“You can’t do that,” Vinet said. “It’s out of the question. I’ve had no orders from Headquarters—”
“Under the circumstances—” the professor began.
“He’s got the highest level clearance and authorization,” Garson said. “And I’ve got orders cut at Dark Harbor, directing you to give your complete cooperation.”
“Dark Harbor’s not in my chain of command,” Vinet said. “And you don’t have the rank, Major. How do I know you’re not all mutineers, anyway?”
“All of us?” the professor’s eyebrows rose steeply. “That’s an interesting hypothesis, but do you have any data to support it? Why would mutineers want to deny other mutineers highly effective weaponry? I’m more inclined to suspect someone who tries to preserve it intact for capture.”
Vinet turned red. “Are you accusing me of being a mutineer?”
“Not at all,” the professor said. “I’m merely pointing out that your refusal to carry through on the very reasonable suggestions of my colleagues, or the orders I’m giving you, could be misunderstood in case of later investigation.”
“That’s ridiculous! This installation is extremely valuable; the equipment alone is worth—”
“Worthless to the Familias if it gets into the wrong hands. Worse than worthless. Don’t you understand that?”
“Well . . . of course, but there’s no proof the mutineers are after it. They may not even know about it.”
“You’re assuming they’re stupid? That’s not a good position to take. Commander, I’m afraid I must insist on your cooperation.”
Margiu noticed Garson’s signal to his troops. So, she saw, did Vinet. He sagged a little.
“Very well. But it’s over my protest, and I will log this. If you had not barged in here with overwhelming force, you’d find yourself in the brig for such nonsense.”
“Thank you,” the professor said, with perfect courtesy. “I appreciate your position, and your assistance.”
He led Margiu back to the cluster of civilians.
“Gussie, we had an idea—” one of them said. “Maybe we could mount the—” he lowered his voice, and Margiu heard only a mumble. “And then attack the mutineers.”
“Mount it on a planet?” The professor pursed his lips. “That’s interesting—that might actually work, if we have time. Do we have the supplies for adequate shielding?”
“Yes, if we dismantle a couple of other things. Oh, and Ty was working on breaking into their communications before Vinet snatched him out of the communications shack and stuck him in here with us.”
The professor glanced at Margiu. “Ensign, you’re going to be hearing many things you should not hear, and which I advise you to forget as quickly as possible. Do you have any specialty background in technical fields?”
“Aside from growing up making what we needed from scrap, no. Basic electronics and carpentry.”
“Well, that may be useful. Come along; we’re going to the labs . . .”
They began with a short meeting in what looked like a snack lounge, with a row of programmable food processors on one wall and battered chairs and couches around the others. A half-finished child’s model of a space station cluttered the low table. Margiu had not suspected scientists of playing with such toys, and someone quickly moved it to a far corner.
“What have we got for communications?” the professor asked. “Ty?”
A skinny man with a bush of black hair came forward. “They’ve got the sats, but we can reach mainland with something I cobbled together. I want to send the specs for it over there, so they can build their own quickly. Getting into the mutineers’ lines is going to be harder; they’ve got tight-link capability up there. But they’ve transmitted some outside that—I suspect to downside confederates—and that I can grab, if I have access to the equipment. I can tight-link if you give me an hour or so—it only takes reconfiguring some modules from one of the labs—but we don’t have anyone to send to.”
“What about scan? Can we detect anything beyond atmosphere?”
“Well—only for whatever’s in our horizon. The problem’s going to be tracking, not to mention what’s below horizon. Knurri had a telescope with a motorized equatorial mount we could’ve used, but he took it with him when he went on leave. We can point something up, but we won’t have an accurate fix if we do find a ship.”
“Do you need anyone else to help you?”
“No, not really. There’s a pretty decent enlisted tech I could use, but I’m a little worried that the mutineers had one or more agents on this base—and he’d be the logical one.”
“Fine—Ensign, get Ty an escort from our group to the communications shack, would you?”
She was supposed to guard his back, but this required only going to the door. Lieutenant Lightfoot was outside, waiting; he called over two NEMs who went off with Ty.
“Now—Cole, you said you had an idea?”
“Yeah—Jen and I think it might be possible to rig the big guy for planet-to-space work. We’ve been trying to come up with the best way to acquire and track the target—”
“Which target?”
“Well . . . we’re pretty sure we can take out the orbital station, and any ships docked there. Distant stuff, without the use of satellite-based scans, is going to be harder—”
“But I think we could do it,” a woman said. “If we take out the station, then get the satellites linked to us—”
“How many hours?” the professor asked.
“Six or seven to mount the weapon, and it’ll take a lot of personnel.”
“We may not have six or seven hours,” the professor said. “We need to know if they’re coming, and how soon. Jen, what about scan within atmosphere? Is there any way to get access to the satellite data?”
“Not right now. What we have here is basically old-style radar, for spotting and guiding air traffic, and a little local-weather scanner. The range is so short that we couldn’t spot incoming LACs in time to do anything useful. We haven’t needed more than that; we had the satellite data for longscan. We really need those satellites, and for that we’ll need to break their lock. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to take time.”
“Which, again, we may not have. Bob, what about Project Zed?”
“Operational. And we really don’t want them to have it.”
“It actually works?”
“Oh yeah. If this were a ship, and not an island, I could flip the switch and they’d never find us. A big improvement over the earlier models. Unfortunately, as it is an island, it’s easily located no matter what cloud we wrap around ourselves.”
Margiu realized with a start that they were talking about new stealth gear.
“Could it be used to cover a retreat in the aircraft? If we took the data and ran for the mainland?”
“I suppose.” The other man looked thoughtful. “We haven’t tried it on aircraft . . . how much can those planes lift?”
“I’ll ask,” the professor said. He glanced at Margiu, who headed for the door again. She passed the question off to Lightfoot, and went back to the professor. In that brief interval, the discussion had already turned too technical for her understanding, but it came to an abrupt end when someone pounded on the door.
“Come in,” the professor called.
Ty came in. “I’ve found two things—one’s a datalog showing transmissions to this station from Stack Three five days ago. From Bacarion. I think someone here’s on their payroll.”
“Most likely,” the professor said. “And?”
“And a transmission from orbit to this station, just now. Personal for Lieutenant Commander Vinet.”
“For Vinet! I’d never have guessed he was part of it,” Swearingen said. “He’s such a fusspot. Did you answer it?”
“No, just acknowledged receipt, using the same sig code that was logged for reply to the others. But I did take a look—”