by Eric Flint
God forbid the right hand should ever tell the left hand what it's doing. He remembered a wisecrack once made by a fellow Air Force officer: The only difference between the nuts in security and the ones in lunatic asylums is that the security nuts insist their straightjackets have to have clearance and be stamped Top Secret.
"What a mess," he muttered. "All right, A.J. I won't tell Fathom until you do an initial check to see if she's the one who's holding the back doors. If she is, then it's a moot point. You and I know, and we just forget about it. But if she isn't the one, then we've got a real problem with security and I'm bringing her in right away. And in the meantime, we don't tell anyone else. I'm willing to stretch things that far, but I'm not willing to spread this to anyone except Fathom."
A.J. nodded. "No sweat. If for no other reason, I don't want Joe to know. Not from me, anyway. You wanna talk about a mess."
Ken grimaced. To everyone else's surprise-and A.J.'s astonishment-Joe Buckley and Madeline Fathom were often seen together since the voyage had started. By now the two were, if not an item, at least one of the strongest candidates for becoming an item on board Nike. If they were wrong about Madeline, a very nice friendship-or something more-could be torpedoed with no justification. Or, if Joe reacted the other way, A.J. could find his best friend alienated from him.
"Right. In any event, we need to check all the other alternativesand immediately. If Fathom's the one with the back doors, she has them on official authority. Which someone else wouldn't-and that would be an order of magnitude worse. We need to make sure, if we can, that that's not the case. In the meantime… Have you closed off any or all of the back doors?"
"Nary a one. But I've booby-trapped them. When someone activates one of them, I'll be able to catch 'em at it. And of course I can always override them now that I know what's going on. That's why you made me the DP head around here."
Ken gave A.J. a hard look, just short of an outright glare. "Understand something, A.J. If it does turn out that it's Fathom, I'll want you to remove the booby traps. I don't like the idea of her having those back doors, but what I don't like doesn't make any difference. She is in charge of security. But until we know one way or the other, keep them in place. If it's someone else, we do not want those back doors functional."
A.J. nodded, although Hathaway was quite sure that he had reservations. Reservations strong enough, in fact, that Ken would probably have problems with him if it did turn out to be Fathom.
But that was for a later day-which might never come.
In that respect, at least, A.J. obviously felt the same way he did. "Well," the imaging specialist said, "I just hope we never have to find out."
So do I, Madeline thought to herself as she shut off the recording. So do I.
Not that it would make a very big difference. She'd been expecting to hear that conversation, or one like it, right around now. A.J. was good, but he was only second-rate as a security specialist. More than good enough for basic civilian or low-level military stuff, to be sure, and he was probably a hell of a cracker if he wanted to be. But when you had the resources to draw on that Madeline did, a second-rater was only going to find what you wanted them to find.
Everything had to be a double blind whenever possible. One of the best ways of defusing effective resistance was to convince your opponents that they were smarter than you were, always just a step ahead. In this case, she'd arranged for fairly well-hidden back doors to exist-while burying her real back doors far deeper inside the system. It was the same strategy she'd used with respect to her martial arts capability.
Not quite the same strategy, she reminded herself. It wouldn't do to underestimate A.J. Baker. Her martial arts skills were hers alone, while in this case she was only about as good as A.J. in her own right. Not even that, really, given a level playing field.
But this wasn't a level playing field, not even close. The HIA could tap the best people in the world when it came to this sort of work. All Madeline had had to do was arrange access for one of them to assist in the coding. He'd done the rest.
Bugging Hathaway's office had not been difficult. It had been trivially easy, in fact, since no one had been expecting surveillance equipment to be installed aboard Nike. The military people and scientists who made up the crew just didn't think in those terms.
Now she had to decide if she'd gotten all the use out of the monitors that she could reasonably expect, or whether she should leave them in place. The longer they sat there, the more chance there was that someone would spot them.
A.J. was, once more, the major threat there. He scattered his Fairy Dust almost randomly at times. And, unlike those in use in engineering and other departments, A.J.'s sensor motes were not merely cutting-edge but bleeding-edge, customized in both their software and sometimes even hardware aspects. In fact, she had to grudgingly admit that they outperformed even the supposedly top-of-the-line stuff she'd been supplied for this mission. If A.J. ever decided to start looking for other sensor motes, she'd be busted. Martial arts was his exercise and computer systems his sideline, but sensor systems and detecting things that were hidden was A.J. Baker's expertise. He was probably the best in the world at it. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that she could no more beat A.J. on that battlefield than he could beat her in an honest fight.
So the decision wasn't to be made casually. She'd gotten excellent intelligence from them so far. But was the chance of getting more such information worth the risk that A.J.-suspicions already aroused by finding the back doors-might decide to sweep the ship for other unauthorized activity?
"No," she answered herself aloud. She was already tap-dancing on land mines. The monitors she had in place to maintain surreptitious surveillance of Nike's personnel were already stretching the letter of the law. Even the military members of the crew would be furious, if they found out. The civilian members would completely blow their stacks, negating at one stroke all of Madeline's long and careful work to build up their trust and cooperation.
