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Chapter 17

Joe leaned back in his chair and gave vent to a long-drawn sigh of relief. "Not a single malfunction!"

"You expected some? In our peerless experiments? Why, Fearless Leader, how could you ever have gotten the impression that anything could go wrong?" Lee Grimes' voice drawled from the other side of the Ares control center. His prosthetic leg was propped up on the console in front of him, encased in one of the Western boots Lee preferred. "It's not as though anything's ever gone wrong here."

Joe laughed. It made him feel twice as good that Lee was not only still here, but able to joke about the accident that had cost him his chance to go to Mars as well as his leg. "Of course not. Still, that far away, it'd be a little hard to tweak the valves if something froze up."

"Told you to send me along. If I left my leg behind, I'd just about have made the weight limit."

"Yes, but there was the issue of air, food, water, that kind of thing. Pirate didn't carry any of those, remember?"

"Hmm. Okay, you could have just sent my leg."

"It's your head that I'd need to send."

"Ouch! No, I think I'll keep it where it is. Still, it's nice to watch everything running. Just look at that! Ferris will have a couple ingots made before we have to shut down."

"And there'll be water in the tanks and fuel to burn before long," Anne put in. "We're on target for Pirate's return launch. Chibi-rover is happily surveying the landscape in Melas Chasma, too. One hundred percent success."

"Well, we don't know that for sure yet," Joe cautioned. "First, it ain't really over until the return launch and recovery. Second, A.J.'s Faeries have to pull off their miracle."

He frowned. "Speaking of which, I'm getting a little worried about that, actually. We haven't heard anything from him in four, five days."

"Oh, stop fretting, Joe." Reynolds was looking over his shoulder at some of the readouts, even though he could have pulled them up just as well on his own personal data center. "You know how A.J. gets. He runs until he drops, wakes up, and then starts running again. I'll bet that if we just take a look out on the Net there's a ton of stuff on the Faeries now."

"Probably." To satisfy his curiosity, Joe opened a connection and sent out a general search. A few minutes later, Lee caught the deepening frown on Joe's face.

"Something wrong, Fearless Leader?"

"I'm not sure," he said slowly. "Anne, Lee, why don't you try pulling up something on A.J.'s progress with NASA."

A few minutes passed.

"That's . . . interesting," Anne said finally, with the tone of someone having discovered a nest of wasps just above them at a picnic.

"A.J. couldn't have dropped the whole ball that badly, could he?" Lee muttered. "I mean, he's an insufferable prick sometimes, but he's earned it, if you know what I mean."

"We helped him on those designs, guys. One, or even two, of the Faeries might have gone bad, but there's no way all of them did. We know the release went just fine, our own telemetry showed them separating and going their merry way."

Joe was frowning at the displayed information, or rather lack of information, as though it might suddenly change if he just glared at it enough. "But there's not a single pic here from later than, oh, I guess about six or seven hours after the Faeries were cut loose. And none of them are showing anything particularly close up."

"'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,'" Reynolds quoted.

"Marcellus to Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4." That came from Lee, as he continued a search for more Phobos data.

Ren looked startled. "I didn't take you for a scholar of Shakespeare, Lee."

"I'm not, really. But I did do some acting, years ago, and Marcellus was one of the roles I played." He shook his head. "Definitely rotten in the state of NASA, anyway. They've been giving out exactly diddly-squat since a few hours after the Faeries flew. No announcements, some vague talk about analyzing data, a few pics dribbled out that could have been taken a little earlier or later than the last official ones. But there's nothing giving us a real grip on what's happening."

"That makes no sense," Joe protested. "Even if somehow it all went wrong, there's no reason for them to clam up like this. They'd just try to slant it to make it look like we screwed it up."

He told his phone to dial A.J.

The phone screen lit with A.J.'s grinning face. "Hey, Joe, how's it going?"

"Fine, A.J., but we—"

"Ha, fooled ya! I'm not here or I'm too busy with my many fans to talk to you right now, but if you'll leave a message I'll—"

There was an audible click as a somewhat nettled Joe cut the connection. "I hate it when he sets his 'away' mode to that annoying little message. Fine, I'll ping him direct."

A few moments later he sat back, scratching his head. "He's not on-line."

Anne, Lee, and Reynolds all stared at him. "That's crazy talk, man. A.J. is off-line about as often as the Pope is Protestant. Okay, he's sometimes blocked or not answering, especially when he's sleeping, but off-line?"

"I'm not finding him."

Anne ran her own check along with Lee. "Looks like you're right. In fact . . . looks like he hasn't been on-line at all since about four in the morning the day after the Faeries flew."

Joe stood up. "That does it. This is all too weird. I'm going over to NASA to find out what's happening. What the hell, it's less than a two-hour drive."

"Well, okay, Fearless Leader," Lee said, after a moment. "But keep in touch. Or this might start to sound like those summer horror movies, you know?"

"Don't worry." Joe headed for the door. "I won't go into the basement, that's all."

"This way, sir," the guard said to Joe, opening the door to a stairway leading down.

