Boundary b-1

by Eric Flint

  Deiderichs nodded. "In a week or two we will arrange a meeting with yourself, Director Friedet, and your financial officer-Hank Dufresne, isn't it?-to determine the details of the contract work involved. By that time I believe we should have some reasonably firm numbers to work with."

  He's serious, all right. They've got this one planned out. Joe now found himself regretting, a bit, his sarcastic thoughts about A.J. It turned out that he was no better at resisting temptation, when the Devil offered the spoon.

  "In the meantime… Dr. Gupta. You and Ms. Secord will have to brief the rest of the engineering staff. It is my intention to send a crew of at least thirty, and possibly as many as fifty, people to Phobos. Can such a version of Nike be built?"

  The sonorous, impressive voice replied immediately. "Can it be built? Undoubtedly. In fact, it has already been partially designed. The engineering department has often speculated on the need for larger vessels, and so such designs have been considered many times. There are tentative blueprints for ships twice the size, even ten times the size, of Nike as she currently stands. Is this not true, Ms. Secord?"

  Jackie smiled. "Yep. Me and several of the guys worked out preliminaries for several Nike-based designs. A couple of them would be right around that size. With modern design software and no budget restrictions, I could get you a brand new set of blueprints good enough to start work on in a few weeks. But-"

  Gupta took the cue as smoothly as if it had been rehearsed.

  "-But, as our colleague Dr. Buckley says, whether it will be done depends on a great many things. So many assumptions which must be made to give you an answer. If, as you have implied, the launch is to take place approximately eighteen months from now…"

  He frowned. "I must say that it can only be done-can only be done-if your promises become truth. If we must worry about the slowness of the bureaucracy, if we engineers must pass a dozen review boards for every new shelf design, then no. If these things change, then yes, I believe it will be done."

  General Deiderichs gave his first smile, a tight but sincere little grin that flashed out and vanished. "I think you will find that bureaucratic roadblocks will begin disappearing very quickly, Doctor. The authority for this mission comes straight from the top, and for once there wasn't even any significant debate about it. As of now, priority requests for the Phobos Mission will override everything else. You can consider yourselves to be working for what will amount to a new Manhattan Project, though with some unavoidable public component to it. Assuming you agree?"

  A wave of nods swept the room, ending with A.J.'s.

  They've reduced him to speechlessness! Will wonders never cease?

  Aloud, Joe said, "Conditional on the implied cooperation on NASA's end, yes. And conditional on Glenn and the rest going along with it. Me and A.J. may represent a large chunk of Ares, but it's not like we own it. I can't really see the rest of them turning this down, especially since I'd guess that if we did, Ares would just get shut down somehow. As long as you're not putting in an actual claim to Ares itself. We're a private concern, and we won't be absorbed into the government."

  A quick glance flashed from the general to Fathom. Joe wasn't quite sure, but he thought that the blonde woman gave-not a nod, exactly, but a slight movement of the head indicating assent.

  Now that's interesting. If I did see that, the General was waiting on Fathom's approval? Good Lord. The woman can't be older than her mid-thirties. Where is her authority coming from?

  The exchange was all very quick. Others in the room might not have caught it, as several of them were obviously distracted by their own thoughts. In any case, the general's answer came smoothly enough.

  "No need to worry, Dr. Buckley. NASA has been working with private companies since its inception. I am sure there will be no need to force you to abandon private industry status. I'm not sure we could do it legally, anyway, even if we wanted to. All we insist upon is that you have to agree to work within our security restrictions until such time as that's no longer necessary."

  "Okay, then, I don't see a problem."

  "Good." Deiderichs seemed to relax very slightly. "Well, ladies, gentlemen, I believe I've given you all more than enough to think about for the time being. Now, I'm afraid, I have a number of private meetings with various staff scheduled, and quite a few later on with members of Congress in the relevant committees. Ms. Fathom will be remaining here, as any new information will obviously be coming from this installation until further notice."

