Ishtar Rising BOOK 2 Page 2

  Let’s just hope the water inside that tank wasn’t the only thing keeping it from being flattened by the atmospheric pressure out there, she thought.

  The group made its way through the hatch and into a room that reminded P8 of the engineering section from some low-tech, pre-Federation Earth starship. From the ceiling, a series of pipes dripped water—the remnants of the contents of the rooftop tank.

  P8 shouldered the phaser rifle and trained it on the area around the pipes. The phaser beam cut through the structure, and a neatly circular section of roof about a meter and a half in diameter fell to the deck with a clatter and a splash.

  “Get everybody up there,” P8 yelled. “Into the tank!”

  One of the men protested, shouting from within his EV suit. “I still say this is crazy!”

  P8 nodded. “Maybe. But it’s your best chance to stay alive.”

  Using a set of wall-rungs and pipes, the first pair of workers reached the hole and climbed up. P8 could hear a hollow gong sound as they clambered within. Using the flashlight mounted on her middle right arm, P8 shined a light up into the hole. The first two men’s arms emerged from the aperture, and they began pulling up the others.

  P8 slung the phaser rifle over her back and grabbed the unconscious scientist, then started to carry him up the walls, bringing up the rear of the party. Balancing carefully, P8 handed the man up to the others, then clung to the lip of the hole for a moment.

  A fast search of her toolbox yielded a small magnetic grapnel, which she aimed down at the section of metal she had just cut away. She aimed, fired, and the flukes made contact. Pulling on the grapnel with four of her limbs, she quickly took possession of the metal disk.

  Using the phaser to weld the disk back into place took barely another two minutes.

  The building shook, as though the molten rock outside had grown tired of being ignored. The already sloping floor suddenly listed even more sharply. Tortured metal creaked and groaned, and P8 could hear a hard wind keening outside. The roof is going.

  P8’s combadge crackled. The voice belonged to Commander Gomez. “—ting rough out there, Pattie. How’s it comi—”

  Keying her combadge, P8 said, “We’re out of time, sir. Please hit the switch.” And hope my welds hold.

  “—ou got it, Pat—” came Gomez’s scratchy reply.

  The tank suddenly rang as if something massive had struck it, and then a hum engulfed it, vibrating the polyalloy walls as the Kwolek’s tractor beam—usually used for construction projects—separated the tank from its rooftop moorings.

  But there was no inrush of hot carbon dioxide gas. The air was stale but remained breathable. The tank’s seams—including the ones P8 had just created—were holding, at least for the moment. She hoped they wouldn’t fail until after the Kwolek had lofted the tank to an altitude where the temperature and pressure would allow Ground Station Aphrodite’s staff to rely on their environmental suits for survival.

  The tank was buffeted from side to side by the increasingly powerful winds. Despite that, P8 Blue felt certain that her plan was going to work. As long as Corsi doesn’t smack into the force fields at the wrong angle on her way back out of here.

  “I’ll be damned,” Stevens said with a big grin, looking up from his instruments. “We just caught ourselves eight humans and a pillbug.”

  Gomez grinned back. “Tractor beam status?”

  “Holding steady,” Tev said.

  “Headed for orbit,” Corsi said, anticipating Gomez’s next order. “Course laid in for Ishtar Station. Quarter impulse.”

  As they rose through the air, Gomez adjusted one of the console viewers to get an aft view. Below the Kwolek, Ground Station Aphrodite was crumbling and melting into nothingness, shaken apart by groundquakes and consumed by the molten mantle of Venus.

  Corsi piloted the shuttle swiftly upward, passing the swirling ochre cloud bands, moving slowly but deftly through the force-field network, and finally grazing the edge of space, where Ishtar Station’s crew managed to beam the people being ferried in the tank to safety.

  Gomez keyed the companel and spoke. “Gomez to Captain Gold. We’ve just completed a rather…unorthodox rescue. All crew members of Aphrodite Station are out of danger.”