Joe was a bit puzzled already. When he'd seen extra security at the entrance, he'd feared the worst. But instead they'd simply checked his ID and waved him through. And when he'd started to ask where to find A.J., they hadn't even waited for him to finish but had just said: "We'll escort you there, sir."

Come to think of it, he hadn't even gotten to A.J.'s name. Near as he could remember, he'd said: "Can you tell me how to find—"

He followed the guard down the stairway, through a well-lit hall, and finally through a set of double doors which opened into a large conference room.

"Joe! Glad you could make it!" A.J. said cheerfully. He was sitting on the other side of a long conference table in the middle of the room.

"Um, so am I. What is it that I've just made?"

His friend didn't answer immediately. Instead, he turned to the black man in a colonel's uniform sitting at one end of the table. "Pay up."

The colonel—he looked familiar to Joe, but Joe couldn't quite place him—gave a resigned smile, pulled out his wallet, and tossed a twenty to A.J. "It's a bet I'm glad to lose."

"I told you he'd be here," A.J. said. "I told them you'd be here," he repeated unnecessarily to Joe. "I knew you'd get here pretty quick, too."

"How the hell did you know I'd be coming? I didn't even know myself until a little while ago!"

"Because," A.J. said in his lecture-room tone, "you attempted to call me, but hung up without leaving a message. Several talk requests tried to ping me. Two people from Ares tried to access my NASA contact info within the same time period. I knew you guys had finally woken up to the fact that something funny was going on. And knowing you, I was pretty sure you wouldn't sit around waiting to see what happened."

"Very well, Mr. Baker, you have had your—admittedly deserved—moment of triumph," said a new voice from behind Joe. "Would you please sit back down? And Dr. Buckley, please take a seat as well."

Joe turned and saw that the speaker was a tall man with brown hair, just starting to gray slightly, also wearing a uniform. He came through the same door Joe had entered from, and moved toward the opposite end of the long conference table from the colonel. Behind him came a number of other people, who filed quickly into the room and took their own seats. One of them was Jackie Secord.

"All right, sir," he said, squinting slightly at the man's uniform. He was suddenly glad he'd said "sir," as he recognized the general's stars. Three of them, no less. "Will someone tell me what's going on?"

"Don't worry, Dr. Buckley. You are not the only one in this room who needs a briefing, although you are, admittedly, the only one who has no information at all. Everything will be made clear in a few minutes. I believe some introductions are in order. I am Lieutenant General Martin Deiderichs. I have been put in command of this operation, at least for the time being."

He indicated a petite blonde woman to his left. "Madeline Fathom, security liaison. You are already acquainted with Mr. Baker and Ms. Secord."

The Fathom woman smiled brilliantly, an expression Joe couldn’t help but echo.

She's one cute package. And I think she knows it. And if she's doing security liaison, she's not just ornamental, that's for sure.

"Ms. Diane Sodher, Information Analysis." The redhead in the lab coat waved.

Was that the one A.J. mentioned? If so, I'm impressed—I don't think I'd be keeping my mind on my work with her flirting with me.

"Dr. Satya Gupta, Senior Engineer." Dr. Gupta gave a courteous nod, his dark eyes studying Joe.

A.J. called him right. Face like a prophet, eyes like magnets. He's got that presence thing going.

"Dr. Wen Hsien Wu." Dr. Wu was a young, round-faced Chinese-American who resembled a youthful Buddha or an Asian cherub. He smiled and bowed slightly from his seated position.

I think Jackie said Wu is the top contender for physician on board Nike. He must be hell on wheels to be that good at his age. He can't be much older than A.J.

"Everyone, Dr. Joe Buckley, Senior Engineer at Ares." Joe was torn between a nod, a wave, and a bow. He wound up more or less doing all three at once, which probably looked incredibly stupid. Fortunately, no one laughed.

"Colonel Kenneth Hathaway, Acting Director, Project Nike," General Deiderichs concluded. The name immediately brought Joe's memory in focus. The colonel was one of the best-known and most experienced astronauts in the U.S. space program. Joe had seen his photograph several times, although this was the first time they'd ever met in person.

The stocky Hathaway smiled at Joe and gestured for him to sit down. Joe realized he'd reached a seat, right across from A.J. and Jackie, but hadn't sat down yet. He did so quickly.

"Now that we are all introduced," the general continued, "let's get to business. I know most of you have some idea of the subject of this meeting, but in my opinion it will not hurt to go over it again, and this will bring our new members up to speed. Colonel, if you would?"

The general seated himself, and Hathaway took over. "As we all know, the ISMs—Independent Sensor Modules, what Mr. Baker calls his 'Faeries'—were released at a distance of slightly over one hundred and sixty kilometers from Phobos at 1600 hours local time on the 14th of this month. ISM-1, code-named Ariel, reached Phobos vicinity at 1745, the other three arriving an hour or so later. A survey to map possible water vapor outgassing sources from Phobos was begun as planned at 2100 hours. This survey indicated two potential sources for this outgassing, as seen here."

