“Charles and I have discussed the details. He thinks we can manage,” I said. “I want to go with them.”
“Why?” Ti Sandra said.
“I won’t even think about sending Mars someplace unless I’ve been there first.”
“Point One will have a fit.”
“Then we just won’t tell them,” I said.
Ti Sandra considered for a moment, weighing risks against advantages. “You’ll go with them. I want somebody I can trust implicitly. As far as I’m concerned, you’re flesh of my flesh.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’d like to put a tweaker team on Deimos as well. If you don’t come back, or come back too late, we’ll move Deimos into the Belt, hide it, and prepare for the worst.”
The prospect of using Deimos as a backup — no need to specify for what purpose — seemed almost normal, not in the least disturbing.
“Are we telling them that Phobos is moving?”
“We owe them that much,” she said. “Whether they’ll believe we’re not attacking, I can’t predict.”
I told her about Wachsler’s continuing objections, about the growing spirit of resistance among the Olympians and some of our closest advisors and aides.
“Just what I expected,” she said. “I’d join you if I could. Help you state our case a little more firmly. But you can do it. They’ll come around.”
I felt my sense of urgency might not be communicating over the vid display. “It may not be that easy. Think of what we’re suggesting.”
“It scares the hell out of me,” Ti Sandra said. “Maybe they’re so scared they’d rather trust Earth?”
“It’s a natural reaction.”
“Is everybody forgetting so quickly?”
“I hope not,” I said.
“Some folks didn’t lose much,” Ti Sandra said with a touch of bitterness. “Keep fighting and persuading, Cassie. Keep your believers enthused. Send them out as proselytizers, if you can spare them.“
“Another campaign,” I said.
“It never ends,” Ti Sandra said.
“Sometimes I feel like such a monster, even contemplating this. Couldn’t we investigate the possibility of having a plebiscite?”
“How much time do we have?”
“Charles gives Earth a month, maybe two, with the clues they have… And he doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there are spies here. It could come much sooner. Oh, God. There is so little choice.”
“Exactly,” Ti Sandra said. “You and I are expendable. We’re working to save everybody else. Remember that, honey.”
“We need you here so much,” I said, my voice breaking. “There’s so little to keep me going any more.”
“I’m healing as fast as I can. You hold on. You’re strong.”
Just hours before dawn, on the twenty-third of Aquarius, five of the Preamble team — -Charles, Leander, myself, and two astronomers — boarded a tractor and crossed a kilometer along a new-carved track from Kaibab to a hidden Mercury launch site.
The astronomers I had met two hours before. They had just arrived from UMS. The elder of the two, Jackson Hergesheimer, specialized in the study of extrasolar planets. He had originally come from the Moon and had no BM affiliation. UMS had invited him to join the faculty twenty years ago. He was tall, knobby, gray-haired, with a worried monkey-like face and large hands.
His assistant, Galena Cameron, had come from the Belt five years before to study at Tharsis Research University . She specialized in the engineering of deep-space observatories. Some of the equipment being brought on board was hers: prototype sensors for the Martian SGO, Supraplanar Galactic Observer, a multi-BM prestige project whose launch had been postponed nine times in the past five years. Hergesheimer seemed unimpressed by what we were going to do — hiding his fear, I suspected — but Cameron’s face sported a rosy flush and her hands could not stop moving.
The launch pad revetment appeared as low dark mounds in our searchlight beams. The Mercury itself lay under a simple soil-colored tarp — the merest of camouflage. Clearly, there had been only a knee-jerk attempt to disguise what was happening here. Equally clearly, observers from the Belt or Earth or points between would have to track hundreds of such launch sites. Martian orbital space was still open to all former BMs, many of whom stubbornly maintained separate orbital shuttle fleets. A launch from what had been disguised as a reopened mining station on Kaibab plateau would not, in itself, attract attention.
The tractor driver, Wanda, a stocky, athletic woman in a bright green thermal suit, looked over her shoulder at us and smiled. “You need to be up and out in thirty minutes. Once you reach orbit, you’ll be given clearance by direct link. When you get back, we’ll use direct link to tell you where to land. We don’t want Terries tracing Mercury back to Preamble.”
“Direct link” was code talk for instantaneous communications using the tweaker. We would be using “direct link” for the first time, but only from orbit.
Charles thanked her and patted her shoulder. “Wanda was our tractor driver on the first jaunt,” he said. “We’re getting to be old hands at this.”
“I don’t ask questions,” Wanda said, brown eyes focusing on each of us in turn, lips set in mild amusement. “I just want the pleasure of seeing the results in the news.”
“No news on this one, I hope,” Charles said. “And that’s all you’ll learn today.”
“Awhh,” Wanda said, disappointed. She extended a pressurized chute between the tractor and the Mercury. The six of us clambered through on our hands and knees. Charles and Leander unloaded the equipment carefully. I helped carry the QL thinker and interpreter. We sealed for launch.
In our narrow couches, stretched side by side in two rows, we waited tensely for the rockets to fire. I hadn’t gone to orbit since my trip to Earth, lifetimes ago.
“Time to tell you something about making a leap,” Charles said. I turned to look at Leander and Charles on my left. Leander lifted his head and grinned. “It isn’t all tea and cakes. For passengers, I mean.”
“What did you leave out?” I asked.
“We won’t have any electrical activity for several minutes while we make the trip, and for a few minutes after. No heat, nothing in the suits, that sort of thing. It might get stuffy in the cabin, but we’ve made a mechanical scrubber without electrical parts, and that should take care of most difficulties for as long as ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Why the lapse?”
“We don’t know. You’ll feel a little queasy, too. It’ll pass, but all your neurons will seem to be on hold for a few minutes. It’s like a blackout, but you sort of realize what’s going on. The body doesn’t like it. Other than that — and it’s pretty minor stuff — everything is as advertised.”
I lay back on the couch. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”
“We had trouble enough back there.” Charles waved his hand in the general direction of the laboratory. “What would Wachsler say if we told him?”
“He’d have a fit,” I admitted. “But what will happen to everything on Mars… life support, not to mention everybody’s mental state?”
Leander interrupted what threatened to be a long discussion. “It may not be a problem in a week or two. We think it’s adjustable. We think we can fix it. But for now… be prepared.”