  “Good work, Gomez. Now we just have to save the rest of the planet.”

  Gold’s words struck her hard. As Tev beamed P8 Blue back aboard the Kwolek, Gomez’s earlier jubilation had abruptly died. After all, not even both the da Vinci’s shuttles could pull off Pattie’s little trick at all the other ground stations, even if the Nasat engineer could be in two places at once. The planetary force-field network still remained dangerously stalled, geological upheavals threatened to engulf still more of the planet’s crust in very short order, and the transporters remained unable to haul the people stranded elsewhere on the surface out of harm’s way.

  Gomez knew that solving those problems had to take priority now that the Aphrodite team was out of immediate danger. Otherwise, she thought, what about the dozen other staffed stations down there? And what happens to Soloman?

  She watched in silence as one of her instruments displayed a schematic of the intricately fluctuating nodes and energy lines that made up Project Ishtar’s force-field network. Problem Number One, she decided, scowling at the image.

  “You still there, Gomez?” said Gold over the still-open channel, his voice free of static now that the shuttle had made low orbit. Gomez realized with a start that she’d been woolgathering.

  “Captain,” she said, suddenly galvanized by a new idea. “I think we may have to try something really risky next….”

  Chapter

  3

  The columns of numbers that speed-scrolled across Soloman’s screen were suddenly anything but understandable, logical, or predictable. The mathematical constraints of the force-field network were quickly taking on characteristics that reminded him of one of the chaotic drad cacophonies to which Carol Abramowitz was so fond of listening. It took all the speed his hands could muster to continue feeding revised force-field parameters into the system in time to prevent a chain reaction of node failures that would have brought half the planet’s dense atmosphere crashing down onto their heads with nearly meteoric force.

  And the numbers continued to change at an ever-accelerating rate.

  Soloman felt a hard, rolling shock radiating from somewhere beneath his chair. It wasn’t unlike the jolt one might feel aboard a starship during a phaser attack. Groundquake! he thought, nearly falling out of the torrent of numbers that roared past his eyes.

  A gabble of nearby voices engulfed him, those of the startled human team members mixing with the shriller-than-normal ultrarapid codespeech of the paired Bynars, who seemed to be struggling every bit as hard as Soloman was to make sense of the swiftly altering datastream.

  Then he heard someone shouting above the din. The voice belonged to Adrienne Paulos, second only to the project’s head, Dr. Pascal Saadya, who was frantically giving instructions to her technical staff. “Keep those equatorial force-field nodes stable! If the z-axis keeps drifting, we’ll have another Hesperus on our hands.”

  Or any number of Hesperi, as Fabian might say. Soloman thought this was an odd time for the tactical specialist’s wry sense of humor to start rubbing off on him.

  The ground station rumbled and groaned, but stopped shaking within a few moments, at least for the time being. But the vocalizations of the other two Bynars remained shrill—almost panicked, to Soloman’s sensitive ears—as the team continued concentrating on maintaining the wayward force fields.

  “Incoming message from upstairs, Adrienne,” someone said. The voice belonged to one of the human technicians, a male human who was working somewhere out of Soloman’s field of vision.

  The on-site team leader acknowledged by opening up a comm channel with an audible snap. “Ground Station Vesper here. Go ahead, Ishtar.”

  A furious blast of static preceded Dr. Saadya’s reply. “Adrienne, are yo
u and your team all right?”

  “We’re all in one piece. But we’ve picked up some pretty severe seismic activity down here.”

  “We’ve detected it, too. It’s centered around Alpha Regio, near Ground Station Aphrodite.”

  His mind still shooting a numeric rapids, Soloman spared a moment to make a quick calculation. Alpha Regio lay over two thousand kilometers to the southwest of Ground Station Vesper. Whatever subterranean forces had been roused there must be powerful indeed.

  “How close is Aphrodite to the epicenter?” Paulos wanted to know.

