John Rankine - Dag Fletcher 01

by The Ring of Garamas

  She watched him out into the pressure lock and heard Cotgrave say, “Good luck, Commander.”

  Sealed in the pressure lock, Fletcher reckoned he would need all the luck there was about. He could see his own face reflected on a polished bulkhead, elongated by curvature, a long thin stranger.

  Crossing from ship to ship in deep space had never become routine. It underlined dependence on life-support systems. Cosmic loneliness invaded the mind, he became conscious of his hands and the small movements it would take to make a quietus, with body liquids boiling off and tissues exploding apart.

  He had to make conscious effort to follow the drill.

  He fired a line across to Europa’s lock and saw the prehensile grab close on a holdfast. Then he snapped on a toggle from his belt and shoved off.

  Outside Europa’s lock, he unhooked the thin nylon line and saw it whip back, spring loaded over the backdrop of infinite, violet-black depth. So many multicoloured sequins of distant light. More worlds than there were grains of sand on Earth’s planet. Action or inaction, all was one in this setting. Here was the still centre of the dance, the silence at the core of music, the ultimate confrontation. What could it matter what he did or Varley said?

  Xenia’s voice spoke quietly inside his head, using Fingalnan which he hardly knew; but the sense was crystal clear, “It matters to us. We are all we have. We are all there is.”

  Then he was inside and a yeoman was leading him along familiar trunks to Varley’s day cabin.

  Concluding what had been a gruelling session, Varley left the psychological vantage point of his executive desk and stumped round to the front.

  Changing ground changed his mood and Fletcher knew that he had made out. The tone was still staccato and short on Charisma; but it was a point or two down on the acidity scale.

  Varley said, “I’m bound to log you, Commander. There was danger to the squadron, quite apart from the danger to Petrel. McCool was ready to blast you. You know that? In his place, you would have done it, no doubt. I see your point, don’t think I don’t appreciate it. But no more risks with my ships. There’ll be action enough to shake your crew down into a combat team. Squadron conference in fifteen minutes.

  Take a look around and get to know what Europa’s control centre has to offer. Call your ship and order a stand down. We may be some time. I’ll reserve judgement.”

  Round the conference table, set up under an acoustic canopy in Europa’s command centre, Fletcher had a mixed reception. Cameron, sitting across, lifted two spatulate thumbs and grinned an unreserved welcome. Grant Crawford, Varley’s staff lieutenant, a dark, muscular type looking like an intellectual weightlifter in his silver grey inner suit, followed the party line and confined his greeting to a non-committal nod. Next to him Colonel Franklin the marine detachment commander and only known to Fletcher by sight, sat stiff as a ramrod and tapped the table in a monotonous, isochronous beat with a silver pencil and looked straight ahead. Cooper and Simpson hardly looked up from their order papers. Anything past was gone for them. Driscoll, heavy shoulders hunched forward and hands stretched out in front of him on the table top said, “If ever I’m tired of life, I’ll get a transfer to your outfit, Fletcher.”

  “Do that.”

  Dag Fletcher was only half listening. The order paper had his attention. Whatever the higher echelons thought about Terrapin and more recently about his unorthodox joining procedures, they had cast him for a very dicey role in the latest exercise.

  Varley cut through with, “You have the detail there, gentlemen. Crawford show us the ground.”

  Lights dimmed, a three-sided screen extruded from the deck a metre behind Varley’s chair and he swivelled round to look at it. Crawford fed a prepared tape into his console and Garamas appeared three-dimensionally in the alcove.

  It was a full relief job and turned slowly on its axis to show every feature. The usual layout of land masses was plain to see.

  For case of reference, a latitude-longitude grid and the familiar Earth pattern had been superimposed in a glowing trace, with the meridian running through Kristinobyl.

