closing in from every direction. Jesus, they’d been all around them. These were pros, too. Nathan counted six men and women. There would be others cutting off the likely escape routes.
All Nathan had were lemons. It was time to make lemonade.
Chapter Thirteen
It took close to their maximum acceleration to slow Liberty Station for orbital insertion. To say that it was a tense time was something of an understatement. If anything went wrong, they’d make a huge skid mark on the Red Planet.
Thankfully, nothing went wrong. All those hard hours of training paid off in spades. They slid into orbit without a bobble.
It took a few hours before they were in a stable position over Olympus Mons, but that was worthwhile, too. The large telescope on the station had an even better resolution than the spy satellites.
He called his senior people together in his office. It was after midnight by then, but they were all too excited to call it a day.
Lindsay looked exhausted, but amped. Black Jack McCarthy, the pilot’s understudy, was a sea of calm. Being an ex-marine fighter pilot, that wasn’t a surprise.
Sandra Dean, his team sniper and now commander of Liberty Station’s security, looked as though she’d just woken up. “I assume we’re orbiting Mars,” she said, pouring herself some coffee. “Is there a reason we couldn’t arrive in the daylight? Metaphorically speaking.”
“That’s just how the cookie crumbled,” Lindsay said. “It’s daylight down on the planet, though not yet inside the caldera. That comes in about an hour.”
Harry nodded. He’d already confirmed those times. “Which is why we’re getting up early. Or late. Whatever you like. There’s something inside the caldera that I want to see in the daylight. We spotted what looks like a crashed ship.”
Black Jack shook his head. “Man, these people are pissing me off.”
He raised an eyebrow at the marine pilot. “How’s that?”
“Every place they go, they crash land. That sounds kind of incompetent.”
Harry laughed. “I see your point. Sooner or later, we’ll find an intact bird for you to look at.”
He turned to the others. “I want to get a team together in the next half hour. Our primary lifter pilot is prepping right now. We’ll go down and take a good look at what’s there. We’ll only have about seven hours of light, based on the location of the crash, so we want to be as efficient as we can.”
Sandra nodded. “This place was marked for a reason. Probably not because of the crash. There’s a base of some kind down there. We’re going to have to find it and see what kind of shape it’s in.”
“Anything we find might help Jess get control of her runaway locomotive,” Harry said. “We’ll take along some geologists and everything we need for a camp. If we find something worth exploring, I want to have a base camp. So, time is short. Get ready to go.”
Half an hour later, they’d all gathered in the lifter. Black Jack sa
t up front with the command pilot while the rest of them strapped in. Harry had taken a few minutes to go to the observation level and watch the Red Planet beneath them. It was awe-inspiring.
The lifter detached from the ship right on schedule and drifted down toward the planet. Atmospheric entry was a lot rougher than he’d expected, considering how thin the atmosphere was.
The lifter had to make a short turn to come back over Olympus Mons, but it was a lot more manageable in flight by then. If he hadn’t known they were over the system’s largest volcano, he’d never have guessed. It looked like the rest of Mars.
Except for the caldera. It was amazingly huge.
The lifter sailed over the lip of the nested calderas and banked toward the crash site. The floor of the depression looked flat from orbit, but up close, it was a lot rougher. There were cracks, ridges, lumps, and boulders. Debris covered the ground.
Luckily, his father’s engineers had designed the lifter to set down in rough terrain. “I see a good spot off to our left,” the pilot said. “It looks to be less than five hundred meters from the crash. I won’t say it’ll be an easy walk, but it looks doable. Hang on.”
The lifter slowed and hovered over the landing zone. The pilot lit the thrusters hard, jerking them up and blowing loose debris away. That made sense.
They did that three times before the pilot slowly settled to the ground and shut the thrusters off. “We’re down and secure,” the pilot said. “Welcome to Mars, everyone.”
They all cheered and began unstrapping.
Sandra poked him in the shoulder. “I hope you’ve given this some thought.”
He frowned. “What?”
She shook her head and clucked sadly. “You’re about to be the first human being from Earth to step onto another planet. This is a big deal, Harry. You’d better have some heavy words to lay down for all the kids back home. ‘One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.’ You remember that, right?”
Neil Armstrong was a hero. Harry, not so much. He’d stumbled into this. Almost literally. “I think Armstrong actually said ‘One small step for a man,’ or at least he meant to. Yeah, give me a second to think about this.”
It actually took them a good ten minutes before the pilot said it was cool enough outside for them to exit. They’d be using a winch to lower the personnel down from the airlock. The cargo, too, but that was a different part of the lifter.
Harry’s mind raced as they secured him to the cradle. He could see across the basin. Well, not completely across it. The most distant walls were more than 50 kilometers away, even if they were more than three kilometers tall. Reddish dirt dominated everything.
The lifter’s telescoping landing legs had cameras there for the pilot to make sure everything was clear. They’d catch him with Mars spread out behind him as he touched down. The time to put up or shut up was here.
He took the manual controls and lowered himself down until he was just above the planet’s surface. He stopped the winch there and took a deep breath.
One slap and his quick release opened, dropping him to the surface where he bounded forward. He prayed to God that he didn’t trip over something.
“Today Mars. Tomorrow the universe. Humanity unlimited!”
* * * * *
Kathleen had just walked into her office when her private phone rang. It was Nathan.
“Please, tell me you didn’t blow up the Colosseum.”
