====================== Assemblers of Infinity by Kevin J. Anderson ====================== Copyright (c)1993 by Kevin J. Anderson Fictionwise www.Fictionwise.com Science Fiction --------------------------------- NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. --------------------------------- *PART I* *GRISSOM MEMORIAL PROPOSED* A space activist group, "The Future Today," has presented the Newsnet Access Service with seven different concepts for a memorial to be erected in honor of the Grissom station, which was destroyed on 17 October 2007. All seven of the designs in some way incorporate either the names or the likenesses of the two astronauts killed in the disaster that shocked the nation. Ramona Gonzales, spokesperson for The Future Today, claims that her organization has already selected several candidate sites for the proposed memorial, including the Challenger Foundation; the Johnson Space Museum in Houston, TX; the International Space Museum in Alamogordo, NM; or the Tourist Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. "This tragedy affected our public mind-set more deeply than anything since the Challenger explosion," Gonzales said. "It hasn't been hard for us to obtain donations. People want to erect such a memorial. It means a lot to them." United Space Agency Director Celeste McConnell, whose husband was killed in the accident, appeared lukewarm about the idea, however. McConnell said, "What we should get out of this disaster is a lesson, not a statue." -- _FINAL FRONTIER_, on-line access date April 2014. * * * * *SIMULATED MARS MISSION MARKS 300-DAY ANNIVERSARY* The "practice" mission for a manned voyage to Mars passed the halfway point of its Antarctic isolation yesterday. Crewmembers opened special packages of treats and celebrated by sending a general message to the people of Earth. Bingham Grace, commander of the practice mission, gave his assurances that everything was going according to schedule, though he admitted that "my people are starting to get a little anxious for the real thing." After orbiting Earth for three months to simulate a trip to the red planet, the crewmembers landed at an isolated base camp in Antarctica, where they are required to survive using only the equipment available to them on Mars. In another 300 days, after successful completion of their Antarctic simulation, the crew will blast off again for another three months in Earth orbit, to simulate the return trip to Earth. The crew will use the Mars Simulation facility on the Moon in two years, to refine training in the much harsher lunar environment. The thirty day lunar stay is intended to be the final training mission before the expedition to Mars. Though the tedious-sounding practice schedule has received attacks from critics who claim it takes too long and costs too much, United Space Agency officials insist that "it is the safest and most cost-effective way to ensure a successful mission to Mars." A high-ranking official said, "It's like practicing in a swimming pool before diving to the bottom of the ocean." -- freelance space agency newsrelease, picked up by AP, UPI, and CNN Associated Newsnets -------- *CHAPTER 1* *moonbase columbus* The helium-3 processing plant looked like a lunar rover thrown together by a committee of abstract artists. Standing two hundred meters away, Jason Dvorak recognized the large wheels and the heavily shielded nuclear power unit. Triangular heat radiators the size of old ship sails jutted up and out at an angle, giving the impression of a stegosaurus lumbering across the crater floor. The front of the He-3 processor opened up in a cylinder of diamond-tipped teeth used for scooping and grinding the top layer of moon dirt, or regolith; at the opposite end, a jumble of hot debris was deposited like excrement. As the leviathan crawled along the surface, swallowing regolith, Jason felt pressure on his spacesuited arm. He turned and, in a habit he could not seem to shake, looked at the reflectorized spacesuit visor of his companion before glancing down to the namepatch. _Never look at the face to recognize someone outside,_ he kept telling himself. After a year, you'd think he'd be used to it. Cyndi Salito's contralto voice came over his speaker. "You haven't moved for minutes, Jase." "Can't help it." Jason turned back to the mobile processor. "I can't believe it's finally working. You beat your deadline by a week. This'll really look good for us. Especially for me -- two weeks in command and already I have a major milestone to show off." _And it's a miracle the base hasn't fallen apart_, he added to himself. He still