  Seen close, the dark line of the power ring seemed an obvious and feasible development. The land mass, all in tropical latitudes, running between fifteen and twenty degrees north and south of the equator was virtually unbroken except for a single rift valley, sited within twenty kilometres of the one-six-five longitude line. Running due north and south, at right angles to the equator, only mountainous ridges along the coasts held the sea back from running through to make a passage between the two huge oceans.

  A seafaring people might have blasted out a navigable channel. But Garamas was land-orientated.

  Communication across the seas had never been important.

  Crawford stopped the spin of the globe and zoomed in on the Grand Canyon. Outer area peeled away as magnification stepped up. The surface of Garamas was unfolding like a flower in time-lapse photography. Here it was utterly dissimilar from the bland downland that surrounded Kristinobyl. It was a harsh world of burning sun and drought.

  A running strip showed the build up of environmental factors. Temperature in the outlying areas was knocking sixty degrees Celsius and still rising.

  There was no sound from round the table. Every last one had come to planet falls on bizarre and mind-bruising terrain. But this, being set in a habitable planet, seemed unbelievable by contrast with the rest. It was as though all the geological frenzy that convulsed any cooling star, had been concentrated in this one place. Demoniac force had wrenched and twisted the crust, creating huge fault blocks which had tilted and shouldered up in angular fragments. Grit laden winds had ground edges to razor sharp blades.

  Colour rioted through the strata. Brilliant blue, veridian, bands of rose madder, streaks and bars of cadmium yellow, all set in the dead black of later basalt formations. Heat eddies distorted the picture, jumbled the lot into an iridescent shimmer.

  Crawford was moving along. It was all of a piece. Slice it anywhere and it stood for anti-life. Nobody in their right mind would want to go there.

  Even before the viewing eye picked up the spectacular, engineering marvel of the Ring of Garamas, Fletcher had felt the nudge of a sixth sense. This was it. The descent into hell. This was the point of the exercise. Varley had already chosen his ground to do a little sabotage. He was, as Duvorac would have said, hoist with his own petard. He was the one who would be there, on the site, sweating into his visor.

  Having conceded that, he was struck, as everyone there present was, by the sheer magnificence of the engineering project which had carried the globe-trotting power circuit across the waste.

  The visible surface of the conductor was a white tube on a four metre diameter. Crossing the desert it had run underground and appeared to come from a point ten or twelve metres below the ragged lip of the crevasse. It was supported over the gap on three spidery suspension spans, with two support towers keyed into handy pinnacles that sprang like jagged molars from the distant valley bottom.

  There was no surprise that the building of the ring had exhausted Garamas for a generation. This pitch alone was a fantastic national project. Scars on the sand, scattered in a kilometre arc showed the size of the support camp that had once been built to house the labour force. Unless they used salamanders, it would have to have been under heat control for a start.

  As they watched, a small platform with a curved undersection that hugged the sides of the white tube came into vision, moving out from below the overhang and Crawford used his last magnification to bring it close.

  Even at that, detail was not too clear. But Cooper, who had reached command by way of the engineering sector, said, “Lubricant. Or painting. Painting I’d guess. Exposed like that, to that heat, it needs round-the-clock maintenance. Probably sprays located inside the hoop. Runs out the other side and back at fixed intervals. That would be too important to leave to robot gear. There’ll be a duty crew.”

  “Thank you, Commander. That’s
how I see it.” Varley signalled to Crawford and the picture folded in on itself and disappeared. Visual aids were okay; but Varley had learned from experience that it paid to switch off, when there was speaking to do.

  He waited until every eye was on him and went on, “For reasons which are too detailed to set out, it is essential to make a break in the Garamasian power system. We shall do it there. You will ask why I choose that point.”

  Nobody did, but every face showed that it was a good question.

  “In the first place it will cause maximum difficulty from a repair point of view. In the second place and most important, it is virtually the only place where it can be done without revealing our identity. That is crucial to the exercise. At all costs and I repeat, all costs, it must not be known that an I.G.O. force is involved. I am outlining the plan to all commanders, though only one ship will go in. The rest will have a support role and must know what is involved.”