  “Near enough to interfere with our transporter locks there.” Saadya’s voice was getting progressively more obscured and distorted by static, presumably from air that was being rapidly ionized by large-scale volcanic eruptions. “We can’t raise them at the moment. We can only hope they weren’t leveled outright.”

  “Dear God,” said Paulos. “Don’t tell me we just happened to execute Project Ishtar on the same day the Big One finally decided to give the planet’s crust a complete pave-over.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Saadya said, an edge of barely contained panic in his voice. “Except that the da Vinci has sent a shuttle down to rescue the Aphrodite personnel before the station is inundated by the magma flow itself. In the meantime, you and your team have to do whatever it takes to keep the force-field network up and running.”

  Soloman knew that without the force-field network, Aphrodite’s fate would be sealed, along with that of the rest of the ground stations. There was no way Vesper or any of the other surface facilities could outlast Aphrodite for very long. Should the force-field nodes collapse while still holding millions of cubic kilometers of atmosphere in high-altitude suspension, the abrupt release of kinetic energy as the atmosphere resettled would scour away every structure on the planet’s surface within minutes. The protective shielding would be pulverized and everyone inside would be reduced to vapor without leaving so much as a bone or a tooth to be buried. Soloman shuddered at the thought.

  The numbers. Don’t lose your grip on the numbers.

  “Understood,” Paulos said, replying to Saadya with an unsteady voice. She, too, must have worked out the consequences of failure. “Let’s hope that shuttle can do some good. In the meantime, it’s all we can do just to hold the force field in place, without either expanding or contracting it.”

  The drift of the numbers racing past Soloman’s eyes quickly confirmed that any attempt to use the force-field network to continue moving the atmosphere outward would greatly increase the risk of causing a catastrophic collapse. And the team had never tried reversing the motion of the force fields to create a controlled settling of the atmosphere. Therefore the force fields had to be maintained right where they currently were, half-expanded, so near the fast-moving seventy-kilometer atmospheric layer that it took all of Soloman’s concentration just to continue following and reacting to the perpetually changing figures—figures that constituted an increasingly imprecise mathematical model of a complex system that was rapidly descending into chaos and entropy.

  Soloman spared a quick look toward the console where his paired, data-efficient brethren worked, their strident voices keening in near-desperation.

  Even they are beginning to fall behind. How can a crippled singleton hope to do any better?

  His head beginning to throb with the fruitless effort of following the figures, Soloman knew that he should not have allowed the bigotry of 1011 and 1110 to affect him to such a degree that he was thinking of himself with the slur “singleton.” He was also rapidly becoming convinced that if another single bit of data were to impinge on his consciousness, his head would surely explode.

  His combadge chose that precise moment to speak. “Gold to Soloman.”

  Please, not now. “Soloman here.”

  “We’re monitoring your situation closely.”

  For reasons that puzzled him, the captain’s remark struck Soloman as humorous. He made a mental note to ask Dr. Lense, or perhaps Fabian, about that later. Assuming, of course, that he would be alive later.

  “Thank you, sir,” was all he could think of to say in response.

  “I’ll give you the bad news first, Soloman,” Gold continued. “We can’t beam anybody back from any of the surface stations at the moment, and the orbital lab is in the same fix. The ‘holes’ in the force-field net that we beamed you through to get you down there are completely closed up now. And the volcanic activity at Alpha Regio is causing too much high-altitude ionization to risk using the transporter at long range anyway; the high-speed atmospheric layer is spreading it around like a yenta repeating gossip.”

  Soloman nodded. The seventy-kilometer superrotational layer could blanket the entire planet in volcanic fallout in just four days—and that was without the extra heat-induced acceleration factor already introduced by the force-field network itself. The entire atmosphere was becoming thoroughly ionized by now. “I understand,” Soloman said. “May I infer that you also have some good news to deliver, Captain?”

  Soloman thought he heard Gold chuckle, though he couldn’t be certain. “Gomez just evac’d Ground Station Aphrodite with the Kwolek.”

