Priam's Lens

TWELVE Hector

“Get Mister Harker a dressing gown, please,” Madame Sotoropolis instructed. The automated systems built into the Odysseus immediately complied, with a small hook running in a track along the ceiling carrying a dark blue gown.

“Thanks for something,” the Navy man grumbled, taking it and putting it on, then tying it off. “You’ll see to my suit?”

“Wouldn’t want to touch it with a five-meter pole,” she responded. “Colonel N’Gana has warned us that such things are not to be trifled with.”

He found some sandals and slipped them on, then emerged from the bathroom of the small suite he now occupied. “Now, you want to tell me when you knew I was there?”

“Well, as I understand, Admiral Krill suspected that someone like you would be there, and this Dutchman confirmed it, that’s all. I must admit I was a bit surprised to find that it was you, even though I am delighted to see you here! We can use someone like you, I suspect.”

He stared at her, all shrouded but still animated, and frowned. “You knew the Navy would send somebody. You deliberately baited me with all those queries for the Dutchman.”

“Let us just say that several of us thought it better to have someone official along. Someone who could give the Navy a pretext to act if need be, or call them off. Like it or not, Mister Harker, you are now the official representative of The Confederacy’s Navy on this trip.”

“Maybe I don’t choose to be.”

“Too late. You already volunteered. Now, come this way, please. I think that you should be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.”

He followed her, still feeling uncomfortable and highly vulnerable but mostly crushed by the idea that his act of bravery was so, well, useless.

“Why didn’t you just request a liaison?” he grumbled.

“Why, dear, you know they would have either ignored us or sent the wrong person. Someone either no good in a fight or only good in a fight, perhaps. But someone who had the nerve to do what you just did—now that is the kind of person we can trust. You may be the best of the lot here, Mister Harker, and we don’t even have to pay you!”

He had a lot of questions; he had nothing but questions at this stage. All that for nothing. And the Dutchman was here and had known he was there. That meant that the Dutchman, or his henchmen, had been there on the base and in the bar all along. And if he knew that, did he also know the codes and signals Harker could use in a pinch? He wondered.

Juanita Krill was taller than he’d thought from the videos and, if anything, thinner. He doubted if she could do much heavy lifting or carrying, but, then, she didn’t have to. She marketed that first-rate brain of hers that could solve all sorts of wonderful ciphers when mated with her specially designed code-breaking and security computers.

She looked up at him from a console, then went back to the screen once again. Her short-cropped wig sat on a small form on the deck. By moving just a bit behind her, he saw that she had a cyberprobe inserted in the slot in the back of her skull. It gave off a low pulsing yellow light, not because it needed the light but because others had to know when it was active in case something went wrong. On the other side of her, on the deck opposite the wig stand, was a simple one-meter-square cube with a handle on it. It, too, was pulsing in rapid time, mirroring the smaller transceiver in her skull.

The fact that she was doing complex analysis inside the computer didn’t seem to interfere with her ability to hold a normal conversation, which was probably the most impressive thing of all. He’d seen people who did computer interfacing on this level who were comatose not only while they were doing it but also for days afterward.

“Come, come, Mister Harker,” she said. “You should know you would never make heads or tails of what you are seeing. I’ll tell you what it is, though, and it is quite disturbing, some of it. It’s the output of the mind of a man who knew he was probably going to die any minute. Fortunately, whoever was stalking him did not get him until he was through. I have experienced a violent death in this manner before and it takes a great deal of work to get it out of your head.”

“This is the Dutchman’s man on Helena?”

“Interestingly, no. It appears that he was another free-lancer or possibly even a civilian operative. The record is unclear. Unfortunately, while he was quite bright, it wasn’t in this technical area. He was more soldier and spy than cyberthief. However, it appears that he couldn’t quite get to the old labs anyway. There has been a collapse in those levels which would require earth-moving equipment to bypass. Needless to say, that is not an option open to us on Helena. There is, however, a potential route using old ventilation shafts that are far too small for us to get through but which another might.”

“That’s the Pooka, I guess.”

