“He has been to Io,” Franklin said. “And now Ganymede. I suspect he wishes to visit the other two Jovian moons. That leaves Europa…and Callisto.”
At this the room hushed a moment. Callisto was the express province of the denizens of Saturn, those enigmatic creatures that called themselves the Xan. Sir Francis Drake was the first to encounter them in his charting of the Jovian system two centuries past, and was told in no uncertain terms that colonization of that world would not be permitted. Since then, embassies and expeditions had been sent regularly by the great powers of Earth, and all were summarily rejected without even being received by the Xan in person.
And of the handful of martial expeditions that were launched, it sufficed to say that the Xan’s alchemy and knowledge far outstripped that of humanity, much as humanity’s was far superior to that those of the Venusians. The belligerents were never seen again.
“We cannot go to Callisto again, Franklin,” President Jay said finally. “Our embassy was rejected just last year. I doubt they shall appreciate another such visit.”
“We shall go, then,” Morrow said. “England’s ties with the Xan are tentative, certainly, but we are an established power amongst mankind.”
Jones turned on Morrow. “I am still not quite convinced we should let you go, Captain,” the Ganymedean said. “Whatever this rogue has planned, it does not change the state of affairs between England and Ganymede, and you and your men have seen too much of our city already!”
Franklin drew himself to his feet, leaning heavily on his stick. “Captain Jones, we have discussed this. This matter is far more serious than the current conflict! We must be allies in this!”
“Do we indeed?” Arnold said from his seat, leaning back and eyeing the English delegation warily. “With all due respect to our guests, if this Cagliostro fellow is amongst Jupiter’s moons, then he is our problem. With your help, Dr. Franklin, I believe this is a matter that the United States can manage on our own.”
“And in doing so, we increase our naval power considerably with the capture of an English frigate,” Jones added.
Franklin looked aghast, but Weatherby saw the guards in the room had taken a firmer grip upon their weapons. And President Jay, seated behind his desk, began to nod slowly.
For once, even Finch looked upset. A shame, Weatherby thought, that it took rank betrayal to finally perturb him.
July 27, 2132
The rover sped across the Martian plain on what passed for a beautiful morning on the red planet. Shaila was oddly chipper; despite the reactions she got from Yuna and Stephane, she was still convinced that the strange EM boxes were key to solving whatever was going on. Moreover, she was actually out doing something about it instead of sitting on her hands or making the base look pretty.
Of course, she also had to explain to Diaz why the hell she was suddenly so chummy with Evan Greene, especially since she had all but wanted to hide from him the day prior. The colonel approved their EVA, but made it crystal clear to Shaila that while Greene was cleared for the investigation of the lava tube, she was not. Of course, if Diaz knew Shaila was withholding a potentially pertinent clue to this mess—even if no one else thought it was pertinent—she’d be on the next transport back home.
But Shaila was energized now. Her career could very well be ending anyway. Might as well go out with a bang. Besides, she had enjoyed reading the journal the night before, and was eager to see what Greene thought of it. On the one hand, she thought it was stupid to think that the book was related to the EM fields, because it made no sense. But the fact was that she thought she saw it the first time, and then it was there the second. It was beginning to creep her out, no matter how strange and intriguing the book’s writing had become.
“Benjamin Franklin? Ganymede? Crazy,” Greene mused as he read the transcribed journal from the passenger seat. Shaila had the computer photograph and transcribe each page as she progressed, and downloaded it to Greene’s datapad before they left McAuliffe, copying Yuna and Stephane as well. She wanted them to know she was at least doing something.
“Oh, I know,” Shaila said over the comm. “A Royal Navy officer’s personal log from 1779…in space…with alchemy…and reptile men on Venus. Awesome, in a drug-induced sort of way.”
Greene smiled. “Well, I’m no book critic, but I’ve read better. More importantly, how’d this thing get in that cave?”
“Don’t know,” Shaila admitted. “It was me, Steve and Kaczynski the first time, and Yuna was down there the second time. Far as I know, that’s it.”
