Fenrir, page 23
“Or getting shot at.”
“There is that. Which kinda threw my calculations right out the window, ’cause there was one other person who knew enough.”
Stephanie stared at him. “You mean . . . Angus? You thought Angus was the one who gave them the data?”
“More like I’d have put him at the top of the list if it weren’t for the fact he took a bullet for me,” Pete said, nodding. “Any way you figure it, that was just plain stupid if he were in on the plan. I’m not pretending I’m indispensable, but no one would run the Bells as well, and what he did saved you two and at least a couple others. All he had to do was stand there and panic after the shots, like everyone else.”
“That . . . is a strong argument,” agreed the President thoughtfully. “It doesn’t remove him from the pool of candidates, though. I don’t need Hailey Vanderman to tell me that it wouldn’t be the first time an agent found his cover ID was becoming real.”
“Don’t care for that idea much.” Pete’s jaw set. “But you’re right, ma’am; we can’t ignore it. Which is why I came here.”
“What are you thinking, Pete?”
“Well, it was the way you pulled off the double shuffle with the antimatter tankers that got me thinking. I can trust the two of you, if I can trust anyone, and I need permission to set up my own insurance, if you get what I mean.”
Stephanie leaned forward, ignoring her aches. “Go on.”
“Well, first off, we don’t ignore the others, even my people. Have your people dig their backgrounds hard. I hate to think anyone working for me would’ve been involved, but I hate the idea of pretending it couldn’t be even more.”
“That you can count on,” President Sacco said. “For that matter, I’ll make sure they double-check Werner and Mr. Almeida as well as Angus.”
“No point taking chances, ma’am. But what I need your blessing on, it’s a little sneaky . . .”
Stephanie began to nod as Peter Flint laid out his plan. She hoped it would turn out to be wasted preparation . . . but if it wasn’t, they just might be able to cut the head off the murderous serpent that had already struck them once.
“Go to it, Pete,” she said finally. “Nail it down tight.”
“Yes, Director,” he said, and flashed her a harder, colder grin than she’d ever seen on the good-natured face. “Trust me,” he went on. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Chapter 37:
Resetting the Clock
Time to Launch: 12 5 days
“Roger, it’s good to see you back,” Jeanne Sacco said, and didn’t restrain herself from giving him a hug.
“Gentle!” he said, with a pained chuckle. “Still not nearly all the way back, but I forced them to let me out.” He pushed his wheelchair farther into the room. “If both of us nearly died for this, there’s no way I’m going to miss it.”
She briefly considered telling him to get back to the hospital—his pale face and shaky movements showed he still needed time for recovery—but dismissed it as impossible. Roger Stone wasn’t any different from the rest of them in being a part of Carpathia, and she wasn’t going to deny him that. Though I’m kicking him out for a month when this is done. He needs rest, time with his family, and by God he’ll get it.
“All right, Roger. Just don’t push yourself, I want you intact for my next term in office, too.”
“Yes, Madam President,” he said with a wan grin.
“You’ve brought yourself up to date?”
“Wouldn’t have dared come back here if I hadn’t,” he assured her. “Just had a talk with Werner, and I’ve gone over all the reports. Everything looks like a go.”
“The launch charges? I’m still amazed they didn’t go off at once and kill us all.”
“Give credit to our adversaries,” Roger said. He tapped a few commands on the presentation computer. “Here’s the report summary from the demolitions group. The point of the explosion was to tip Carpathia over. Detonating all of the charges would just have just been a full-power launch test, and since Carpathia’s center of mass is very low, would almost certainly have just resulted in the ship bouncing up and coming back down; the shock absorber assembly would have taken it all easily.
“So they needed to detonate only on a narrow arc on one side. More, they had to prevent the rest from going off. That’s one of the things they used their control of our systems for, to not notice how they separated the charges. There were only a few unplanned detonations and they didn’t spread. The plan was not to slaughter everyone in the area; they wanted to stop the antimatter tankers, then detonate them in one of the craters, kill key people, and then drop Carpathia, damaging key parts of the ship.”
“So the charges were mostly recoverable?”
“About fifty percent. A lot of them were damaged beyond recovery when Carpathia shifted, but didn’t go off.”
Jeanne looked out the window, where the gigantic ship’s squat profile loomed sharply against the clear blue of the desert sky. “Can we really shave a week off the launch date?”
“I . . . believe so,” Roger said finally. “The entire crew has been working as hard as possible, extra shifts and long hours. All the consumables are onboard. The ACES are fully supplied and ready for launch for support, defense, or assault roles. Crew quarters are all assigned, scientific labs completed and equipped.”
“What about the crew? We lost quite a few people in that attack.”
“We had alternates for all selected crew, sometimes two or three deep. A couple of crew also lost their alternates, but fortunately all of those had second alternates. Those all passed the basic requirements; they’ll have to do some catch-up, but fortunately none of the people crucial for launch were lost.”
President Sacco nodded. “I have discussed the situation with the general secretary, and he agrees on the expedited launch. We also agree that it’s to be kept quiet until launch day. If the Group still has any shots to take, let them think they have more time.”