“Indeed. The man wasn’t going for this sort of stuff when he was dropped. He was attempting to get modular keys to more conventional but still quite potent weapons that are stored away in vast underground bunkers on Achilles. That was the prize. Instead, he ran into information, apparently old-style written information, that led him instead to the location of the research and control center for the Priam’s Lens project. He knew what he had from the printouts and journals he recovered down there and read later on. Unfortunately, when he tried to get down to the laboratory levels for the data and code blocks, well, he just could not get there. The position is quite dangerous both from the standpoint of the physical plant and because of its close proximity to one of the Titan bases. He didn’t dare to try for more, but he wanted to ensure that the message got out. He had data on where some trickle charge emergency stations might be located and he found one. He got out the information he had using the old planetary emergency channels, without really knowing whether it would be received by anyone. Only the Dutchman was in the area and so only the Dutchman received the signal.”

He nodded. “So, any idea why the Dutchman called in the tiaras family?”

“Not exactly. He will not show himself. We don’t know who or even what he is. However, he can hardly go to the nearest Naval base and say, ‘Hi, I was out in the Occupied Territories near Helena and I received this signal from the ground.’ They would have him. This way, he controls things.”

“Seems to me he’d be better off going in or sending in his own team,” Harker commented. “That way he’d have this all to himself.”

“Well, yes, except that he’s already done just that. At least, so he says. Two separate groups, in fact. Neither was ever heard from again. He decided then that only a professional team tailored for the job would have a crack at doing it.”

Harker nodded. “And now I suppose I’m a part of this team?”

“I believe you were always supposed to be. Knowing Commander Park, it would not surprise me if your very presence here is part of some convoluted plot to deal himself in by proxy. Well, it doesn’t matter now. You are either in at this point or you will have a very boring time here and perhaps get an opportunity to test yourself against the Dutchman. I’m sure that this has occurred to you. There is simply no way that every competent fighter is going down there, leaving you aboard with a mathematician, a physicist, a mummified opera singer, a middle-aged pot-bellied old yacht captain, and an emaciated half machine like me.”

He gave her a wry grin she couldn’t see. “I suspect you’re a lot more formidable than you make yourself out to be. I know your reputation, and I suspect that you are already interfaced with just about every system on this ship. What chance would somebody like me have?”

“The comment is both flattering and partially correct, but only partially. You would have an excellent chance in that combat suit and you know it. I can tell that it is state of the art, and well beyond the ability of even someone like me to compromise. I have no doubt that if anything happened to you the suit is perfectly capable of taking us on completely by itself. No, sir, I don’t think so. And I don’t think the colonel could do much about it, either. That really leaves things up to you, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can stop the colonel from dispatching you to whatever form of Valhalla you think you’ll go to, because I am confident enough of the programming in that suit to want to protect myself. I think the old lady fancies you, too. But you’re going to have to decide whether to sit here with us and keep the old lady endlessly entertained for maybe months, or go with them. Your choice.”

He sighed and considered the idea. He had no desire to go down there, even in a full combat suit, let alone in nothing but his birthday suit. But considering the alternative, it was true: he had an unpalatable choice to make.

The whole thing had been so anticlimactic after that buildup that he couldn’t get himself psyched to do much of anything. Riding the keel was not something that had been fun; the nightmares were, well, bizarre and had terrified him, he knew, even though he couldn’t quite remember any of them, and he was still feeling a lot of deep bruises. Still, to come all the way through that only to be picked off and invited inside—well, it was at the very least embarrassing. Krill was right, though; the Dutchman could hardly have counted on any belief or cooperation from the Navy, and they could hardly have invited a Navy combat expert aboard and expected to actually get one without strings. Now—now they had him.

He went to see Doctor Katarina Socolov. She seemed rather happy to see him but not all that surprised. “I almost hoped you’d find a way to come,” she told him. “I admit that going down with just those two Neanderthals wasn’t my idea of a good time.”

“You only know me from one dinner, and that was arranged under false pretenses,” he noted. “I could just as easily be another N’Gana or Mogutu. Not that they are exactly storm troopers, either. They’re old-time fighting men who, for one reason or another, stepped on some toes and were forced to retire. In fact, N’Gana had a damned good record overall, and his great crime was that he would not commit large numbers of troopers to a suicidal position. Even though he was right, as was proven when he was replaced on the spot and the order given by his subordinate, he’d disobeyed a direct order. They let him quit and he was happy to go. I looked over his whole file and record.”

“And yet he immediately went into business doing the same thing.”

Harker shrugged. “He’s a professional soldier and he doesn’t really know any other life. I think he has a pathological fear of dying in bed of old age. Still, he’s good at his job and single-minded about his missions. If you don’t mind my saying so, from the outset I’ve thought that the possible weak link in this isn’t either of the military men.”