  Driscoll, a natural for asking the obvious question, said, “But surely, Admiral, any ship in the gravisphere will be identified before she makes a planetfall.”

  “So I believed, Commander. But not so. There is one blind vector. In the brief electrical disturbance which occurs at twilight, tracking gear is jammed. Timing will have to be dead right; but there is an interval long enough for a ship to get in. The squadron will assist by laying decoy flares over the opposite hemisphere. Detail has to be worked out and I want you to think about it and bring up any suggestion that you have.”

  Varley activated the screen for himself and brought up the picture again. “Broadly speaking, this is the plan. Our ship will go in farther along the rift. There is a place where the bottom is clear for a hectare.

  About a hundred kilometres nearer the north coast. That means she will not be seen from the bridge post.

  She will come down on the floor of the canyon. Observe radio silence. Show no light. A cutting-out party will use the scout car and fly along the gorge, to reach the bridge area before daylight. There, they will wait until midday. At that time a relief maintenance crew arrives for a twenty four hour duty period. Then they will seize the post, blow the cable at the middle section and return by the quickest route to the ship.

  Blast off will be timed again to the mid-dusk period.”

  He switched off and there was a digestive silence.

  Cameron broke it, for once deadly serious, “It’s a bonny scheme, Admiral. No reason against it working out. But once the cable goes, there’ll be a fine scurry to that site. They’ll work along either way to take a look. They’ll surely find the ship.”

  Frazer answered him, “There’ll not be as much rush as you might think. Only special craft can land in that area. I’d say thirty minutes before the nearest maintenance unit is ready to leave. That’s located south-west in Velchanos, over a thousand kilometres distant. Our ship will have pulled out before they arrive.”

  There was only the sixty thousand dollar question hanging about and Fletcher reckoned he knew the answer. He was the least surprised round the table when Varley said, “It only remains to detail the corvette. Petrel will go in. Being a short mission, I do not propose to increase the technical crew. Berths will be filled by a military detachment. Five commandos with sabotage experience and an officer, I leave that detail to Colonel Franklin.

  Petrel was suddenly full of supercargo. Fletcher left it to Cotgrave to settle them in. On a forty-eight hour mission there was no problem about permanent quarters, they would get what sleep there would be in the acceleration couches, at battle stations.

  Each section had its lay figure cocooned in steely grey, hung about with small arms and miscellaneous gear like so many tinkers’ mules.

  Their top hand, Abe Carrick, a small burly type, rounded out like a Michelin tyre man with Lieutenant’s, flashes on his gauntlets said, “Forget about us, Commander, we’re used to waiting. Just get on with the driving bit and give us a cookhouse call every so often.”

  It was a nice touch of confidence and Fletcher reckoned it could easily be misplaced.

  He had a full hook-up with Europa’s computers and could draw on advice from some of the best navigators in the business; but the problem was the most complex he had ever faced. He had to hit a tennis court at the bottom of a gorge without a proving orbit to line himself up and with the penalty for a near miss being total loss of his ship. Fractional misjudgement would impale Petrel on any one of a collection of needle sharp spars that stuck out from the tortured rock in random disarray.

  That would mean not only another ship written off, but the whole safari blown sky high. Literally so.

  Varley had been explicit on that point. “One last thing, Fletcher. If you can’t get out, at the right time, that is six hours after the ring is cut, blow the ship. Complete destruction. Not a square centimetre for identification.”

  “Personnel?”

  “What do you think? Where would you go without a ship? Total destruction. I’m sorry; but that’s the way it has to be.”

  The Squadron was strung out in line astern, led by Hawk, in so far as direction had meaning in the vacant interstellar places. Petrel trailed fifty kilometres back, with its navigators running a final check on calculations which allowed no margin for error.

  When he was set, Dag Fletcher called Varley on a personal hook up. “Ready to go Admiral. Request permission to detach.”

