Boundary b-1

by Eric Flint

  Helen shook her head. "No, I'm not sure what they were shooting at, but it certainly wasn't a bunch of civilized dinosaurs."

  "Do you think there might be traces around Chicxulub?" asked Jane.

  A.J. shook his head doubtfully. "Dunno. I wouldn't think so, but then we don't know what the hell they were throwing asteroids at.

  Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones in R'lyeh? It's possible, I suppose, if whatever they were fighting was built really well. The impact might well have killed everyone off but left some pieces we could recognize if we're looking for them."

  He stopped and waited expectantly.

  Then she realized they were all staring at her, waiting.

  Mentally she kicked herself. "Oh, I'm sorry. You're waiting for my approval. Please, go ahead, transmit this. It doesn't give away any useful technical details, which is all I'm officially assigned to watch for. And-who knows?-somebody might decide to go excavate Chi.. . Chick… Chicken Little. Whatever. Once you tell them."

  "Chicxulub," Helen said, enunciating the syllables through a wide smile. "All right, Rich, Jane, we have a joint paper to write, as we're just about squarely in the middle of all our disciplines."

  As Helen and the two linguists launched into a discussion of the projected paper, A.J. left the table and came over to Madeline.

  "Thanks," he said quietly. "I figured there wouldn't be a problem, but you did stick yourself with the job of clearing everything."

  "Yes, I did." She frowned. "Actually, I am concerned about this, although I see no reason to keep it secret. I've heard the arguments as to why we aren't going to meet Bemmius or any of his relatives, after all this time, and I'd presume all those arguments apply to any other species that were contemporaneous with them as well. But, still, I have to wonder-if they were fighting something that existed on more than one world at once, wouldn't that something else also be able to detect and stop things like that? And if so, how do you manage to hit them with falling rocks?"

  "Yeah. That is a question. Maybe we'll get an answer when we look over the rest of the base and start sifting through the pieces that remain of the puzzle." A. J. shook his head. "Wouldn't that have been a hell of a fight to see?"

  "It would," Madeline said quietly. "Pray that we don't."

  She saw by the sudden widening of his eyes that he had abruptly made the connection to her job. "Yes, that is what I have to think about. Every day."

  "You can't prevent scientific progress, though-or hide technology forever." His tone wasn't mocking, but serious. "In the end, people will find out anything you're trying to hide, and there's no way you can keep them from using it. You do realize that, don't you? Or do you actually believe that you can stuff the genie back into the bottle?"

  "Yes. No. Most of the time, maybe and maybe not. And some days I'm not sure what I believe anymore. I'm sorry this whole situation exists, A.J., I really am. But I'm also very much afraid of what might happen to the world if certain things get out of control."

  "Can't say I entirely blame you. Joe says you have good reasons, and I trust Joe. Speaking of which, go see him."

  She looked away. "He told me not to speak to him. 'For a while,' he said. But since I don't know what that means, I thought I should let him decide."

  "Yeah, I know. But…"

  A.J. seemed torn. He started to reach for her arm, obviously to lead her out of the conference room. Then, drew it back sharply, as if he'd spotted a viper.

  "Jesus!" she heard him hiss. "I lay so much as a finger on you, Helen will have my scalp."

  A.J. turned the dramatic withdrawal of his hand into an equally dramatic gesture of invitation. "C'mon, Madeline, let's go somewhere else to talk. Ladies first."

  As she preceded him out of the room, Madeline found herself in a good humor for the first time in days. Once they were in the corridor beyond, she looked at him over her shoulder.

  "Did she really make you sleep on the couch?"

  "Sure did. And let me tell you, even at one-third gravity that couch was lumpy."

  "Good for her!"

  A.J. smiled. "Funny. That's exactly what she said about you. We gotta veritable feminazi Waffen SS on this moon."

  Madeline grinned at him. Despite their little brawl-if something so one-sided could be given the term-she liked A.J. Baker. And was glad to see that whatever animosity had existed seemed to have faded away.