“You mean me.”

He nodded slowly. “It’s nothing personal, or even professional. N’Gana’s not going to rape you, nothing like that. But it’s going to be pretty damned primitive and very rough down there. Rougher, I think, than any of us imagine. We’ve never had to live completely without our machines. N’Gana can physically break logs in two and he’s a hell of a wrestler; Mogutu’s got black belts in fighting disciplines I never even heard of, let alone can pronounce. Still, neither of them has ever had to go it absolutely alone. No communications, no weaponry, no computer links, not even a hot bath. And they’re in better shape than you are, although you appear to be in decent condition. I know what it’s like to be pushed past the point of exhaustion when it’s life or death. So do they. You may think you do, but you don’t. I didn’t until I had to do it.”

“I’ll have to make it. You can’t scare me any more than I’m already scared, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t go.”

“There’s one more thing. You’re the only woman and the only person on the squad without military training. There is going to be a tendency for the others to be protective or solicitous of you even though they will try not to be. I’ve seen it before. If you get into real trouble, somebody’s gonna have to stop what they are doing and try and save you.”

“There are women combat soldiers. I’ve seen some of them.”

“That’s different. Suited up, there’s no real difference. Even not suited up, there’s the same training background and mindset.”

“Well, I may be the only woman but I’m not the only civilian going down. There are four of us—unless you feel like coming along.”

“Who’s the other?”

“The priest, Father Chicanis. He was born and raised on the continent of Eden before the Fall. He would have been there when it fell but he was at some religious conference. I think he’s always felt guilty he wasn’t there. He’s our native guide, so to speak. He can find the old landmarks and get us where we need to go, considering we won’t have any computer or navigational aids.”

Harker hadn’t thought of this. “Now I like it even less. A priest who wants to be a martyr. Just great. He’ll also want to minister to everybody who might kill him. The world he remembers is a century dead. The world down there now is like nothing he’s ever known.”

“He’s a tough guy, at least that’s the impression I get, and for a priest he’s pretty grounded in realism. At least, I don’t think he’s about to get us killed for his religion. I think he’d die for it, but he wouldn’t take any of us with him. I also always had the idea that, with him, this was personal. There’s something in his past, somewhere, that he’s kept inside but it’s what drives him beyond just his faith. I don’t know what it is. I think Madame Sotoropolis does, but I’m not sure.”

“We’ve all got things like that driving us,” he told her. “I swore I’d never get myself in a combat situation again. I know what it’s like when it goes bad. I’m not sure I didn’t use up any lives left in me that last time, too.”

He turned to go, deciding to speak to this priest next. She called him back: “Harker?”

“Yes?”

“You ever been in a combat situation without something on? Some armor?”

He thought about it. “Only in training exercises, and not recently, no.”

“We’ve all been training in the simulator here. Even though we’ll have a lot more stuff than those people on Helena probably have, we’ll still be pretty stripped down. Maybe before you start questioning the abilities of other people, you might want a crack at that simulation yourself. That’s if you decide to come with us, of course.”

He took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it,” he told her, and left.

He found Father Chicanis in the big lounge, which looked just the way it had on all those spy camera recordings. When not officiating in his priestly sense, Chicanis tended to dress informally in a black pullover shirt, and slacks, and slip-on sneakers. He looked very much like a middle-aged man in fairly decent condition who might well be a programmer or technician or even janitor.

“Ah, Mister Harker! Glad to have you with us,” the priest greeted him, sounding like he was just saying hello to somebody he had asked aboard.

“I’m not sure how much with you I am yet, Father,” he responded.

“Come! Sit down! I’m afraid this may be the only chance we’ll have to get to know each other. After sitting on our duffs forever, we’re now moving very fast, it seems.”

“We’re heading out?”

“The Dutchman is dispatching a corvette that’s now attached to his ship to get us. Ships this size, or even the size of his vessel, would trigger every alarm the Titans might have. It’s by using very small ships like the corvettes and then using small outer system genhole gates that they’re able to get in and out without the energy flare attracting attention.”

“I haven’t said whether I’m in or out on this, you know.”

“Come, come! You’ve come this far out of curiosity! I don’t think you’re the kind of man who can sit back and remain passive when things are going on. I assume you don’t have a family or you wouldn’t have volunteered for that courageous ride.”