“Have no fear, Mother. All the historically important sites are safe. I can’t say everything went off without a hitch, but we had more success than I expected. I bribed a cop to get a copy of the manuscript pages. They’re on the way via high security courier.”
She smiled coldly. Finally, something was going her way.
“Why a courier?”
“The idiot we bribed attracted more than his fair share of attention. It turns out there were more papers than father’s little bit managed to retrieve.”
Kathleen leaned back in her chair. “Explain that.”
“The pages she stole were not the only ones Romano owned. These new ones look like notes the author made to himself. Several dozen pages, some of them badly faded or stained. A mixture of the strange language and Italian. Some Latin, too, I think.
“And that’s not all. There’s a map. It looks like somewhere in France. I think that makes this pretty damned important. There was also something that looks like a data stick, but it doesn’t fit any computer I know of. The courier left before I found it in the bottom of the envelope. I can get it to you later.”
“Excellent work. I assume you got away cleanly.”
“We’re still in Rome. With the police swarming, we’ll probably stay for a day or two. Besides, I have some unfinished business.”
She really didn’t want to know what it was this time. With Nathan, it might be a woman or a killing. Or both.
“Fine, as long as this doesn’t blow back on me. Call when you get to Paris. Send digital images of the papers, both old and new.”
“I’ll get them off to you within the hour.”
Kathleen hung up without responding. Her experts working on the book might be able to crack the code with this new material. Otherwise, it was proving impossible. They could see the patterns, but it wasn’t making sense. Gibberish.
Now it was time to see if her assistant had wrangled the conversation she wanted with the Indian space officials.
Her private phone rang again. “Bennett.”
“Mrs. Bennett, this is Ethan Wagner. I was wondering if you could make time to come by.”
Wagner was the senior scientist studying the wreck. If he wanted her there, they’d made some kind of breakthrough.
“Look for me in an hour, Doctor.”
It would take that long to be sure she’d lost the tail the FBI had on her. What they expected to find, she didn’t know. Perhaps they hoped she’d lead them to another trove of bodies.
Rather than take her car, she climbed into the back of a panel van with the BenCorp logo in the parking garage. There were hundreds of them running all around the campus. Another one wouldn’t draw any undue attention.
She still had the driver take a roundabout path into Chicago. He dropped her in another parking garage near a major hotel. A vehicle from the secret site picked her up and they made it there without any complications.
Wagner was waiting for her in the lobby. Sweat covered the short man’s bald head. It always did, no matter what the temperature was.
She followed him into the secure section of the building. The hard-eyed men guarding the doors not only examined their ID cards, but also took retinal scans. She’d been here often enough that they undoubtedly knew who she was, but that didn’t stop them from verifying her identity.
Paranoia of which she heartily approved.
They ended up on the floor where his team was dissecting the wreck. The scientist only spoke once they were safely inside the area. “We’ve managed to crack the power requirements and have the ship’s consoles online.”
“Really? That’s excellent news. How did you manage that without understanding the language?”
“We cheated. There’s a secondary console in the aft section. Not much of one, but enough to experiment on. We isolated it and started feeding it low power levels and looking at how it responded.
“Once it reached a certain threshold, it came on enough to have data on the screen. Not much, but enough to tell us we were getting closer. One of my people wondered if it was telling us how the power needed to change.
“We modulated the voltage and amperage and watched the response. That let us compare what we were feeding it to the writing on the inputs. We made some educated guesses and pegged it closely enough for the console to come online and show the data its designers meant for it to display. With that as a guide, we did the same for the main control console. And here we are.”
She nodded judiciously. “Very clever, Doctor. Very clever. That gets us one step closer to plum
bing the secrets hidden in the ship. What about the drives?”
“Those have power requirements, too. Ridiculously large ones, if I’m supposed to believe the numbers. I’m not certain I’d trust them. If our calculations were correct, it would take the output of a nuclear reactor to move this vessel. From a cube ten centimeters on a side. I’m not certain I believe that.”
Kathleen gestured at the spaceship. “Yet here it is. I have people working on upgrading the prototype for my mini reactor. Perhaps it will do the job. It won’t fit in a small area like that. Or in the crashed ship, for that matter. Show me the main console.”
They’d cleaned out the inside of the ship since the last time she’d been there. Now everything gleamed. And the body bags were gone.
She sat at one of the forward couches. “How does this work?”
“The console comes alive when you touch it. We don’t know any of the controls, so we’ve been very cautious about exploring it.”
A touch brought the console to life, along with the screen above it. It displayed the lab in very high resolution. The controls looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
“If this vehicle is designed like anything we have, it has a record of where it’s been. Perhaps even a log. I want those found. We’ve had a breakthrough on the language, so we might be able to start deciphering all this very soon. If we’re lucky.”
“That would be wonderful,” the scientist said. “I’m certain there’s so much we could learn here. The propulsion system must be very powerful.”
She turned in her seat to face him. “Do you have any ideas on how it might work?”
“Well, it’s not a reaction based system. No fuel. My guess is that it manipulates the curvature of space.”
“I’m not certain that I follow. How will that move a ship?”
His expression told her he was trying to find words small enough to explain a complex idea while not offending her.
“Just spit it out, Wagner. I’m not going to rip your head off.”
“Of course. You see, gravity is an effect of mass distorting space. Imagine setting a bowling ball on a mattress. The ball presses into the mattress and there is a divot. If I put something near it, that second object will roll into the depressed area. That is actually how gravity works. Roughly.”
