Knowledge.
Chief Warrant Officer Tom Bann ran the calculations for the fifteenth time. It was going to be close, closer than he liked. If everything went perfectly, they were going to have less than a thousand kilos of hydrogen when they landed. To a groundhog, that might have sounded like a lot; a pilot, on the other hand, knew that it was nothing over the distance they were traveling. The margin of error was more than that.
He glanced at the monitor and shook his head. He was a "Regiment" pilot, not one of the shuttle pilots assigned to DeGlopper, but it still hurt to watch a sacrifice like that. They were all Fleet, whether they were Marines or Navy, and Krasnitsky had sure taken the highroad. He shook his head again and looked at the number. It would really suck if it all turned out to be for nothing.
"Hello? Pilot?" He didn't recognize the voice in his earbud at first, but then he realized it was the prince's chief of staff.
"Yes, Ma'am? This is Warrant Bann." He wondered what the airhead wanted at a time like this. It had better be important to interfere in a deathwatch.
"Can we still get a connection to the ship's computers?"
Bann thought about all the things wrong with the request and wondered where to start.
"Ma'am, I don't think—"
"This is important, Warrant Officer," the voice in his earbud said firmly. "Vital, even."
"What do you need?" he asked warily.
"There's a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica in my personal database. Why we didn't bring it with us, I don't know."
"But..." Bann said, thinking about the problems of connecting to the ship. Even if there were surviving antennae, he'd have to use a whisker laser, and with the Saints attached to the hull, there was a good chance that they would detect it, which would give away the shuttle's location.
"I know there's hardly anything on Marduk in it," O'Casey said quickly, anticipating part of his objection, "but there is data on early cultures and technologies. How to make flintlocks, how to make better iron and steel... ."
"Oh." The warrant officer nodded in his helmet. "Good point. But if I try to connect with the ship, we might be detected. And then what?"
"Oh." It was O'Casey's turn to pause in thought. "We'll have to take the chance," she said after a moment, her voice firm. "This data could make or break the expedition."
Bann thought about it as he warmed up the laser system. He saw her argument—it could be vital data—and there certainly wasn't much time to kick the idea around. If he tried to find Captain Pahner's blacked-out shuttle first to ask for permission, DeGlopper would almost certainly be gone before they could get anything. Which meant that he had to decide if it was worth endangering the entire mission to get some possibly useless data.
On the whole, he decided, it was.
"Whisker laser!" The lieutenant at Ship Defense Control turned towards her superior. "It appears to be sending a data request to the Empie assault ship. From... two-two-three by zero-zero-nine!"
"The shuttles," Delaney said. "It's the shuttles, trying to sneak away to the planet."
"We're too far out," the chaplain objected. "You said so yourself. They can't brake and make a reentry. And even if they could, we'd still be here to control the planet."
"True." Delany nodded. "But they could hide on the surface for a time."
"Only until the carrier detected them," Panella said dismissively. "They'd be mad to try to sneak down to the surface. Besides, we can still run them down, and we would've detected them soon after they started their deceleration."
"Maybe," the captain said dubiously. "But those shuttles use a hydrogen reaction jet that's fairly hard to detect much beyond a light-minute." He scratched his beard in thought about it for a moment. "Still, you're right. They must have expected to be detected."
He thought for a moment more, and in his eyes flew open wide.
"Unless they know we won't be here to detect them!" He wheeled to his bridge crew.
"Detach the ship! Detach now!"
"What to download?" O'Casey asked the empty compartment. "What? What, what? Come on, load!" she snapped.
Warrant Officer Bann had experienced great difficulty finding a connection, but Eleanora was in now, and waited as the final connects were made. When the screen finally came up, she sent the command through her toot.
"Search 'survival,' " she whispered, watching the results of the query come up. "Scroll down, scroll down, 'hostile flora and fauna' download, 'medicine' download. Search 'fuels, shuttle.' Scroll down. 'Expedient' download. Search, 'military, primitive.' Refine, 'arquebus.' Scroll down, scroll." She kept one eye on the loading diagram. The whisker laser was a relatively small bandwidth system, and the first download on hostile flora and fauna survival wasn't complete yet. She hissed, and then shook her head as a default message came up. "Four thousand three hundred eighty-three articles. Damn." She didn't have time for this.
"Refine... 'generals.' Refine, 'greatest.' " She viewed the results. There was only one name she recognized offhand, despite her doctorate in history. She'd been more interested in societal developments than in military destructiveness, and arquebuses were as distant as ancient Rome and its fabled legions. But one name stood out in both the military and societal continuum.
"Download, 'Adolphus, Gustavus.' "
"Damn," Pahner snarled.
Roger nodded, more comfortable with the information now. "Disconnection."
"Yes," the captain replied in a quiet voice, watching the simple text "TOS" which had replaced the data feed from DeGlopper. Termination of Signal. Such a... sanitary acronym. The letters held his eye, and then the sensor readouts on the Saint cruiser disappeared, as well.
"Ah," he said sadly, and Roger nodded again.
"Well," the prince said after a moment, trying to lighten the atmosphere, "at least they got them."
Without even turning around, he felt the temperature in the compartment drop, and swore at himself for putting his foot into his mouth yet again. He'd been wrong about the Marine's lack of feeling, he realized.
"Yes, I suppose they did. Your Highness," Pahner said flatly.
"Damn!" Eleanora shouted, slamming her hand down on the panel. The transmission had shut off in mid-line, and she'd only gotten part of the way through the entry on Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.
She'd hunted for other data after entering that article, and as she had, she'd realized the incredible reach of the information available. The Marines could use data on improved metallurgy, agriculture, irrigation, and engineering. On chemistry, biology, and physics. It had all been sitting there the whole time, available for translation to pads or even toots. They could've loaded the whole thing into individual toots and had a walking encyclopedia!
But only if she'd thought of it in time.
"What's wrong?" Sergeant Major Kosutic asked, coming back into the compartment. She glanced at the monitors and nodded. "Oh. The DeGlopper's gone. But they got the Saint."
"No, no, no. That's not it!" O'Casey snapped, banging the workstation again. "I realized after you'd gone that I had the whole universe in my hand. I had a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica in my personal system on the ship. I hardly used it, because it was only outline information. But there were all sorts of things that we could've downloaded if we'd only thought of it in time. I started grabbing articles, but the signal terminated on me."