  He rose from his chair. "Unless there is anything else at the moment, this meeting is concluded. Thank you all for your attention and assistance." He left, accompanied by Fathom.

  A.J. still looked shell-shocked, until Jackie poked him. "Hey, A.J. Think about it. Now you'll get to design the sensor suite for the Nike. And ride a nuclear rocket to Mars."

  "Yeah." A.J. was perking up, but there was still a wary look on his face. "So why am I still looking for the catch?"

  "The catch," Hathaway said, getting up, "is that you'd better keep producing. Haven't you got some real work to do, A.J.?"

  A.J. glanced at the corner of his virtual display and suddenly scrambled for the door.

  "This is why I hate meetings!" trailed after him, as he ran out the doorway.

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  Chapter 19

  "Bracing calculations, check. Geometry, check. Force configuration, check."

  A.J. glanced over all the parameters once more. He'd checked them a dozen times already, but he was still nervous. Three Faeries were about to try to pry open one of the doors, and if something went wrong, he could potentially be cut down to two ISMs-which wouldn't be able to transmit while exploring any distance inside the miniature moon, as at most they'd have only one other for a relay.

  He'd told Jackie that he wasn't likely to lose the Faeries. That was true, in a sense, because just blowing the manipulator arms wouldn't be likely to cause trouble. The fact remained that prying on something in zero g carried other risks, especially if something broke. The sudden release of forces and fragments of broken prying arms flying around in close quarters could easily do damage to any of the Faeries. They had been built to survive launch and travel stresses, but only in specially-designed cradles in Pirate's equipment bays.

  Once he hit the transmit code on this one, there'd be no stopping it; the three little probes would follow their directions to the electronic letter. He ran another simulation. Too many unknowns. They might move the door, or break the Faeries, or anything in between.

  At least he was sure there was something to find behind there. Despite the amazingly dispersive and absorptive characteristics of the door-and, apparently, the wall material on the other side-he had managed to gain an idea of the size and layout of the chamber beyond. Shadowy blobs hinted at other objects inside the oval room, which was about twenty-five meters long. He'd been able to get some idea of the composition of the door's exterior, which was an odd alloy of iron, copper, beryllium, and apparently mercury and silicon in small quantities. But the precise alloy wasn't known-and whatever was inside wasn't the same material. It might have a core of some sort of insulation, with the exterior clad in the aliens' version of armor plate.

  "Well, are you going to just sit there all day, or are we going to get some action around here?" As usual, Diane's tone suggested a double entendre.

  A.J. ignored it. "You wouldn't be in a hurry to push the button if it was several million bucks of your money. And if you'd spent months making the things."

  Jackie looked up from her nearby workstation. As she was stuck at the command center until the news broke, Hathaway had set both Gupta and Jackie up with engineering design stations in the center. Gupta was currently off at the main engine facility, working with the others to determine if they wanted to make a larger engine design or just use several more like the prototype.

  "Relax, A.J.," she said. "You've already gotten more than your money's worth out of them. I
know they're like your babies, but do you want to wait another couple of years until we can get Nike out there to look?"

  "No. Hell with it. All systems and calculations check. Implement Routine Prybar."

  The "go" code shot out into the nonexistent ether, to stroll its leisurely way across the intervening millions of miles. Now that the decision was made, he relaxed, took a deep breath, and looked around. Suddenly he chuckled.

  "What's funny, A.J.?"

  "I wish I was in Hollywood."

  Jackie looked puzzled. "Why?"

  "Because in Hollywood, after I sent the 'go' command, we'd watch the results right away, and I'd have an emergency stop button on hand to keep things from going wrong."

  "Video links at the speed of plot," Jackie chuckled, nodding sagely. "But it's just as well. If you were in Hollywood, you wouldn't use your emergency stop button in time. If something went wrong, the Faeries would go up in huge explosions-they're nuclear powered, remember. And if they did get in without mishap, an alien energy being would possess the probes and then download their commands to our computers and kill us all."

