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Chapter 19

"Bracing calculations, check. Geometry, check. Force configuration, check."

A.J. glanced over all the parameters once more. He'd checked them a dozen times already, but he was still nervous. Three Faeries were about to try to pry open one of the doors, and if something went wrong, he could potentially be cut down to two ISMs—which wouldn't be able to transmit while exploring any distance inside the miniature moon, as at most they'd have only one other for a relay.

He'd told Jackie that he wasn't likely to lose the Faeries. That was true, in a sense, because just blowing the manipulator arms wouldn't be likely to cause trouble. The fact remained that prying on something in zero g carried other risks, especially if something broke. The sudden release of forces and fragments of broken prying arms flying around in close quarters could easily do damage to any of the Faeries. They had been built to survive launch and travel stresses, but only in specially-designed cradles in Pirate's equipment bays.

Once he hit the transmit code on this one, there'd be no stopping it; the three little probes would follow their directions to the electronic letter. He ran another simulation. Too many unknowns. They might move the door, or break the Faeries, or anything in between.

At least he was sure there was something to find behind there. Despite the amazingly dispersive and absorptive characteristics of the door—and, apparently, the wall material on the other side—he had managed to gain an idea of the size and layout of the chamber beyond. Shadowy blobs hinted at other objects inside the oval room, which was about twenty-five meters long. He'd been able to get some idea of the composition of the door's exterior, which was an odd alloy of iron, copper, beryllium, and apparently mercury and silicon in small quantities. But the precise alloy wasn't known—and whatever was inside wasn't the same material. It might have a core of some sort of insulation, with the exterior clad in the aliens' version of armor plate.

"Well, are you going to just sit there all day, or are we going to get some action around here?" As usual, Diane's tone suggested a double entendre.

A.J. ignored it. "You wouldn't be in a hurry to push the button if it was several million bucks of your money. And if you'd spent months making the things."

Jackie looked up from her nearby workstation. As she was stuck at the command center until the news broke, Hathaway had set both Gupta and Jackie up with engineering design stations in the center. Gupta was currently off at the main engine facility, working with the others to determine if they wanted to make a larger engine design or just use several more like the prototype.

"Relax, A.J.," she said. "You've already gotten more than your money's worth out of them. I know they're like your babies, but do you want to wait another couple of years until we can get Nike out there to look?"

"No. Hell with it. All systems and calculations check. Implement Routine Prybar."

The "go" code shot out into the nonexistent ether, to stroll its leisurely way across the intervening millions of miles. Now that the decision was made, he relaxed, took a deep breath, and looked around. Suddenly he chuckled.

"What's funny, A.J.?"

"I wish I was in Hollywood."

Jackie looked puzzled. "Why?"

"Because in Hollywood, after I sent the 'go' command, we'd watch the results right away, and I'd have an emergency stop button on hand to keep things from going wrong."

"Video links at the speed of plot," Jackie chuckled, nodding sagely. "But it's just as well. If you were in Hollywood, you wouldn't use your emergency stop button in time. If something went wrong, the Faeries would go up in huge explosions—they're nuclear powered, remember. And if they did get in without mishap, an alien energy being would possess the probes and then download their commands to our computers and kill us all."

Diane's screen suddenly showed some animated robotic drones running through Phobos' corridors. "Resistance is futile—if less than one ohm" scrolled across the bottom as a subtitle.

"Hey, that's pretty good," A.J. said. "Did you do that just off the cuff?"

"Well, sorta. I had these little guys drawn up a while back, but I had to get the computer to kick in and draw the animations pretty quick, once the conversation turned in that direction."

"Cute. Well, it'll be a little bit more before we get telemetry back to show whether we've still got Faeries or if Peter Pan will need a new sidekick. So I'm going to run down and get me something to drink. Anyone else want something?"

"Coffee," Jackie said immediately.

"As if I couldn't have guessed. Diane?"