couldn't figure out why the space agency director, Celeste McConnell, had named him -- an architect, of all people -- commander. He was still getting used to the title. "If it's working," corrected Cyndi. "The ten metric tons of dirt it's processing should yield a hundred milligrams of He-3. If the wizards back dirtside keep their part of the bargain, we could have a working fusion plant by early next year. We're due to receive another proton transmission from the Nevada Test Site next month." "I'll turn this place into a resort yet." Jason laughed. "That's why you're up here, Jase," Salito said. Jason hated to be called by the nickname, but he never bothered to correct people. She nudged him back to their rover. "Come on, demonstration's over. If I was ten years younger, I'd take you out to dinner." "You're just trying to make points with the boss," he said. Salito made a sound like static on the suit radio. "Won't need to after next month." "Columbus won't be the same without you all," he said. "I'm going to miss the crew." "You'll have sixty other people to keep you company." Jason stepped over a rock as he climbed onto the rover's passenger seat, trying not to grip anything. Even at 4.5 psi suit pressure, the gloves still bit into his flesh. It was a common complaint. _Fifty years of spaceflight and you'd think they could solve a simple problem of constant-volume suits_, he thought. For months he'd put up with rubbing his hands raw each time he pulled off his gloves. Salito started the rover and turned for Moonbase Columbus. "Aren't you looking forward to getting back to your wife? Seeing your twins?" "Of course," he said. That's what Salito expected him to say. But Jason's wife Margaret had filed for separation a month ago, before he had even been gone a year. Some devotion! Talk about twisting in a knife 240,000 miles away. And his children Lacy and Lawrence hadn't seen him except on video transmissions since they were a year old. He was not looking forward to returning home. Being so far away put a little distance on the pain. He tried to sound upbeat, for Salito's sake. "Hey, someone's got to put in that second level of habitation modules and make this base liveable, not a crummy boot camp. Can't trust a bunch of physicists and astronomers to get their hands dirty, digging tunnels and piling regolith. I watched how much trouble Bernard Chu had getting you all to put together the Sim-Mars base!" Salito grunted over the radio; Jason had the frightening feeling that she saw right through his small talk. Four groups made up the sixty person base, and everyone worked and socialized within their own group. Every six months a group rotated off the Moon, and a new one came on. After a six-month apprenticeship under Bernard Chu, who had transferred up to the Collins station at L-1, Jason had suddenly found himself the new commander of Moonbase Columbus. The change in assignment had surprised him as much as it had Chu.... As the rover continued, Mare Smythi unfolded to reveal Columbus Base. The Earth hung low over the crater wall, like a big blue drop teaming with life. The tip of the base's 16-meter telescope was barely visible behind the embankments of the buried living modules. From this vantage point, Jason couldn't see the optical interferometer, the gamma-ray telescope, and other astronomical equipment. One of his first troubles as commander had been to placate the Earthbound astronomical community by assuring them that the seismic vibrations from the wandering He-3 processing plants would not disturb any of the sensitive astronomical devices. No one using a Disneyland telepresence link would be driving these monstrosities; the amusement parks used only little robotic rovers in a compound hundreds of kilometers away. Jason had done that himself once, before he told anybody his dream to come up here. He remembered sitting behind the controls after waiting five hours in line at Disneyland, marveling at how he could be driving a real lunar rover almost a quarter million miles away, just for the fun of it. He smiled as Cyndi Salito continued to drive to the moonbase. As if a switch had been thrown, radio chatter filled Jason's helmet as they came into line-of-sight. " -- not sure what happened. We lost contact with the hopper just before Waite's signal ended." "Get a hold of Dvorak yet?" "Still trying! L-1 can't raise him -- " Salito turned toward him, but Jason was already using his chinmike to break into the discussions. "Columbus, this is Dvorak. Big Daddy, what's going on?" "Jason, am I glad to hear you! We were just going to send someone out to find you -- " Jason cut Lon Newellen off. "Okay, I'm back. What's going on?" He barely noticed Salito increasing the rover's speed. "Trevor Waite's hopper -- we haven't been able to raise it." "Did the communication link fail?" "No, that's not it. They ... they were broadcasting from the VLF. Waite had gone with Becky Snow down into Daedalus crater and Lasserman was relaying the information from the hopper -- " Newellen fell into an uncomfortable silence. Jason was about to press him, when Newellen spoke again. "There's something more. You'd better get in here and see the visuals yourself." * * * * Jason stood just outside the holotank in the control center. Two meters in diameter, the transparent cylinder took up the center of the hemispherical room. He placed a hand on the shimmering image and let out his breath. "Whoa. What in the hell is that?" Translucent spindly arms grew up from an impossibly deep hole next to the crater wall. A faint shimmer could be seen between the arms; two of them met in an arch half a kilometer up from the hole. The rest of the object seemed to be under construction. The enormity of the scale made Jason take a step back when he caught a glimpse of the hopper landing zone, outside the crater. The hopper itself was destroyed. Trevor Waite, Becky Snow, and Siegfried Lasserman were dead. The first deaths on the Moon in years. And they were his responsibility. But the mystery of the artifact kept grabbing his attention. The thing was huge -- and no one had even suspected its presence. "Flash up the most recent orbiter picture of that site." A cube dilated in the holotank, rotated. It showed the identical scene -- without the hole and ghostly infrastructure. "When was this picture made?" "That's from LO-3. That orbiter went down two years ago. Those pictures were taken just after the VLF went operational." Jason stepped close and squinted at the images Waite had transmitted, but the tank's resolution got no better. "I can't make out any vehicle marks, except for Waite's rover." "There weren't any." Newellen pulled up his powder-blue jumpsuit and moved with ballet-like grace in the low gravity toward the holotank. The heavyset man seemed out of place in the lunar environment; but Newellen's beefy frame was held up by some of the largest bones Jason had ever seen. People didn't appreciate the nickname of "Big Daddy" until they met the man up close. Newellen jabbed a chubby finger into the shimmering 3-D image. "Way over here you can see plenty of places with rover tracks -- here, here, and even here. These are all from when the VLF array was built years ago. You can even tell where some of the folks went off joy riding. But except for this isolated spot by the ... the thing," he outlined the volume with a chubby finger, "the regolith is undisturbed. See." He punched at the holotank and the entire view collapsed to the spot he had outlined some seconds before. Cyndi Salito pushed closer to the image, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jason and Newellen. "How come we didn't detect any of this before? What could have built that thing in the past two years without leaving any footprints? Has the regolith around the hole been swept back to cover tracks?" "No way." Newellen magnified the image even more, and the ground took on a jumbled appearance. "We already ran a Mandelbrodt simulation -- we got the same distribution as what you're seeing here. The ground is essentially undisturbed." No one spoke as he pulled the view back to encompass the entire structure. Jason kept staring at the image. "So what you're saying is that something the size of a football stadium just appeared out there, without any sign of construction, no by-products? That doesn't explain a damned thing!" Newellen just shrugged. "Abracadabra." "And Hopper-1 -- no idea of what happened? Or that last transmission from Trevor Waite?" Jason scowled and ran a hand through his dark curly hair. "Come on, dammit! Skyscrapers don't just start growing on the lunar surface!" When nobody spoke for several moments, Newellen reran Lasserman's video transmission, relayed from Waite's stereochip. He stopped at the closeups of the gossamer structure rising up from the pit. Cyndi Salito finally broke the silence. "I'm not going to be the first to say the "A" word." Newellen rolled his eyes. "Right. Alien construction corps invades Moon. That'll rank right up with that statue of Elvis we're supposed to find on Mars." Jason looked around to the other people in the control center and narrowed his eyes. "I'm not going to be a laughingstock. But three people are dead, and we'll damn well find