“Consider the options. Are the Marglotta alive? Then we have responded to their call for help, and we are ready for their thanks and willing to begin negotiations—on our terms. Are the Marglotta dead? Then the whole of the planet, except for an insignificant area where the rest of our original party is located, is ours for the taking. We will of course rescue Julian Graves and the others and be prepared to receive their gratitude—eventually.”
There was no justice in the universe, and a man had no right to expect any. Louis had known that long before he was a man—before he was weaned, probably, though his memories didn’t go back that far.
Even so, it was never pleasant to have your nose rubbed in injustice one more time.
He was sitting in his own quarters, at his desk and working on the difficult question of the landing party, when Sinara walked in.
No, she didn’t walk in; she waltzed in. The laws of morning-after said that she should be feeling like hell and looking as green as Claudius. Instead she was rose pink and bright-eyed, with a spring in her step. The bottom of her mouth ought to feel as though bats without toilet-training had roosted all night on her upper palate. But when she said, “Good morning—and a great morning it is,” she leaned over and gave Louis a kiss on his unshaven cheek. Her breath was as sweet, fresh, and perfumed as the spring violets on Sentinel Gate.
A woman without a trace of conscience, who showed no signs of guilt for anything she had done? That was Sinara. The thought brought back memories of Glenna Omar. What was Glenna doing right this minute, back on the garden world of Sentinel Gate? Louis didn’t know, but he had his suspicions.
He gestured to the seat at the other side of his desk. “Sit down.”
“Over there? Not over here?” She was standing by him and breathing into his ear.
“Not now. We got work to do. We’re heading down to Marglot. Question is, who goes and who stays here?”
“Everyone should go. It maximizes our chances of survival.”
“What makes you think so?”
“In our survival training classes on Persephone, we were provided logical proofs, based on long-established game theory results, that the probability of survival in an unknown environment is proportional to the size of that party.”
“That’s fine, if you happen to regard survival as a game. In our case, I can see three or four things wrong with the idea that everybody should go. First, whoever we send may need backup. If the Have-It-All went down to the surface and somehow got smashed up, that would be it. There’s no sign of another ship anywhere in the Marglot system. That means we gotta send the pinnace down, and keep the Have-It-All up here and out of danger in case it’s needed for a rescue mission. It could make it down easy enough on autopilot, but I’d rather have somebody at the controls who can make the right decision if things get hairy.”
“So you have to leave Claudius here. He’s the best pilot. But I don’t think from the look of him this morning he’s in any condition to travel.”
“That’s his problem, not ours. Claudius is a navigator, an’ I don’t know how good he pilots when he’s not juiced up. Anyway, are you willin’ to put that much faith in a Chism Polypheme? I’m not. Give him half a chance and Claudius would be out of here an’ take the Have-It-All with him. He says this ship is no good, but you can see his eye roll when he looks at some of the fixtures. I don’t care how bad he’s feelin’, he has to go down ’cause I don’t trust him here.
“Which brings us to the second problem. You flew the pinnace down to Pompadour, so you know it don’t have that much space on it. In principle it has a three-person limit, though you can squeeze two in the back if you have to. Archimedes can’t go—he’d be bulging out of the hatch with no room for anyone else.”
“That gives you one definite stay-at-home on the Have-It-All.”
“Yeah. Trouble is, Archimedes is stronger than greed but he ain’t none too smart. If it came to a rescue mission, it’d be a toss-up whether you’d trust him or the autopilot to take the right action. You need a rescue crew that’s smart and a good enough pilot to land the ship on top of Julian Graves’s bald head and be out of there before he has time to feel the pain. And there’s one other thing. You need a rescue crew that won’t turn and run, no matter how dangerous it gets. You need a rescue crew that would die rather than leave you behind on the surface of Marglot.”
“Kallik and J’merlia?”
“You got it. Put all that together, and it’s easy. Atvar H’sial and I go down in the pinnace, and so does Claudius. Archimedes, Kallik and J’merlia stay behind. Kallik is really smart, and J’merlia flies this ship better than I ever could. Both of them are so devoted to At and me they’d come after us if we were marooned in hell. In fact, they’re too damned devoted—if we don’t stop ’em, they’ll be down there every ten minutes to check on us. I’ll tell ’em to come if they get my signal, or the pinnace beacon goes dead, an’ not before. That leaves only one person still to decide.”
“Me? You can’t possibly mean me.” Sinara stood in her most aggressive hands-on-hips stance. “Let me remind you of something, Louis. I am a survival team member. I am trained for trouble.”
“You certainly know how to start it. All right, you’re the fourth. It will be a squeeze in the pinnace, but we’ll manage.”
“We’ll do more than manage. We’ll have fun.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. Because I’ll be the pilot, and the way space inside the pinnace is arranged, either Atvar H’sial or Claudius will have to sit next to you. I’ll give you the choice.” Louis looked up at her scowling face. “If you want to hear the rest of it, you might as well sit down again.”
“The rest of it? You had this all worked out before I came in. You didn’t want me to help, you just wanted me to listen.”
“Not true. A second head can help. I think I know what I’m doin’, but suppose I’m wrong? Here’s the other part. We’re going down to Marglot, but where do we land?”
“Are you asking me, or are you just going to tell me?” But Sinara sat down again.
“I’m going to explain the situation as I see it. Then I’m goin’ to ask your opinion. What we know isn’t much and it isn’t complicated. We have six people in suits in one place on the surface, near the Hot Pole. Kallik has been monitoring suit signals, and one of the people is banged up pretty good.”
“Who?”
“Ben Blesh.”
“I bet he got hurt trying to be a hero. That was always his ambition.”
“No information on that, an’ you’re bein’ bitchy. The others are all right. But we got one, E.C. Tally, way off in the temperate zone between the hot and cold hemispheres. How he got there, what he’s doin’ there, your guess is as good as mine.
“Now we come to what we really don’t know. Who else, or what else, is down there? The Marglotta were advanced enough to commission a Polypheme ship an’ fly all the way to the Orion Arm to ask for help. They must have had some spaceflight of their own. You’d expect to see satellites buzzing all over the place around Marglot. We don’t. Maybe in the combined gravity field of the sun, M-2, and Marglot, orbital paths are so weird that orbital decay times stop you puttin’ up anything unmanned. But that’s pure guesswork.