“Five days; I suppose there’s actually a chance of keeping it dark for that long.” Roger looked cynical, and she couldn’t blame him. An awful lot of people would know launch had been moved up, just by watching preparation. Even a few days left an awful lot of minutes for someone to let all the cats out of the bags.
There was a knock on the door, and it opened to show Hailey Vanderman. “Madam President, can I—Roger! They let you out!”
“I insisted,” Stone said, accepting a handshake from the Carpathia security head.
“Good to see you up. Sorry to interrupt, Madam President.”
“No problem, Hailey. I assume you have news?”
“We’ve found the other two members of the cell that the Duchess was in.”
“Thank God.” A moment of relief washed through Jeanne, making her feel momentarily years younger. “Who are they? Are they in custody?”
Vanderman grimaced. “Only if being in a morgue counts as custody.”
Good feeling gone. “That can’t be coincidence. They didn’t get killed during an attempt to catch them, did they?”
“Not this time. Both of them died the same day as the attack on Carpathia, in apparently completely unrelated events.”
“The Duchess?”
“Fragmentary records imply that strongly, yes. Apparently she thought she no longer needed their services, or their awareness of her identity.”
“Dammit!” Jeanne gritted her teeth, took a few breaths to calm herself. “I assume we’re going over their history with a microscope?”
“Absolutely, Madam President. And these two explain the problems we’ve had very well. One, apparently nicknamed ‘Keys,’ was Martin Grant.”
“Grant?” Roger said, incredulously. “The author of Seven Keys to Master Coding?”
“The same.” Hailey looked at Roger with the same bemusement Jeanne felt. “You read it?”
“When I was some younger, I was a CompSci major before I decided it wasn’t for me. Grant’s book was practically a bible for the department.”
“He kept up with his field,” Hailey said with a nod. “He was their computer coding and espionage wizard. Connections both legit and underground. We’re not yet sure what his particular reason was for wanting Carpathia to fail, but he must have had one, and a very strong one. He was assaulted while out walking; assumed to have been a mugging, but that was likely just a cover.
“Second member of the cell, called ‘Lathe,’ was Michelle Anson-Stewart—yes, that one. Engineering process lecturer and publicity maven. This explains how they were able to get someone into so many manufacturing processes; if anyone had more contacts in the manufacturing world than Anson-Stewart I’m sure not thinking of any. Her car went off a bridge and into a river; I’m betting that we’ll find evidence it was no accident once forensics gets through with the car and the site.”
Jeanne considered this for a moment. “These two presumably didn’t expect to be killed. So for the moment, this Group is headless, right? Falling back on the next cells down, which aren’t connected to each other?”
Vanderman’s lips tightened, causing a similar reaction in her gut. “I wish it were that simple. But whoever put the Group together certainly had contingencies in place. The Duchess—who was called ‘Needle,’ by the way—certainly threw a few wrenches into the works, but I’m not entirely counting out the possibility that they can get their act back together. If you’re really moving up the timetable—”
“We are,” Jeanne confirmed.
“Well, in that case there’s a good chance they can’t get reorganized before it’s too late. But . . .”
She waited. “But?”
A long exhalation. “But George and I think this top cell might have been anomalous—with one or two more members.”
“You mean the Duchess wasn’t at the top?”
Roger’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Makes too much sense, Madam President,” he said. “We already know that the Duchess was in this for a specific and practical reason. She’s not the sort to run a completely separate organization like this.
“Martin Grant . . . he was known as almost a recluse. Very private guy, apparently friendly to his small circle of friends but really introverted. Someone like that isn’t going to be the center of the Group or anything like it. Anson-Stewart . . . Don’t know as much about her.” Roger looked to Hailey Vanderman.
“Much more gregarious,” the former CIA head said. “Certainly could promote and run such an organization. She clearly did do a lot of recruiting and influencing to get her agents into the right position to sabotage components of Carpathia. But how she’d have known to recruit someone like the Duchess is a lot harder to figure. We think we’re missing someone.”
“I think that just makes it more important to launch,” the President said finally. “The faster Carpathia is out in space, the faster we make their efforts useless.”
“I agree,” Hailey said. “The others in the Cabinet probably will as well.”
“Then we move forward. Keep me posted, Hailey. Roger, you contact Director Bronson and tell her . . .
“. . . . the word is GO.”
Chapter 38:
Launch
Time to Launch: ZERO days
Stephanie paused at the bottom of the ramp. “I can’t believe all this will be gone.”
“Consequence of practicalities,” Werner replied, following her gaze across the “Carpathia Complex” that had grown up around the gigantic spaceship. “All the facilities could have been built far enough away from Carpathia to survive the detonations and fallout . . . but then so much time and energy would have been wasted shuttling everything and everyone back and forth. Time was our biggest enemy, and so”—he shrugged—“we built a disposable town.”
“It’s been home for more than a year,” she murmured. “Now that’s going to be Carpathia.”