There was no point in keeping around extra ways of detonating the mines if she didn't really need them. She sent out the signal which caused the motes to move into the air system and allow themselves to be filtered out with the rest of the dust.
Then, was surprised at the relief that swept over her. It was disconcerting to realize just how uncomfortable she'd become with her role in this mission. She hadn't gotten the usual satisfaction seeing how neatly Ken and A.J. had followed her script. It had been almost painful to listen to them voicing their suspicions about her.
Jesus! I'm actually feeling guilty about this whole thing!
She shook her head and sighed. She still believed in her mission, even if she'd slowly come to detest it from a personal standpoint.
The worst aspect of the situation was that if she wanted to avoid the eventual confrontation, she had to hope that nothing particularly exciting or revelatory was discovered on this trip. Which meant that either way things went, her friends were going to end up disappointed-either in what they found in Phobos, or in what they found in her.
And this was the first time in her life that Madeline Fathom had had real friends.
Even possibly-she started to shy away from the thought, but forced herself not to-a romantic involvement that went beyond a brief and casual sexual liaison.
Madeline couldn't conceal from herself that the worst part of that whole conversation was the thought of them telling Joe, and the relief she'd felt when they decided not to tell anyone. For the first time in her life, she had an impulse to just get it over with-go to Ken, tell him the situation, and drop the whole thing in his lap. She sat in the chair, feeling one-third of a gravity pulling on her more heavily than anything she'd felt on Earth since she was nine years old.
What am I going to do about Joe?
She had no answer. Or, at least, no answer she liked.
Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor
Boundary
Chapter 34
"All rotation stopp
ed. Habitats secured and locked. All personnel report ready for acceleration."
"Understood." Captain Hathaway surveyed Nike's bridge to make sure everyone was properly seated and strapped in. While they wouldn't be taking extreme acceleration, "up" and "down" would no longer be in their accustomed directions. And there would be varying levels of acceleration; enough to be anything from inconvenient to dangerous for the unwary.
He hit the PA button. "Attention all hands."
That sounded sort of pompous, but he couldn't resist. It also sounded proper.
"We are about to begin deceleration in our approach to orbit. After the main burn, there will likely be two or three minor burns to match us with Phobos and then bring us to rest with respect to it. Following that, work crews will begin preparations for landing. We expect to land the first people on Phobos sometime tomorrow or the day after. Unless there's an emergency, please do not move around until the main burn is completed. We don't want any accidents. We're all healthy and ready to get to work, and we don't need anything getting in the way of that."
The presence of a number of humans in the bridge area was more a security blanket and backup than anything else. The precise burn durations and vectors had been calculated and recalculated dozens of times, and were updated daily to account for any departure from the original assumptions. Nike knew exactly when to turn, exactly when to fire her mighty engines and for precisely how long. Unless something went wrong, neither Hathaway nor anyone else on board would have to lift a finger during the entire process.
The only expected partially-manual work when it came to flying Nike was going to be closing the distance with Phobos. The automatic orbit-matching was deliberately designed to leave a considerable distance between the ship and the little moon, just in case something did go wrong. Like the tiny Faeries before her, Nike would use ion drives to close the distance after matching the basic orbit.
Unlike the Faeries and Pirate, however, Nike had the fuel and power to match orbits through its own efforts, rather than requiring atmospheric braking. That was necessary, because the design challenges involved in making a spacecraft the size, shape, and complexity of Nike able to survive atmospheric braking were something to give even modern computers major, major headaches. Dr. Gupta didn't think it could be done at all, in the absence of science-fictional deflector shields or unobtainium hulls.
A faint vibration ran through the ship, and suddenly a deep-throated roar thundered through Nike. The nuclear engines had awakened for the first time in months. Six columns of nuclear-powered fire now blazed astern, pitting themselves against the miles-per-second momentum of the huge ship.
In space there was no sound. But vibration at that level transmitted itself through the main hull and reverberated in the atmosphere of the bridge. There was certainly sound in Nike herself. Ken was pressed back into the cushions of his seat at nearly half Earth-normal acceleration-which felt much greater to a body used to Martian levels of gravity after many weeks in space.
Displays showed the decrease in velocity, the approach of the vessel toward its intended orbit, Phobos approaching in simulation. Another showed the approach of Nike as seen from Phobos itself, a blaze of light from what had been something barely more than another star a moment before. A.J. had two of the Faeries positioned to record the entire approach and eventual landings for posterity.
The live view from a rear-facing boom camera, projected on the main window's active display, showed Phobos swelling. Starting at the size of a misshapen Luna from Earth, by now the moonlet was nearly twice that size.
The sharp gray-black shadowed surface suddenly looked menacing to Ken. Twenty kilometers was miniscule on the astronomical scale, but when compared to Nike it was immense. From that perspective, Phobos was a mass of rock nearly fifty times Nike's length. It was a flying mountain the size of ten Everests mashed together, where an alien race had built a base-and had then died from an unknown catastrophe sixty-five million years before.
