by Allen Wold
"It's not as bad as it might be," Scott answered. "Acceleration through your atmosphere simply caused excessive vibration, resulting in an electrothermal conduction which degaussed the gravity coils. Nothing has shorted, fortunately, though the lambda alignment is way off and polarity has reversed in several condensors."
"Great. Now, what exactly does that mean?"
"It means we don't have to use any replacement parts but can just retune the circuits."
"Thanks. So how long do you think that will take?"
"Just a couple of hours. First we have to isolate the faulty input channels and redirect the oscillator bus. We can't shut the whole thing down, which would be easier, or we'd lose power altogether."
"And what would that do?"
"All the lights would go out and suffocation would follow within fifteen minutes."
"No, we don't want to do that. But tell me, if you know that much about it, how come you're not doing it yourself?"
"Have you ever rebored the engine in your own car?"
"I get the point. Okay, but is there any way one of these technicians could blow up the ship with what they're doing?"
"Not at all. The worst that could happen would be to permanently disable the two engines we're working on."
"Thanks for the reassurance," Caleb said dryly.
"You needn't worry," Scott told him. "None of these people want to die, and they're not political fanatics."
"I'll have to take your word for it," Caleb Taylor said and went back to rejoin his friends. "Scott's got everything under control," he told them, and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
Juliet Parrish and Mike Donovan sat in the command center, holding hands, watching while Martin directed fifth columnists and other trustee technicians working at various control consoles. The process of flushing the contaminated atmosphere out of the ship was well under way, and only a few areas of the ship's atmospheric display panel were still red. Among those, of course, were the compartments in which the bodies of the Visitor soldiers had been temporarily stored.
Over at the communications console, Barbara was still trying to decode the signal coming from Diana's escape shuttle. Mike, tired of doing nothing, left Juliet and went over to ask Barbara how it was going.
"No luck so far," Barbara told him, "and I don't really expect to break it. It's a code like your public key code, based on very large prime numbers, a million digits long at least."
"Then breaking the code is impossible," Donovan said. "It would take more years than the universe has already existed to try all the possible factors."
"That's true, but it turns out there's an algorithm that can test at least for the range of the primes. Given ten years or so, I think we could break it. The real security lies in changing the code once a year."
"That doesn't really leave us much better off. Can you tell at least where the signal is coming from?"
"The signal source is still moving toward the moon, but remember, while the escape shuttle has lots of power, it won't last long. She's turned off her engines and is coasting now."
Meanwhile, Juliet had gone over to see how Martin was progressing in flushing out the contaminated atmosphere.
"Another hour or so should do it," he told her.
"What about the compartments where the bodies are stored?" Julie asked.
"We'll have to manually rig special exhaust ducts," he said, "but we don't have to worry about them now, at least as far as the toxin is concerned. The real problem will be that the bodies will have begun to decay by the time we get to them. That will be a real mess."
Barbara, at her console, looked up at them. "We can't just leave them there forever," she said.
"What do you do with your dead?" Mike asked her. "You don't eat them, do you?"
"No," Barbara answered, "we're not cannibals, though we may seem like that to you. We bury our dead." She looked at him with silent pleading. "Can we do that when we get back?"
"Of course," Juliet said, coming over to her. "I guess it's been hard for us to realize that you've lost friends too."
"Having to fight your own kind is not easy," Barbara said.
"No, it isn't," Mike Donovan said. "Those kinds of wars can be the worst. Our country had its Civil War, with brother fighting brother, not just friend against friend. The scars remain even after more than a century."
"Wait a minute," Barbara said, turning back to the console. There was a subtle but distinct difference in the signal. "I think someone is trying to get through to us on the same wavelength."
"You're right," Julie said. "That sounds like a voice, but the code signal is so strong I can't make out what they're saying."
Barbara turned up the volume, but the code signal became louder too, and the second signal was so weak that the words, whatever they were, were completely obscured.
"I think it's in English," Donovan said uncertainly.
"Yes," Julie said. "Let me listen." Her face showed the effort of her concentration. "Or maybe it's Dutch," she said, or German. Can't you do anything to bring it in clearer?" she asked Barbara.
"I'm trying," Barbara said, delicately touching the dials. "It's no good. If it were even a few cycles different, I could filter the code out, but it's on exactly the same wavelength."
"It has to be somebody back at the base," Mike said. "That means they're receiving the code signal too. We have to try to get in touch with them to let them know we're all right."
"I'll try," Barbara said, and bent over her controls.
"What's going on?" Elias Taylor asked, coming up to where Juliet Parrish and Mike Donovan were standing as they watched Barbara trying to get a message through.
"I think our base is trying to contact us," Donovan said, "but Diana's code signal is drowning them out."
"I wish we knew what was going on," Juliet said. "We don't even know if the balloons were successful in spreading the toxin."
"I'm not worried about that," Elias said. "Ham Tyler may be a purebred son of a bitch, but he was in charge of the balloons, and he knows what he's doing." Mike Donovan nodded agreement. "It's what's happened to the rest of the country that I'm concerned about," Elias went on. "I mean, from what I saw happening down there, if I wanted to go back to my old trade, I could make a fortune. Black market, dope, you name it. But I've kind of lost the taste for that kind of thing. What am I going to do for a living after this is all over?"
