"Were you able to verify the existence of the coilguns?"
"Not yet. On our next close approach, I will. I can say there are a few anomalies along the accelerator ribs, but none that a fast-talking engineer couldn't explain away at this point. The motes will keep trying to work their way in, try to gain access, but they've got to do it as subtly and conservatively as possible, or they'll trip something."
Madeline looked satisfied. "So the whole plan doesn't need to be changed?"
A.J. shook his head, confidence filling him as usual. "Not a thing, really. We do our braking maneuver at closest approach—just about scraping atmosphere off the big guy—and then make sure they do theirs. With the right vectors we should be able to close on them again and give them the chance to make a deal."
"What if they fire?" Larry asked. "People whose ships were suddenly hijacked have been known to do that."
"I think I can screw that up even now," A.J. said. "And by that point, we'll also have the proof we need, I think. So shooting us wouldn't accomplish anything, right?"
"True enough. And it's not like we'll be offering them nothing."
"Then," Jackie said, smiling in a more natural way than she had since they started, "in a few days this should all be over."
"Just a few. Then, of course, we'll have to actually get to Enceladus, but we can both do that, especially once we're cooperating instead of competing."
A.J. had to admit, he was glad it was almost over, at least on the cloak-and-dagger side.
But he did have one more bit of fun in store for himself at the expense of the Odin. Harmless overall, but it would be his little reminder to Horst—and especially the unseen Mr. Fitzgerald—of just who he'd been messing with.
He couldn't wait.
Chapter 32
"Maximum power burn will commence in approximately fifteen minutes," General Hohenheim said, his voice resonating throughout Odin. "All stations, report readiness."
"Engineering, all ready," Mia Svendsen's voice replied.
"Security, all ready," said Fitzgerald from his position to Hohenheim's far left.
"Damage control, all ready."
"Living quarters, all secure."
The remaining groups also reported readiness. Hohenheim leaned back in the command seat. The acceleration of Odin would be relatively small, but after months without noticeable acceleration, there were still many potential chances for minor and even major disasters. "Dr. LaPointe, is all ready?"
"Yes, General. Ready for Oberth Maneuver in . . . ten minutes."
Jupiter loomed before them, covering more than half the sky. The planetary lord of the solar system and the king of the Norse gods were speeding toward a rendezvous, a brief dance of power in which Jupiter would gift them with three times the delta-vee of the rocket burn they performed, energy drawn from a gravity well of nearly sixty kilometers per second—fifty, at the altitude the Odin would pass.
"Any sign of Nebula Storm?"
LaPointe shook his head. "She had drawn considerably ahead, sir. We will not see her again until we clear the other side of Jupiter."
"Can you tell if she performed any powered maneuvers, or a simple flyby?" The Ares vessel had preceded them toward Jupiter, collapsed its dusty-plasma sail, and disappeared into darkness some hours before.
The French-English astronomer studied other readouts. "It appears that she will have two unique accomplishments to her credit, at least. From traces of water vapor I can tell that she did indeed perform powered maneuvers. She has the first manned flyby of Jupiter, and the closest."
Horst turned at that, startled. "Closer than we will pass?"
At LaPointe's confirmation, Horst gave a soundless whistle. "They must be practically scraping the cloud tops. No wonder they had to retract the sail."
"Impressive," said Hohenheim. "Perhaps they need every bit of speed they can get. But let them have the small triumphs, as long as the end of the race is ours."
"We will know that when next we see them. Their final velocity will be our answer. Either they will be faster, and will almost certainly win, or they will be slower, and we have won," LaPointe said. "Not long at all now."
The general checked the chronometer. "Coming up on five minutes. Mia, the engine is ready?"
"As ready as possible, sir. No one has ever attempted to run these engines at this level of output before, so nothing is quite certain, but I am confident."
"I can ask no more." The Oberth Maneuver depended on accomplishing the change of velocity as much as possible at perigee. Ideally, of course, it would be instantaneous, but absent reactionless drives and mythical acceleration compensators, some compromise had to be made. In this case, they were "redlining" the NERVA assembly to produce the absolute maximum thrust for this burn. Modeling showed it should do no real damage for this one burn. Hohenheim knew full well, however, that models were not the same thing as the real world.
