“The trickiest part is right now,” she told him, inadvertently reminding the others of the tremendous danger they were now in. Krill was as much computer as human, or so it seemed. She’d clinically describe in great detail her own dissection. “We need to use power to get close to them, and the closer we get, the more likely we are to be detected. I understand that the theory here is to make our signature similar to that of a small comet or meteor. They may count them, but they do not shut them down.”
This solar system as originally constituted had been a very good one for humans. Discovered more than four hundred years earlier, it had one planet in the life zone that was so easily and inexpensively terraformable that it was habitable in a matter of decades, and a second world that, though not nearly as nice to live on, was filled with a great many valuable minerals and heavy metals that served as a virtual supply depot for building a new world.
The project was one of the first to have been handled from discovery through settlement by private corporations rather than a government or major institution or movement. The primary contractor for the job had been the large Petros Corporation, which was headed by several large families of ancient Greek extraction, hence the names of all the planets, moons, and the like had been taken from Greek myths. Few of the settlers were actually Greek, though; in fact, there were only so many Greeks at any point compared to the vast ethnic diversity spilling out into space.
Although Helena, as the beautiful habitable world was called, was divided up into districts based on founding Petros family names, there were Italians and Croatians and Yorubans and Han Chinese down there from the start. It was an echo of the ancient Greek world that no ancient Greek would probably have recognized.
Other than a love of and dedication to their new world, though, they had one thing in common that the founding patriarchs of the world had controlled to a large degree.
Constantine Karas had once thought of becoming an Orthodox priest instead of a captain of industry. In his old age and with his crowning project building, he determined that it would be a place where only those Orthodox churches recognized as Christian would flourish. There was already a world or two for just about every other ethnic group or religion or culture: Islamic, Buddhist, Taoist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, as well as many which were polyglot worlds. He held to it, even getting the reigning Patriarchs to recognize Helena’s own Orthodox branch, although there were also many Copts down there. Roman Catholics had also been welcome, but they had not flourished there. Even the millennium since the beginning of space travel and colonization hadn’t healed the ancient schisms between the Roman and Eastern churches.
That made this mixture even more atypical of the old visions. Harker was a lapsed Roman Catholic, N’Gana was a nominal Moslem, and Mogutu had been raised in the Anglican Communion, as it turned out, while Krill and van der Voort were lifelong atheists from a long line of them. Takamura was something of a Buddhist, but no more devout than Harker or N’Gana. Only Katarina Socolov, who was Ukrainian Orthodox in background, would have been what the old man had in mind for the colonists. It was one reason why she’d been picked for the mission, there being an assumption that something of the religious base might have survived down there even if in mutated form.
“There!” Father Chicanis breathed, pointing to the screen. “There is a full Helena, as beautiful as her legend!”
Nearly filling the screen was a magnified view of the world, looking so very peaceful and normal, a blue and white marble just hanging there in the sky.
“If you look closely, you can see almost all of Atlantis almost in the center of the planet,” Chicanis went on. “Eden is a bit south and to the east, but will be coming into view, I suspect, shortly. From this distance they both look more rounded than they actually are, which is how they came to be called Helen’s Eyes.”
Katarina Socolov grinned and commented, “Come, come, Father! We’re not in Sunday school here!”
He gave a kind of resigned chuckle and replied, “All right, then. Most people called them Helen’s Breasts.”
That drew a snicker from the combat folks in the rear and helped break the tension. It was only a brief respite, though; they could all feel it, made all the worse because at the moment they were helpless and totally at the mercy of the Dutchman and his programming. If a Titan should pass by or do an energy sweep, they were all dead and they knew it.
The computer on the corvette broke in with a voice that sounded a lot like the Dutchman’s. “I can show you through filters the Titan layout down there and you can see the sweep,” it said. “I will do this now, but I must then power off the screen until we are in and behind Hector. I am registering an abnormally high energy flow. One of the suits in the hold must be powered on more than it should be.”
Probably mine, Harker thought. He suspected that the damned thing was smarter than he was, or at least cleverer.
The screen changed and went through a series of obvious visual filters. It was on the broad-spectrum filter that the Titan net was clearly visible, though. Now, most of Atlantis and a good half of Eden were visible, and in the viewer you could clearly see the bright anchor points of the Titan bases, the smaller anchors and the center nexus for each, and the rather tight grid for each continent. The poles also pulsed brightly, and, because the corvette’s pilot had timed it for this purpose, they were able to see the thin pole-to-pole line of the steady sweep, as if a single line of longitude were visibly making its way around the world.
It was a reminder of what they were really looking at: a world that had once been alive and filled with people, living a pretty good life there in relative peace and contentment, but no more. Now it was a conquered world, an occupied world. And there was the enemy.
“Powering down,” said the computer pilot. The screen went blank, and for some reason that action, coming immediately after that vision of the grids and sweeps below, felt more threatening, more scary, than just seeing it.
It was probably no more than a half hour, possibly a bit longer, but it seemed like an eternity before the screen came to life again. Curiously, during that time there had been almost no conversation, as if all of them, collectively, had been holding their breaths.
Now the screen came to life again. “Power is stabilized,” the pilot reported. “Achilles now in sight. We will be using it as partial cover until we can move easily to Hector.”
Achilles looked like a proper moon, about thirty percent the size of the planet below and essentially round. It was heavily cratered, but frozen liquid covered much of its surface, giving the appearance of vast flat spots with jagged fractures.
After a few more minutes, during which they pretty much paced Achilles and kept it between them and the planet below, they saw Hector coming toward them. None of them were impressed.
“Shaped like a thigh bone,” Katarina Socolov commented. “What a silly, twisted little thing!”
“Not much gravity on it, either,” Admiral Krill warned her. “And the uneven rotation can be rather dizzying from the model I’ve run. Still, it’s where we have to go.”
“Why didn’t they put it on Achilles?” Colonel N’Gana asked aloud. “Stable platform, plenty of water. What kind of weapon could you even aim from that thing?”
“It seems we are coming in to land,” Krill responded. “I think we may soon find out—if there’s anything there at all.”
THIRTEEN