Boundary 2: Threshold (17 page)

Hohenheim saw Fitzgerald grimace. "Nothing in particular, General. It's the waiting. Most of the jobs I've been on in the past, I was the one in charge of the timing. Bloody annoying to be sitting here waiting for one of our eggheads to find what we need."

"Other than that, how do you gauge the situation?"

"Pretty good, actually, if I look at it from the outside. I've managed to keep away from Fathom. She knows I'm here, no doubt of it, but I guess she doesn't want to push things any more than we do. Dr. LaPointe hit it off really well with their astrophysicist, Conley—turns out the two of them have published in some of the same journals and knew each others' work, so they had a common ground. One good thing about the time element is that it's given us a lot of chances for the initial suspicion to die down. Conley and LaPointe are both going over the alien data that they've been getting from the noteplaques. A whole bunch of them turned out to have astronomical-related data on them. That's a big break, I don't think I need to tell you."

"Indeed it is." The general nodded thoughtfully. While it was A.J. Baker who was credited with the first two discoveries, it was Conley who had discovered the third, and in the long run Hohenheim expected that it would be the astronomers and their allied fields that discovered the best leads to new alien finds. They were, after all, the ones most likely to be studying the right material.

"I'm more worried about Eberhart," Fitzgerald said. "Didn't mind him getting friendly with the locals. After all, it might make things a lot easier in the long run. But I'm worried about his developing relationship with that IRI engineer Secord, which has the potential to go way beyond 'friendly.' That could cause problems down the road."

"Horst is a very loyal and honest man. The latter makes it a bit difficult for him to do anything underhanded, true, but the former makes it so that I can depend on him to do his part when the time comes."

Fitzgerald shrugged, running a hand through his short graying hair. "I guess. And it's not like we're going to ask him to hurt anyone."

Hohenheim noted that there wasn't a trace of irony or self-persuasion in that last sentence. Richard Fitzgerald honestly did not see that from the point of view of people like Horst Eberhart or Anthony LaPointe they were going to be asked to harm their new friends. Might be, at least. In ways that were probably legal and not physical, and ones that they had intellectually accepted when they took the mission. But it would be harm nonetheless. The general expected the two would still carry through, but he was quite aware of the hard choices he might be asking his men and women to make. It concerned him that Fitzgerald appeared to be totally blind to that.

Granted, it could be argued that Fitzgerald's attitude was the correct one to take for a man in his position. The Irishman was not the
Odin
's commander; he was its chief of security—which, being honest, meant that he also doubled as the informal head of whatever industrial espionage was carried out by the
Odin
's crew. It wasn't his job to be liked, or to make people happy: it was to make sure that the entire mission succeeded.

That said, Hohenheim was still concerned. He was particularly concerned because he hadn't been allowed any say—any input at all—in the selection of the mission's head of security. That was . . . odd. Normally, a commanding officer on such an expedition, especially one as experienced as Hohenheim, would have at least been consulted in the matter.

The fact that he hadn't been led him to wonder if Fitzgerald had been given secret instructions. By . . . whomever. Hohenheim was not naïve. He knew full well that the power structure of the European Union's space program was complex and involved a number of sometimes antagonistic forces. It was indeed possible that some powerful people or agencies in the EU were using Fitzgerald as a tool.

"Secret instructions" was perhaps the wrong way of putting it. Hohenheim doubted very much that Fitzgerald had been told to do anything radically different from the mission Hohenheim had been given. The problem was more a matter of parameters. Two men can both be told to do the same task. But if one of them is also privately instructed to let nothing stand in the way of success, then the task itself can become transformed. Especially if the man involved is someone who has difficulty making distinctions or seeing limits to begin with.

He restrained a sigh. There was no point in brooding on the matter. In all likelihood, nothing would ever happen that might bring the underlying problems to the surface.

"What about the secrets?" he asked.

