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Chapter 37

"Ms. Fathom," A.J. said, "would you please join us in Phobos Conference Room?"

Madeline's voice replied a moment later. "With that level of formality, I suppose I must."

"I think you'll want to."

The past week had been uncomfortable for everyone. So far, no one had tried to get around the deal that had been struck at the meeting. But it was clear that many of them considered it to be a deal with the devil, and didn't go to any trouble to hide that attitude when Madeline was around. Room temperatures appeared to drop by ten degrees whenever she entered a room, with a few exceptions. Even those who appeared to have accepted the situation without particular rancor, like A.J., didn't seem inclined to let her off the hook she'd hung herself on.

And Joe was still avoiding her.

"On my way."

Fortunately she was already on Phobos. If she'd been on Nike it would've been a matter of hours to get there. She drifted down the newly sealed hallway towards the conference area.

Madeline raised an eyebrow as she entered, seeing not just A.J. but Captain Hathaway, Helen, Rich Skibow and Jane Mayhew sitting around the conference table. Hanging onto it, it might be better to say—the term "sitting" meant little in microgravity.

Helen gave her a smile. Somewhat to Madeline's surprise, since she knew that Helen's attitudes concerning intellectual secrecy were every bit as firm as those of most of the scientists, the paleontologist had been one of the very few members of the scientific staff on Nike who had been just as friendly to her since that meeting as she'd been before.

Madeline suspected that Helen's attitude stemmed from her own life's experience. Us girls gotta stick together, for lack of a better expression. The deep-seated, gut reaction of a woman who'd fought her way to the top in a male profession, seeing another woman in the same position come under pressure.

She'd even learned, from a somewhat amused Jackie Secord, that Helen had been so furious at A.J. when she learned of his behavior at the initial fracas that she'd verbally stripped his hide off—too bad she didn't BREAK your fucking arm, you stinking bully!—and then made him sleep on the couch for the next several days.

Madeline felt a little guilty about that. The truth was that A.J.'s grab at her had been more in the way of an angry reflex than a serious attempt to attack her. Madeline could have easily just fended it off. The real reason she'd chosen—as Ken Hathaway put it—to use

A.J. for wallpaper hadn't been self-defense, it had been to make a point as forcefully as possible. So, readily, Madeline returned the smile. And, as she always did whenever Helen was around, felt more relaxed.

"Quite a grouping. What's so important?"

"We think we've made a discovery that rather changes our entire outlook on these people and what they were doing here," Jane said without preamble. "You will recall, I think, that in our attempts to translate the language of Bemmius secordii we found certain symbols and words which we believed to represent 'craters'?"

"Yes. I think by now I could even sketch the symbols. And you found that they'd already labeled the dinosaur-killer crater, too. Chix—whatever. I can never pronounce that name correctly."

"Yeah," A.J. said. "And, you know, that bothered me. For quite a while. The problem with it was a matter of the probabilities involved. Improbabilities, rather. First, look at the timing. If we're right, within days of the disaster that killed Bemmie and helped finish off the dinosaurs, something else hit this base—inside or outside—and killed off everyone inside, or at least a lot of someones. That's a pretty funky coincidence, isn't it?"

"Well, yes, but . . ."

"Wait up, there's more. Something about the whole situation bothered me, so I went to talk to our astrophysicists.

"These Bemmie guys crossed a hell of a lot of space to find this solar system, right? And they brought enough stuff with them to carve out bases in asteroids and apparently explore at least parts of two planets and other parts of the Solar System. Either they had some magic space-drive technology we don't even have the words for, or they used some kind of tech we can imagine. If the latter, the only methods we know of would require lots of energy. Lots and lots and lots of energy. Which means they'd be past masters of knowing how to 'watch the skies,' so to speak, for dangerous stuff."

A.J. loved dramatics, and Madeline didn't begrudge him the habit. So she waited patiently for him to get to the point. At least, with A.J., there almost always was a point. Eventually.

"So what the hell are the odds that they wouldn't see a friggin' asteroid long, long before it approached a planet they were studying? And that they also couldn't do something to stop it?"

Madeline frowned. "You're saying that either the impact shouldn't have happened, or that Bemmie shouldn't have been on the planet when it did hit."

"Bingo. And then we get to Joe and Harry's little room. Well, big room."

"The firing range?"

"Yes," Rich Skibow said. "Joe and the engineering department went over that area very carefully, given its potential for military significance. Since there wasn't all that much written material in the location, they didn't call me or Jane in for quite a while. But when they did, we noticed something immediately."

On the wall screen, a picture popped up of a storage bin. On the bin were a series of markings, ones that looked somehow familiar. Another bin or chute had other markings, some of them the same. One of the images from the back wall areas, downrange from the shooting booths, was shown; again, alien script, some of the markings identical to the other two.

Then the image of the Earth map appeared; at the crater site, among other markings, the same sequence.