out why. Put me through to Director McConnell on Earth." -------- *CHAPTER 2* UNITED SPACE AGENCY: WASHINGTON, D.C. The general was in his element. Celeste McConnell could tell by his animated gestures, the emotion on his face as he strode in front of the sprawling holographic tank. He focused Celeste's attention on images of the asteroid as it tumbled toward Earth, an unstoppable island of rock nearly a mile across. "Icarus is on an intercept course," said Major General Simon Pritchard. "It hasn't come this close to Earth orbit since 1968. These views are from the wide-field-of-view cameras on the orbiting Leansats." The window showed a potato-shaped Icarus rotating as it approached. It grew larger as the frames changed. A picture of Earth filled another window as the general moved his fingers over the computer's controls. A moving bull's-eye scanned the Earth as the asteroid approached. Right then, the point of impact crossed Brazil. "If we use the SpaceGuard orbiting defense system -- " Just at the edge of the screen, Celeste could see a missile, streamlined and coasting outward, with the insignia of the United Space Agency perhaps too bright and prominent on its nuclear tip. The proposed SpaceGuard missiles were intended to be directed against space-borne threats. Celeste smoothed her business suit. She still found it uncomfortable, even after all these years. But Washington, D.C. demanded a strict dress code. People wore ties and three-piece suits while relaxing in front of a fire. She had never gotten used to it. She preferred the comfortable zero-g jumpsuits she had worn as an astronaut, seven years ago now, while on the Grissom.... Pritchard didn't look up as he reviewed the simulation. Two stars were prominent on each of his shoulders. She wondered what he would have been like as a college professor, like most of the other PhDs she knew. Celeste suspected he had groomed himself specifically for her visit. He had set up the meeting weeks in advance. Pritchard remained focused in total concentration. On the primary screen, Celeste watched a crater the size of a shopping mall appear over the asteroid's terminator as Icarus tumbled on its axis. The SpaceGuard missiles streaked toward the craggy rock. The situation here seemed surrealistic to her, a two-star general and the director of the United Space Agency alone in this control room. Pritchard had chased the techs and his aide away. He wanted to run the simulation himself; he had spent enough time training on the system. "Missiles are in-coming." Pritchard nodded at the image of Icarus. She could see the rock moving, changing, tugged by the steep gravity well of Earth. The nose of one of the SpaceGuard missiles tilted, and a targeting cross appeared on the surface of the asteroid. On the third viewing window, Earth rotated, placidly unaware of the approaching threat. "Course correction." Propulsion systems kicked in with a blast of silver-white vapor. Pritchard's eyes were wide, enraptured by the events. Celeste tore her attention away from the screens to look at him, maintaining a professional expression on her own face. His medium-brown hair was tousled, a thin film of sweat holding it to his forehead. Wiry and sharp, Simon Pritchard did not look like a "Blood n' Guts" general. "Ready, ready ... impact." Brilliant orange and yellow flared up on the screen showing Icarus as the missiles detonated. "Now, we've got two scenarios. Either the yield will be small enough to deflect the asteroid's orbit -- " On another screen an orbital diagram appeared, showing the old orbit in red, intersecting Earth's position with an ominous X; then a new path in blue projected a more elongated ellipse that carried Icarus safely out of the bounds of Earth. " -- or it will be larger than the asteroid's tensile strength and fragment the asteroid into smaller pieces. And _that's_ the problem. A lot of tiny chunks could hurt us more than the whole asteroid. So the trick is to have the missiles diagnose the asteroid while in flight, then change their yield so that the asteroid is only deflected." Celeste put her hands on her hips. She stood several inches shorter than the major general. "If you can convince anyone to be worried about the threat in the first place." "The probability of an impact is actually quite high," Pritchard said. "Right now, a kiloton of rock hits the atmosphere each year -- and that's just a lot of small stuff. Icarus is on its way, after all. Watch." The screen refreshed, showing an unaltered view of Icarus, still hurtling toward Earth. Celeste watched as the computer-generated views showed the asteroid