  He grinned back, although the look in his eyes had something of calculation in them. "Look, I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Helen's right and I was way out of line. Even if-"

  For just an instant, he looked like a falsely-accused six-year-old boy. "I still think Helen's nuts to accuse me of trying to beat on a woman. I was just going to grab you by the shoulder, stop you. And besides…"

  The calculation was back in his eyes. "I never had a chance, did I? Even if I had really been trying to get you."

  "To be honest? Not a cold chance in hell."

  "Didn't think so. What exactly are you, anyway? Seventh dan? Eighth dan? Ninth dan?"

  Madeline shook her head. "The terms don't mean anything, in the schools I finished my training with. They weren't even schools, really. By the end I was learning one-on-one from the best senseis I could find, in whatever school-and none of them are people you'll ever see mentioned in the martial arts magazines. They pay no attention to that ranking business at all. They either decide to teach you, or they don't. The move I threw you into the wall with, I learned from a seventy-four-year-old Okinawan during the months I was on the island. Never mind what I was doing there. He was almost a hermit, having spent his whole life studying the art. Didn't speak a word of English or any other language I knew."

  A.J. winced. "Oh, Lord. You're talking about a whole 'nother league, aren't you?"

  "About as different as the major leagues are from double-A. The truth is, A.J., I'm about as far out on the bleeding edge of that skill as you are with your own specialty. Of course, with their greater strength, reach, and mass, there are some men in the world who could beat me in a fight. A handful of women, too. But you aren't one of them. Not even close, frankly."

  She swallowed. "Ask Joe about it, if you want. Tell him I said it was okay. There's a reason that martial arts are an obsession for me. He knows what it is."

  "Okay, I will. And, uh…"

  Madeline smiled. "Oh, certainly. Since you're being such a gentleman about it, I'll let Helen know that I wasn't really in any danger of suffering from male chauvinist abuse."

  "Thanks." There was silence, for a moment. Then Madeline swallowed again. "I think you were going to say something…"

  "Yeah. Go talk to him. Now. Forget that 'in a while' business. He doesn't know what it means, either, and knowing Joe-which I do-by now he'll have convinced himself that if he approaches you he'll be rudely encroaching on the space he insisted you keep around you so that means he'd be acting like a jerk since he insisted on it in the first place and Joe can't stand the thought of being rude. The dummy. There are advantages, you know, to letting it all hang out the way I do."

  Her eyes were almost crossed. "I understand what you're saying. But don't ever say that in front of a grammarian. That's the most twisted sentence I ever heard."

  A.J. smiled, but it was a thin business. "There's one thing, though, Madeline. Joe's my best friend, and… dammit, don't you play with him."

  She was genuinely shocked. "'Play'? I don't-"

  He waved his hand impatiently. "I didn't say it right. I know you're not toying with him. That's not what I meant. What I meant was that I've never seen Joe get this hung up on a woman, and I've known him for a long time. And what that means is that nothing'll work unless you're willing to be as serious about it as he will. And I'm really not sure you can do that, Madeline. Or, to put it another way-being my usual crude self-will those unnamed and mysterious people you work for let you do that?"

  "Oh." She started to make a quick response, but then forced herself to think about it.

  "I don't know," s
he said finally. "But that's not really the issue. If I decide… They-he-can't really tell me what to do, and he knows it. If I decide, and he pushes me, I'll just quit."

  "'He'?"

  "My boss. Never mind his identity. It doesn't matter, A.J., because this has never been a job for me anyway. Not really."

  "Yeah, I understand. So what you're saying is that the real issue is what you decide to do."

  "Yes."

  Suddenly, he grinned as widely as Madeline had ever seen him do. "Well. That's a relief!" Again, her eyes were almost crossed. "Why? I never said what I would decide, A.J. I don't know myself yet."

  The grin never faded. "Sure. Of course. That's what the whole complicated business is about in the first place. So what? Whether you and Joe work anything out is between the two of you, period. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But that's all I wanted to know. That the only person inside of you is you. If you understand what I mean. Not somebody else, pulling the strings."

