Quiet Invasion(91)

“Desk,” she said as she returned to her work area. “Locate Michael Lum.”

After a pause, Michael’s voice came back through the intercom. “I’m here Helen.”

“Where’s here?”

“Admin. Security. My desk, specifically. Do you want me to come up there?”

“No. I’ll come down. Do me a favor though. Find Ben and your friend Bowerman. We need to talk.”

“I’m on it, Helen.”

“Desk. Close connection.”

I will deal with this. We will all get through this, and if this isn’t the permanent solution I dreamed it would be, then I’d better find that out now, hadn’t I?

Helen strode out the door.

“Hi,” said Angela Cleary as the hatch swung back. “Can I borrow a cup of sugar?”

Vee chuckled from her seat in the kitchen nook. It was strange seeing someone emerge from the airlock without a suit on. But the two scarabs had backed up against each other in a clunky but effective docking procedure that preceded what Terry called the “gab and grill.” It happened at dinner every other day and allowed the passengers to circulate and talk about their work face-to-face. It also allowed the crews to sit with their friends and talk about the passengers, Vee was certain.

Angela was the first one over, but she was followed quickly by Lindi Manzur, who hugged her Troy happily and fell into talking with him about a theory of universal curiosity as a mainstay of sentient life that they’d been cooking up together. It might even be a good theory. Pity it wasn’t going to come to anything. Isaac and Julia made a beeline for the fridge and the mango juice, which they both seemed to live off. Josh grabbed Bailey Heathe, the copilot for Scarab Fourteen, briefly by the hand as Bailey brushed past to the pilot’s compartment to catch up with Kevin and Adrian.

Angela moved out of the way of the new arrivals and came to stand over the kitchen table. Vee saluted her with a plastic cup of tea.

“Dr. Hatch,” said Angela, her voice low and formal. “I was hoping we could talk. There’s some incidents in your background check that I wanted to go over….”

Vee pulled on an expression of surprise. “Yeah, sure.” She downed the last of her tea in one lukewarm gulp and stood up. “I think the couch compartment’s empty.”

It was. Vee touched the lock on the door. Now anyone who wanted to come in would at least have to knock.

“You don’t think anybody believed that, do you?” For the past week they had been doing most of their talking via e-mail or the occasional comments on gab-and-grill nights. But now that the investigation was in full swing upstairs as well as down here, Angela was becoming visibly less patient with sporadic communication.

“People have a tendency to believe the Blues are after them personally.” Angela shrugged. “So they’re not all that surprised to hear we’re after somebody else.” She picked her way unerringly to Vee’s couch and perched on the edge. “Show me what you’ve got?”

“Just simulations so far.” Vee snatched up a pair of used socks off her couch and stuffed them into the storage bin overhead. Then she sat down cross-legged with her case open on her lap and switched on the back screen so Angela could see what was displayed. “But they’re based on reality. I found all the drones you’re going to see in Venera’s current inventory.”

Vee had been expanding her image library every day since she’d gotten to Venera, so the simulations actually hadn’t taken all that long to put together, once she’d tracked down what she thought of as the component parts.

The screen showed a three-dimensional rendering of the little cup of a valley outside. A fat, multitreaded drone rolled down the lava corridor. It’s main features—a tank and a hose.

“Experimental emergency drone,” Vee told Angela. “Number ED-445. The idea was it’d be able to carry coolant down to a scarab in trouble. But it could do this too.”

The drone extended its hose and planted it against the ground, as if it was nuzzling the stone. In the next second, a huge white cloud rose up around the nozzle and the hose started sinking into the rock, like a drill into cement.

“What’s it spraying?” asked Angela.

“Water,” Vee told her, and just nodded at the look of skepticism that appeared on Angela’s face a moment later. “I checked with Josh on this. He ran a lab-level simulation. The rock outside has no water in it, which makes it stronger than normal terran rock, which is how you can get these massive continents thrusting out of the crust. But, power-spray that rock with water, and it weakens. Add in the fact that the water reacts with the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, turning the air around the stone into a corrosive, then the rock crumbles.” The hose on the screen had already buried itself eight or nine centimeters into the ground. “They could have hollowed out the whole thing with one or two of these. And they do have one or two.” She entered another command, and the image skipped forward. “The metal in the ladder rungs and the laser is your basic iron. You could either bring it down from the base, or you could sort it out of the waste rock from the digging.”