A 3-D projection appeared in the display at the center of the table, showing a false-color plot of vapor concentrations and likely emission points.

"Verifying the existence of native sources of water is deemed to be of great importance for the Phobos Base component of the Nike mission. Accordingly, at 0130 on the 15th, Ariel was directed to examine both locations to determine the possibility of tracing the source of the outgassing material. The first location was a small crack in the surface of the moon, but the second proved to be a much larger fissure—sufficiently large to permit one of the ISMs to enter. As all other ISMs were functioning properly, Mr. Baker decided that the potential risk of losing one of the four was outweighed by the possibility of verifying the existence of water sources within the moon, and possibly discerning other important information about Phobos' structure and composition. Therefore, at 0335, Ariel descended into the interior of Phobos to search for the source of outgassing."

Joe noticed that even though no one else had been speaking, the room seemed to have gone even quieter. Whatever the others knew, they seemed to be almost holding their breaths.

"A little more than two hours later—to be precise, at 0552 local time—Independent Sensor Module-1, named Ariel, recorded this image."

The central display blanked, to be replaced with a large, detailed color image of a bronzish, three-sided plaque covered with strange symbols.

Joe just stared at the image for a moment. "What the hell is that?" he muttered.

"Precisely what we would like to know, Dr. Buckley," the general said bluntly.

"Well, in one sense we know exactly what it is," A.J. stated. "It's an artifact of a nonhuman civilization. Yeah, we don't know if it's an underground street sign, their equivalent of a historic marker like 'George Washington Alien slept here,' or a radiation warning. But the important thing is that we didn't put it there, and it's been there a really long time, and it's not natural."

Joe knew he sounded slow, but he couldn't help it. "Hold on. You found an alien artifact on Phobos?"

Dr. Wen Hsien Wu apparently shared his reaction. "I had known something unusual had been discovered in the survey, but this . . . General, why is this not in the news? It is not at all a matter for debate, as I see it. This is wonderful news! We are not alone! Why are we not broadcasting this image for all to see? And what other images have we acquired? Why—"

General Deiderichs raised his hand. "Dr. Wu, you are not alone in asking these questions. In fact, it is specifically to address these issues that we have called this meeting. Ms. Fathom?"

Madeline Fathom stood. "First, Dr. Wu, I'd like to make clear that in an ideal world, and in my own heart, I'm of your own opinion. I'd like nothing better than to throw the informational gates wide and let the world see it all. But this isn't an ideal world, and neither General Deiderichs nor myself are free to act just on what we feel."

She made a smooth, rippling gesture which Joe found jarringly familiar. After a moment, he recognized it as very similar to A.J.'s, when he was using a VRD display interface for controlling various peripherals. The display in the table's center faded to show a slowly-moving tunnel scene.

"The wonderful nature of this discovery, unfortunately, has become part of the problem. What we appear to have here is a fairly intact alien space installation. A.J. Baker, and others, are of the opinion that it's very unlikely any of the actual devices we may find there will be functional. However, many of them may be intact enough to be studied."

"And it wouldn't do to have just anyone studying such things, would it?" A.J.'s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

Fathom sighed. "Mr. Baker, I understand your hostility, but would you mind terribly much not directing it at me? Please? We're not making these decisions."

As A.J. opened his mouth, she interjected: "And if you make some smartass geek comment about 'just following orders' in a stupid German accent, I will actually get annoyed."

A.J.'s mouth snapped shut. Joe's estimate of the delicate-looking blonde woman shot upward. It wasn't easy to cut off A.J. at the pass, but she'd done it.

"The simple fact is that unless these aliens did everything exactly as we do, and never got past our own level of technology, the potential discoveries awaiting us in that base are revolutionary. We may not be at war with anyone, but we also have had many reasons to suspect the completely benign intentions of many other countries. Not to mention any number of paranational organizations. Therefore this project now falls under the category of a national security matter."

Joe shook his head. "Sorry, Ms. Fathom, but you know that's not going to work very long. You can't fake up the data that good. Hell, I got here because I knew something funny was up."

That unexpectedly brilliant smile flashed out again. "You're quite correct, Dr. Buckley. Some of the truth—most of it, I imagine—will be revealed immediately. But critical information must be controlled, and that is where I come in. General Deiderichs will be directing the overall operation, but I've been assigned to help sort the released information into categories we can release and those that will be kept restricted, at least until careful study has been concluded."

Joe nodded slowly. If done by someone who really understood how the different investigations of the projects were carried on, it just might work, at least for a while. There would be knowledge of the existence of the alien base, but the artifact analysis could take an indeterminate amount of time.

"We were debating how to contact Ares and discuss the situation, when Mr. Baker informed us that you were coming over here. While, in a way, we might have preferred to talk to Glenn Friedet, the two of you actually constitute a considerable proportion of the 'guiding lights' of Ares. So we will at least discuss the basics with you, and then get into details with the rest of the main staff later. I think you can understand that, at this point, the government can no longer afford the risk of independent private flights in a potential security situation such as exists on Phobos."

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