  Her jaws tightened. "Nobody else ever pulls my strings."

  "Oh, good. Well, that being the case-if you'll pardon me for taking the liberty-I guess it's okay for me to give you a push."

  He reached out, planted his hands on her shoulders, turned her around, and gave her a little shove. Even as gentle as the motion was, with his much greater mass she found herself moving rather quickly down the hallway. Microgravity still seemed weird to her, sometimes.

  "So go talk to him," his voice followed. "Now."

  Madeline didn't quite follow his orders. First, because Joe was still on the Nike, so it took her several hours to get there. Second, because she made a brief stop at her own cabin.

  When she left the cabin, she felt a bit like an idiot. There was something just plain ridiculous about a secret agent superspy carrying a hope chest. Of a sort.

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  Chapter 38

  Joe Buckley sat in his cabin, looking out at the stars, and at Phobos as the giant space rock moved in and out of view with Nike's rotation. The new Gourmet Illustrated Quarterly glowed from his cabin display. Blinking in irritation, Joe pulled his attention from the eternal circling panorama and focused on the magazine. It dawned on him that he wasn't even sure where he'd left off. "Again. Damn."

  He just didn't seem to find the recipes as interesting as he used to. Granted, he had a lot less opportunity to test things out on board Nike, even as well-equipped as the ship was. Still, he'd never found himself bored with reading new approaches or new ways to use the old ones.

  With a sigh, he started flipping through his collection of movies and series. Madeline would've liked As soon as that thought intruded again, he gave a sound somewhere between a growl and a snort and stood up. A bit too fast, unfortunately. He bounced nearly three feet into the air, a mistake he hadn't made for months.

  He considered going down to see how things were coming in engineering analysis. Room R-17 had contained what appeared to be a sort of vehicle, maybe a runabout or shuttle for Bemmius. Joe, Gupta, Jackie, and A.J. had been working on analyzing the thing from an engineering standpoint, using A.J.'s sensors and the engineering expertise of the others.

  He was off-shift for another six hours, but it wasn't like he was getting anything accomplished here. He'd like to see what Mayhew and Skibow were up to, but he was temporarily persona non grata with the linguists ever since he'd gotten distracted for a moment while salvaging some noteplaques and banged one into the wall. The sixty-five-million-year-old artifact had practically exploded into powder and fragments. A.J. was trying to reconstruct what was on that plaque from the images the suit sensors had picked up incidentally. But it was taking a while as there hadn't been an in-depth scan of that one, and in some cases he was having to piece together components from partial images in various scenes at differing ranges, resolutions, and wavelengths. This was especially annoying to the two linguists as there was fairly good reason to believe that the noteplaque in question had included a map for part of Mars.

  On the positive side, A.J. had pointed out, he and the rest of the physical sciences and engineering crew now had pieces of noteplaque to analyze without having to decide if they could afford to damage one. "You did that for us, Joe. Good work."

  The door chimed.

  Muttering something which was probably rude enough that it was a good thing no one else was there to hear it, Joe went to the door and opened it.

  Madeline stood there, looking up at him with huge blue eyes. For a moment he just stared at her. Then he turned away. "Look, I'm not ready to talk right now. Please go."

  After a moment, the door shut. He sighed and turned back to the case near the door, where he kept his spacesuit-and nearly ran over Madeline, who was standing just inside the door. "Madeline, what the hell-?"

  The blonde security agent still hadn't said a word, but from behind her back she produced an enormous bouquet of flowers- roses, irises, daisies-and a box of chocolates.

  The ironic inversion of the approach did not immediately strike Joe, as he was focused more on the utter impossibility of fresh flowers on board a ship nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.

  "Where in the universe did those come from?" He reached out and took the bouquet.