"Well, I'd like a Margarita, but I'll settle for a diet Coke."

"One coffee, one diet Margarita Coke. Got it."

A.J. jogged to the cafeteria; while he could've gotten the drinks nearer to hand, he wanted munchies too. About fifteen minutes later, he trotted back into the control room, balancing the drinks in one hand and a large plate of cheese nachos in the other.

"A.J.! You can't bring that in here!"

"That theory has been falsified, as I obviously have brought this in here. Here's your substitute Margarita." He put Jackie's coffee— dead black, no sugar—in front of her as Diane continued her protest.

"Well, you're not supposed to bring food into the center."

"If you read the rules," he retorted, sitting himself before his workstation again, "I think you'll find that you're not supposed to have drinks in the center, either. Which is a bigger problem around electronics than food, usually. And it's one of those rules that I'll lay big odds was disobeyed about fifteen seconds after it was first enacted at the first computer workstation in history."

He gazed down cheerfully at his nachos. "I always clean up after myself, anyway."

"Aren't you supposed to be in training?" Jackie demanded. "That's like about a billion calories, mostly fat." She eyed the golden mass, sprinkled with deep green peppers, with a combination of clinical contempt and instinctive longing.

"I am indeed in training, but there's nothing wrong with my weight, thanks very much. I have an iron stomach and intend to keep it that way."

"Allow me to hope that you are right, A.J." Hathaway's voice came from behind them. "But I've known several guys with iron stomachs on the ground who spent their first time in real weightlessness fighting every second to keep from blowing their groceries all over the interior of the spacecraft."

"Well, I'm not a complete idiot. I don't plan to eat much before my first experience. Got a lot of other training to do first. Lots of suit practice."

A.J.'s conciliatory tone was then replaced by his usual theatrics. "Glad you could make it, Colonel! We're about to try to open up and see what's behind Door Number Three."

"Actually, Door Number D-11," Jackie corrected.

"Well, darn. Janice was always behind Door Number Three. D11 just has alien artifacts behind it."

"A.J., you're not old enough to remember that show," Hathaway snorted. "Hell, I'm not old enough to remember that show."

"Old shows never die. They live on in sound bites and cultural references for generations."

Movement showed on the screen. A.J. instantly focused all his attention on his VRD-enhanced display. "Grab a seat and don't spill your popcorn, ladies and gentlemen. It's showtime!"

The display showed four separate images in the separate quadrants. Three were image streams from their respective Faeries; the fourth was a constructed representation of the view of a hypothetical observer standing in the corridor, watching the three goggle-eyed metallic probes trying to open the ancient door.

"You people should appreciate just what's going into this show. Even with all the advances in the past few years, there's severely limited bandwidth available for Ariel to use in transmitting this back." A.J. watched tensely as the three probes slowly took their positions in the corridor, using their manipulator arms to brace themselves first.

"Can't be all that limited if you're sending us three streaming images," Diane pointed out. Then she frowned. "But . . . I know the bandwidth you specified. You can't be putting three image streams down that, not even with compression. Not even with the fact that we're using a much more capable relay satellite to handle the Earth transmissions directly."

"Not with ordinary compression, no. But what I'm doing here is not ordinary. There's an entire neurofuzzy expert system in each Faerie dedicated to smart compression, and I can specify methodologies if I need to. First, they take the main images and scans. Then they chop out all the stuff not in the immediate ROI except for a really general representation. Remember, in any given frame of video, very little usually changes; so you only need a small amount of data to represent it. Then, for people watching it, much lower resolution will do, so you can drop that. You can encode the picture even more by being able to have an encoded representation of the presented image concept. For instance, sending the image of the Faerie itself is a matter of just sending a listing of the current condition of the Faerie, something I can squeeze into very few bytes and then generate here based on the original design, with updates from later pics if needed. If we ever need the raw data, the Faeries can send that on demand later. They actually give me reminders to check data for importance before I erase it. Then I—never mind, here we go."

