Phytosphere

remember who’s idea it was to depressurize the Council Chamber in the first place.”

“We don’t have any weapons on the Moon. What else was I supposed to do?”

“And the halothane was a nice touch,” Mitch piped in.

“And the way Kafis loosened his collar,” said Ira. “I haven’t had a good laugh like that in a long time.

You know what? I found it inspiring. To see a couple hundred Tarsalans all unconscious like that. It gave me… I don’t know… a secure feeling.”

“I feel sorry for them,” said Gerry. “They’re so far from home. They’re obviously terrified. And now we’ve locked them all away.”

“No one’s going to run interference on our damn mission,” said Ira.

A burst of dust came from Mitch’s area. “Anchor eight is secure,” he said. “Boy… that drill packs a punch, doesn’t it?”

“What’s the psi on your crampons?” asked Ira.

“Tenfold.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

At the end of the seventy-two-hour training session—and with the CAPS it really wasn’t a training session so much as going along for the ride—they were ferried up to the AviOrbit launch platform fifty miles above the Moon and installed in the Prometheus.

AviOrbit and the Prometheus did a lot of the subsequent work by themselves. In fact, having a human crew was really nothing more than a fail-safe, though determining the exact placement of the five big FMC Transit Collective drives on the surface of Gaspra would require a human eye.

Gerry watched through the window as the Prometheus approached the five Federated Martian Colony drives. A strong titanium alloy frame locked the drives together, two at the front, three at the back, in a triangular boom. The Prometheus docked with the frame in a classic orbital rendezvous. At that point, AviOrbit Control asked the crew to make a complete systems check.

“I’m reading a glitch on the starboard number five thrust conduit,” said Ian. “Control, can you copy that?”

“We copy that, Prometheus. Please refer to Procedure 5-78a-11. It could be a misread.”

Ian referred to the procedure in question, then initiated the steps via the onboard diagnostics computer.

As Gerry watched his old friend, he felt a new admiration. Ian moved quickly and precisely, and looked right at home operating these complicated systems. After fifteen minutes, Ian finally had the system green-lighting him on the starboard number five thrust conduit. The pilot glanced at Gerry and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Ian’s head was now shorn—in fact, he had decided to go for the completely bald look, and his scalp was as pink as the skin of a freshly washed piglet, as if shaving his head was just another way he was reinventing himself. His handlebar mustache, however, was still thick and, for the most part, brown, but with some silver.

“I’m sober three weeks today,” he told Gerry.

“Congratulations.”

“This thing we’re doing… you have no idea what it means to me. I know you two are the ones with people back on Earth, but I finally feel as if I’m doing something…that really matters.”

Gerry gestured at the control panel, then at the CAPS they were wearing. “All this AviOrbit stuff… I had no idea. AviOrbit deserves a lot of the credit.”

“They’ve made it fairly foolproof,” said Mitch. “Though that warning… on the starboard number five thrust conduit.”

“It’s fixed,” said Ian.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m getting a green on it. And the procedure allows for a test fire. The test fire is a go.”

“I’ve just never seen it before. Especially in an M-class freighter. And as that particular thrust conduit is supposed to link FMC Drive Five—”

Ian gave him a wry look. “We got red-lighted all the time back in the old days. The thrust conduit’s just a minor system with a hundred redundancies in it. You don’t have to worry about it.”

34

They transited past Mars, which happened to be in closest opposition, a week later and the Martians sent them fresh oxygen, food, water, and the heartfelt best wishes of its citizens.

Then it was out to the asteroid belt.

The sun was no longer an orb but a gigantic star, a bright presence to their port side, bristling with

jagged rays, like a dangerous and sharp object one could cut oneself on if one got too close.

They settled into their own Kirkwood Gap seven million miles away from Gaspra. The Prometheus performed exactly to spec and braked as it neared the asteroid, spinning round so that the log-boomed singularity drives were now behind it.

Over the next sixteen hours, as they got closer to Gaspra, Gerry kept looking out the window, hoping to get a visual on the asteroid, but it finally had to be sighted through the telescope apparatus, and he got his first view of the misshapen rock on the monitor eighteen hours later.

Twelve miles long and seven across, it reminded him, in shape, of a peanut—a giant stone floating through space, twirling like a gargantuan football, rotating once every six hours and fifty-eight minutes.

The approach procedures were fully computerized. Gerry sat back and watched Prometheus take control.

She approached the asteroid’s “south pole,” though such directions were entirely relative, and for mission convenience only. She brought herself within five hundred yards of the asteroid’s surface, firing a final braking thrust to match Gaspra’s orbit, then initiated two axial bursts so that she began to rotate exactly in tandem. What Gerry saw below him was a bleak, moonlike surface, with horizons that dipped alarmingly and craters that looked disproportionately big on what was a small celestial body.

With its orbit and rotation established in Gaspra’s wake, Prometheus then fired three harpoons at the planetoid, instantly compensating for the force of the shots by five quick and perfectly timed blasts of its axial thrusters.

“She’s red-lighted our axial number three,” said Ian.

“Really?” said Mitch.

Ian quickly keyed in some queries on the diagnostics. “It’s a bug,” he announced a few seconds later.

“Like the one we got in the number five starboard thrust conduit.”

“That’s suspicious,” said Mitch.

The word choice startled Gerry. “Suspicious how?”

“One red-light I can accept,” said Mitch.

“We used to get red-lights all the time,” said Ian.

“And when was your last active mission?” asked Mitch. The question was rhetorical. Everyone knew Ian hadn’t flown in five years. Ian looked away. “You see what I mean?”

Then Ian brightened up. “Look, she’s green-lighting it.”

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Shit.”

“Mitch, it’s working fine. There’s just some small bug in the diagnostics. There’s nothing wrong with the basic equipment.”

“We got every single Tarsalan?” asked Mitch. “There weren’t any hiding out anywhere?”

Gerry got the drift of this with a jolt to his heart. “You think we’re sabotaged?”

“Don’t they want to stop us any way they can?” said Mitch, looking at Gerry through his visor screen.

“They don’t want us to save the planet. They want to keep it bagged until their reinforcements arrive.