Perhaps Phobos had devoured them. The moonlet made Ken think of a gigantic sea beast, rising from the black depths.
He dismissed the grotesque notion. There were enough genuine hazards without inventing fantastical ones. "Engine status?"
"All engines showing green," Jackie answered. "Not that you needed to ask, really. If anything goes wrong, about a dozen alarms will scream their heads off."
"Will you at least let me pretend to be a real captain?"
"Aye aye, sir." Jackie got a false-solemn look on her face. "We're approaching the alien base, Captain. Should we raise shields?"
"Very funny. How are we tracking?"
"Well within tolerances. About four hundred seconds of burn left to go. Relative velocity has dropped below two point five kilometers per second."
The freight-train roar continued, the nuclear engines hurling more than three tons of fuel into space every second at an exhaust velocity of nearly twenty thousand miles per hour. Phobos was enormous and still swelling, now a hulking presence more than ten times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth. Even more than before, the satellite reminded Ken of a monster-with the five-mile-wide crater of Stickney being its single, glaring, off-center eye.
"How big is that going to get before we stop?" Ken wondered idly, trying not to sound at all nervous.
The problem with Phobos was that it was on a scale that the human mind could-just barely-grasp, as opposed to the Earth or the Moon. Something like that approaching touched a very primal chord.
"About seven point one six degrees-more than fourteen times wider than the Moon looks," A.J. answered, from his own console. "Being a hundred miles away is pretty far, sure, but that thing is twenty kilometers wide. It looks a hell of a lot bigger than it did in the photos back home, I can tell you that."
He turned his head and flashed Ken a wicked grin. "Lives up to its name Fear, doesn't it? Especially with that crater staring at us! Reminds me of some sort of gigantic Cyclops."
"Shut up, will you?" Hathaway growled. "I was trying not to think the same thing."
The blaze of Nike now covered measurable width on Rane's image; six separate tiny jets were visible.
"Sixty seconds left… thirty… ten… five, four, three, two, one, ze-"
The rockets cut off as Jackie was in mid word. Ken felt a momentary disorientation as free fall returned. Phobos loomed before them, but no longer did the barren miniature moon swell like a slowly inflating balloon.
"Relative speed with respect to Phobos?"
"Waiting on verification…" A.J. answered. "Okay, near zero. Very near zero. Let's just say that if we were staking Nike out in the yard like a dog, it'd be a week before she reached the end of her chain. Not bad for a shot across a hundred million miles. Starting closing calculations now."
Ken hit the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have stopped relative to Phobos. We have successfully completed the first interplanetary voyage in the history of mankind. Congratulations!"
He didn't need the intercom to hear the cheers.
Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor
Boundary
PART VI: PHOBOS
Surmise, n: a matter of conjecture; an idea or thought of something as being possible or likely, often coming unexpectedly or by surprise.
Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor
Boundary
Chapter 35
"One… two… three!"
On three, Joe and Harry Ingram pulled hard on the levers, each held from moving by the bracing they were strapped into. Jobs like this could be done using automatic machinery, but automated drones were much better for doing the more controlled and predictable gruntwork of sealing, insulating, and making livable portions of Phobos. If human muscle and mechanical advantage couldn't do the job here, they could always use some of the fancier powered equipment.
No need, Joe saw with satisfaction, as the alien doorway ground partly open for the first time in over sixty million years. Ingram, who'd done more work of this sort than Joe, unsnapped part of hi
s harness expertly and rotated his body around, shining a bright LED flashlight into the room.
"Clear on the near side, nothing in the way. Looks interestingnot a duplicate of any of the other rooms we've seen so far. Let's get the door open a little further."
Joe nodded, noting to himself that it was a lot more comfortable doing stuff like this when you could use the best equipment. The Ares Project had planned on using the best spacesuit designs it could afford, of course, but when you are strapped for cash, what you can afford isn't the same thing as what a government agency with a top-level mandate and effectively unlimited credit can afford. The spacesuits worn by Nike's personnel were lighter, thinner, tougher, more efficient, and more versatile than anything Ares could possibly have managed.
The suit's main advantages came from its incorporation of a carbon nanotube-derived fiber weave manufactured (at currently ruinous cost and mostly for military applications) by the Tayler Corporation. The "carbonan" reinforcement layers made the suits virtually impenetrable by any accident short of being struck by a meteor or shot by a heavy-duty firearm. The integrated electronics, "smart" sensors, recycling systems, and other bells and whistles had even forced A.J. to grudgingly admit that he couldn't have programmed their suits to be as effective; the integrated processor power simply wouldn't have been there.
Similar top-end designs were being tested by the military as powered battlefield armor. Due to a strong preference for saving power in space for other functions, however, there were no provisions for boosting the user's strength in the Tayler spacesuits. But there were ports to connect the suit to various other devices to control and even power them, as well as distributed sensors to track conditions around the wearer.
