And then the Polyakov’s slow rotation carried the planet past the edge of the window, and he was looking at stars and emptiness once more.
To his left, Commander Joshua Reiner reached up and tapped one of the monitor displays on the console above his workstation in that annoying way people have of trying to chivvy delicate electronics into proper operation. “Hey, Garroway?”
“Yeah?”
“We got a fault in camera sixty-two. No picture.” Reiner tried upping the gain on a volume control. “No sound, either.”
“Is the thing on?”
“Yup. Readouts say it is, anyway. Must be a loose connection.”
Garroway snorted. Trouble with electronic systems was always dismissed as “a loose connection,” even when the whole system was solid-state, with no wires to come loose in the first place. Pivoting his seat, he took a look over Josh’s shoulder, verifying that the system was on, but without sound or picture.
“Huh. I see what you mean.” The control-deck console was receiving a visual feed, but the screen was black. The sound, though, appeared to have been switched off.
“Storm cellar,” Reiner said, identifying the location of the dead camera. “It’s done this a few times before. Probably nothing major, but we have to log the failure for maintenance, y’know?”
“I’d let it go,” Garroway replied, leaning back in his seat. He was pretty sure he knew what the problem was “See if it fixes itself.”
“Um. Trouble is, old L&M’s on his way up there.”
“Eh? Why? When?”
“He’s logged for…let’s see.” With a few taps on his keyboard, Reiner called up a schedule on one of his monitors. “Here it is. Platoon weapons assembly drill, RSHF, 1530 hours.”
“Oh, shit,” Garroway said, glancing at the digital time readout on a nearby bulkhead. He’d prepared that schedule last week but forgotten that a drill was on for today.
“Yeah. And you never know if he’s gonna want a vid record of the drill.”
“Yeah, roger that.” He pushed back from his console. “I’d better get up there before he does. Cover for me here?”
“You bet.”
Garroway walked across the control deck, ducked low, and stepped through the open hatch into the transport-pod accessway. He moved carefully; spin gravity at the control-deck level was currently only about two-tenths of a G, and a careless move could send him slamming into the overhead.
“L&M” stood for “Lloyd and Master,” the wry sobriquet of Colonel James Andrew Lloyd, the MMEF’s commanding officer. The name was strictly unofficial, of course, used only behind his back by those who had to work with him. Lloyd was a stickler both for regulations and for proper form. His weapons drills aboard the cycler spacecraft had made him notorious; what, the ship’s astronaut crew frequently asked one another in Garroway’s hearing, could possibly be accomplished by drilling Marines in disassembling and reassembling their weapons in zero G? It wasn’t as if they would need to accomplish the feat on Mars, where one-third gravity kept the inner workings of their M-29s conveniently anchored.
Technically, Lloyd held no more authority aboard the cycler than any of the other Marines—or the civilian scientists, for that matter. The ship’s commanding officer was Polkovnik Natalia Filatinova, and she was the one who set the standards by which the men and women in her charge behaved. Nevertheless, old L&M wouldn’t like it if the storm shelter was used for…unofficial activities.
Garroway touched the transport-pod call key mounted on the bulkhead between two lockways. Several moments dragged past, and then he heard the chunk-hiss of a connection being made, and the sealed airtight door swung ponderously open.
A man clambered out, tall and dark-skinned, mustached, clad in a NASA-blue coverall. Two mission patches adorned his left shoulder: the light blue flag of the United Nations, and the circular sword-on-Mars emblem with the letters OEU:AE.
Organisation des Nations unies: Armée de l’Espace. The United Nations’ Space Force.
“Monsieur Colonel Bergerac,” Garroway said, stepping aside to clear a way for him.
“Hello, Major.” The man’s English was perfect, his eyes cold. “Going down? Or up?”
“Up, monsieur.”
“Ah?” He questioned with eyebrows and a cocking of the head.
“An electronic fault. Nothing serious.” Grateful that the French colonel seemed uninterested in pushing the question further, Garroway ducked through the lockway and into the transport pod beyond. A touch of a keypad sealed the lock behind him, and then, he was climbing up one of Polyakov’s three two-hundred-meter arms.