tumbling end over end. It flared into brilliance like the Sun as it plowed into Earth's atmosphere, boiling steam from the air so that she couldn't see even the vaguest outlines of continents. It vanished into blood-red and orange as the model tried to show the impact. "A couple of gigatons," said Pritchard. "Just like what hit the dinosaurs. We'd all be extinct, wiped out from the shock, from the earthquakes and tidal waves, or at the very least smothered over the long term by massive climatic disruption." His gaze seemed to bore into her. Celeste felt uncomfortable, but she paid attention. Something about Pritchard's technique might be useful when she needed to convince members of Congress to support a pet project of her own. Celeste folded her hands. She appreciated seeing this in a simulation room instead of enduring some boring lecture that had to be tailored to wide audiences and endless interruptions by aides and pagers. With a jerk of her narrow chin, Celeste indicated the holography. All of the pictures had gone blank except for one, showing the globe smothered in gray clouds beneath which orange glows could be seen. "Is this a useful simulation, General?" He raised his eyebrows, thought for a moment, then chose his answer. "Icarus swings close to us every nineteen years. The error bars of its 2025 orbit are almost overlapping our path. An impact _will_ happen -- if not Icarus, then another one. We've squeaked by over and over again. I guess it just depends on how lucky six billion people feel. Are we prepared if it does happen? Most emphatically no." Then Pritchard used a tactic she did not resent, though most other people would have been too frightened to bring it up. He said softly, "You of all people, Director McConnell, should not be comforted by the supposedly insignificant odds." Celeste fixed him with a cold stare. She caught the slightest quaver in one eyelid. If she pushed, he would probably back down and apologize. But Celeste didn't want to do that. The Grissom station had been wiped out by one such unexpected impact, by "space debris." Two people had died, one of them her husband Clark. Celeste herself and five others had been saved only through her quick thinking and what everyone else had called plain dumb luck. The incident had ruined her life, made her an international heroine, and, after rising up through the bureaucracy, had eventually led to her appointment as Director of the United Space Agency. Few people were willing to mention that part of her past; Pritchard, though, pulled no punches. "I admire what you're doing, General. I really do. And in me, you have a sympathetic ear. I especially appreciate your candor. I have to put up with enough bull in twelve committee meetings a week. "But now I must be honest with you. Regardless of the Icarus threat, whether perceived or real, your SpaceGuard defense system is not something I can sell to Congress. Nobody wants to hear about space-deployed missiles. Nobody wants to even think about them -- even if we need it." The general set his mouth. "I didn't calculate the probabilities that we'd be hit, Ms. McConnell. It was _your_ people that approached us for a solution." Celeste reached across the table, palms up. "I realize that. But in the current political climate, even if the Icarus impact were an undisputed fact, it still wouldn't do any good. Nobody wants to hear about a threat from space. No matter how bad it is." She beamed a smile at him. "Forget about Icarus, General. According to mythology, Icarus was a fool who lost his wings and crashed into the sea. Daedalus, though, was the interesting one who created dazzling new technologies. Come with me -- let me show you exactly how interesting Daedalus has become." * * * * Celeste took Pritchard past the two stone-faced guards into the Agency's Mission Control. The two guards, a young Japanese man and woman, scrutinized Celeste's badge, though they had seen her a thousand times before. But recent terrorist threats by an EARTH FIRST! group had forced increased security. Before either guard could object about the general's presence, Celeste raised her hand. "It's all right. I'll vouch for him." Pritchard started looking around before the reflectorized booth door closed behind him. Celeste saw his eyes widen. The local Mission Control was drastically reduced compared with the old Mission Control centers from the days of the Shuttle missions. Because of advances in neural networks, distributed processing, and sheer computing power, the United Space Agency did not need a room the size of a giant auditorium staffed by a small army of