“So what we need is something to make a big bang, that will look like a shuttle blowing up on the bad guys’ scan from upstairs . . . which we can get far enough away from before it blows that we don’t also blow . . .”
“Something, yes.”
The group dissolved as the scientists wandered off. Margiu, used to direct orders and a clear set of directions, felt let down as she followed the professor down one passage after another. Were they ever going to go to work? And what would Major Garson think, with her just wandering around idly watching someone who seemed to have very little idea what he was doing.
But that, she soon found out, was a mistake. After a rapid tour of the ground-floor levels of the site, the professor found Major Garson and began suggesting where to put what. Garson, meanwhile, was working on his own pretense. He had divided his troops and assigned the NEMs to play mutineer.
“If they think the NEMs are mutineers,” he said, “they’ll believe that the loyalists are in serious trouble. Also, the NEMs are so big and bulky that it’s hard to get facial detail when they’re in their p-suits with the head-jacks. That means I can move them around and have them play more parts.”
Margiu glanced at the NEMs sitting around, half of them sticking odd-shaped patches to their p-suits. One of them grinned at her. “The bad guys are old Lepescu cronies,” he said. “They take ears from their kills. So—we thought we’d use an ear shape openly, as a recognition patch. No one else would.” He slid the tube of adhesive back in one of the pockets.
“Come along, Ensign,” said the professor; Margiu followed him, glancing back at the NEMs who were clustered there. She hoped they were all loyalists.
Twelve hours later the whole situation felt even more unreal. Periodically, Margiu and the professor joined Garson and one of the troops and scuttled rapidly from one building to another, following a plan of Garson’s that had the loyalists trying to evade the “mutineers.” The NEMs pretending to be mutineers, meanwhile, shot entirely too close for Margiu’s comfort, and shattered all the ground-floor windows. Far underground, with doors shut against the wicked drafts from above, the scientists and remaining troops had organized the collection of boxes, cylinders, cables, and things that looked like leftovers from a junk heap onto pallets.
On one of their tours through the working areas, the professor shook his head over the tarps used to cover the loads before lashing them down. “It’s too bad they destroyed those seaplanes,” he said. “Look—these would have made wonderful sails, and we could have built a ship with the frames of the planes.”
“No, we could not,” Swearingen said. “I can just see us now, Gussie, setting sail in something you whipped together with stickypatch and hairs pulled from your beard. Which aren’t long enough to make ropes, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Rope . . .” the professor said, his eyes going hazy in what Margiu now knew meant a moment of thought. “We’re going to need one really good cable to make this work . . .”
“There was cable in the planes,” one of the pilots said. “But now—”
“Spares,” said the other. “They had to stock spares somewhere around here—” He looked around the room they were in, bare to the walls except for the pallets.
“I know,” offered one of the scientists. “What’s the cable for, Gussie?”
“Towing the explosive,” Gussie said. “We don’t want to just drop it . . . then we’d have to delay its explosion, and it’d be below our last visible position. We want to tow it . . .”
“Out the back of a troop shuttle,” said the first pilot, blinking. “I’m beginning to wish I weren’t shuttle-qualified.”
“It’s doable,” said the other. “I did a practice equipment drop once, and they shove the stuff out the back with a static line—there’s a kind of yank, and then it’s gone . . .”
“Fine; you can fly that part of it,” said the first.
“What bothers me,” said another scientist, “is the scan analysis of the explosion. If they’ve got somebody good up there—and we have to assume they do—then they’re going to expect shuttle components in the explosion. You’ve proposed that we use some of the weaponry in development, and it certainly will make a big enough bang. But it won’t have any shuttle-specific ID. Once they realize that, they’ll know we’re still around.”
“What kind of stuff would it take?” Garson asked. “Can we just throw out the life rafts or something?”
“No, it’s the explosion itself. They’ll expect some differences, because they’ll know the shuttle has exotic new stuff on it, but the shuttle itself, when it explodes, would contribute recognizable chemical signatures. The shuttle weaponry, for instance, would be assumed to go up with it.”
“Why not just add the shuttle’s weapons pods to the tow load?” asked Margiu. Everyone stopped and looked at her.
“Of course!” The professor, unsurprisingly, was the first to recover speech. He beamed at her. “Didn’t I say redheads were naturally brilliant?”
“But that would leave us with no weapons . . .” Garson said.
“But we weren’t going to fight our way out with the shuttle anyway,” said the professor. “We’re just using it as transport. We know we can’t take on a deepspace ship.”
Garson chewed this over a long moment. Finally he nodded. “All right. It makes sense, I just . . . don’t like not having them. But as you said, they’ll do us more good proving we’re not there, when we are. I’ll add that to our list of priorities once we get aboard. Be sure we have extra tiedowns and pallets, though.”
The troop shuttle made a careful circle around the island; its onboard scans could pick out details from a distance that made light weapons ineffective. The NEMS clustered on the runway with the little huddle of scientists obviously under guard and the tarp-wrapped bundles of the cargo beside them. The shuttle made another approach, this time dropping out a communications-array bundle. The NEM commander grabbed it and flicked it on. Margiu could hear what he said, but not what the shuttle crew answered.
“No—we were mainland based—at Big Tree—waiting, but we got grabbed for this mission—yeah—no. No, he died in the first firefight. Got his body, if you want it. I’ve got his ears. . . .”
The shuttle swung back, slower yet, and settled onto the runway. Margiu had not realized how loud such shuttles were, if no one bothered to baffle the exhaust. She could hear nothing but its own whining roar. The great hatch in the rear swung down, forming a ramp. Five men came out, weapons ready. Surely there weren’t just five . . . no, there came another five, setting up a perimeter.
The NEMs waved; the newcomers waved back as they came forward. Margiu could sense the moment in which they decided it was all right, when their attention shifted from the “mutineers” to the scientists and their equipment. Margiu flicked through the channels on her p-suit headset, and found the active one.
“Got ’em all, did you?”
“Except the dead ones,” one of the NEMs said. “Listen, we’ve got to get all this aboard—and there’s another load packed up inside. How many personnel d’you have?”
“Eighteen. They want us to hurry it up—”
“Come on, then.” Half the NEMs turned, as if to head back inside; the others were still obviously guarding the scientist-prisoners.
“Barhide—come on down—” said one of the newcomers. Eight more armed men came down the shuttle’s ramp.
These were much less wary, their weapons now slung on their backs.
“We’re goin’ in to pick up the rest of the cargo,” she heard one of them say, and someone aboard the shuttle—a pilot, she hoped—told them to hurry it up.
With her primary task still the professor’s life, she had no part in the brief, violent struggle that followed, when the NEMs and the other loyalist troops jumped the mutineers and killed them, while the putative rebel NEMS chivvied the scientists toward the shuttle, talking loudly on open mikes. It took less than two minutes, and most of it had happened out of sight of scan from overhead. Margiu scrambled out of her p-suit into the gray shipsuit of the dead enemy, rolled him into her p-suit, and let one of the NEMs haul him out by the legs. She crammed the com helmet on her head, tucking the telltale red hair out of sight, and stalked out onto the runway as if she belonged there.