“Fair enough. Oh—you really should stop by supplies and get yourself a decent pair of pants. In fact, I’ve already arranged for an entire kit to be prepared in your size. Just pick it up and sign for it.”
He was certainly predictable, anyway, Harker thought, as he got and checked through the kit. There were two complete outfits in there, each with the same nondescript black pullovers that the priest, the colonel, and the colonel’s long-time partner and aide fancied aboard. In fact, when he answered the page to go to the lower docking bay, he found that it was the uniform of the day.
He was surprised to see that they’d brought his suit down as well. It looked the worse for wear on the outside; the smooth gloss was off it, and it had some minor fading and beading that made it seem less awesome and more seedy, but he knew it was still in top shape inside.
“We think the suit will be quite handy,” the colonel told him, seeing his surprise. “Not on the surface of Helena, of course, but on Hector. The same low power modes that allowed it to stick undetected by us to the outer hull of the Odysseus should be sufficient for work there without drawing an unwelcome crowd, or so this Dutchman says.”
“Anything on him yet? Anything other than what we already knew?” Harker asked.
“Nothing. Every transfer’s been by computer and robotics. It’s almost like he really is his namesake. A cursed captain who cannot be in the company of humans, served by a ghost crew.”
“Surely he’s coming with us!”
“I don’t think so,” Father Chicanis answered. “I think he’s staying right where he is. What he needs is in the computer navigational and piloting system on the corvette. He’s not going to risk his own neck. Not when he can get us to risk ours.”
One by one they gathered there. Only Madame Sotoropolis and Captain Stavros would remain aboard the Odysseus for this leg. Neither could offer anything more to the expedition than they had by financing and assembling it.
“I should love to see my beautiful Helena one more time,” the old diva said wistfully. “But I would be as a stone to the expedition, and I would be dead in an instant if the Titans sapped energy. I will have to say `Good luck and Godspeed’ from here. Take care, all of you.”
A gloved, shaky hand grasped Father Chicanis’s and squeezed hard. He looked down at her and said, “If we can do it and it is God’s will, we will. That much I swear.”
“Do you—do you really believe that anyone is still alive down there?” she asked him.
“Not anyone who remembers us, surely,” he responded, and clearly not for the first time. “Still, someone is there. God would not bring us to this point with these fine people and let us fail. I do believe the road will be one of the hardest anyone has been asked to take in centuries. God bless you, Anna Marie. Sing joyfully of me, for I am going home.”
The airlock slid open, and they all turned and walked single file through the tubelike connector and into the small corvette. The suits and other supplies were handled by the Odysseus’s automatic cargo and servicing robots, which took them out and slid them into the cargo section in the corvette’s underbelly.
Katarina Socolov hadn’t been in the assembly, and for a moment he’d hoped that she’d come to her senses, but now here she was, taking a seat next to Father Chicanis in the front row.
The Pooka slithered in and curled up in the back. Being the unexpected added passenger, Harker took the only seat left open, the one next to Krill, just behind the priest and Socolov.
“I see that had I elected not to come I wouldn’t have had your company after all,” he noted.
“I decided that the old security codes and devices might be more of a problem than we think. I’ll not be going to the surface, though. Any encounter with a Titan field will kill me, you know. But I could not allow this to proceed without verifying that it exists and that we can get in and out,” Krill replied.
“That fellow whose brain scan you deciphered got in and got information,” he noted.
“Yes, but he did not get what we needed and he did not make it out. Even as he died, he could not have truly known if there was anything to this more than a failed project and a set of contingency plans. That’s what we find out first.”
Harker nodded and looked around. Nine of them going into Titan territory pretty well blind and untrained as a true military team. How could this possibly work?
“I’m still surprised that the Dutchman, or a crony, isn’t along,” he noted. “Mighty trusting of him after all this.”
“What’s to trust?” she asked him. “His program is taking us in, his programmed AI unit is handling all the ship’s piloting and navigation, and it’s the only way to or from. He’s got the Odysseus and the only exit. What else does he need?”
The corvette powered up, the airlocks closed and then hissed, and finally the lights came on stating that there was a valid seal and that pressurization was accomplished.
They pushed off, then they could feel the ship come about. When the engines came up to normal, though, all sensation of movement stopped and they just had the steady hum of the engines.
“I forgot to ask,” Harker said. “How long is this little jaunt?”
“Just a few hours, or so we’re told,” Father Chicanis called back.
Harker sighed. “Well, then, I’m going to dial up a real meal and a decent drink and then get a little sleep. It seems I’ve been a very long time between meals.”
The food didn’t have much taste, but it filled him, which was what he needed. After that he really did recline and nod off, but he kept having the same dream, of a star-filled universe being overrun by cockroaches.
And he was one of the roaches.
There was curiously little conversation on the way, even when they were awake, and then it was entirely about practical things like eating and drinking and power consumption.
Emerging back into normal space from the very small genhole and into the Trojan system was done very quickly, and they knew it from the sudden drop into red warning lights and the sudden and complex maneuvering of the craft.
On the screen, though, came a sun and four very distinct planets.
“Save for a trickle charge that keeps it from imploding, the small genhole is inactive inside the orbit of two of the moons of one of the larger gas giants in the system,” Krill explained to him, knowing that he alone would not have been fully briefed. “The amount of surge produced when it powers up and allows us through is masked by the magnetic field and electrical storms in the upper atmosphere of the giant, so unless we literally run into a Titan ship or patrol they won’t be able to pull us out of the muck. That’s how they move these little ships in and out.”
“So they say,” he commented.
“Oh, there’s no problem with this. As totally incomprehensible as the Titans are, they still obey the general laws of physics. We just haven’t figured out how they do it all yet.”
We haven’t figured out how they do most of it, he thought sourly, but he let it pass. Much worse, we haven’t the vaguest idea why. How could you deal with an adversary this powerful who would not even accept a surrender?
Cockroaches…
Maybe it wasn’t so bad being a cockroach after all, he thought. The buggers survived virtually everything and you never could completely get rid of them no matter how hard you tried. No other creature in the universe had ever been encountered that was as versatile and persistent as the various kinds of Terran cockroaches. That, at least, had been a blessing. So if we’re the second Terran evolutionary species to be too ornery and tough to die, maybe there’s something to be said for the whole thing.