personnel to run the various missions -- a handful of people in a large meeting room sufficed. While Pritchard gawked, Albert Fukumitsu, the duty manager, waved her over. "Director McConnell, we've been trying to track you down!" He wiped sweat off his forehead. He had shaggy black hair tucked behind a headband. "Jason Dvorak keeps calling from Moonbase Columbus." "I had my pager shut off," Celeste said. She had enjoyed her few moments of peace enough to make the headaches of being out of touch worthwhile. "Jason needs to stop panicking and handle a little more himself." Fukumitsu looked at her with a wry, skeptical expression. "This is a somewhat unusual circumstance." "Agreed. Did he launch the telepresence probe on schedule?" "Yes, an hour ago." He waved his hand toward the screens on the wall. One of the technicians, eavesdropping, called up a file that showed the sequence of the hopper rising up in a puff of methane. "ETA at the Daedalus site in about ten minutes." "Long enough to get Jason on-line." Celeste pulled up one of the chairs vacated by an off-duty tech and sat down beside Fukumitsu. "He's probably fidgeting like a new father in the hospital waiting room." She still smiled at how unlikely being in charge must seem to Dvorak, and she certainly couldn't explain to him the reasons behind her unexpected decision to place him in command. Dvorak was an award-winning, innovative architect; he had grown bored with the mundane work on Earth after having designed the impossible a dozen times over. Then he had used his connections to get himself an audience with the director of the United Space Agency. When he sat down across the desk from her, Celeste had had no idea at all why he wanted to see her. But when he began to spill his idea about revamping the entire moonbase, getting it ready for the explosion of inhabitants that would arrive as soon as the Mars mission was a success, Dvorak had won her over. "They are our pioneers," he had said. "Right now they're living in flimsy tents. Let me give them log cabins at least." She had approved his training and his assignment, and after nearly a year on the moonbase, scoping possibilities, reconfiguring some of the living quarters, Jason Dvorak had already made his mark on daily life up there. Without giving him any preparation time, she had rotated the former moonbase commander, Bernard Chu, up to the Collins waystation at L-2, while sending Collins's former commander, Eileen Dannon, back Earthside, where her frequent disagreements with Celeste could be covered up much easier. At first, Dvorak had reveled in his dream-come-true assignment, but at times like this he was proving to be too much of a nice guy to make tough decisions under stress. Maybe Bernard Chu would be better off back down on the Moon, at least for the interim ... ever since the Grissom disaster eleven years before, he had supported her in everything she asked. But no, Jason Dvorak had only been in full command for two weeks now. He deserved more of a chance. "Let me see Waite's pictures," she said. Fukumitsu nodded to one of the techs, who worked on pulling up the images. General Pritchard came up beside her, relaxed in his Air Force uniform. "Daedalus -- that's where some of your astronomy equipment is stationed on the lunar Farside." "That's right." The image of the crater as seen from Trevor Waite's viewpoint appeared. "Zoom in," Fukumitsu said. The images of the Daedalus anomaly resolved themselves on a large window that blossomed in the center of the wall. Unlike the general's computer-generated graphics, though, these images were real. She felt her skin crawl with an eerie foretaste of what would be in store for the world as soon as they understood what was really happening on the Moon. She had had nightmares about this. "We're still analyzing the situation," Celeste said to Pritchard, "but I hope we know something new in a few minutes." On the screens, they saw close-ups of Daedalus, its flat crater floor dominated by pieces of the VLF array and the smooth-walled pit covered with a translucent framework of the main structure. The white lines looked like an architectural sketch, a 3-D blueprint that had somehow appeared but had left no debris, no seismic signatures, no obvious clues as to its origin. The general seemed to comprehend that this was something far more bizarre than he had expected. "What is this? Where did it come from?" At that moment, the main portion of the videowall was supplanted by a too-close image of Jason Dvorak. His brown eyes were bright with fatigue, his dark curly hair mussed, but his lips had a persistent upturn