'Yes, four pods up here, then we go in low and drop it. An arbitrary decision, really. It makes no difference in what order we do it,' said Jane.
Cormac got out of his seat and headed off into the wing of the shuttle, searching for something to eat or drink. He could have stayed on Hubris, as his presence here was not required, but he was fed up with waiting for something to happen or something to be found by the ship's scanners. Chaline and her technicians were well enough employed preparing their runcible to be taken down, and he had not had much opportunity to talk to her - or any wish either, to be honest. She was just the kind of involvement he did not need right now, or was he kidding himself? Mika was becoming increasingly involved in her study of the dracomen, and had already induced the four Sparkind and a few of the crew to assist her. The rest of the crew were involved in replacing mycelium-damaged components and superstructure. Hubris, of course, was involved in just about every aspect of all these activities, while simultaneously scanning the planet. Cormac had felt like a spare wheel, so grabbed the first opportunity offered to get out of the ship. He needed action, not introspection.
Under one of the bench seats that lined the front edge of the wing Cormac found a ration box. From it he removed a foil package that the label identified as 'egg mayonnaise sandwiches'. He glanced at the lid of the box, where a logo identified it as ECS property. Was this the Sparkind's secret? He grinned and also removed a self-heating coffee from the box before replacing the lid. He pulled the tab on the coffee and, while it heated, he studied the globular tanks distributed along the wing, and the mesh of pipes running into the floor. Full of counteragent. He remembered the image Mika had shown him on the screen of her nanoscope. The thing had claws, damn it, and a mouth. He had asked why its skin was so… knobbly. He once again considered her reply, before returning to Jane: 'Those are atoms,' Mika had told him.
'How long should this take us?' Cormac asked Jane, after swallowing a mouthful of egg mayonnaise washed down with scalding coffee.
'Four hours.' Jane turned to inspect him. 'You are easier now about not being gridlinked?'
'A lot. It seems to me that I'd been living a vicarious life: all my involvement with the external world had become secondary. Blegg was right about the twenty-year limit. I should have been taken off the grid ten years ago.'
'I am surprised that was not done. Obviously your usefulness to Earth Central outweighed their concern for your mental health.'
'It didn't take me long to recover.'
'There are fifty-eight people on the Hubris.'
He looked at her in surprise. She went on.
'Four of them are the Sparkind; twenty-two of them are crew; the rest are technicians. That you did not know this is not surprising. After being gridlinked you find there are a lot of questions you forget how to ask. Had you had any normal social interaction, this fact would have become evident.'
'So you're saying I'm not recovered yet.' He found he was having trouble keeping a smug grin off his face.
'Your efficiency does not seem overly impaired…'
He thought back to his conversation with Blegg, and realized what Jane was inferring: it was his humanity that was impaired. She was wrong, he felt - or was she? His avoidance of Chaline might be an aspect of that impairment. It might also be a perfectly human wish to avoid emotional involvement. The point was debatable.
'Should I spend more time in the recreation area? It would be wasted time now that everyone is busy'
'Your course of action is for you to decide. I merely make observations.'
Patronizing doll. He smiled to himself. Now that had been human enough.
The conversation moved on to Dragon and its motivations, while the shuttle moved on to each of the four seeding areas. Jane seemed to have stored all the Dragon/human dialogues. As they spoke, he wondered about that time back on Aster Colora: he had only been gridlinked for five years then, though an agent for many more. How different was he now? Could it be that Jane was confusing his own natural reserve with the aftereffects of being linked for too long? Again he smiled to himself. First contempt for the android, and now doubts about its abilities. He was becoming more human by the second. Soon he would be treating her like any other person, which would be just what she wanted.
When the contrail from the pods had bled away, Jane twisted down on the joystick and the shuttle spiralled down into the lower atmosphere. They dropped through a thick bank of yellow cloud, where flat ice crystals the size of thumbnails hissed against the screen. They came out of this and swooped low over a desolate landscape that could have been described as tundra had it possessed but a little vegetation. The only suitable description to Cormac's mind was 'arctic desert'. Here the ground had a pattern of tidal sands and icy sculptures like frozen waves poised over narrow gullies. In the rear-view screen Cormac saw that their passage was creating a blast cloud of powdery CO2 ice. Ahead was a huge mountain with the shape of a giant sandstone butte surrounded by snow-heaped slopes. As they drew close, Jane slowed the shuttle to less than the speed of sound so they could bank round the mountain's icy flanks.
'It was originally M65, but over a twenty-year period seven people died trying to climb it. It is now called Mount Prometheus. Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a mountain, where every day an eagle came to feed on his liver, and where every night his liver was renewed.'
'Charming. Has anyone ever reached the summit?'
'A woman called Enoida Deacon once climbed it with nothing but a coldsuit and oxygen pack. No one else has climbed it. She settled at the runcible town.'
So was now dead, he thought.
They swooped on past the mountain then across the ice-pan of New Sea below an off-white sky completely clear of cloud. Once they were beyond sight of the shore, it was as if they were flying between two curved but featureless cotton sheets. Jane upped the speed of the shuttle past the sound barrier, and soon twists of sooty cloud smeared the horizon. Minutes later they streaked over the farthest shore: a row of cliffs like the edge of a crust yet to be stripped away from the purity below, arctic desert again, but this time scattered with obvious flat areas that were frozen water. In the distance, Cormac saw a heat-sink station. It might have been the one they had been inside, but there were many on that shore, so it was difficult to tell. Soon they came upon the first scattering of buildings, most of them undamaged. Ahead was the dark ring of the blast-site.
'Strap yourself in,' said Jane.
Cormac pulled his harness across and clipped it into place. You did not get such comforts as internal gravity in anything other than passenger shuttles. This wing was military, so you didn't get shockfields either. ECS did not believe in pampering its employees. Jane yanked back on the joystick and the shuttle turned straight up into the sky. Cormac was thrust back into his seat, but the pressure soon eased off as Jane levelled the shuttle out and slowed. Soon they came to a halt above the blast-site, AG operating at full.
'Bomb away,' she said, after punching out a sequence on the console.
He watched the screen that showed the view below. He saw the silver sphere fall away, to be quickly dimin- ished by distance. Seconds later there was a flash which left a momentary black spot on the screen, then around that there was a ring of eight flashes as the cluster bombs carried the counteragent across the site. After a short time a cloud of icy dust rose up and obscured the ground. Had the body of the intrepid Enoida Deacon been destroyed then or before? He doubted it would have mattered to her.