  Diane's screen suddenly showed some animated robotic drones running through Phobos' corridors. "Resistance is futile-if less than one ohm" scrolled across the bottom as a subtitle.

  "Hey, that's pretty good," A.J. said. "Did you do that just off the cuff?"

  "Well, sorta. I had these little guys drawn up a while back, but I had to get the computer to kick in and draw the animations pretty quick, once the conversation turned in that direction."

  "Cute. Well, it'll be a little bit more before we get telemetry back to show whether we've still got Faeries or if Peter Pan will need a new sidekick. So I'm going to run down and get me something to drink. Anyone else want something?"

  "Coffee," Jackie said immediately.

  "As if I couldn't have guessed. Diane?"

  "Well, I'd like a Margarita, but I'll settle for a diet Coke."

  "One coffee, one diet Margarita Coke. Got it."

  A.J. jogged to the cafeteria; while he could've gotten the drinks nearer to hand, he wanted munchies too. About fifteen minutes later, he trotted back into the control room, balancing the drinks in one hand and a large plate of cheese nachos in the other.

  "A.J.! You can't bring that in here!"

  "That theory has been falsified, as I obviously have brought this in here. Here's your substitute Margarita." He put Jackie's coffeedead black, no sugar-in front of her as Diane continued her protest.

  "Well, you're not supposed to bring food into the center."

  "If you read the rules," he retorted, sitting himself before his workstation again, "I think you'll find that you're not supposed to have drinks in the center, either. Which is a bigger problem around electronics than food, usually. And it's one of those rules that I'll lay big odds was disobeyed about fifteen seconds after it was first enacted at the first computer workstation in history."

  He gazed down cheerfully at his nachos. "I always clean up after myself, anyway."

  "Aren't you supposed to be in training?" Jackie demanded. "That's like about a billion calories, mostly fat." She eyed the golden mass, sprinkled with deep green peppers, with a combination of clinical contempt and instinctive longing.

  "I am indeed in training, but there's nothing wrong with my weight, thanks very much. I have an iron stomach and intend to keep it that way."

  "Allow me to hope that you are right, A.J." Hathaway's voice came from behind them. "But I've known several guys with iron stomachs on the ground who spent their first time in real weightlessness fighting every second to keep from blowing their groceries all over the interior of the spacecraft."

  "Well, I'm not a complete idiot. I don't plan to eat much before my first experience. Got a lot of other training to do first. Lots of suit practice."

  A.J.'s conciliatory tone was then replaced by his usual theatrics. "Glad you could make it, Colonel! We're about to try to open up and see what's behind Door Number Three."

  "Actually, Door Number D-11," Jackie corrected.

  "Well, darn. Janice was always behind Door Number Three. D11 just has alien artifacts behind it."

  "A.J., you're not old enough to remember that show," Hathaway snorted. "Hell, I'm not old enough to remember that show."

  "Old shows never die. They live on in sound bites and cultural references for generations."

  Movement showed on the screen. A.J. instantly focused all his attention on his VRD-enhanced display. "Grab a seat and don't spill your popcorn, ladies and gentlemen. It's showtime!"

  The display showed four separate images in the separate quadrants. Three were image streams from their respective Faeries; the fourth was a constructed representation of the view of a hypothetical observer standing in the corridor, watching the three goggle-eyed metallic probes trying to open the ancient door.

  "You people should appreciate just what's going into this show. Even with all the advances in the past few years, there's severely limited bandwidth available for Ariel to use in transmitting this back." A.J. watched tensely as the three probes slowly took their positions in the corridor, using their manipulator arms to brace themselves first.

  "Can't be all that limited if you're sending us three streaming images," Diane pointed out. Then she frowned. "But… I know the bandwidth you specified. You can't be putting three image streams down that, not even with compression. Not even with the fact that we're using a much more capable relay satellite to handle the Earth transmissions directly."