that always made him look about to break into a grin. He stepped back into better focus. "Director McConnell, I was beginning to wonder if you'd be here to witness the probe." Celeste smoothed her trim business suit and stood into prime focus. She was petite, but carried a powerful presence. Her eyes were dark enough to look like black lacquer. Newsnet profiles insisted on calling her the Ice Lady. She spoke softly, letting her voice carry a chiding tone, but not enough to jeopardize her working relationship with Dvorak. "Jason, I agreed to be here, but I didn't promise to be early." After a half-beat of silence, she continued. "This is Major General Simon Pritchard. He's here to add his thoughts. Perhaps together we can figure this thing out." Pritchard nodded with surprise, but he recovered quickly. Holding a conversation from the Earth to the Moon with its resultant transmission lag was a bit like a drunkard's walk, two steps forward, then a pause to catch bearings, and then another two steps forward again. Dvorak looked off screen. He nodded, then said, "Switching to the cameras on the hopper." The view expanded to take in a group of people clustered around him. A large man next to Dvorak called up a holographic control panel that hung in the air in front of his hands. Other technicians in his cramped control center called out numbers and sent readings down to Earth. The window showing Dvorak's image receded to the upper left corner, while new windows opened to display telemetry, a CAD animation showing the attitude of the hopper, and a rotating globe of the Moon displaying trajectories with a targeting cross over Daedalus crater on the nightside. The largest window on the viewing wall opened up, showing Daedalus as it grew larger each second. Already they could make out the mysterious gossamer structure of the anomaly. As the hopper flew over, Dvorak refrained from commenting, which Celeste appreciated. Nobody knew what was going on here anyway. Pritchard drew in a breath as the hopper's medium-resolution camera showed the arcs rising from the dust, the framework of a huge bowl, impossible lacy girders that seemed to have no support whatsoever. It looked as if some gigantic being had played cat's cradle in the middle of a crater. "Okay, getting some readings now," Dvorak said. "X-ray backscatter shows the materials are extremely hard and light, not very dense. Like an aerogel, except made out of diamond fibers. Maybe it's like the diamond foam they're trying to fabricate in the orbiting labs." Celeste nodded. Dvorak's voice took on a trace of alarm. "I'm detecting no sign of my crew. Nothing. There should be a rover and a hopper. Not to mention three bodies, three suits. Where the hell are they?" "What is he talking about?" Pritchard asked. Speaking in a rushed whisper out of the corner of her mouth, Celeste filled him in on the details about Waite, Lasserman, and Snow. "But how did it get there?" Pritchard said without taking his eyes from the display. "Look at that pit -- to excavate that would have required a few megatons of energy!" Celeste had forgotten about Pritchard's background as a scientist. "I know. But we detected nothing. I can show you all the traces. The Moon is a million times less active than Earth, and we should have at least seen something. But no seismic activity near Daedalus." The hopper flew over the wide pit. _Was this some surreptitious lunar mining operation? Ore pirates?_ The thought was so ridiculous Celeste was glad she had not said anything aloud. Even under the dim nightside illumination, the depths of the pit looked as black as tar. If anybody was still working down there, they used no lights. "Could they -- " the general paused, emphasizing the word they as if afraid to suggest what he might be thinking; Celeste had already begun arguing with herself about the same thing. " -- I mean, could your seismic network have been scrambled somehow? The traces erased?" "Either that," she said, "or they found some way to excavate that pit and erect those frameworks without causing a a jitter." "Impossible, isn't it?" "General, the entire thing is impossible!" Dvorak interrupted. The CAD viewing window showed the hopper flying away from the pit. They had opted to use all of the vehicle's fuel to survey the site completely and to forego a return flight. "Maneuvering fuel is getting low. That's about all the overhead reconnaissance we can manage if we want to guarantee a safe landing." "Set the hopper down," Celeste said. "Go to one of those tower structures," Pritchard suggested. As the hopper settled down on a flat tract of