"I guess we haven't had much time to think about that," Donovan agreed. "But you're right. The most important and powerful people in government, both state and federal, were converted by the Visitors. How are they going to behave without the Visitors to control them?"
"My god, Mike," Julie said, "you're right. And those who couldn't be converted are somewhere on this ship, down in the storage holds."
"But worse," Elias said, "the people back home don't know that their President, their senators and governors are Visitor puppets with their strings cut. They'll think, now that the Visitors are gone everything's back to normal."
"The shooting may be over," Mike said grimly, "but the war isn't even half won."
The sudden silence in the command center caught everybody's attention.
"What happened?" Elias Taylor asked, speaking for them all.
"Diana's signal has stopped," Barbara said. "The escape shuttle must have used up its limited power."
"Unless Diana was rescued," Mike suggested.
"By whom?" Julie asked. "All the other ships have gone back to Sirius."
"As far as we know," Barbara cautioned. She turned to another set of instruments. "A Mother Ship," she said after a moment, "is big enough that we could detect it from here if it were anywhere near Diana's escape shuttle, but there's nothing out there, so Diana can't have been rescued."
"Then she's dead," Elias said.
"I'm not going to lay any bets on that," Mike Donovan told him. "Goddamn it, when are we going to get power? We don't know what she was saying, or to whom. We've got to get to her."
"I agree," Julie said. She crossed the command center to Martin. "Do we have power yet?" she asked.
Martin looked at her a moment, then moved to another console. He flipped switches and examined the telltales which lit up.
"Not yet," he told her. "Both the engines that went down are completely out of the circuit, so I'd guess they're still working on them. No, wait ..." One light changed from orange to blue, and another bank that had been dark came on yellow. "Engine four is back on line," he said. "And it seems to be operational." One by one the yellow lights turned blue. Then another bank of telltales lit up. "Yes," he said. "We've got power on all systems now." He stood away from his console, relief plain on his face. "We can go back to Earth now," he said.
"Not just yet," Elias said, crossing over to him. He looked in Mike and Julie for confirmation. "First we get Diana, right?" His two friends nodded.
"All right," Martin said. "Barbara, you have the coordinates?"
"I'm feeding them in now," Barbara told him.
"Good. We'll be within a mile of her last position in twenty minutes."
Chapter 3
The plant where human beings had been put into suspended animation before being stowed aboard the Mother Ship seemed deserted. No lights shone in the darkness, there was no sound of machinery. The gates in the fence that surrounded the place were closed but unlocked. The damage the rebels had caused in their abortive raid some months back had been repaired, and there were no signs of subsequent fighting. Isolated as it was from the rest of the community, it had not suffered vigilante wrath following the departure of the Mother Ships.
Still, Ham Tyler, Robert Maxwell, Chris Faber, and the other rebels who had come in five trucks were cautious. The weather had prevented the toxin from drifting to this area, and while most of the Visitors had been recalled to their ships, it was entirely possible that there would be a few survivors.
"You go take a look around that side," Ham told Fred Linker, a middle-aged man who had been a lawyer before the Visitors' arrival. "This place is just too neat. If it was abandoned all of a sudden, there should be some disorder, but there isn't."
Fred nodded and, tapping a woman named Claire Bryant and another man named Paul Overbloom to join him, started working his way around to the right, keeping well back from the fence. When they were out of sight, the Fixer turned to another rebel, a woman named Grace Delaney, whose husband had disappeared into the plant some months before.
"I want you to spread the others out to right and left here while Chris and Maxwell and I go in," he told her.
"Let me come in with you," she demanded.
"No, Grace, you're too personally involved. If there are Visitors in there, I want them alive. But if you hear shots, then it will be up to you to get us out, okay?"
"I don't like it, Ham," she said. "We shouldn't keep prisoners even if there are survivors."
"Then who are we going to use to deprocess people when Mike comes back?" Robert Maxwell asked her.
"The equipment can't be that complicated," Grace said. "I'll bet Barry Stine and I could figure it out, if you give us a chance."
"You may have to," Ham Tyler told her, "but we'll do it my way first. I want you at my back, because I know you'll do whatever needs to be done if we need help, okay?"
"All right, Ham, but if you don't come out in ten minutes, I'm coming in whether I hear shots or not."
"Fair enough," Tyler said. Then with Robert Maxwell on his right and Chris Faber on his left, he walked boldly toward the fence and the gate.
They had just stepped through when the sound of a Visitor weapon going off came from the far side of the building, followed almost immediately by a brief return volley.
"Keep this side covered," Ham called to Grace, then he and Robert and Chris ran around the building. There were no other shots. They came to the front where the offices were located and found Fred Linker and his companions kneeling over a figure in a red uniform that was lying half out of the front doorway.