  "Not with ordinary compression, no. But what I'm doing here is not ordinary. There's an entire neurofuzzy expert system in each Faerie dedicated to smart compression, and I can specify methodologies if I need to. First, they take the main images and scans. Then they chop out all the stuff not in the immediate ROI except for a really general representation. Remember, in any given frame of video, very little usually changes; so you only need a small amount of data to represent it. Then, for people watching it, much lower resolution will do, so you can drop that. You can encode the picture even more by being able to have an encoded representation of the presented image concept. For instance, sending the image of the Faerie itself is a matter of just sending a listing of the current condition of the Faerie, something I can squeeze into very few bytes and then generate here based on the original design, with updates from later pics if needed. If we ever need the raw data, the Faeries can send that on demand later. They actually give me reminders to check data for importance before I erase it. Then I-never mind, here we go."

  The three ISMs were now positioned in such a way that they were locked together, almost entangled but in a very carefully calculated manner. Each Faerie had two manipulator arms. Three of these, adjusted to maximum power, were hooked in the just-barelyaccessible crack where door and wall met. The vacuum deterioration of the seal had helped in that respect. Had that not happened, the manipulator arms would never have been able to get a significant grip on the door. The other three arms were configured to give the Faeries support, leverage, and stability, since in microgravity there was no assistance to be had from weight.

  The three Faeries synchronized their systems as directed by A.J.'s programming, and then began to pull. For long moments, nothing happened. Indicators showed the stress on parts of the Faeries rising; then, passing normal limits, entering the danger zone.

  A.J. was barely aware of the tension in his own arms. His hands were literally white-knuckled as he gripped the console, lifting and pulling in sympathetic unison with his own creations.

  Titania suddenly fired its chemical thrusters.

  A.J. hissed. That was an attempt to utilize leverage and inertia to drastically increase the force on the door, for a brief moment. But he'd programmed that maneuver as a last-ditch effort, and the reason Titania had used it now wasn't immediately obvious to him.

  The downward thrust pushed on the temporary structure formed by the Faeries in such a way as to use it as a fulcrum. Manipulator arms bowed alar
mingly under the pressure.

  Suddenly, the view from Rane spun crazily. The others followed suit, the emulation showing that something had broken and the three Faeries were trying to recover. Telltales blinked on.

  "Damn! Lessee… Rane's broken both manipulators, must've gotten twisted around… One of Titania's still works… Oh, fufarging hell, something banged into Tinkerbell's left lens!"

  Rane's images steadied and she turned her cameras back. A piece of manipulator arm bounced lazily across the field of view. But the image also showed a yawning dark patch at the base of the door, fully two feet high. Large enough for a Faerie to pass through.

  "Oh, yeah!" A.J.'s momentary annoyance and concern vanished. It would have been worth the loss of at least two Faeries to get that door open, in his view, and he hadn't actually lost any of them. All three were damaged, but none of them in a way that would render them useless or even tremendously impaired in their main function.

  "Well, let's hope there's something in there worth looking at. I sure can't pull off that trick again. Knowing how these things go, we've probably just succeeded in breaking into the alien equivalent of the broom closet."

  Rane was not able to retract or fold the remainder of its manipulator arms, meaning that it was much more likely to snag itself going through narrow spaces. Tinkerbell's loss of an imaging unit made it less effective for surveying.

  That left Titania. Fortunately, the status indicators and a visual survey by the other ISMs showed that the nonfunctional arm was in fact completely missing-it had broken cleanly off at the joint connecting it to the Faerie's main body. There was nothing to prevent Titania from surveying the now-accessible room.

  Nothing, that was, except the inevitable verification and programming delay engendered by the many millions of miles between Earth and Phobos. After Prybar had concluded, the change in the ISMs' status had been more than sufficient to require them to wait for instructions from A.J. on what to do next.