Jupiter was closer now, no longer a planet but a gigantic cream and brown-striped wall, a mass of churning clouds beyond human comprehension. The Great Red Spot was close enough to show its true nature as a titanic storm, a hurricane large enough to swallow three Earths.
Alarms buzzed, and red lights suddenly appeared on LaPointe's console, just as a faint quiver ran through Odin.
Hohenheim leaned forward. Jupiter was moving, the entire field of view in the forward screen rotating. "What is it, Dr. LaPointe?"
"I do not know, General! The lateral thrusters, they have fired!" LaPointe's hands moved over the controls. "I am getting no response. We are continuing to rotate."
Horst Eberhart brought up his displays. "It looks like a reversal of vector. But it's not accepting the cancellation codes."
"Dr. LaPointe, if we are even slightly off when we make this burn, it could seriously impact our outward course."
"Yes, I know, General." LaPointe was now working virtually every control in sight.
"Mr. Eberhart?"
Eberhart shook his head. "Our commands are not getting through to the thruster systems, General. It will take time to figure out why—and I don't have that much time."
"Dr. Svendsen," Hohenheim said calmly. "Are you following this situation?"
"Naturally," Mia Svendsen's cool, controlled alto replied. "I will go to manual control. This means that your controls will be cut out, however."
"They do not seem to be of much use at the moment. Get us back on course, Dr. Svendsen."
"Yes, sir."
Jupiter and the stars outside appeared to have completed approximately half a rotation when the lateral thrusters rumbled again. The rotation stopped. Hohenheim waited, but no additional movement commenced. "Dr. Svendsen, we are waiting!"
The voice was now no longer so cool or controlled. "They are not responding to manual control. The problem appears to be in the embedded controller code itself."
"Damn!" Horst cursed. "That will take hours, maybe a day or two, to figure out."
"We have two minutes," Hohenheim said. "I think it would be wiser to troubleshoot with maximum fuel for course correction in case of emergency. Since our controls are still cut out, Dr. Svendsen, please cancel the main burn. Shut down the NERVA drive for now."
"Yes, sir."
He leaned back slowly, thinking. "Dr. LaPointe, obviously without a powered flyby our course will be quite different. Please begin to—"
The entire ship shuddered, and the thundering roar of a NERVA rocket at full power filled the air.
"Svendsen! I told you to shut the engine down!"
"I did, General! The reactor is refusing to respond! I entered all the commands, I got all the regular acknowledgments, and then it went right ahead with the burn!"
Hohenheim pursed his lips, then sighed. Nothing to be done now. All I can do is try to salvage the mission. He waited until the entire burn completed itself. "Mr. LaPointe. I would presume that in this orientation we lost, rather than gained, velocity?"
Looking somewhat shell-shocked, Anthony LaPointe
nodded. "Approximately thirty-six kilometers per second, sir."
"Please recalculate our orbit and determine whether we are headed for immediate disaster—and if so, what we can do about it." He rose. "Mr. Fitzgerald, I will see you in the briefing room in five minutes."
No one said anything as he left.
"Horst Eberhart, General," Richard Fitzgerald said. "It can't really be anyone else."
He could see by the grimness of the general's face that Hohenheim had already reached the same conclusion. "Can we be sure?" the general said.
"Look at the facts, General. He was control systems. He and Svendsen together, but Svendsen isn't a programmer. Oh, she can code all right when she has to, but not a patch on him. He had a hand in every single bit of control code written, from the firmware in the bloody control nodes to the main user interface. So he's got the opportunity. Motive, well, you were the one who let him talk to his little skirt over on the Ares ship. First thing out of his mouth is how sorry he is, and the two of 'em are going sappy a few minutes later. Eberhart's just the kind of guy to figure that he could make it all right by letting them get ahead of us."
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."
Chapter 33
"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 us
eful 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."