Fitzgerald grinned. It hadn't taken long for the crew of
Odin
to figure out that there were at least two major secrets that the
Nobel
personnel were trying to hide from them—and doing pretty well at it. One of Fitzgerald's priorities had been to find out what those secrets were. From the expression on his face, he'd clearly met with some success.

"I know what they're hiding now. Well, not all the details, but I know for sure one of them. Took me a while to figure it out, mainly because, well, they're damn good for civilians. Fathom's work, probably, but what I mean is that someone's briefed them on how to say a lot without actually revealing anything. I had to sort through a lot of nothing and get our analysts to go over the secondary and tertiary material before I could get a handle on what they were doing.

"Anyhow, the boffins involved are engineering and hard-sciences people, especially particle physicists and . . . but you don't need the details. Long and the short of it is that the aliens were melting ice here on a really grand scale for some project of theirs, and they think they've found the generators that let them do it."

Hohenheim froze. He could see his own reaction was gratifying to Fitzgerald. "Fusion."

"Fusion. They're virtually certain now, and from some of the work they're doing I think it may be something they'll be able to get working in some reasonable time. Not in weeks or months, but we're not talking twenty years, either. The E.U. or the U.S.A., now, you might be talking even less time. These boys and girls haven't got those kinds of resources, though." He pulled out a data stick. "I've got the outline of an op on there that should let us grab the critical data and send it to HQ. With that as a head start, we'd get working fusion ahead of these guys and could announce it as our own innovation."

General Hohenheim stared at the little data stick. The idea had its temptations. There was no fuzziness about whether such a discovery would be worth the effort. Working, efficient fusion technology would have essentially inestimable value for applications on Earth or in space. And Richard Fitzgerald's assessment was almost certainly correct, in that even with the considerable brainpower they had available, the IRI-Ares consortium simply didn't possess the resources to bring that technology out as fast as the E.U. could. If Fitzgerald's operation worked, the benefits would be immense.

However . . . 

Hohenheim shook his head. "No, Mr. Fitzgerald. This isn't the operation we are supposed to perform, and there are huge potential risks. This well exceeds the level of duplicity we were intending to use. And without seeing your plan I can still tell you that there would be a significant risk of people being injured. You cannot be certain of obtaining this critical information without any confrontations."

"Very minimal, sir." Fitzgerald looked at him as though he wished to argue, but didn't. In some ways that worried the general even more, as Fitzgerald wasn't usually given to much restraint in speaking his mind. "But if you don't want it, fine. Might be some time before they find anything like what the head office was talking about, though. Going by the odds, looks to me like it might be another year or two. By then, I'm going to be worrying about whether we can count on our staff in a pinch, especially the ones getting really chummy with the locals."

He did have a point, much as Hohenheim didn't want to admit it. If they spent another year—or even a few more months—on station, pretty soon a number of his personnel would be seeing the people from
Nobel
as being as much their comrades as those of
Odin
. "What do you want, then?"

"Nothing much, sir. Just authorization to have some contingency plans in case I have to push things when we actually do make our move. I know you don't like it, General, but you know as well as I do that if we get loyalty issues, there may be some . . . incidents. I want to have some time to plan ways to neutralize the opposition without getting anyone hurt, and hopefully without them being able to prove we had much to do with it. But I can't guarantee that there won't be anyone getting hurt, if by 'hurt' we're including any and all sorts of emotional damage."

"Mr. Fitzgerald, I understand that it's impossible to avoid any type of damage when the interests of two parties clash. But we must avoid anything extreme. Any violence would seriously damage the claims the E.U. might get on our target, even leaving aside whatever disputes might arise from the use of industrial espionage."

"I understand that, sir."

Hohenheim studied him for a moment. To all appearances, Fitzgerald seemed the very model of obedience. The problem was that a man with his background and experience was inherently a very good actor. What did he really think? More importantly, what did he really intend?

There was no way to know. Hohenheim would just have to remain alert.

