Boundary 2: Threshold (31 page)

He could see Hohenheim's grimace of distaste, both at the bluntness of his commentary and the fact of his eavesdropping on a private conversation. Well, too bad. That
was
his job in such delicate circumstances, and in this case it looked to have been bloody good he'd done so.

"Horst is a good man," Hohenheim said finally. "He wouldn't risk the ship just because he felt guilty."

Fitzgerald waved that off. "He isn't the type to kill anyone, I know that. But there wasn't much risk in this. He just screws up the whole mission, but no one gets killed. He knows we can get home eventually."

"Ares had motive, too, of course."

"Too right on that. But they never had access to our systems. Sure, if even one of them had ever been on board I'd be looking real close at our friends on the alien ship, but there's just no way. They'd need time to get into the systems, figure out how to cut out the right areas, and they'd have to do that
without alerting our friend Horst
. I don't believe that last part one little bit, unless we go the whole way and make him a double agent. Which"—Fitzgerald held up a hand, forestalling Hohenheim's protest—"I don't believe, either. He's not sneaky enough for that."

He stopped and waited. He didn't need to say any more. The general knew what had to be done, no matter how much he liked the young engineer.

General Hohenheim nodded. "Have him brought here."

It only took a few minutes before Horst arrived. He looked startled when he saw Fitzgerald as well as the general. "Sir?"

"Sit down, Horst," the general said. When the system engineer hesitated, Fitzgerald stepped forward and shoved him down.

"The man said sit, boyo, and sit you will. And listen, and then talk when we say. Now, why don't you just come out with it?"

Horst stared at him in apparent disbelief. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't go playing an idiot, Eberhart! There isn't anyone else on this ship that could've messed with the drives like that, and you know it."

"Calm down, Mr. Fitzgerald," Hohenheim said. "Horst, please. I can understand why you did it, but denying it will do no good."

"You think
I
caused the drive failures?"

"Well,
somebody
bloody did. And it sure wasn't me, and it wasn't the general, and I'd like to ask you who else
but
you could do it."

Horst glared at Fitzgerald, but said nothing.

"Mr. Eberhart . . . Horst. You have been an excellent member of the crew so far, but you cannot deny appearances are very much against you. One odd drive failure, in one drive system, could be accident. Two, under these circumstances, are entirely beyond the pale of believability. And, again in these circumstances, I really cannot afford to take risks. However, there is one other obvious group of suspects. If you can only tell me how they could have done it."

"You mean the
Nebula Storm
."

"Exactly. Is there any way that they could have done this, given what we know about the access they had to our vessel?"

Moments passed slowly as Horst thought. Richard smiled inwardly as he saw, by the young engineer's expression, that there was no way out. "Sir . . . No, I can't see one, not even for A.J. Baker. If he had access to our system designs, or any interior access . . . or if he had his Faerie Dust on our ship, yes, he could. But there's just no way I can think of he could have done that. If they'd had that on board our ship near Ceres, they'd have stopped us long since—they'd have had plenty of chances"—he glanced at Fitzgerald narrowly—"to find out what we did, and how we did it. They wouldn't need to do this—they'd just have transmitted the evidence." He looked desperately at Hohenheim. "But . . . Sir, I didn't do it!"

The general shook his head. "I truly wish I could believe you, Mr. Eberhart. But I can't." He nodded to Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald grabbed Eberhart's arms, forced them behind his back, and slipped on the cuffs. "Horst Eberhart, you're under arrest for suspicion of sabotage and possible espionage. Come along with me." He hustled the stunned Horst out of the general's office, toward the security area. Weeks back, anticipating possible problems, he'd had his security team set up three tiny holding cells. It was a jury-rigged arrangement, but it should do the job well enough.

This was working out well. While Richard had never had any personal animus against Eberhart, he'd always known the idealism of the young man could be trouble. And here the trouble was.

"Once this crisis is over, we'll have a longer time to talk. And talk you will, boyo. Talk you will."

"Are we a go?" Jackie asked.