  Someone from Ishtar Station must have just relayed the same news to Paulos’s team, since a brief cheer went up among the busy human technicians.

  Gold continued: “Gomez thinks that the engineers might be able to reestablish transporter locks on the other ground stations, at least intermittently.”

  “That would certainly be welcome, sir.” There was no trace of irony behind Soloman’s words. “But how can that be done without allowing the force-field network to collapse entirely?” Clearly that wasn’t desirable so long as maintaining the force fields remained essential for keeping all of the ground personnel alive.

  “Nobody said this was going to be an easy job, Soloman.”

  “Captain, we have our hands full just keeping the force fields from collapsing and swamping everyone down here with an atmospheric deluge.”

  Throughout this exchange, Soloman continued trying to maintain his grasp on the numbers as they ebbed and flowed across his monitor. His hands fluttered quickly across the keypad, feeding revised instructions to the network, the human technicians, and the other Bynars.

  His head was pounding, as though it contained a small animal that was determined to escape. The Bynar pair’s tandem dataspeech had risen to an almost ear-splitting screech. The sound resonated across a gap in Soloman’s being, forcibly reminding him of the easy informational intimacy that had been forever ripped from him on the day 111 had died.

  If only 111 were here now. I’m certain the four of us, working as paired pairs, could maintain some measure of control over these variables.

  And he could feel that the datastream was eluding him. He was rapidly losing his hold on the numbers. He knew that soon he would input a parameter-change incorrectly, causing two or more of the wavering force-field nodes to fall into each other. A chain reaction would quickly ensue, probably faster than even the paired Bynars could react to it. Implosion would follow a fraction of a second later.

  And minutes after that he and everyone else who remained on this planet would be reduced to their constituent atoms.

  “Just hang in there for as long as you can, Soloman,” Captain Gold said. “Gomez is on her way with the cavalry. I’m sure you and her team will find a solution that everyone can live with. Gold out.”

  The comm channel closed, but the cramped control room was anything but silent. The shrill elegance of the datasong the other Bynars sang as they interfaced directly with the linked networks of atmospheric probes and force-field node controls filled Soloman’s soul with melancholy and longing. He wanted desperately to join in their ululations.

  Switching on his console’s voice interface, he opened his mouth, adding his voice to the piercing soprano chorus of the paired Bynars.

  A Klaxon wailed as a force-field node suddenly collapsed. The first collapse was followed
immediately by another. One of the human technicians yelped in terror. Soloman quieted, deactivating his voice interface. He resumed using his hands to input a series of lightning correction factors even as the Bynars altered their dataflow to counterbalance the ebb and flow of the field lines. Somehow, the three of them managed to transfer power in the correct amount, reconfiguring the remaining nodes to compensate for the rapidly accumulating errors. The network was holding steady.

  At least until I make my next mistake, he mused sourly. Without a direct interface like that of 1011 and 1110, an otherwise easily avoidable error seemed all but inevitable.

  It was intolerable. How can humans be content to dwell outside the flow of the numbers, merely looking in at them? How can they deal with streams of data without knowing the joy of swimming through them?

  His skull felt as though it were expanding, until it seemed to him as big as all of space. He began to wonder whether he would suffer a brain hemorrhage before his processing incompetence cost everyone on the planet their lives. Dr. Lense’s stern warning returned to haunt him: There’s a sound physiological reason why your people aren’t called Trynars, Soloman.

  A static-shredded voice spoke from his combadge. “Kwolek to Soloman.”

  “Here,” he replied curtly, wary of splitting his concentration even by a small amount. The numbers continued to elude him until all he could follow was their general shapes and outlines. Useless.

  He recognized the voice that responded as that of Fabian Stevens. “You don’t sound so hot, Soloman.”

  “We’re…having some technical problems down here.”

  Commander Gomez’s voice replaced that of Stevens. “You don’t say. How is the force-field network holding up?”