regolith, Celeste could see the sharp-edged tread marks of one of the lunar construction rovers that had erected the VLF array three years before. The base of a ghostly tower rose seamlessly out of the soil, cutting in half the footprint some worker had left behind. Dust from the hopper's landing clouded the black sky. Spotlights shone up into the weblike arches. In the upper-left corner of the viewing wall, Lon Newellen played with the telepresence panel. The probe deployed its instruments. "I'm getting no motion anywhere. Not a tremor, not a heartbeat, just a few jitters left over from landing. This place is as still as a fossil." Somehow the image reminded Celeste of the great Egyptian pyramids, or the sphinx, or some long-abandoned temple erected at the dawn of time. But this was not old. She kept reminding herself of that. Data from electromagnetic sounders, mapping spectrometers, chemistry, mineralogy, topography and gravitational sensors scrolled down their own windows at the bottom of the viewing wall, but Dvorak interpreted them. "Not seeing any radiation, no detectable energy surges, but the area temperature is about seven degrees hotter than we can account for. I keep getting ultra-transient blips on the gamma-ray detectors. Too brief to contain any information. I would try to explain them away as glitches, but they're confined to a very discrete energy range. That doesn't make sense." The image on the screen jerked with a blast of static, then refocused. The static returned, worse this time, and the picture did not wholly recover. The image skewed, with video distortion and graininess. Then the camera swung sideways, as if someone had bumped the entire probe. "I'm not doing that!" Newellen said, holding his hands up as if to display his innocence. Several of the probe instruments blared error messages. Two went blank. "Turn the camera to look at the ground," Celeste said. Newellen's own answer overlapped hers in the transmission lag. "Something's screwing with the electronics. Failures are showing up everywhere." The image jerked, as if some piece had just snapped off the supports. But Newellen managed to swivel the camera around, zooming in on the spiderlike leg of the probe. The gleaming gold surface showed grainy pitting. As she watched, Celeste saw it fizzing like foam. "The whole thing is disintegrating!" Dvorak said. The hopper canted, then toppled over on its side. The image swung wildly to display the silent, gossamer towers stretching toward the stars. Then all the windows on the viewing wall filled with a thunderstorm of static before Fukumitsu closed them, bringing Dvorak's image back into the primary position. "I don't know what else we can do," Dvorak said. "No radiation bursts, no energy surges. I didn't detect anything that could have caused this!" "All right," Celeste tried to sound soothing to cover his alarm. "I want you to try again. If it's radiating in the infrared, I want an IR flyover. Put a new sensor package into those javelin probes you've been deploying to take remote core samples for the geologists. Next time, arrange for a sample-return mission." "We need a closer look," the general said. "I'm not going to send a person out there. I've already lost three people, and now this probe," said Jason. She paused to ponder her options. "No, we can do it remotely. Something in the area itself seems to be disintegrating our machines. We've got to grab a chunk of that regolith, then return. But I don't want to risk contaminating Columbus if it's something in the dirt. You can set up an isolated laboratory in the Sim-Mars module -- that should be far enough away from the moonbase to keep you safe." Dvorak spoke again, sounding formal now, "I don't think I have the facilities here to do much, Director McConnell. We aren't a full-fledged research station, you know." She sighed. "I'm going to gather a team of experts to help you out. We'll even send them up if need be, but we need to know more before I can choose." Dvorak nodded, still looking overwhelmed, but a bit more relieved. "All right, but I think it's time we go public with this. Waite, Lasserman, and Snow deserve that at least." "I agree. I have no intention of keeping this a secret," Celeste said. "No intention at all." After Dvorak had signed off, General Pritchard remained grim faced. Celeste placed a hand on his shoulder, which startled him. His uniform felt crisp and uncomfortable beneath her palm. "Well, General, how is that for an outside threat? I don't think you need to continue your Icarus scenarios. Do you think we can stir up a little interest now?" -------- *CHAPTER 3*