The three ISMs were now positioned in such a way that they were locked together, almost entangled but in a very carefully calculated manner. Each Faerie had two manipulator arms. Three of these, adjusted to maximum power, were hooked in the just-barely accessible crack where door and wall met. The vacuum deterioration of the seal had helped in that respect. Had that not happened, the manipulator arms would never have been able to get a significant grip on the door. The other three arms were configured to give the Faeries support, leverage, and stability, since in microgravity there was no assistance to be had from weight.

The three Faeries synchronized their systems as directed by A.J.'s programming, and then began to pull. For long moments, nothing happened. Indicators showed the stress on parts of the Faeries rising; then, passing normal limits, entering the danger zone.

A.J. was barely aware of the tension in his own arms. His hands were literally white-knuckled as he gripped the console, lifting and pulling in sympathetic unison with his own creations.

Titania suddenly fired its chemical thrusters.

A.J. hissed. That was an attempt to utilize leverage and inertia to drastically increase the force on the door, for a brief moment. But he'd programmed that maneuver as a last-ditch effort, and the reason Titania had used it now wasn't immediately obvious to him.

The downward thrust pushed on the temporary structure formed by the Faeries in such a way as to use it as a fulcrum. Manipulator arms bowed alarmingly under the pressure.

Suddenly, the view from Rane spun crazily. The others followed suit, the emulation showing that something had broken and the three Faeries were trying to recover. Telltales blinked on.

"Damn! Lessee . . . Rane's broken both manipulators, must've gotten twisted around . . . One of Titania's still works . . . Oh, fu— farging hell, something banged into Tinkerbell's left lens!"

Rane's images steadied and she turned her cameras back. A piece of manipulator arm bounced lazily across the field of view. But the image also showed a yawning dark patch at the base of the door, fully two feet high. Large enough for a Faerie to pass through.

"Oh, yeah!" A.J.'s momentary annoyance and concern vanished. It would have been worth the loss of at least two Faeries to get that door open, in his view, and he hadn't actually lost any of them. All three were damaged, but none of them in a way that would render them useless or even tremendously impaired in their main function.

"Well, let's hope there's something in there worth looking at. I sure can't pull off that trick again. Knowing how these things go, we've probably just succeeded in breaking into the alien equivalent of the broom closet."

Rane was not able to retract or fold the remainder of its manipulator arms, meaning that it was much more likely to snag itself going through narrow spaces. Tinkerbell's loss of an imaging unit made it less effective for surveying.

That left Titania. Fortunately, the status indicators and a visual survey by the other ISMs showed that the nonfunctional arm was in fact completely missing—it had broken cleanly off at the joint connecting it to the Faerie's main body. There was nothing to prevent Titania from surveying the now-accessible room.

Nothing, that was, except the inevitable verification and programming delay engendered by the many millions of miles between Earth and Phobos. After Prybar had concluded, the change in the ISMs' status had been more than sufficient to require them to wait for instructions from A.J. on what to do next.

"Take a break, people," A.J. said, absently. "I'm going to be designating new instruction sets and getting the Faeries redistributed to maximize the bandwidth feed when I send in Titania. This intermission will probably run you about two and a half hours. If someone would like to thank me for producing this Oscar-winning film, they could grab me a couple of hotdogs with mustard and relish and a large OJ in an hour or so."

Two hours and forty-seven minutes later, A.J. sat back down at his workstation, having taken a quick bathroom break. He noticed a large number of new people had arrived to watch what was happening—some of the new scientists added to the project recently, and Madeline Fathom.

"The show should be starting any minute now, ladies and gentlemen. In . . . five, four, three, two, one . . . action!"

There was now only a single viewpoint, that of Titania, as the little ISM carefully maneuvered itself down and through the gap. It eased through and then activated its full-power lights.