“No, nobody.”

“Then, see? That’s really all of us, you know. In addition to the skills involved, everyone aboard, even Captain Stavros, has no close remaining family. The mercenaries and the science people—all orphaned by this point, no known living siblings.”

“Including you?”

Chicanis’s face darkened. “Everyone I held dear was still on Helena when it was overrun. They’re all most certainly dead now. Most probably died in the initial loss of power and the scouring. I see their faces, I hear their voices, every night in my dreams, but they are somewhere else now, in the arms of Jesus. I really believe that, you see. It’s why I can go on and not be consumed with grief. I fully expect to see them again someday.” He paused and stared at Harker. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”

Harker shrugged. “I’m not at all sure, and that’s an honest answer, Father. Sometimes, when I see a beautiful sunset on some distant world or stare into the heart of a spectacular stellar cloud, it’s easy. Other times, looking at starving people, twisted and broken children, blown-up bodies, shorted-out minds—then I can’t find God at all. Let’s just say that I reserve judgment on God, but that I very much believe in evil. I’ve seen evil.”

“Well, that’s more than most people. Half The Confederacy is still trying to figure out what the Titans want and why they do what they do, as if understanding a truly alien race would make the genocide go away. Most people stopped believing in evil centuries ago. In ancient times a majority of good churchgoing types believed in hell. Oh, now they believe in God and Jesus and love and all that, but when it comes to hell—no, not that.”

“I’ve already been to hell, Father,” Harker told him evenly. “That I believe in.”

“You know, there’s some from the start who thought that the Titans were angels,” Chicanis commented. “The Jewish tradition has good angels and bad angels, and we Greeks took the bad and called them by a proper Greek label, daimon. I can’t help but wonder sometimes when I see the beauty of those Titan formations. Satan was always supposed to be the crowning cherub, the most beautiful of all the angels. Beauty and evil are not opposites.” He sighed. “But we’re not here to discuss theology, now, are we?”

“No, we’re not. I was just wondering, though, if you’d thought through what it’ll be like down there. Pardon me, Father, but it’s pretty clear that you’ve lived more real-time years than me, and you haven’t spent them all in situations where you had to be in peak physical condition. I’ve looked at the maps here. If we put in where we’re supposed to, we’re talking a good three hundred or more kilometers walking, both there and back. Running some of the time, I suspect, in a reworked primitive world like nothing any of us have ever experienced before. I’m not sure that Doctor Socolov can hack that, and I’m not sure you could, either.”

“You’re not saying anything I haven’t heard from Mogutu,” the priest admitted. “The fact is, though, from the Dutchman and from Navy files we have aerials of Helena and I can determine the old points from them. They’ve reworked a good deal of Atlantis, but Eden is pretty much left alone save for their replanting. Many of the natural landforms and just about all the distances are still correct. I feel confident I can get us wherever we need to get on the ground. I am not sure that anyone else could. That is, anyone not born and raised there. So, I go, and God will grant me whatever strength is necessary to get the job done. I feel certain of it. I am also prepared, if need be, to die there, or to remain there, if that is what God wants. But I simply cannot accept that He didn’t have a plan for me to be in this position. It explains why I wasn’t there when the Titans came, why I was in a certain company at a certain time when this came up, and why I am here. I believe this is a divine plan. You can dismiss it or not, but I believe it to be so, and faith will carry a person a very long way.”

“I hope you’re right, Father,” Gene Harker replied. “I really hope you’re right.” He stood there for a moment, trying to bring up his biggest concern diplomatically. Finally, he decided head-on was best.

“Tell me, Father. If you’re down there, and it’s the difference between one of our lives and one of the poor wretches down there, could you decide? Could you actually act to keep Socolov from death or rape or whatever, or even one of us from having our brains bashed in?”

“The truth? I don’t know, Harker. I don’t think I will know until and unless I face it, and I know I might. None of us truly knows what is within us until an action is forced, do we?”

“Well, at least it’s an honest answer,” the Navy man responded.

“Call it off, Colonel.”

The big man with the deep voice continued to look over terrain maps on the console in front of him but did say, “Hello, Harker. Glad to have you with us.”

