As time grew near for the run to the surface, tension mounted within the whole party, not just among those who were going. This was the start of the truly dangerous part of the mission, and none of them even knew what the full price of failure would be, only that they might well be the only hope the human race had for survival.
Katarina Socolov had been cool to Harker and everybody else for much of the time, but suddenly she was quite friendly to him. He suspected that it was less his magnetic charm than the sudden realization that she was going down to a primitive world so alien they might not have imagined just how different it would be, and she was going to be the only woman along with three big military guys, a priest, and a Pooka. N’Gana and Mogutu were good men on your side in a fight, that was certain, but she wasn’t even sure how they felt about women, although she knew full well that they would have preferred she not be along. Not because she was a woman, she suspected, but because she wasn’t military, wasn’t One of Them. They weren’t too thrilled about the priest, either, but they weren’t the ones paying for this trip.
Still, of them all, Harker, who was One of Them but also an outsider to this happy group, seemed to be the one common sense said would be the best friend to have in a hostile environment.
The infiltration team had left the scientists in the control center, attempting to master the system and determine that it would work as advertised. Even if the ones who were going down to the surface were totally successful and got themselves or at least the code data out, they knew they would get only one try with the weapons system. If it worked, that was all they would need; if it didn’t, they were literally dead ducks.
The tiny lifeboat-style ship that would take them down to the surface was cramped and not built with comfort in mind. It could take up to eight people, more than was needed, but those eight would be stacked in tubelike compartments unable to see or do much of anything. There wasn’t even an intercom; that had been stripped out, lest its use alert the Titans below of something unusual.
“You look uncomfortable, Mister Harker,” Alan Mogutu commented with a slight, sardonic smile.
One of these days somebody’s gonna knock that superior grin off your face, you asshole, Harker thought, but instead he replied, “I’m not used to going into a hostile situation without a suit. These camouflage fatigues and boots are no substitute.”
“True,” the mercenary responded. “Still, it is essential to occasionally test yourself against the elements with nothing but your own body, skills, and wits.”
Colonel N’Gana looked up from where he was securing some equipment in one of the small boat’s compartments and added, “Your suit would be your coffin down there. That’s the problem. Always has been. If they notice you at all, they will simply drain all power from your equipment. We don’t know how they do it, but nothing we’ve tried in the way of insulation works at thicknesses you can carry around. That old weapons station back there, for example, is shielded, but the shields involved are of very rare and expensive substances and they’re over a meter thick. Even then, once that shield is breached just long enough to direct fire, just once, and used—they’ll know. At that point, they’ll have a matter of minutes, perhaps as few as seven minutes, depending on how ready our friends down there might be to respond to a threat from such an unlikely area, to live. There is no way they could be evacuated in that amount of time without the ship itself being caught and drained by probable planetary defenses. No, this is one for history, Harker. We do it and we’re the heroes of all humanity. We fail, we die. It’s that simple. I wonder just how many people could actually pull this off, getting down there and doing this job with minimal power, almost like in the ancient times.”
“We’ve all gone soft,” Mogutu continued as N’Gana went back to checking the pack one last time. “I doubt if any of us—you, me, even the colonel—would be any sort of match for a Roman legionnaire in Julius Caesar’s army, or Alexander the Great’s infantry, Ramses II’s conquering horde, or in particular Genghis Khan’s. Imagine those Mongols—they had the largest empire on earth and held it without modern communication. The only thing that stopped them from conquering all of ancient Asia, Europe, and probably Africa as well was that they kept knocking off the conquest to go home every time they needed to elect a new emperor. You much on the ancient history of our people?”
“Not much,” Harker admitted. “Just the usual school and trivial stuff. But I know who they were, at least. And you think that a rank private in any of those armies could take us?”
“The lot of us,” Mogutu replied without hesitation. “They walked the whole of a planet and nothing stood in their way. Discipline, skill, constant training. They were the real supermen, Harker. We just try to emulate them with our fancy fighting suits. I wish you’d had a chance to run Socolov’s sim back on the Odysseus. You had to run it through without a suit. Without anything at all, really, except some stones and spears and such. It’s a humbling experience.”
Harker nodded. “So, how many times did you run it before you got all the way through?”
Mogutu’s finely featured face was suddenly a grim mask. “I didn’t get through it, Harker. Nobody did. Not a single one of us survived. And we ran it again and again and again.”
Now that was a sobering thought. Not N’Gana, not Mogutu— “Nobody? ”
“Nobody. Of course, it was based on a lot of remote research and intelligence on what these worlds are like without anybody involved having actually been down on one. It might not be as tough as she has it.”
“Or it might be tougher,” N’Gana pointed out. “Still, if these pirates have been looting these worlds under the Titans’ noses, so to speak, then there is a chance. On the other hand, the fellow who got this information out but did not get himself out was a seasoned man on these worlds who could blend in like a native and knew probably more than anyone how the Titans worked and where they were blind. This time he didn’t make it. It could be that Helena is one hell of a Trojan horse.”
Harker stared straight into the colonel’s eyes. “You don’t believe that for a second, not really. And neither do the people who hired you. They went outside their own people to bring in a team that their computers and researchers decided was the best. You know it, I know it. And if you make your living stealing hairs from the devil’s beard, then sooner or later he’s going to wake up. The pirate’s failure proves nothing.”
N’Gana remained impassive for a few seconds, then suddenly he grinned and broke into good-natured laughter. “Harker, maybe you are the one who should be with us! At least you don’t scare easy!”
And maybe you don’t scare easily enough, the Navy man thought, but returned the big mercenary’s grin.
He went over to Katarina Socolov, who was doing a last-minute inventory of her own supplies. She acknowledged him, but was too busy for conversation. Suddenly she stopped and asked sharply, “Colonel? Where’s my data recorder?”
“Left on the deck, madam, along with several other things of yours which require power and have internal power supplies. We cannot afford giving anything that would register as our signature on their monitoring equipment. Sergeant Mogutu and I have gone through everyone’s equipment and pared it all down. Anything we don’t know they won’t pick up on gets left behind.”
“Then what am I supposed to use for my database and field notes?”
“Try using your head and perhaps writing things down in notebooks the way our ancestors did. You can’t get a doctorate in the social sciences these days without knowing how to write, since you can’t take a lot of our stuff into primitive cultures without corrupting them. Cheer up, Doctor. You are going to miss a lot more than a mere recorder.”