"We no longer believe that this sequence of symbols represents a word meaning either 'crater' or 'site of interest," Jane Mayhew said. "Based on their occurrence on the firing range in the locations they were found and their association with certain objects, it is now our professional opinion that we have found a far superior and much more likely translation for this word.

"The word is target."

For a moment, Madeline couldn't quite take it in. "Target?"

Then it connected. "They were using asteroids as missiles! But what were they shooting at?" A thought suddenly occurred to her. "Hey, this may sound crazy, but could it be that it really was a literal 'dinosaur killer'—that some kind of dinosaur might have had a civilization and they were bombarding the planet?"

"Nice idea, and I thought of that one too," A.J. said. "But Helen says—"

"It's completely out of the question," Helen stated firmly. "For a number of reasons. The main one is that if a civilization large enough to be interesting or threatening to something like Bemmius existed on Earth at that time, we'd have found traces of it by now. Lots of traces. Consider the fact that we found traces of high tech around the original Bemmie, and he was just one fossil of one visiting technological race. I suppose a fantasy writer might be able to come up with some explanation as to how the entire fossil record could be wrong or missing just those critical pieces of data, but no paleontologist would believe it for an instant.

"Second, to wipe out such a civilization would almost certainly take a lot more than just one major bolide, unless it was something several orders of magnitude bigger than the Chicxulub impact. But there's only one 'target' symbol on Earth, although there are a considerable number on Mars and a few on other bodies around the Solar System."

Helen shook her head. "No, I'm not sure what they were shooting at, but it certainly wasn't a bunch of civilized dinosaurs."

"Do you think there might be traces around Chicxulub?" asked Jane.

A.J. shook his head doubtfully. "Dunno. I wouldn't think so, but then we don't know what the hell they were throwing asteroids at.

Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones in R'lyeh? It's possible, I suppose, if whatever they were fighting was built really well. The impact might well have killed everyone off but left some pieces we could recognize if we're looking for them."

He stopped and waited expectantly.

Then she realized they were all staring at her, waiting.

Mentally she kicked herself. "Oh, I'm sorry. You're waiting for my approval. Please, go ahead, transmit this. It doesn't give away any useful technical details, which is all I'm officially assigned to watch for. And—who knows?—somebody might decide to go excavate Chi . . . Chick . . . Chicken Little. Whatever. Once you tell them."

"Chicxulub," Helen said, enunciating the syllables through a wide smile. "All right, Rich, Jane, we have a joint paper to write, as we're just about squarely in the middle of all our disciplines."

As Helen and the two linguists launched into a discussion of the projected paper, A.J. left the table and came over to Madeline.

"Thanks," he said quietly. "I figured there wouldn't be a problem, but you did stick yourself with the job of clearing everything."

"Yes, I did." She frowned. "Actually, I am concerned about this, although I see no reason to keep it secret. I've heard the arguments as to why we aren't going to meet Bemmius or any of his relatives, after all this time, and I'd presume all those arguments apply to any other species that were contemporaneous with them as well. But, still, I have to wonder—if they were fighting something that existed on more than one world at once, wouldn't that something else also be able to detect and stop things like that? And if so, how do you manage to hit them with falling rocks?"

"Yeah. That is a question. Maybe we'll get an answer when we look over the rest of the base and start sifting through the pieces that remain of the puzzle." A. J. shook his head. "Wouldn't that have been a hell of a fight to see?"

"It would," Madeline said quietly. "Pray that we don't."

She saw by the sudden widening of his eyes that he had abruptly made the connection to her job. "Yes, that is what I have to think about. Every day."

"You can't prevent scientific progress, though—or hide technology forever." His tone wasn't mocking, but serious. "In the end, people will find out anything you're trying to hide, and there's no way you can keep them from using it. You do realize that, don't you? Or do you actually believe that you can stuff the genie back into the bottle?"

"Yes. No. Most of the time, maybe and maybe not. And some days I'm not sure what I believe anymore. I'm sorry this whole situation exists, A.J., I really am. But I'm also very much afraid of what might happen to the world if certain things get out of control."

"Can't say I entirely blame you. Joe says you have good reasons, and I trust Joe. Speaking of which, go see him."

She looked away. "He told me not to speak to him. 'For a while,' he said. But since I don't know what that means, I thought I should let him decide."

"Yeah, I know. But . . ."

A.J. seemed torn. He started to reach for her arm, obviously to lead her out of the conference room. Then, drew it back sharply, as if he'd spotted a viper.

"Jesus!" she heard him hiss. "I lay so much as a finger on you, Helen will have my scalp."

A.J. turned the dramatic withdrawal of his hand into an equally dramatic gesture of invitation. "C'mon, Madeline, let's go somewhere else to talk. Ladies first."

As she preceded him out of the room, Madeline found herself in a good humor for the first time in days. Once they were in the corridor beyond, she looked at him over her shoulder.

"Did she really make you sleep on the couch?”

“Sure did. And let me tell you, even at one-third gravity that couch was lumpy.”

“Good for her!"

