“We’ll need a visible force of baddies,” the major said. “A squad’ll do for that. Local uniforms . . . and PPUs can look like anything, with the right setting. We’ve got the suitcoms for local—have to have our people stay in character.”
“So . . . what are we going to do if we get the shuttle? They can always shoot us down before we get anywhere.”
“Not that easy if they come down with one of the combat troop shuttles, sir,” said one of the neuro-enhanced Marines. “They’re hardened and highly maneuverable.”
“Which brings up—who’s going to fly it?”
“I’m shuttle-qualified,” said one of the pilots. “Ken’s not, but Bernie is.”
“If you’re qualified to fly troop shuttles, why are you on seaplanes down here?”
“Fleet has a lot more shuttle pilots than seaplane pilots,” the pilot said, spreading his hands. “Only a few of us mess around with the old-fashioned stuff.”
“Bob . . . what about Zed?”
“On a shuttle, LAC size? No problem, Gussie. It’ll fit, and we can use it. Like I said, it’d hide something the size of this island, let alone a shuttle.”
The professor glanced again at Garson. “Then, Major, if you’ll divide us into loyalists and mutineers—giving me the tech-trained people—and set up a scenario for us to act—”
“We’ll have to do something about those bodies. . . .” Garson said, and gestured to some of the men.
Margiu had never had close contact with scientists before this, and if she’d thought about them at all, she’d had a storycube image of vast intelligence applied step-by-step to some arcane problem. They would be solitary, so they could concentrate; they would be serious, sober, abstracted.
They would not, for instance, waste any moment of their precious preparation time playing some incomprehensible game that involved a singsong chant, puns, and childish insults, dissolving into laughter every few seconds.
“Your starfish eats dirt,” the professor finished.
“Oh, that’s old, Gussie.” But the others were grinning, relaxed.
“So now—we’re going to get them to bring us a ship, and then let us fly away?”
“We’ll have Zed on—they won’t see us.”
“They’ll see the moving hole where we were,” Swearingen said. “It’s a lot harder to hide things in planetary atmospheres.
“Not with Zed,” Helmut Swearingen said. “We’ve solved that problem, or most of it. The thing is, all they have to do is hit a line across our course—and since we have to fly to the mainland—”
“Why?” the professor asked; he had found a cache of candy and spoke around a lump of chocolate. “It’s the obvious thing, of course, but being obvious won’t help us now. At the very least we can zig and zag . . .”
“Not forever . . . we have to come down somewhere.”
“Maybe,” the professor said. “And maybe not. Suppose they think we’ve blown up or something. We could toss fireworks out the back—”
“Oh come on, Gussie! The fake explosion while the real vessel gets away is the oldest trick in the book.” Swearingen looked disgusted.
“Because it works,” the professor said. “All it has to do is distract them long enough for us to make a course change. Two points define a straight line: they have takeoff and the explosion. If we aren’t at an extension of that line, they’ll have no idea where we are.”
“It’s ridiculous! It’s all straight out of storytime. I have to agree with Helmut—”
“There’s a reason for stories being the way they are,” the professor said.
“Yes, they’re for the stupid or the ignorant, to keep them out of our way while we do the work . . .” Swearingen said.
“Can you even name one time in real life—not your pseudo-history—when someone faked an explosion and escaped in a vessel the enemy thought was blown up?”
The professor blinked rapidly, as if at a long sequence of pages. “There are plenty of ruses in military history—”
“Not just ruses, Gussie, but that hoary old cliche of faking the explosion of an engine, or a ship, or something . . .”
“Commander Heris Serrano,” Margiu said, surprising herself. “When she was just a lieutenant. She trailed a weapons pod past a fixed defense point, and when it blew it blinded the sensors long enough for her to get her ship past. Or Brun Thornbuckle, during her rescue, sent the shuttle as a decoy after landing on the orbital station.”
“You see?” the professor said, throwing out his hands. “A hoary old cliche still works.”
“It works better if you keep them busy thinking about other things,” Margiu said.
“Like what?” one of the others asked her.
“Anything. Because you’re also right, if they see the shuttle taking off and then it disappears, and then something blows up, they’re going to be suspicious.”
“So we don’t have it disappear until just at the explosion.”
“We have Zed, but the controls aren’t that good. Not yet.”
Silence for a long moment. Then one of the pilots said, “Look—the shuttle will have a working com, right? The bad guys will want to be in touch with the shuttle crew.”
“Yes . . .”
“So we continue our little charade on the shuttle. Suppose . . . suppose we talk about the weapons we’ve recovered. We’re trying to see how they work—”
“They’re not going to believe their people would do something that stupid.”
“Wouldn’t they?”
“But—” Everyone turned to look at Margiu. She could feel the ideas bubbling up in her mind like turbulence in boiling water. “Suppose the bad guys—ours, I mean—said they also had the scientists—and they were questioning them—and they found out one of the things was a stealth device. And they wanted to try it, to see if it really worked—”
“That would explain the disappearance. Good, Margiu!”
“I still think they’d be suspicious.”
“Spoilsport.” The professor sighed, and rubbed his balding head. “But you’re probably right. Let’s see. Our pseudo-bad guys question the scientists . . .” He pitched his voice into falsetto. “Please don’t hurt me—I vill tell you effryting.”
“Good lord, Gussie, what archaic accent is that?”
“I don’t know—I heard it on a soundtrack years ago. Don’t interrupt . . . so the scientists act like terrified victims and maybe that can be overheard. And then they turn Zed on, and it works—”
“And it’s still as transparent as glass,” Bob said.
“So I’ll scratch it up—YES!” The professor leaped up and danced in a circle. “Yes, yes, yes! Brilliant. Scratchy, like old recordings, old-time radio—break-up—”
“What?! Damn it, Gussie, this is serious—”
“I am serious. I am just momentarily transported by my own brilliance. And yours, and Margiu’s here.” He calmed down, took a breath, and went on. “Like this: the normal takeoff, the threats of the bad guys, the terror of the scientists. But then, when they—we—turn Zed on, it doesn’t keep working. It sort of—” he waggled his hand. “Sort of flickers. They hear an argument—more threats, more piteous pleadings, curses at some fool who—I don’t know, kicks the power cable or something. The shuttle is there, then it isn’t, then it is—but always on the same course. A voice shouting in the background: be careful, be careful, don’t overload it, it wasn’t designed for—! And then the explosion, and then the course change.”
A long silence this time, as they all digested what the professor had said. He mopped his face, his head, and pushed the crumpled, stained handkerchief into his pocket.
“It does explain everything,” Swearingen said. “It gives them more to think about, more complications.”
“It seems to give them more data,” said Bob. “But all the data are false. It might work.”