"No sign of
Odin
yet. And if she'd stayed anywhere on original course, she'd have come blazing out of there quite a while ago," A.J. answered.

Jackie glanced at Madeline, who nodded. "If our guesses were right, Jackie, they would have been accelerating on that leg, and we reversed that."

"Of course, if we'd been wrong and they'd been planning a deceleration, that would have meant we'd have sent them accelerating out of control, wouldn't it?" Jackie asked with sudden concern.

A.J. gave her a hurt look. "Do I look that simple-minded? We planned on
emulating
a glitch that reversed the vectors. I wasn't actually putting in something that boneheaded and unadaptable. If they were planning on decelerating, Larry and I had figured out specific changes to their profile. No way was I taking chances on doing that, because then there really wouldn't be anything in the system that could catch them, at least not without getting lost itself." The sensor expert shrugged. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. The fact that we haven't seen them tells us what happened. They had to have decelerated."

"Larry? When will we see them?"

"Unless celestial mechanics have changed, I'd say we can expect our guests to pop into view in about . . . twenty minutes."

"Once we establish contact, A.J., how long until you will be able to confirm the existence of the coilguns?"

"A few minutes, no more. I've already got a lot of contingency programs laid in for establishing a no-go lockout on them. That shouldn't take too long."

"What if they
do
fire on us?" Helen asked.

"Same drill as before," said Joe. "But remember, we've already done the calculations. There's no way they can hit us. That goes double now that we'll have the Faerie Dust in the systems. Even if A.J. can't do anything to stop the firing, we'll know exactly when it fires, and even sluggish as
Nebula Storm
is down here, we can get out of the way. We still have enough reaction mass for a short emergency burn on the main engine, too."

Maddie frowned. "So this weapon is useless in space?"

"Hardly useless," A.J. retorted. "Worked damn well on Ceres. If you don't know it's coming, it's effective over a pretty long range. Beam weapons would be a hell of a lot better, but those would be hell to hide. Not that they'll be able to hide weapons like this now, either, but it was a useful trick the first time, just like the original Trojan Horse. A projectile weapon of that kind is useful against fixed targets or targets that either don't know it's coming, or that really can't accelerate out of the way. You could probably even put a little bit of terminal guidance into the shell to predict and adjust for target accel that wasn't too large."

He looked abstracted for a moment. "In this case it wouldn't make much difference. We start with a regular sail maneuver. If the shell shows a shift in course, we do a bigger burn. It can't have much maneuvering capability, since there's a limit to what you can stuff into a projectile. And especially a projectile that's going to go through a coilgun. The combination of electromagnetics and radiation will fry anything except very, very hardened or shielded electronics, or some MEMS/NEMS or optical units."

"Radiation?" Maddie asked.

"The way the accelerator works, you tend to get X-ray or gamma pulses out as a side effect. If I'd suspected anything of the sort before the fact, I'd have been able to prove they used a coilgun just by being able to localize a radiation pulse to the
Odin
. That's why they'd have to have the things out on the drive ribs anyway, now that I think about it. You want to keep the gun away from habitable areas, no matter how good your shielding is."

"And magnetic shielding is useless against X-rays and gammas," Joe noted. "So the only shielding that would work is a lot of mass. The same arguments would apply to the main drive, if not as intensely, so it wouldn't have been hard to justify the design to maximize the fuel tankage and reactor shielding along that arc. It'd make sense, given that you're putting the NERVA engine in that area anyway."

"All right, everyone," Jackie said. "It'll be showtime in a few minutes. As we discussed, we're basically going to our old choice number two, except this time we're the ones in the stronger position. We'll have proof they had the means to perform the attack on Ceres—a weapon deliberately concealed from the IRI and other powers—and that we can now probably beat them to Enceladus."

"So, then we make them the deal that should have been made all along—for all three groups to work together. We'll even let them be in on the first landing on Enceladus. Yeah, we know, Captain," A.J. said. "And we blow the whistle on them if they tell us to screw off."

"Exactly. And that would take us just a few seconds, right?"