A.J. smiled. "Funny. That's exactly what she said about you. We gotta veritable feminazi Waffen SS on this moon."

Madeline grinned at him. Despite their little brawl—if something so one-sided could be given the term—she liked A.J. Baker. And was glad to see that whatever animosity had existed seemed to have faded away.

He grinned back, although the look in his eyes had something of calculation in them. "Look, I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Helen's right and I was way out of line. Even if—"

For just an instant, he looked like a falsely-accused six-year-old boy. "I still think Helen's nuts to accuse me of trying to beat on a woman. I was just going to grab you by the shoulder, stop you. And besides . . ."

The calculation was back in his eyes. "I never had a chance, did I? Even if I had really been trying to get you."

"To be honest? Not a cold chance in hell."

"Didn't think so. What exactly are you, anyway? Seventh dan? Eighth dan? Ninth dan?"

Madeline shook her head. "The terms don't mean anything, in the schools I finished my training with. They weren't even schools, really. By the end I was learning one-on-one from the best senseis I could find, in whatever school—and none of them are people you'll ever see mentioned in the martial arts magazines. They pay no attention to that ranking business at all. They either decide to teach you, or they don't. The move I threw you into the wall with, I learned from a seventy-four-year-old Okinawan during the months I was on the island. Never mind what I was doing there. He was almost a hermit, having spent his whole life studying the art. Didn't speak a word of English or any other language I knew."

A.J. winced. "Oh, Lord. You're talking about a whole 'nother league, aren't you?"

"About as different as the major leagues are from double-A. The truth is, A.J., I'm about as far out on the bleeding edge of that skill as you are with your own specialty. Of course, with their greater strength, reach, and mass, there are some men in the world who could beat me in a fight. A handful of women, too. But you aren't one of them. Not even close, frankly."

She swallowed. "Ask Joe about it, if you want. Tell him I said it was okay. There's a reason that martial arts are an obsession for me. He knows what it is."

"Okay, I will. And, uh . . ."

Madeline smiled. "Oh, certainly. Since you're being such a gentleman about it, I'll let Helen know that I wasn't really in any danger of suffering from male chauvinist abuse."

"Thanks." There was silence, for a moment. Then Madeline swallowed again. "I think you were going to say something . . ."

"Yeah. Go talk to him. Now. Forget that 'in a while' business. He doesn't know what it means, either, and knowing Joe—which I do—by now he'll have convinced himself that if he approaches you he'll be rudely encroaching on the space he insisted you keep around you so that means he'd be acting like a jerk since he insisted on it in the first place and Joe can't stand the thought of being rude. The dummy. There are advantages, you know, to letting it all hang out the way I do."

Her eyes were almost crossed. "I understand what you're saying. But don't ever say that in front of a grammarian. That's the most twisted sentence I ever heard."

A.J. smiled, but it was a thin business. "There's one thing, though, Madeline. Joe's my best friend, and . . . dammit, don't you play with him."

She was genuinely shocked. "'Play'? I don't—"

He waved his hand impatiently. "I didn't say it right. I know you're not toying with him. That's not what I meant. What I meant was that I've never seen Joe get this hung up on a woman, and I've known him for a long time. And what that means is that nothing'll work unless you're willing to be as serious about it as he will. And I'm really not sure you can do that, Madeline. Or, to put it another way—being my usual crude self—will those unnamed and mysterious people you work for let you do that?"

"Oh." She started to make a quick response, but then forced herself to think about it.

"I don't know," she said finally. "But that's not really the issue. If I decide . . . They—he—can't really tell me what to do, and he knows it. If I decide, and he pushes me, I'll just quit."

"'He'?"

"My boss. Never mind his identity. It doesn't matter, A.J., because this has never been a job for me anyway. Not really."

"Yeah, I understand. So what you're saying is that the real issue is what you decide to do."

"Yes."

Suddenly, he grinned as widely as Madeline had ever seen him do. "Well. That's a relief!" Again, her eyes were almost crossed. "Why? I never said what I would decide, A.J. I don't know myself yet."

The grin never faded. "Sure. Of course. That's what the whole complicated business is about in the first place. So what? Whether you and Joe work anything out is between the two of you, period. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But that's all I wanted to know. That the only person inside of you is you. If you understand what I mean. Not somebody else, pulling the strings."

Her jaws tightened. "Nobody else ever pulls my strings."

"Oh, good. Well, that being the case—if you'll pardon me for taking the liberty—I guess it's okay for me to give you a push."

He reached out, planted his hands on her shoulders, turned her around, and gave her a little shove. Even as gentle as the motion was, with his much greater mass she found herself moving rather quickly down the hallway. Microgravity still seemed weird to her, sometimes.

"So go talk to him," his voice followed. "Now."

Madeline didn't quite follow his orders. First, because Joe was still on the Nike, so it took her several hours to get there. Second, because she made a brief stop at her own cabin.

When she left the cabin, she felt a bit like an idiot. There was something just plain ridiculous about a secret agent superspy carrying a hope chest. Of a sort.

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