“I’m not with you, or against you. I just think you’re going to do what you wouldn’t do before. You go in, and you’ll kill people—that’s part of the job. But Socolov and Chicanis are liabilities in any ground movement and you know it. Take them, and either they will die or the mission will fail as we keep saving their necks.”

“I note you now said `we,’ which makes me correct. And I can’t call it off. I couldn’t even call off the action that got me early retirement. Those people still went in, remember, and they still died. This is even clearer. They are going in with or without us. If they go in without us, they will surely die. If they go in with us, they will probably die, but something might come of the effort. Look on the bright side.”

It was a pretty cold way of looking at things, but it was also hard to argue with. “Is this trip really worth it?”

“Krill thinks so. This Dutchman thinks so. The preliminary examinations of the historical record suggest that they might have had something. We’ll know more once we get into Hector.”

“Hector? You’re going to the little moon?”

“Initially. That’s KriIl’s and the two brains’ jobs. The actual weapon is supposed to be there, still hidden away in bunkers. If it’s there, then it is worth going down for the codes. If it is not there, then we all go home—or, more likely, we all get to find out if we can blow the Dutchman before the Dutchman blows us away once he has no use for us. But I’m not going to abandon it if something’s there. Someone with an incredible amount of guts died, probably in a nasty way, to get us that information. Do you know how long the burst was that got all that data out that Krill’s now looking over?”

“No.”

“About six seconds. After that, you can actually see the damping field kicking in to intercept and gobble up the power, and not incidentally target the sender precisely as well. A six-second transmission. We won’t even have that. It’s doubtful whether, now that it’s been done once, the Titans will leave anything with surface access unmonitored. I’m certain they could drain the entire planet of power if they wished; it’s just too much trouble and no profit. Our objective is to bring the codes out without activating them. Once we do, once storage becomes active energy—watch out!”

“Do you really think even the likes of us can hack it down there, Colonel? Give me my combat suit and I’ll take on an army, but bare-handed…”

“I have no intention of being down there bare-handed,” N’Gana responded. “However, there will be both vulnerabilities and limits. You were Commando, right?”

“Yes. A while ago.”

“You’re still a Commando and you know it. It’s in the blood. If you’d quit and gone into the diamond business or started dirt farming, maybe not, but you stayed in. I think you’re probably very good, Harker. Both the sergeant and I were Rangers. Much the same sort of thing. Each of us, deep down, thinks the other’s training wasn’t quite up to our own, but we know how even we really are. What was the final exam for you, Harker? In individual rather than squad training.”

Harker gave a mirthless smile. “They stripped us down to our underwear and dropped us on a hellhole of a planet with only what we’d have coming out of a lifeboat. The pickup point, the only one on the whole damned planet, was almost three thousand kilometers away by land and sea. We either got there whole and called for pickup or we failed.”

“Fairly similar with us. We dropped as a squad, fully organized, but the problem and objective were the same. Did everyone in your class make it?”

“No. I understand that, out of twenty-five who were eventually dropped, six never checked in.”

“Well, my losses were a bit worse,” said N’Gana, “That’s why we volunteered. Nobody had to do it. Even down to that last drop, anybody could have said `No!’ and nothing more would have been said about it. They’d have simply rotated back. But we went. By that point anybody who’d freeze had already been pressured or threatened out. We did it then. This will be no different.”

“Maybe. I was nineteen real at the time and I thought I was immortal and, after that full course, some kind of superman as well. I’m a lot older now, and I’ve been shot up a lot of times and scraped up a few more.”

“Well, I’m nearly fifty real, and I believe I could do that course again. I have yet to be defeated by Doctor Socolov’s simulator program, and I see nothing so far that would suggest that this is not doable. I would agree that the odds are almost nil that we will all survive, and slim that any, let alone most, of us will make it back to be picked up. But I don’t see anything here that skews the odds any worse than the Ranger examination course.”

Harker sighed. “Colonel, I had an electronic direction finder, I had a small sidearm, a medikit, and a few other things when I did my exam. No matter what you say, I know you had similar as well. I’d love to try the Doc’s sim, but it’s only a guess. Nobody’s come back from being down there.”

“The Dutchman has people who have managed the trip, or so he says. It is not easy, but if it can be done by pirates, then it can be done by me.” He paused. “I do wish that you could try the sim at a high level, if only for me to judge how out of practice you might be, but there will not be time. We are to board the corvette in just over three hours. Since there is a great deal of risk simply activating a gate—let alone coming in-system—near Titans, this will be the start of it. Hector first, then, if it’s all there, we go down and the rest remain on Hector. You are in, or you remain right here. You have one hour to decide. After that, there will not be time to allow for your supplies.”