"Very well, Mr. Fitzgerald. Let me know as soon as anything new develops."

* * *

Once he was out of the general's office, Fitzgerald allowed himself a little smile. There was a certain delicious irony here. Nothing could be more plausible about "plausible deniability," after all, than the person in charge of a project being in fact ignorant of what was happening when his back was turned.

True, if and when the discrepancies surfaced, Hohenheim would be furious. But he was just the man in charge of the project. Which is not the same thing as being the man in charge of the payroll. The bonus that had been directly offered to Richard by Goswin Osterhoudt and more subtly implied by Commissioner Bitteschell was more than large enough—way more than large enough—for Richard to be quite willing to risk Hohenheim's ire. In fact, he was willing to risk a lot more than a mere general's wrath. With
that
bonus, Richard could retire a wealthy man.

Anthony pushed back his hair, muttering, and then sighed, undid the ponytail, and shoved the escaping and offending strands back into it, tying it tighter. Ceres' gravity was enough to keep most items in one place, but had little effect on hair or other very light materials. "Larry, this plaque, it is for the linguists, not us."

Larry Conley glanced in his display, seeing the image Anthony was sending him. "Oh, yeah. About an acre of text and one little diagram that looks like it might be something astronomical. Maybe. Or it could be a Bemmie mating-dance diagram. They loved those little sketch-thingies. Maybe they were just better at figuring out each others' chicken scratches, I dunno. Send that one to Rich and Jane, that's for sure." Larry shook his head. "I swear, it's so totally frustrating. We
know
a lot of this is astronomical data, or maybe astrogation stuff, but anyway it has to do with the actual solar system and the stuff they did in it, but we can't read it. That damn Rosetta Disk is taking them a hell of a long time to crack."

"We are better off than we were before, at least," Anthony pointed out, stretching a bit before going on to the next image of a noteplaque. There were literally thousands of the devices to go through. Why the aliens had chosen to stack that many of them in the one area was yet another mystery. A.J.'s best guess was that it was a repository for spare noteplaques—a place where you'd dump them for reuse by someone else. Why none of them were wiped off—blank—was somewhat confusing, though.

Still, no one was complaining, least of all Jake. This was a treasure trove, and he'd been spending the last few weeks carefully excavating the room, cataloguing each plaque's relation to all the others around it, and with Rich and Jane's help sorting them into likely subject categories. Apparently, if A.J. was correct, there had been a lot of work done involving astronomical/solar system navigation or surveying early on, and they were going through the discarded notepaper.

Both Larry and Anthony's initial enthusiasm on the vast number of potentially useful plaques had . . . well, not exactly vanished, but become dampened as it became increasingly clear that it was going to take weeks to go through them and even decide which ones were worth more study by them, rather than by dumping them on the increasingly overworked linguists. Xenolinguistics was a new field, with several universities trying to produce graduates soon, but it would be a while before real help arrived in that area.

Anthony blinked, then grinned at the new image. "The Great God Bemmie is once more on this one."

Larry laughed. "I wonder if they were really religious?"

"Who knows? Maybe that was one of their debates. Wasn't something like that in one of the books A.J. mentioned?"

"Oh, yeah, a classic.
The Mote in God's Eye.
There it was a nebula that looked like a hooded man, though."

"The Great God Bemmie" was Jupiter. Apparently, while the Great Red Spot had not existed sixty-five million years ago, similar semipermanent storms had; three of them, to be precise, apparently connected to something on Jupiter's quasi-surface thousands of kilometers below the cloud tops. The three rotated along with the planet and maintained a relationship which was geometrically very similar to the trilateral structure of the Bemmies themselves, and several sketches had indicated that whatever else the alien's perceptions might be like, they could, like human beings, see similarities between themselves and even astronomical phenomena. They often represented the giant planet as having three eyes, and there were sketches of Jupiter as the front end of a gargantuan Bemmie with a fully functional third eye.