"It's a Visitor," Fred said, looking up. "He's not wearing any armor, and his shot was so wild he can't have been a soldier, but look at this." He rolled the body over onto its back. Covering the dead Visitor's mouth and nose was a close-fitting, circular respirator.
They stepped over the body and entered the darkened building. The reception area was empty, but a door on the far side led to other offices and eventually back into the plant proper. Ham, his gun drawn, eased himself into the corridor.
"Don't shoot," an oddly muffled but distinctly alien female voice called from a partly open door at the far end.
"Throw out your guns," Ham Tyler barked.
"We don't have any," the voice answered. "Louie had the only one."
"All right," Ham said while Chris found a switch and flooded the place with light. "Come on out with your hands up."
The door opened slowly and the speaker, also wearing a respirator, emerged, her hands high over her head. Claire and Paul quickly went up to her and checked her for weapons while Fred looked into the room from which the Visitor had emerged.
"Three dead in here," he called back.
"How many more are you?" Robert asked the Visitor.
"Only twelve alive—eleven now, including me," she answered. "That's all the respirators there were."
"All right," Ham said. "Fred, you get back to Grace and make sure she doesn't start shooting just for the fun of it." Fred nodded and went back out the front door.
Ham Tyler and the others quickly looked into the other offices on the floor. In each room they found three or four dead Visitors. By the time they finished, they could hear Grace Delaney and the others moving through the larger plant area in hack.
"There should be ten more of you," Ham said to their prisoner. "Where are they?"
"Upstairs, in the executive suite," the Visitor woman answered.
"Show us the way," Robert Maxwell said. The prisoner, her hands now clasped behind her head, nodded toward an el at the other end of the corridor. Taking her with them, they turned the corner to see Grace and several other rebels coming from the far end where the corridor entered the main processing area.
"Nobody back here," Grace said, "at least not alive."
"I thought the toxin hadn't spread this far," Claire Bryant said as the two groups joined. Grace Delaney looked at the prisoner with an obvious urge to kill.
"Toy balloons," the prisoner said. "They floated down all around the place this afternoon. We didn't know what they meant, but when Nancy shot one just for fun, this red dust came out of it, and she went into convulsions. That's when those of us who could got the respirators."
"What did you need respirators in this plant for," Grace asked suspiciously.
"The heat exchangers use a toxic cooling fluid. We keep respirators just in case we have to make repairs."
"All right," Tyler said. "Now let's go find the rest of your friends. Where are the stairs?"
"Through that door there," the Visitor told him.
"Claire," Ham said, "Paul, you stay here with our guest. The rest of you, come with me. "Keep alert, but don't shoot unless you have to. I mean it, Grace."
The woman rebel glared at him, but holstered her pistol.
The stairs, broad and curving up a circular well, led them to a corridor identical to the one below. The branch of the el going toward the back opened onto a large, glass-enclosed observation balcony. Two bodies lay huddled at the far end.
Several doors opened off the main corridor which crossed the front of the building. The rooms beyond the first three were a bathroom, a kitchen, and a small dining room. In the last were three Visitors, sitting slumped over the octagonal table. Chris Faber checked each one. "Just making sure nobody's playing possum," he explained.
As they neared the far end of the corridor, they could see that the inner wall was of glass, with a glass door at either end. The room on the other side of the glass was dark, illumined only by the light that came through from the corridor
. Ham and Robert, their guns drawn, slid down the wall across from the window until they could see inside.
It was a large conference room with an oval table and chairs drawn up all around it. The surviving Visitors, all wearing respirators, were sitting there watching the glass. As soon as they saw Tyler and Maxwell, they all raised their arms in surrender.
"We got them," the Fixer told the others as he holstered his pistol. He went to the door and stepped inside, Robert and Chris at his heels.
"Isn't this a pretty sight," Ham said. The Visitors slowly got to their feet.
"Please don't shoot," one of them said, his resonant voice muffled by the device over his mouth and nose. "We're not armed."
"Turn around and put your hands against the wall," Ham ordered. As the Visitors complied, several rebels holstered their weapons and went around the table to search the prisoners.
"Why didn't you go back to the Mother Ship?" Robert Maxwell asked.
"We didn't have a chance," one of the Visitors, a woman, told him. "The last shuttle of suspendees left just before the soldiers were ordered to return to the ship. We waited for one to come for us, but it never did."
"So you were abandoned," Ham said. "Maybe you were lucky."
"Do any of you know how to operate this plant?" Robert asked as the rebels concluded their search.
"Yes," the woman said, turning around to face him. "Most of us were technicians. I'm a supervisor. There were only twenty soldiers here."
"All right," Ham said. "We think our people have captured your Mother Ship. If they have, they'll be bringing it here to unload the people you put into suspended animation. Can you reverse the process?"
"We can."
"That's fine, and as long as you cooperate, you won't get hurt. Now let's go downstairs. But I warn you, some of us here have relatives aboard that ship and might be a little inclined to take vengeance if you make the slightest wrong move. Get me?"
The Visitors nodded. Then, under the supervision of the rebels, they all filed out of the conference room and down the main floor of the plant.
There Grace Delaney came up to Tyler her face angry.