“An hour!”

“I think you would be most useful to us, Mister Harker,” the Colonel said quite smugly. “And I think having come this far uninvited, you could not resist going the rest of the way. Not someone with your service record and awards.”

Harker didn’t have to think too hard on this part. “I’ll go, at least as far as the moon, just to see what the hell this is all really about. But going down there, on a Titan world—that I won’t promise.”

“Fair enough. Oh—you really should stop by supplies and get yourself a decent pair of pants. In fact, I’ve already arranged for an entire kit to be prepared in your size. Just pick it up and sign for it.”

He was certainly predictable, anyway, Harker thought, as he got and checked through the kit. There were two complete outfits in there, each with the same nondescript black pullovers that the priest, the colonel, and the colonel’s long-time partner and aide fancied aboard. In fact, when he answered the page to go to the lower docking bay, he found that it was the uniform of the day.

He was surprised to see that they’d brought his suit down as well. It looked the worse for wear on the outside; the smooth gloss was off it, and it had some minor fading and beading that made it seem less awesome and more seedy, but he knew it was still in top shape inside.

“We think the suit will be quite handy,” the colonel told him, seeing his surprise. “Not on the surface of Helena, of course, but on Hector. The same low power modes that allowed it to stick undetected by us to the outer hull of the Odysseus should be sufficient for work there without drawing an unwelcome crowd, or so this Dutchman says.”

“Anything on him yet? Anything other than what we already knew?” Harker asked.

“Nothing. Every transfer’s been by computer and robotics. It’s almost like he really is his namesake. A cursed captain who cannot be in the company of humans, served by a ghost crew.”

“Surely he’s coming with us!”

“I don’t think so,” Father Chicanis answered. “I think he’s staying right where he is. What he needs is in the computer navigational and piloting system on the corvette. He’s not going to risk his own neck. Not when he can get us to risk ours.”

One by one they gathered there. Only Madame Sotoropolis and Captain Stavros would remain aboard the Odysseus for this leg. Neither could offer anything more to the expedition than they had by financing and assembling it.

“I should love to see my beautiful Helena one more time,” the old diva said wistfully. “But I would be as a stone to the expedition, and I would be dead in an instant if the Titans sapped energy. I will have to say `Good luck and Godspeed’ from here. Take care, all of you.”

A gloved, shaky hand grasped Father Chicanis’s and squeezed hard. He looked down at her and said, “If we can do it and it is God’s will, we will. That much I swear.”

“Do you—do you really believe that anyone is still alive down there?” she asked him.

“Not anyone who remembers us, surely,” he responded, and clearly not for the first time. “Still, someone is there. God would not bring us to this point with these fine people and let us fail. I do believe the road will be one of the hardest anyone has been asked to take in centuries. God bless you, Anna Marie. Sing joyfully of me, for I am going home.”

The airlock slid open, and they all turned and walked single file through the tubelike connector and into the small corvette. The suits and other supplies were handled by the Odysseus’s automatic cargo and servicing robots, which took them out and slid them into the cargo section in the corvette’s underbelly.

Katarina Socolov hadn’t been in the assembly, and for a moment he’d hoped that she’d come to her senses, but now here she was, taking a seat next to Father Chicanis in the front row.

The Pooka slithered in and curled up in the back. Being the unexpected added passenger, Harker took the only seat left open, the one next to Krill, just behind the priest and Socolov.

“I see that had I elected not to come I wouldn’t have had your company after all,” he noted.

“I decided that the old security codes and devices might be more of a problem than we think. I’ll not be going to the surface, though. Any encounter with a Titan field will kill me, you know. But I could not allow this to proceed without verifying that it exists and that we can get in and out,” Krill replied.

“That fellow whose brain scan you deciphered got in and got information,” he noted.

“Yes, but he did not get what we needed and he did not make it out. Even as he died, he could not have truly known if there was anything to this more than a failed project and a set of contingency plans. That’s what we find out first.”

Harker nodded and looked around. Nine of them going into Titan territory pretty well blind and untrained as a true military team. How could this possibly work?

“I’m still surprised that the Dutchman, or a crony, isn’t along,” he noted. “Mighty trusting of him after all this.”