  Immediately he recognized that-as he should have assumed- the flowers were artificial. Yet he was still pretty sure that artificial flowers weren't among the cargo manifest for Nike. Atomic powered or not, every ounce of her cargo space had been allotted to useful things; even the decorative items brought on board had been selected for flexibility and long term use, not for casual ornamentation.

  There was a faint perfume to the flowers, though not, as far as he could tell, that of any one flower. A scent Madeline sometimes wore, now that he thought of it. He studied the flowers more closely, still trying to make sense of their presence. At very close range, he could see they were handmade, and from the oddest things. Stems from sections of tie-down cable, petals from various types of shrink-wrap and packing seals…

  He looked up slowly, incredulously. "You made these?"

  "Yes," she said softly, almost shyly. "I know it's kind of silly, but- "

  "How long did it take you to do this?"

  "Not all that long. Well, about a week. I spent my off hours working on them."

  "A week?" He glanced down at the chocolates. Those he knew were real, as he'd selected them himself. He also knew that on the Dessert Points scale that the crew had to abide by, that box represented about a full week's worth of desserts for Madeline-and she was someone who doted on chocolate.

  He looked from the box to the flowers to her face. Her gaze was calm, serious… yet very intense.

  "Why?" he asked, finally.

  "There isn't a standard ritual to make amends to a man that I know of. Some things haven't changed much in a hundred years, despite all the other advances. But this gets my point across. Can I talk to you now?"

  He gestured her further inside. "Sure, sure. Sit down. Um, have a chocolate."

  "Not right now, thanks."

  If she was turning down chocolate, she was serious. "Okay. Well. .. go ahead, talk. I'm kinda bad at this, and I wasn't ready."

  Madeline settled herself into one of the chairs across from Joe's sofa, where Joe had sat down, and then looked into his eyes. "Joe, you've always known that I was an intelligence agent. This job was given to me the day A.J. discovered this base, and that job was to control information. An agent doesn't allow her personal feelings to affect her work. In fact, smart agents don't allow themselves to have personal feelings at all during a mission."

  She gazed down at her hands, "I did, anyway, even though I knew it wasn't a good idea. But… oh, let's just say that mine is a lonely life. That didn't bother me for years. I'm still not sure why it started bothering me now. I think it's because all this time on the Nike project, especially since we left Earth, made me feel like I had something of a family. For the first time in my life, really."

  Her s
houlders seemed to twitch. "But whatever the reason, I did start having feelings for you that went way beyond anything an agent should have, for one of the people she is-I'll be blunt-assigned to watch over. I guess I'd hoped, somehow, I wouldn't have to do anything, so it would never get to be a problem." She shook her head. "A stupid hope. Either way it would have had a bad result-I have to intervene, and become the enemy, or I don't, because the entire mission finds nothing worthwhile.

  "And that's what I don't want my life to be, Joe. Finding nothing worthwhile."

  Joe stared at the small woman, trying to put his thoughts in order. As ever, Madeline was persuasive. Sincerity seemed to drip from every word. But Joe also knew that her professional skills made her a superb liar. A master of deceit, capable of convincing anyone that she was on their side, while she calmly worked against them. Or, if not against them, certainly not for them.

  Could be a superb liar, he corrected himself. The ability to do something didn't automatically mean it was exercised. And… did he really think she'd been lying to him all along? Or any of them, really?

  No. He knew the answer the moment he asked himself the question.

  He stood up and paced to the window, but ended up looking at her instead. "Madeline, I'm the kind of person who gets committed to things. And I guess what bothers me is that I don't know how I'd handle getting personally committed to someone who might well end up on the other side-the way I see it, anyway-of the life's work I've also committed myself to. You haven't gotten a response from your superiors yet, have you?"

  She shook her head. "Nothing concrete, one way or the other yet. There must be considerable arguing going on."

  "And what if they tell you to crack down?"

  "Then I will. Unless what he-they-define as 'cracking down' goes beyond what I'm willing to do. In which case"-the brilliant smile came, in full flashing force-"I guess I'll be the first case of interplanetary unemployment. Maybe I can get a job washing bottles for the chemists."