  “Granted, Commander. Remember, you’re on your own. We can’t pull you out if anything goes wrong.

  Officially I should know nothing about it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good luck, I’m sure I’ve got the right man.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  Petrel arrowed off like a pointer in an animated diagram.

  Command settled like a shroud over Fletcher. It was once again totally up to him, without any filter or intervening agency. Every part of the ship was present as a blue print in his head. It was his habit, when his mind was off load, to run through the modules from the fire turret below the cone to the freight bay above the tripod jacks, ticking off personnel, estimating readiness. He had gotten it to a fine art with Terrapin, seeing the ship down to the fine grain finish of the wardroom table.

  With Petrel, it was more difficult; but he worked along to his own cabin with fair success. There, however, he stuck with a considerable question mark hanging over the area and enough emotional overtone to have him grabbing for the intercom.

  In all the orderly turmoil of coming and going and settling the final details of the assault, nobody had mentioned Xenia.

  Unless Crawford or some other had whipped her out unknown to him, she was still there, sitting on her trim, silvery can in exemplary patience.

  The command cabin was overfull for private chat and seemed suddenly even more crowded when her voice came back with bell-like clarity to the inside of his visor, “Harree, I’m tired of looking at these leetle star maps on your roof. When are you coming to your bed?”

  Fletcher slammed a run of figures through his computer. Course changes, times for a trip across to Europa. New start. It was not on. As it was, he needed every minute to be in the right vector. There was no tolerance left. She would have to stay. It was something else to notch up Varley’s blood pressure.

  Cotgrave was looking his question, as one fish to another in neighbouring tanks. There was, anyway, no possible chance of concealing even a small stowaway on a fully manned corvette.

  Fletcher switched direct to his co-pilot, “We still have our spy. She was not transferred to Europa.”

  Reaction was immediate and one more proof that Cotgrave had identified with him in a team situation,

  “My fault, Commander. I should have fixed that. I got involved settling in the marines. Not to worry. It’s only another forty-eight hours for her. She can serve the coffee in the wardroom. Make a change for all hands.”

  “I’m glad you think so. Stand down for one hour. Minimum movement about the ship. I’ll go and tell her the score.
”

  On the way, he visited every module from the subsidiary command post below the power pack, to the small gunnery control in the turret where Carrick had made his quarters. It was necessary, but he wondered how much of it was a simple delaying tactic to keep away from his cabin.

  Finally he knew she had to be faced and when he slid back the hatch, he reckoned he had been wasting his time.

  There was a non-military smell of some exotic powder that she had used inside her suit which was lying over a chair ready for instant use. She was busy at the small wall mirror dramatising her eye make up, wearing brief triangular pants in lime green as a big gesture to the rough military life. But although as feminine as a girl could well get there was not an atom of sex tension in the dielectric.

  It was a mission and there was work to do. Even when she turned to greet him and looked pleased to see him, there was no erotic overtone about. “There you are, at last. Don’t blame yourself. I wanted to come and I deeleeberately kept out of the way. I have a feeling here—” this time a delicate finger tapped her forehead—“that you weel need me on thees affair. We work together like your Charley and Joan.”

  “That’s as maybe. But right now, if you want to help you can get dressed and go along to the wardroom.

  Like that you’d disturb the crew’s concentration.”

  “I know that. Evereebodee eesn’t cold and eenteelectual like you Harree. You’ll see, I weell be a beeg help. A shield for your backside.”

  Petrel was dropping like a silent stone. Fletcher was a machine, an extension of the electronic gear that had lined them up unerringly on the selected target. His voice was metallic as any robot’s as he reeled off the last instructions, holding back retro until the dark lips of the gorge were filling the main scanner.

  When Engels fired his motors with a reflex that cut every record for the move, the set was bathed in a brilliant orange that brought up detail in a lurid spotlight on a neglected corner of hell.