“What’s to trust?” she asked him. “His program is taking us in, his programmed AI unit is handling all the ship’s piloting and navigation, and it’s the only way to or from. He’s got the Odysseus and the only exit. What else does he need?”

The corvette powered up, the airlocks closed and then hissed, and finally the lights came on stating that there was a valid seal and that pressurization was accomplished.

They pushed off, then they could feel the ship come about. When the engines came up to normal, though, all sensation of movement stopped and they just had the steady hum of the engines.

“I forgot to ask,” Harker said. “How long is this little jaunt?”

“Just a few hours, or so we’re told,” Father Chicanis called back.

Harker sighed. “Well, then, I’m going to dial up a real meal and a decent drink and then get a little sleep. It seems I’ve been a very long time between meals.”

The food didn’t have much taste, but it filled him, which was what he needed. After that he really did recline and nod off, but he kept having the same dream, of a star-filled universe being overrun by cockroaches.

And he was one of the roaches.

There was curiously little conversation on the way, even when they were awake, and then it was entirely about practical things like eating and drinking and power consumption.

Emerging back into normal space from the very small genhole and into the Trojan system was done very quickly, and they knew it from the sudden drop into red warning lights and the sudden and complex maneuvering of the craft.

On the screen, though, came a sun and four very distinct planets.

“Save for a trickle charge that keeps it from imploding, the small genhole is inactive inside the orbit of two of the moons of one of the larger gas giants in the system,” Krill explained to him, knowing that he alone would not have been fully briefed. “The amount of surge produced when it powers up and allows us through is masked by the magnetic field and electrical storms in the upper atmosphere of the giant, so unless we literally run into a Titan ship or patrol they won’t be able to pull us out of the muck. That’s how they move these little ships in and out.”

“So they say,” he commented.

“Oh, there’s no problem with this. As totally incomprehensible as the Titans are, they still obey the general laws of physics. We just haven’t figured out how they do it all yet.”

We haven’t figured out how they do most of it, he thought sourly, but he let it pass. Much worse, we haven’t the vaguest idea why. How could you deal with an adversary this powerful who would not even accept a surrender?

Cockroaches…

Maybe it wasn’t so bad being a cockroach after all, he thought. The buggers survived virtually everything and you never could completely get rid of them no matter how hard you tried. No other creature in the universe had ever been encountered that was as versatile and persistent as the various kinds of Terran cockroaches. That, at least, had been a blessing. So if we’re the second Terran evolutionary species to be too ornery and tough to die, maybe there’s something to be said for the whole thing.

“The trickiest part is right now,” she told him, inadvertently reminding the others of the tremendous danger they were now in. Krill was as much computer as human, or so it seemed. She’d clinically describe in great detail her own dissection. “We need to use power to get close to them, and the closer we get, the more likely we are to be detected. I understand that the theory here is to make our signature similar to that of a small comet or meteor. They may count them, but they do not shut them down.”

This solar system as originally constituted had been a very good one for humans. Discovered more than four hundred years earlier, it had one planet in the life zone that was so easily and inexpensively terraformable that it was habitable in a matter of decades, and a second world that, though not nearly as nice to live on, was filled with a great many valuable minerals and heavy metals that served as a virtual supply depot for building a new world.

The project was one of the first to have been handled from discovery through settlement by private corporations rather than a government or major institution or movement. The primary contractor for the job had been the large Petros Corporation, which was headed by several large families of ancient Greek extraction, hence the names of all the planets, moons, and the like had been taken from Greek myths. Few of the settlers were actually Greek, though; in fact, there were only so many Greeks at any point compared to the vast ethnic diversity spilling out into space.

Although Helena, as the beautiful habitable world was called, was divided up into districts based on founding Petros family names, there were Italians and Croatians and Yorubans and Han Chinese down there from the start. It was an echo of the ancient Greek world that no ancient Greek would probably have recognized.

Other than a love of and dedication to their new world, though, they had one thing in common that the founding patriarchs of the world had controlled to a large degree.

