He’d accessed a dozen TSIs recorded by different contact team members as they fumbled and slid along the eerie curving passages that threaded through the interior of the Watchtower. None of the recordings had revealed anything new. The Prime structure was as dead as any Egyptian Pharaoh’s tomb. None of the physical samples they’d brought back, the crumbling structural material and radiation-saturated fragments of equipment, had helped further their understanding of the Watchtower mechanism’s true nature. It was all too fragile, too old, for any useful analysis to be carried out. The navy still wasn’t sure what the installation used to be a part of, though the best guess was some kind of mineral processing facility. No part of it the contact teams had explored had machinery that was even close to working condition. The tunnel that Bose and Verbeke had ventured down was no different. And it was Oscar who had given them that initial authorization to proceed deeper, to find out what was there. He’d been encouraging, he remembered. Often during the interminable playbacks he’d hear the enthusiasm in his own voice.
Time after time he went through recordings that corresponded to the time they dropped out of communication. Bridge logs, engineering logs, power logs, a dozen other onboard datastreams, flight logs from the shuttles that were ferrying the contact teams between the starship and the rock. Worst of all were the detailed space suit recordings from Mac and Frances Rawlins as they made their frantic, useless rescue bid. They’d gone a long way down the curving tunnel-corridor that had swallowed Bose and Verbeke. Nothing in those decaying aluminum walls gave any hint of danger lurking ahead.
Two nights ago, after his bridge duty was over, Oscar had decided on a slightly different approach to the analysis. He was running every sensor recording he had of the Watchtower rock, and compositing them into a specific overall picture. He wanted to run comparisons between the rock and its wreckage from the time they’d encountered it right through the mission until the time they left. The shape, thermal profile, electromagnetic spectrum, spectrographic composition; each building up to a comprehensive multi-textural snapshot every two seconds. When they were all assembled the Defender’s RI could run a detailed comparison program between all of them, searching for the slightest change.
His cabin’s holographic portal was in projection mode, filling the small area with the image from the shuttle cameras, playing back Mac’s first exploration flight. Oscar sucked on an orange juice drink bag tube as the familiar dialogue between himself and Mac and the shuttle pilot repeated itself yet again. Sensor data from the shuttle was being compiled and added to the starship’s own sensor log record to enhance the snapshots, producing a tighter resolution. He watched as the hangar doors parted, and the ungainly little craft rose off its cradle, belching sparkly cold gas from its reaction control thrusters. The huge bulk of the Second Chance twisted slowly and silently around his cabin, the translucent projection allowing him to see the bulkheads through its main cylindrical superstructure and the giant life-support ring. Oscar felt a pang of nostalgic regret at seeing the starship again. There would never be another one like it. The Defender was sleek and powerful in comparison, but it lacked the grandeur of its ancestor. Everyone working at the Anshun complex had devoted themselves to that first starship, putting in ridiculous hours, ignoring their family and social lives; its assembly had been an act of love. The atmosphere they’d shared back then was lost as well, the naïve excited optimism of launching a grand exploration into the unknown. They’d been full of hope in those days as the adventure loomed close. Simpler, easier times.
The shuttle cleared the life-support ring, and its main engines fired, carrying it toward the Watchtower. Dyson Alpha slipped up across his cabin bulkheads; a distant lightpoint as bright as Venus appeared in Earth’s night sky. The rest of the alien starfield flowed around it. Oscar peered at the image, picking out the dull speck ahead of the shuttle. He’d seen it so many times in so many spectrums that he knew the Watchtower’s exact position against the unfamiliar constellations.
His lips sucked down some air. The bag of orange juice was empty. He reached out to push it into the mouth of the refuse tube at the side of the washroom cubical. Stopped in midmovement. Frowned. Stared at the image of the Second Chance.
“Freeze image,” he told his e-butler. The recording halted immediately.
“Hold this viewpoint, and increase magnification by three, focus center on the Second Chance.” The starship’s gray-silver structure swelled rapidly, covering the washroom cubical and his sleep pouch. Oscar forgot to breathe. “Son of a bitch.” He stared and stared at the primary sensor array, shock like icy electricity shooting along his spine. The starship’s main communications dish was extended, pointing toward the tiny star behind him.
The Defender’s alarm sounded.
“Captain,” the executive officer called. “Sir, you’ve got to get up to the bridge right now. We think we’ve found the other end of Hell’s Gateway. The hysradar has picked it up in a star system three light-years away.”
CHAPTER SIX
Morton was still smiling when his bubble dropped out of the wormhole, fifteen meters above the Highmarsh Valley in the Dau’sing Mountains.
It had been two days since Mellanie’s last visit at the barracks. She’d cut it fine, arriving just hours before Kingsville was closed off and everyone received their final clearance orders. It had been one hell of a visit, the two of them screwing each other senseless in the little rec room, like teenagers who’d unexpectedly found the house empty one afternoon. Hence the long-lasting smile.
That memory of the two of them together was the last one to be loaded into his secure store. So if, as likely, his body was blown to shit on this mission, that would be the strongest memory in his brain when he was re-lifed. Now that was a stylish way to emerge back into reality.
His bubble was a translucent gray-blue sphere of plyplastic, three meters in diameter, its surface stealthed against every known sensor type used by the Primes. He was suspended at the center by the transparent impact gel that filled the interior. During training it had seemed like a sensible way to arrive on a hostile planet light-years behind enemy lines. They were neat little machines: tough, highly mobile, and reasonably armed. Actually riding one down as it exhibited all the aerodynamics of a granite boulder pulled the smile off his face. Fear hit him for the first time, making his heart pound and his stomach quake. Life didn’t get any more extreme than this.
The rest of Cat’s Claws had come through the wormhole okay, their bubbles very hard to see in the visual spectrum as they all fell toward the ground. It was only their high-UV IFF beacons that gave him their locations. The three combat aerobots that had led the deployment zoomed away across the grungy landscape, disgorging chaff and decoy drones.
Up above them, the wormhole closed. It had been open for about ten seconds, just long enough to shoot them out. Back on Wessex, the gateway had been surrounded by a giant mechanical loading system, resembling a scaled-up version of an artillery gun magazine, with over a thousand bubbles sitting on conveyor racks ready for the assault. Parallel racks carrying wedge-shaped combat aerobots moved forward smoothly beside them, their separate ranks merging at the gateway amid the weird cluster of lithe malmetal tentacles that was the actual launch delivery mechanism.