“For quite a while,” agreed Ben Robinson, coming up the ramp with Captain Lín. “Even with our nuclear-pulse drive and Fenrir being in a good position, we’ll be in Carpathia for many months.”
“Are you ready, Captain?”
Hàorán Lin bowed. “I am ready, and also if you will believe it very nervous.”
“I think we all are,” Stephanie ventured, with a smile. “You’ll do great.”
She couldn’t blame Captain Lín for being nervous. He wasn’t just the representative of China in this, he was going to be one of the main faces of humanity on board Carpathia. While Stephanie would have a say in certain operations, it had been agreed by all groups that the captain of the Carpathia would be the ultimate authority aboard the vessel once launched.
Which made the success or failure of the mission, ultimately, rest on the shoulders of Captain Hàorán Lín. That’s enough to make anyone nervous.
Not that it really took much off her shoulders. Popular perceptions and the long development of the scientific, engineering, biological, and even psychological corps of experts under her sometimes only tenuously informed direction had kept Dr. Stephanie Bronson in the center of all activity, and the dramatic events of the Group’s final assault, with her assassination being thwarted by her mentor York’s sacrifice, had simply made that more melodramatically spectacular.
And also led to all sorts of stuff I never imagined, like discovering there were people, um, shipping me and York. And even writing about it. She shook her head. People are weird sometimes.
“Well . . . I’m heading up,” she said. “See you all soon.”
“I hope to welcome you on the bridge once launch is complete,” the captain said. “If you don’t mind the weightlessness.”
“I won’t let that keep me away, Captain!” She waved and turned left, down the corridor that led to the residential lift.
The lift passed through several sections, bringing her to the top layer of the residential area. The corridors included intersections with vertical shafts—which would become, in turn, level corridors when spin gravity took over. The cabins, currently oriented with their floors toward the ground and the drive plate, would stay that way as long as Carpathia was under acceleration. In microgravity, the residential and laboratory sections would spin up to simulate gravity, with the entire cabin or lab rotating ninety degrees and locking to match the new frame of reference.
Such a design, Stephanie knew, would be incredibly wasteful of space in a traditional rocket-driven ship; only the ludicrously overpowered capabilities of a nuclear-pulse rocket made the design practical. For that, she and most of the civilian-recruited crew were grateful; it allowed roomy individual apartments that would remain at a reasonable acceleration (depending how close to the center you were, between one-half and one gravity) for most of their time in space.
The door to her cabin unlocked at her touch, the vacuum-seal door swinging open smoothly. Her apartment was a double-sized unit, including a meeting room and other official components in the additional space. She took the personal bags she’d carried with her and locked them into the secure locker, to ensure that they wouldn’t move during launch.
With that in mind, she went around the entire cabin, checked for any loose objects. She found two, a pen and a small tablet of paper she’d forgotten, and stowed them away.
By the time she finished this review and preparation, the voice of Carpathia Operations came over the intercom. “Carpathia, this is Ops. Ship-wide announcement follows.
“All crew are registered as onboard. Please make sure to stow all luggage and items not secured on your person in your personal secure stowage. Items not secured may pose a threat, or may be damaged or broken during launch.
“It is recommended that everyone make use of the toilets in the next half hour. Lockdown begins in thirty-five minutes. Launch, T-minus two hours and counting.”
Stephanie had her own bathroom, as did others who were ranked very high, one way or another, but those were very few. Almost everyone would use one of four communal bathrooms spaced equally around the core on each floor of Carpathia. These bathrooms also had provisions for operating in microgravity, something Steph devoutly hoped she would never have to deal with. Despite decades of space development, null-gee toilets had never become easy or elegant to use.
She freshened up and then lay down on her bed, which was provided with restraints for launch. Locking these down, she adjusted the tilt and support of the bed to match the needs of someone experiencing multiple gees of acceleration.
“Prelaunch lockdown commences.” Stephanie heard the final clack of her door securing itself, knew similar sounds were now being heard throughout Carpathia. Heavy soundproofing, using a lot of aerogel as well as standard insulation, prevented her from hearing any more. This would, of course, help preserve personal privacy—but more importantly, would attenuate the tremendous sounds of nuclear launch.
“Steph, this is Audrey,” came the voice of her publicist and—often—buffer between her and the press. “Want to record your prelaunch thoughts?”
“Seriously? All my prelaunch thoughts are ‘I hope it works I hope it works I hope it works oh God I hope it works,’” Stephanie said with a little laugh. “We’ve done ten thousand sims and all, but now it comes down to this, setting off some ridiculous number of tons of explosives and then riding atom bombs up to space. It’s insane, and exciting, and terrifying, and I’m so excited to be a part of it. And God, I hope we get to Fenrir in time, that there’s still people there to help, so we can really, truly see that we’re not alone in the universe anymore.” She felt herself flush. “So, totally hackneyed stuff, really. Nothing worth recording here.”
“I’m the judge of that,” Audrey said. “And you got that expression again while you were talking, and this time I got it on camera, so it’s definitely worth recording.”
“Don’t you dare send that stupid speech out! I didn’t even get ready—”