Constantine Karas had once thought of becoming an Orthodox priest instead of a captain of industry. In his old age and with his crowning project building, he determined that it would be a place where only those Orthodox churches recognized as Christian would flourish. There was already a world or two for just about every other ethnic group or religion or culture: Islamic, Buddhist, Taoist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, as well as many which were polyglot worlds. He held to it, even getting the reigning Patriarchs to recognize Helena’s own Orthodox branch, although there were also many Copts down there. Roman Catholics had also been welcome, but they had not flourished there. Even the millennium since the beginning of space travel and colonization hadn’t healed the ancient schisms between the Roman and Eastern churches.

That made this mixture even more atypical of the old visions. Harker was a lapsed Roman Catholic, N’Gana was a nominal Moslem, and Mogutu had been raised in the Anglican Communion, as it turned out, while Krill and van der Voort were lifelong atheists from a long line of them. Takamura was something of a Buddhist, but no more devout than Harker or N’Gana. Only Katarina Socolov, who was Ukrainian Orthodox in background, would have been what the old man had in mind for the colonists. It was one reason why she’d been picked for the mission, there being an assumption that something of the religious base might have survived down there even if in mutated form.

“There!” Father Chicanis breathed, pointing to the screen. “There is a full Helena, as beautiful as her legend!”

Nearly filling the screen was a magnified view of the world, looking so very peaceful and normal, a blue and white marble just hanging there in the sky.

“If you look closely, you can see almost all of Atlantis almost in the center of the planet,” Chicanis went on. “Eden is a bit south and to the east, but will be coming into view, I suspect, shortly. From this distance they both look more rounded than they actually are, which is how they came to be called Helen’s Eyes.”

Katarina Socolov grinned and commented, “Come, come, Father! We’re not in Sunday school here!”

He gave a kind of resigned chuckle and replied, “All right, then. Most people called them Helen’s Breasts.”

That drew a snicker from the combat folks in the rear and helped break the tension. It was only a brief respite, though; they could all feel it, made all the worse because at the moment they were helpless and totally at the mercy of the Dutchman and his programming. If a Titan should pass by or do an energy sweep, they were all dead and they knew it.

The computer on the corvette broke in with a voice that sounded a lot like the Dutchman’s. “I can show you through filters the Titan layout down there and you can see the sweep,” it said. “I will do this now, but I must then power off the screen until we are in and behind Hector. I am registering an abnormally high energy flow. One of the suits in the hold must be powered on more than it should be.”

Probably mine, Harker thought. He suspected that the damned thing was smarter than he was, or at least cleverer.

The screen changed and went through a series of obvious visual filters. It was on the broad-spectrum filter that the Titan net was clearly visible, though. Now, most of Atlantis and a good half of Eden were visible, and in the viewer you could clearly see the bright anchor points of the Titan bases, the smaller anchors and the center nexus for each, and the rather tight grid for each continent. The poles also pulsed brightly, and, because the corvette’s pilot had timed it for this purpose, they were able to see the thin pole-to-pole line of the steady sweep, as if a single line of longitude were visibly making its way around the world.

It was a reminder of what they were really looking at: a world that had once been alive and filled with people, living a pretty good life there in relative peace and contentment, but no more. Now it was a conquered world, an occupied world. And there was the enemy.

“Powering down,” said the computer pilot. The screen went blank, and for some reason that action, coming immediately after that vision of the grids and sweeps below, felt more threatening, more scary, than just seeing it.

It was probably no more than a half hour, possibly a bit longer, but it seemed like an eternity before the screen came to life again. Curiously, during that time there had been almost no conversation, as if all of them, collectively, had been holding their breaths.

Now the screen came to life again. “Power is stabilized,” the pilot reported. “Achilles now in sight. We will be using it as partial cover until we can move easily to Hector.”

Achilles looked like a proper moon, about thirty percent the size of the planet below and essentially round. It was heavily cratered, but frozen liquid covered much of its surface, giving the appearance of vast flat spots with jagged fractures.

After a few more minutes, during which they pretty much paced Achilles and kept it between them and the planet below, they saw Hector coming toward them. None of them were impressed.

“Shaped like a thigh bone,” Katarina Socolov commented. “What a silly, twisted little thing!”

“Not much gravity on it, either,” Admiral Krill warned her. “And the uneven rotation can be rather dizzying from the model I’ve run. Still, it’s where we have to go.”

“Why didn’t they put it on Achilles?” Colonel N’Gana asked aloud. “Stable platform, plenty of water. What kind of weapon could you even aim from that thing?”

“It seems we are coming in to land,” Krill responded. “I think we may soon find out—if there’s anything there at all.”