There were faint gasps of indrawn breath throughout the room.

A.J. could not quite restrain another whoop of triumph. "Not a broom closet!"

"Closet, hell," Hathaway said in quiet awe. "That's a control room."

The large oval room was a study in curves and ramps and triangled paneling. Even though constructed by completely inhuman minds and manipulative members, the layout was something hauntingly familiar. A sort of dais, with scalloped indentations at the edge that must correspond to seating arrangements, was located in the center. Around the perimeter of the room, on the side opposite the door, there were a series of tripartite panels. They were clearly separated yet related in groups of three, each with what appeared to be some kind of display panel or viewing screen above the central of the three subpanels.

Other dark, indefinable shapes were barely visible, sharp-edged but confusing, casting eerie shadows on the walls behind them. Titania began its preprogrammed survey of the room, in a counterclockwise direction from the entrance—which, naturally, took the other shapes out of view.

"Damn! I flip a coin and it chooses the wrong direction."

"We'll get to that area eventually," Jackie pointed out reassuringly. "How long?"

"You can't survey the room too quickly, especially if you don't want to hit anything. I'd say it's another half hour before we get our second look. Getting other data in now and . . . Yes, it's what I thought. There's something in those walls that was messing with the readings earlier. They're all much clearer now."

A.J. was still not paying a great deal of attention to the other data. Like everyone else, he was watching the slow revelations of Titania as she carefully surveyed the great control room.

"Look at that," one of the newcomers whispered. "More symbols on those keyboard-type things."

"How do you know they're keyboards?" challenged another.

"I don't know. But if we assume this is a control room, then it stands to reason that these things are very likely to be something like a keyboard."

"Size argues that they must have been using a phonetic alphabet rather than one oriented to meaning, like ideograms," someone else put in.

"Unless they had developed a symbology that included a method of representing meaning."

"Well, it could be mathematical . . . But look there, that one. I think some of those symbols are the same ones on a couple of the plaques we've located in the corridors."

"Not just mathematical, then. Unless they discussed hallway-style directions in mathematical terms."

"The hallway signs don't have to be directions. They may have known directions instinctively. Perhaps they were reminders of significant equations . . ."

The discussion continued in low tones with the participants examining in detail the specific frames in question. The rest of the spectators continued to be glued to the new images flowing in from Phobos.

"There, that station, it's bigger," Jackie said. "And the ramp that leads up to it flattens out into almost a platform. It's got more than one of those display-type screens above it, too. A captain's station?"

"Could be," A.J. allowed. "Or chief researcher or engineer."

After a pause, he added: "Okay, people, here we go. We're getting back to a FOV that ought to show us those whatever-they-weres towards the far side."

The darkness lightened. The mysterious shapes began to clarify again. Something like a small, black-brown bush with a thick, jagged stem drifted by the imager.

"What the heck is that?" Diane wondered aloud.

Suddenly, sliding into view almost as though it had lunged from the left-hand side, a far larger shape loomed on the screen. Three long, sinuous projections extended towards Titania, with the glittering of something smooth and whitish showing between them. Behind these projections bulked a massive body extending several meters back into the darkness, shadows and light playing on it and hinting at more detail.

As Titania continued onward, the shape emerged more clearly, coming into profile: an almost sluglike body, three stout projections on the far end mirroring the longer ones at the front.

"Holy mother of—" A.J. began.

"That's—" Jackie said.

"Bemmie!" they both finished simultaneously.

"Bemmie?" Hathaway repeated. "What the hell's a bemmie?"

Madeline Fathom looked just as puzzled as Hathaway. A.J. and Jackie turned to both of them, started talking at once, and went through several cycles of "Okay, you tell them, no, you, no, go ahead, you say it, no . . ." before A.J. finally claimed the floor.

"Colonel, I think we have a new crew member for you. Because,"

A.J. said with a wicked grin, "we know someone who's already spent two years studying our aliens."

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