“Huh. You writing a novel?”
“Oh, no. I’d be horrible. As for anyone else, I don’t think Stephane could manage the idioms, and Kaczynski isn’t romantic enough. Yuna? Doubt it, plus I think I caught a glimpse of it before she got down there. That means someone put it there, and someone managed to tag it with both Cherenkov radiation and an EM field. Who and why?”
“Good question,” Greene said. “I mean, first off, you don’t just go and ‘tag’ something with this kind of radiation, or with an EM field without a discernible source. Pretty interesting, really.”
“You’re the scientist. I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” Shaila said. “Any theories on the box we dug up?”
“Yeah, but it’s pretty out there,” Greene admitted. “When there’s nothing in the mainstream that seems to work, you have to go to the fringe.”
“Hey, I’ve got earthquakes on Mars, geographic features shifting all over the place and a big-ass wall building itself in a cave. Go for it,” Shaila said.
“Fair enough. Let me tell you about tachyons. A tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that can travel faster than light.”
“Except that nothing can travel faster than light,” Shaila interrupted.
“Like I said, hypothetical. But quantum physics allows for the possibility that space and time are not universal constants, and thus allows for the possibility of faster-than-light particles.”
“So how does a particle get to move that fast?”
“It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, really,” Greene said. “Do you bend space, and thus seem to bend time as well? Or do you bend time, and thus move through space at a seemingly faster-than-light pace? Or is the distinction moot?”
“I vote moot,” Shaila said as she deftly guided the rover around an outcropping of rock. “So are tachyons the cause of this faster-than-light movement?”
“More like a byproduct,” Greene said. “The more energy you expend—and you’d have to expend a lot to start warping space-time—the stronger tachyon emissions you’d get. And as you already know, when you have charged subatomic particles moving faster than the ambient light around them, what do you get?”
Shaila grimaced. “Cherenkov radiation. And if you expend energy in those quantities, you’re probably going to get some residual EM fields, too.”
“Bingo. Well done.”
“So what are you saying? That there’s some kind of space-time rift going on here?” Shaila asked.
Greene paused and looked hard at Shaila. “Umm, no. Not at all,” he said, sounding as if Shaila wasn’t taking his findings seriously. “But I imagine that someone might be playing around with a lot of energy. And those boxes generating the directional EM fields could very well be some kind of primitive particle accelerator, designed to speed up particles, smash them into each other and create huge amounts of energy that could theoretically shed tachyons.
“Of course, we can’t actually detect tachyons because they’re still theoretical,” Greene added. “But we can see the Cherenkov radiation. Now, I don’t know why this book would have similar readings, but it’s a start.”
Shaila felt he might be onto something. Smashing up molecules would probably do the trick, energy-wise, especially if you managed to weave it through the Martian terrain. “So what the hell is a homebrew particle accelerator doing on Mars?” Shaila asked.
“Hey, I just came up with the theory. Up to you to p
rove it,” Greene said.
“Well, it’s the best explanation I’ve heard since this whole thing started,” Shaila said. “Particle colliders can throw off some serious energy. If it’s not properly shielded, well, I can imagine it might shake things up around here.”
“Yeah, but I ran the numbers. If this thing is a particle accelerator, it’s still not powerful enough to cause earthquakes, unless it hit some pretty specific geologic points. My thinking is there’s something still missing in the equation.”
Shaila glanced at the rover’s readout. “Only one way to find out. Coming up on the coordinates now.”
A light breeze swept across the Martian plain as Shaila pulled the rover to a stop about ten meters away from the coordinates she got from Harry’s suit beacon log. They’d have to do some poking around, because the coordinates were a bit too broad to pinpoint the exact locations, but that’s why she brought Greene’s once-confiscated holocam with them. They got out of the rover and started surveying the area—Shaila with a sensor pack, Greene with the holocam. Shaila tried to look for signs of Harry’s visit, but it had been months ago, and even with Mars’ weak atmospheric pressure, the light breezes and subsequent dust devils—a problem for Mars explorers since the first 21st century rovers touched down—would’ve been more than enough to erase boot and rover tracks.
