“Yes?”
“I believe you’ll find Ms. Fiorella out in the hall. Disarm her, and send her in.”
41.
Rested and equipped, but not fed—they were uncertain about the availability of alien restrooms and although some facilities were built into the EVA suits, nobody enjoyed using them—the exploratory team assembled in the air lock of the storage and shuttle bay. The bay could be pressurized for shuttle maintenance and other on-site activities, but normally it was left open to space.
The seven-person party, led by George Barnes, a marine captain, suited up. The short-range shuttles, designed to carry up to twelve people and convey a substantial amount of cargo, were boxy skeletal affairs, similar in size and shape to double-decker omnibuses, so, naturally, that’s what they got called.
Barnes was soft-spoken and meticulous. Sandy had always been a bit suspicious of marines during the Tri-Border fight, as they seemed willing to trade casualties for easy movement. That is, they used lighter weapons than Sandy thought reasonable. Faced with a Guapo hardpoint, they’d tend to do recon with a live patrol, then attack with backpacked munitions. The army would check it with drones of various kinds, both fliers and crawlers, and once the extent of the hardpoint was determined, the army had no qualms about calling in the air force with thousand-kilo bunker-busters, or toasting the place with a fuel-air heater.
On the other hand, good marine officers were just plain good officers, and Barnes was affable enough. Along with Sandy, Barnes taught a couple of popular physical-fitness courses.
As Barnes hand-checked the readouts on all seven suits, he took a call from Fang-Castro. “Captain Barnes, your party will be enhanced by one extra member. She’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am. Who is it?”
“One guess.”
Fiorella showed up two minutes later, still pissed. “I imagine you set Fang-Castro straight,” Sandy joked on a private channel.
Fiorella bared her teeth.
Sandy said, “Seriously, did you pee before you left? You have a bladder the size of a thimble.”
“Yes. I peed. Now shut the fuck up.”
“Keep your teeth off your lip—you won’t be able—”
“Shut up.”
“I gotta tell you one more thing, before you tell me to shut up again.”
“Tell me.”
“I brought the mini-Red with a Post-it pad. You can stick it to the bus rail and focus it on your face as we go out, and talk to it on a side channel. When we get back, we can intercut your commentary with the documentary photos.”
“Sandy… but wait. You knew I was coming?”
“No, but I’ve been exposed to your powers of persuasion,” Sandy said. “I suspected I might be seeing you.”
“Sometimes I think you’re brighter than I give you credit for,” Fiorella said. Pregnant pause. “But only sometimes.”
The Nixon’s buses weren’t pressurized. The upper deck was equipped with seats and harnesses and umbilical connectors for space suits that provided life support, power, and communications. The suits were comfortable; they’d been designed to be lived in for up to thirty-six hours. They’d support a human being for longer than that, but things would start to get ripe. Food, water, waste elimination, air recirculation, were provided for. A built-in sponge bath, not so much.
The suits even offered entertainment: the heads-up virtual screen could show movies, vids, reading material, even games, whatever the wearer had uploaded into the suit databanks, or had transmitted to it. None of the team had bothered uploading data for this trip; boredom seemed unlikely to come up inside Saturn’s rings, with the vast delicately colored expanse of Saturn itself hanging to one side and aliens awaiting them.
Beneath the seats, the life-support system sat on top of an open framework equipped with grapples, maneuvering actuators, and tie-downs. The front of the bus was equipped with manipulator arms, like the claws on a lobster. At the rear end of the bus were the rockets. The bus “cruised” at a maximum ten kilometers a minute, a snail’s pace by the standards of space travel, but entirely sufficient for the bus’s normal operating range of a thousand kilometers.
The first trip to the alien constellation’s primary would be an easy half-hour run, and over that distance, fancy orbital mechanics didn’t come into play: Gorey could fly it by the seat of his pants.
The five-kilometer primary was impossible to miss if you knew where to look; it was dim and dark, but it was twice the size of the full moon. When they were loaded, strapped in, checked one last time by Barnes, Fang-Castro gave them the go-ahead.
Barnes said, “Mr. Gorey. You’ve got the wheel.”
The bus unlatched from the ship, Gorey gave it a tiny boost to the left, pointed it slightly inboard of their alien objective, and opened the engines. The bus’s quarter-gee acceleration brought them to their cruising velocity in barely over a minute; it felt oppressively heavy to people who’d been living in a tenth of a gee for half a year.
Hannegan, the physicist, said, “My God, when we get home, it’s gonna hurt, the gravity is.”
“That’s why you’ve got to keep coming to the PE classes,” Barnes said. “If you don’t, going home won’t just hurt, it’ll kill you.”
Sandy kept his high-resolution cameras running all the way in, with the recordings retransmitted to the Nixon as they were made. Gorey stopped the bus ten kilometers out. Fang-Castro asked, “Anything?”
“Not that I see,” Barnes answered.
They’d agreed that purely passive reconnaissance was the safest course. No laser altimeters or radar-mapping, nothing beamed at the alien structure, nothing that could be interpreted as hostile or invasive. They thought they’d been invited… but what if they were wrong?
The bus trip had been timed so that they’d arrive shortly before the primary’s rotation brought the rainbow target in line with the Nixon. The scientists had wanted the bus to loop around the primary, so that they’d have a minutely detailed record of its entire surface, but Fang-Castro had vetoed the idea. The bus would never be out of sight of the Nixon, not on the first trip.
Barnes: “Here comes the target.”
As the alien sphere turned, the rainbow target slowly appeared, brightening and sparkling but now something new happened. A hundred meters off to one side of the rainbow, a new, smaller bull’s-eye target began to glow, in repeating concentric rings of yellow, green, and blue that shrank toward the center and disappeared.
Barnes: “John, is that a landing port?”
Clover said, “Can’t see what else it could be.”
Barnes said, “Admiral, unless you object, I’m going to have Elroy take us in. Otherwise, we’ll be waiting another four hours before you’re line-of-sight with us.”
“I concur,” Fang-Castro said.
“Elroy…”
Gorey took them in. As they closed, a port began to open in the middle of the smaller rainbow target, and a massive shelf pushed out.
“One damn fine mousetrap,” Clover laughed.
“Not helping, John,” Barnes snapped.
Sandy glanced at Fiorella, who was smiling into the mini-Red she’d stuck to the rail of the bus, talking a kilometer a minute.
Barnes: “That shelf could take the bus. Do we land it? Or do we leave the bus hanging? If we land it, it’ll rotate out of sight.”
There was a long silence, then Fang-Castro said, “We now agree here that you should land the bus. Then, if you’re asked to leave, or pushed out, you’ll have something to leave with—you won’t be hanging on the wrong side of the primary without a ride.”