In fact, the ground car had been unnecessary, and MacIntyre had sampled the normal operation of the transit shafts now, but not before Dahak had found time to explain them. Which was just as well, for while they were undoubtedly efficient, MacIntyre had still turned seven different shades of green the first time he'd gone hurtling through the huge tunnels at thousands of kilometers per hour, subjective sense of movement or not. Even now, after months of practice, he couldn't entirely rid himself of the notion that he was falling to his doom whenever he consigned himself to the gravitonic mercies of the system.
MacIntyre shook himself sternly. He was woolgathering again, and he knew why. He wanted to think about anything but the task that faced him.
"I know you'd like more training time," he said, "but we've had six months, and they're ready to schedule Vlad Chernikov for another proctoscope mission. You know we can't grab off another Beagle without tipping Anu off."
There was a moment of silence, a pause that was one of Dahak's human mannerisms MacIntyre most appreciated. It was a bit difficult to keep his own thoughts focused when the other half of the conversation "thought" and responded virtually instantaneously.
"Very well," Dahak said at last. "I respectfully submit, however, that your 'plan' consists solely of half-formed, ill-conceived generalities."
"So? You've had a few dozen millennia to think about it—can you come up with a better idea?"
"Unfair. You are the captain, and command decisions are your function, not mine."
"Then shut up and soldier." MacIntyre spoke firmly, but he smiled.
"Very well," Dahak repeated.
"Good. Is the suppressor ready?"
"Affirmative. My remotes have placed it in your cutter." There was another pause, and MacIntyre closed his eyes. Dahak, he thought, could give a Missouri mule stubborn lessons. "I still believe you would be better advised to use one of the larger—and armed—parasites, however."
"Dahak," MacIntyre said patiently, "there are at least five thousand mutineers, right? With eight eighty-thousand-ton sublight battleships?"
"Correct. However—"
"Can it! I'm pontificating, and I'm the captain. They also have a few heavy cruisers, armored combat vehicles, trans-atmospheric fighters, and the personnel to man them—not to mention their personal combat armor and weapons—plus the ability to jam your downlinks to any remotes you send down, right?"
"Yes, Colin," Dahak sighed.
"Then this is a time for finesse and sneakiness, not brute strength. I have to get the suppressor inside their enclave perimeter and let you take out their defensive shield from here or we're never going to get at them."
"But to do so you will require admittance codes and the locations of access points, which you can obtain only from the mutineers themselves."
"I know." MacIntyre recrossed his ankles and frowned, pulling harder on his nose, but the unpalatable truth remained. There was no doubt the mutineers had penetrated most major governments—they must have done so, given the way they had manipulated Terran geopolitics over the last two centuries.
Which meant any approach to Terran authorities was out of the question. It was a pity Dahak couldn't carry out bio-scans at this range; that, at least, would tell them who was an actual mutineer. But even that couldn't have revealed which Terra-born humans might have been suborned, possibly without ever knowing who had suborned them or even that they had been suborned.
So the only option was the one both he and Dahak dreaded. Somehow, he had to gain access to the mutineers' base and deactivate its shield. It was a daunting prospect, but once he'd taken out the defenses that held Dahak's weapons at bay, the mutineers would have no choice but to surrender or die, and MacIntyre didn't much care which they chose as long as they decided quickly.
The first of the automatic scanner stations had gone off the air, destroyed by the outriders of the Achuultani. Despite the relatively low speed of the Achuultani ships, humanity had little more than two and a half years before they reached Sol... and for him to find a way to stop them.
That was the real reason he wanted to find the link between Anu and NASA. If he could get his hands on just one mutineer—just one—then he could get the information he and Dahak needed one way or the other, he thought grimly. Yet how did he take that first step? He still didn't know, but he did know he couldn't do it from here. And he intended to admit to Dahak neither that he meant to play things entirely by ear nor who his single Terran ally would be lest the computer stage a mutiny of its own and refuse to let him off the ship!
"Well," he said with forced cheeriness, "I'd better get going." He dropped his feet to the invisible deck and stood, feeling as if the universe were drifting beneath his bootsoles.
"Very well, Colin," Dahak said softly, and the first hatch slid open, spilling bright light like a huge rift among the stars. MacIntyre squared his shoulders and walked into it.
"Good hunting, Captain," the computer murmured.
"I'll nail 'em to the wall," MacIntyre said confidently, and wished he could just convince himself of that.
A sliver of midnight settled silently amid the night-struck mountains of Colorado. It moved with less noise than the whispering breeze, showing no lights, nor did it register on any radar screen. Indeed, the stealth field about it transformed it into more of a velvety-black, radiation-absorbing absence than a visible object, for not even starlight reflected from it.
It drifted lower, sliding into an unnamed alpine meadow between Cripple Creek and Pikes Peak, and Colin MacIntyre watched the light-stained clouds glow above Colorado Springs to the east as the cutter extended its landing legs and grounded with a soft whine.
He sat in his command chair for a moment, studying the miniature duplicate of Command One's imaging system fed by the passive scanners. He examined the night carefully for long, long minutes, and his emotions puzzled him.
There was a deep, inarticulate relief at touching once more the soil of home, but it was overlaid by other, less readily understood feelings. A sense of the alien. An awareness of the peril that awaited him, yet more than that, as if the last six months had changed him even more than he had thought.
He was no longer a citizen of Earth, he thought sadly. His horizons had been broadened. Whether he liked it or not, he had become an emigré, yet that bittersweet realization actually made him love his homeworld even more. He was a stranger, but Earth was his source, the home of which he would always dream, and its remembered beauty would always be purer and more lovely than its reality.
He shook himself out of his musings. The night beyond the cutter's hull was silent, filled only with life that ran on four feet or flew, and he could not justify remaining aboard.
He switched off the display and interior lights and bent to free the suppresser webbed to the deck behind his command seat. It was not a huge device in light of what it could do, but it was heavy. He might have included a small anti-grav generator, but he hadn't dared to. Inactive, the suppresser was simply an inert, apparently solid block of metal and plastic, its webs of molecular circuitry undetectable even by the mutineers. An active anti-grav was another matter, and the mere fact of its detection would spell the doom of his mission. Besides, the suppressor weighed less than three hundred kilos.
He slipped his arms through the straps and adjusted it on his back like the knapsack it had been camouflaged to resemble, then opened the hatch and stepped down to the grassy earth. Night smells tickled his nostrils, and the darkness turned noonday-bright as he adjusted his vision to enhanced imaging.