After a few minutes, they decided to tackle things in a much more methodical manner. They spread out several hundred meters apart, moving in a zigzag pattern toward each other to cover the maximum amount of territory.
“It was easy to find last time,” Shaila said about ten minutes later. “What the hell’s the problem now?”
“Maybe the boxes were shut down somehow,” Greene said, his eyes fixed on his cam screen. “I mean, who knows whether this thing’s been on the whole time, or whether we just got lucky?”
“It’s out here somewhere,” Shaila said. “Keep going. Harry was doing something out here.”
Another fifteen minutes later, the two met by the rover, having covered 500 square meters of territory without so much as a beep from the sensor or a glitch on the holocam screen. “Maybe we’re not going about this the right way,” Shaila said. “Let’s switch. I’ll go back where you came from with the cam, you head to where I started with the sensor.”
Greene handed over the cam. “Just don’t erase the tape, OK? This could still be big.”
Shaila’s rejoinder was cut short by a sudden flare on the holocam screen. There was a flash of very familiar static off to her left. “Greene, I got something.”
She turned in the direction of the flicker she saw, and was rewarded with a vision of the rover, about four meters away. There was a very thin line of static running under it.
And the line was growing bigger.
And brighter.
And Greene was only a meter or so away from the vehicle.
“Greene, jump away from the rover!”
“What?” he said, turning toward her.
“Jump away from the rover! Now!”
He didn’t need further prompting, leaping as far back from the rover as he could—several meters thanks to Mars’ gravity—and landing on his side. Shaila saw her holocam’s viewscreen turn white, and she could feel it start to vibrate in her hands.
And then it died.
A wisp of smoke curled up out of the camera. She looked up and saw a very similar trail emanating from the rover’s electrical motor.
“Greene, report,” Shaila said as she leapt toward the rover.
“I’m here,” Greene said. “Sensor pack is offline, though.”
“Suit check,” she said curtly.
“Checking,” Greene said as he got to his feet. “All systems normal.”
She finished her jump-sprint over to him and nonetheless took a look at his chest and gauntlet monitors. “You’re all right. I think we just saw a major EMF spike.”
Greene fiddled with the sensor pack once more. “Yeah. Right before the sensor was scrambled, it recorded a large buildup of EM energy. And it was directional.”
Shaila looked over his shoulder at the screen. The data showed a linear spike of energy that appeared to travel toward their area…and right under the rover. Then the signal scrambled for several seconds. By the time the sensor’s computer righted itself, the energy spike was gone.
“That’d explain the holocam,” Shaila said, holding it up. “Fried. Most civilian holocams aren’t rad-hard like our suits.”
“Yeah, but a sensor pack? The rover?”
Shaila shrugged. “Turns out we parked the bloody rover right over the line. Probably too much for the shielding to handle. And the sensor pack didn’t fry. It just got confused for a bit.”
Greene holstered the sensor. “Well, we found our EM line. But now we don’t have a rover.”
Shaila grinned at that. It was well over 25 kilometers to base. “Oh, come on. Lovely day for a walk in the sun.”
“Can’t we just call and have someone come get us?” Greene said, sounding slightly petulant.
“And explain to Diaz what we were doing out here?” Before Shaila could continue, her comm beeped.
“McAuliffe to Jain, McAuliffe to Jain, priority one, over.” She recognized Finelli’s accent.
“Shit,” Shaila said, keying her comm. “Jain here, McAuliffe, go ahead.”
“There’s been an accident at Billiton Site Six,” Finelli said. “Multiple injuries. Report there immediately to assist. Over.”