"Well, longer than that," A.J. said. "Not normally, but remember, we haven't even completely cleared Jupiter yet, and Io's going to be getting in the way. I figure it'll be another . . . what, six or seven hours, Larry?" The astronomer nodded. "Six or seven hours until we can punch through a message to Ceres, let alone Earth or Mars."

"But it's only a few seconds of transmission, anyway. And they can't stop us from transmitting, correct? Jam us or something?"

"Not a chance," said Joe. "At a range of thousands of kilometers, tens of thousands? Nope. We'll get through. They can't shoot us, and they can't jam us. They'd be crazy or stupid to do anything other than cut the deal."

Jackie glanced at A.J. "You wanted to open the conversation. You wouldn't tell me why. Are you going to embarrass me?"

"
You
might be embarrassed to do it," A.J. said. "But it's nothing too bad. I thought of a lot worse. Besides, all of you have been complaining about how I've been growing up too much. Consider this my one last great hurrah of immaturity."

Jackie studied him, then smiled and shrugged. "I got my personal phone call on company time, I guess I can give you one last A.J. stunt, as long as you promise it's not
too
extreme. And you know what I mean by that."

A.J. gave a little seated bow. "I do. And it will in fact be very much extreme, but not extremely embarrassing. And"—he gave the trademark A.J. grin—"extremely apropos to the situation, I assure you."

"Then take your places, everyone," Jackie said. "We've got about seven minutes."

"When will
Nebula Storm
be in view?" Hohenheim asked.

Anthony LaPointe shrugged. "I would expect very soon, General. However, we do not know exactly what reaction mass they had to expend, what ISP they could manage to obtain from their necessarily improvised nuclear rocket, or exactly what course they intended to take. These will affect the exact point at which we will regain line-of-sight on the Ares vessel."

LaPointe was clearly ill at ease, with his best friend currently held in the
Odin
's tiny brig. Hohenheim couldn't spare the time to reassure him—and if there were others harboring similar thoughts of sabotage or collusion with the Ares vessel, this would certainly make them reconsider. Hohenheim hated having to think this way, but despite Eberhart's appearances of sincerity, there did not seem to be any other reasonable explanation for the
Odin
's drastic misbehavior. He connected to Engineering. "Mia, how are things?"

"I am trying to trace the faults, sir." Mia Svendsen's voice was tired and harried. "It really does look like the problem with the laterals is in the control nodes, probably in the firmware driving them. That's the only way I could see something being able to intercept and abort the commands from here. I've sent two people up to take one of them out of the housing, put in one of the replacement units, and bring the old one down for a full examination."

"What about the NERVA systems?"

"I only have so many people, sir. The NERVA engine is essentially out of the picture in terms of useful—or even nefarious—applications. The laterals, which share controls with our ion drive, could still be of very significant use. I am personally performing some pre-use testing of the control systems on the mass-beam, in case . . ." She hesitated, then went on. "In case the same person has managed to compromise those as well."

Hohenheim nodded. "Any results?"

"At the moment, all seems to be functioning normally, although I have been detecting slightly higher than normal RF noise, which I am trying to localize."

"
Nebula Storm
in view, General!"

Hohenheim turned. "Range?"

"About ninety thousand kilometers, General. We are slowly overtaking them."

Hohenheim breathed a sigh of relief, glancing at Fitzgerald. If the Ares vessel had been moving faster—had accelerated, rather than decelerated, strongly—the mission would have been almost certainly at an end, and probably his career with it. It seemed, however, that the
Nebula Storm
had no special tricks available to decelerate at Saturn, and therefore, even with the loss caused by the reversal of thrust on their Oberst Maneuver, there was a good chance that they could still beat the Ares vessel to Enceladus. It would just be a much, much closer race.

He studied the viewscreen. This deep in Jupiter's magnetosphere, the
Nebula Storm
's captive nebula was vastly compacted, only a few tens of kilometers across; the vessel appeared as a tiny dot of light. "Any sign of communication?"

"Not yet, General. Do you wish to initiate contact?"

"In a moment. Let us take a closer look at our competition and see how they are doing from the outside."