Shaila looked at Greene with dread. Site Six was an underground mining operation in the foothills—and right on the border of the decagon they had mapped out last night. “Our rover’s malfunctioned. We’ll have to go by foot. You have rescue teams on the way? Over.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Finelli said. “Please get there as best you can. McAuliffe out.”
Shaila keyed up a map on her datapad. “Six kilometers. Let’s get moving. Maybe we can hook up with the rescue team on the access road.”
“You think it’s related,” Greene said. It wasn’t a question.
“If it is, I’m going to bring Harry up on charges,” she replied, already bouncing across the terrain at full speed.
CHAPTER 14
May 2, 1779
So it was that our gambit failed. I suppose our only fault was in trusting these Ganymedean insurrectionists to keep their word. I admit, I am especially disappointed with Doctor Franklin, of whom I had begun to think better. Of course, we may have underestimated the influence he has upon his fellow traitors.
I am reminded of a tract I saw amongst the crew aboard HMS Egmont not two years ago, where, as you recall, I served as fourth lieutenant. This tract, inexplicably called “Common Sense,” was one in which the cause of Ganymedean independence was put forth. The greatest fanfare came in describing the military potential of the colonies. But I say that if Jones and Arnold are the best these rebels can muster, then they are an honourless lot and our victory is all but assured.
And yes, the seaman who had this tract in his possession spent considerable time in the brig.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than to write in that blasted diary of yours?” Finch asked, quite perturbed as he saw Weatherby, seated on the floor, scribbling into his journal.
Weatherby looked up at Finch and gave him a small smile. “We have been in here but a half hour, Doctor,” Weatherby said. “And I thought we agreed we should allow the guards time to relax before making our move.”
The two were inside a painfully small room in the attic of the State House, with Morrow and Anne presumably held elsewhere upon the premises. The scene in the parliamentary chamber had devolved quickly—Jones and Arnold had ordered the Daedalus officers taken prisoner—without pretense, this time— while Franklin protested vociferously and the supposed leader of the insurrection, President Jay, said nothing at all, tacitly allowing the Englishmen to be detained.
At first, they could still hear the occasional voice raised in anger below as they wai
ted, but there hadn’t been such an outburst in some time. Weatherby had already tested the room’s security, such as it was, and knew it was only a matter of time before they could act. There could hear two voices directly outside the door, and Weatherby was hoping he’d hear one of the sentries leave. In the meantime, he had taken to writing once more, while Finch nervously paced about the room.
Some minutes later, during which Weatherby continued writing and Finch continued pacing, they heard a set of footsteps receding across the attic and down the staircase. “It’s time, Doctor,” Weatherby whispered. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Finch quickly produced a number of small pouches and vials from about his person, tucked away more than five hours ago at Weatherby’s suggestion. “Morrow shall have us in the brig if this does not come off well, you know,” Finch said as he began mixing substances. The smell of jasmine and other, less pleasant odors began slipping into the air.
“Fortune favors the bold,” Weatherby said. “The Greeks said that, did they not?”
“Romans,” Finch corrected with a smirk. “Though I must say, I am continually impressed with your literacy, especially considering your horrible breeding.”
“Must do something whilst we wallow in the mud, I suppose,” Weatherby said as he rose and slid toward the door, pressing his ear against it before turning back to respond.
Finch finished his working and poured a now-noxious mixture over his hastily doffed neckerchief, while Weatherby secured his pencil and journal on his person. The two approached the door from either side, Weatherby taking the cloth from Finch’s hands. “Simply over his face?” he whispered.
Finch nodded and began knocking at the door. “Get me out of here!” Finch bellowed. “I cannot take being in the same room as this loutish peasant any longer!” Weatherby raised an eyebrow at this, while Finch grinned wickedly.
The door opened, and one of the guards entered, musket in hand. “All right now, lads, what’s all this?” Weatherby was on him in a flash, placing the cloth over his mouth and holding on as best he could, while Finch grabbed the musket and began wresting it away. The man struggled mightily, his cries muffled by the cloth, until he finally relaxed and, a moment later, went limp.
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