Rue compromised, by hauling herself along the cord until she was going as fast as she could, then giving herself a little boost with the jets. Once she was going again, she checked her instruments.
Hmm. The magnetometer was going crazy and the Geiger counter readings were rising fast…
Something black had blocked out the stars ahead of her. It expanded quickly until it filled her vision.
"Crap!" She grabbed the cord with both hands; it scraped her gloves, yanking her to a stop just meters from the terminus of the cord. Rue found herself perched on the end of a long, insectile arm that curved away toward a gigantic black object. She hung on for a few minutes while she stopped cursing and her heart rate slowed. When her faceplate had unfogged, she took a careful look around.
The plow sail was like a huge black spider, cylindrical of body, with at least a dozen long legs fanning out from its open end. Each arm ended in a spinnerette that held a delicate thread. The threads trailed away to infinity behind or below, depending on how she wanted to look at it.
Everything was perfectly still against the stars. The monstrous shape made Rue decidedly uneasy— it looked like it was frozen in midconvulsion and might at any second thrash those giant legs and draw her into its mouth.
The eeriness of it made her remember Dr. Herat's story about Dis. For a moment she could vividly picture the place— the dead roads and buildings black under the stars, a weightless cityscape where bodies frozen for three billion years still drifted through the rooms like ghosts, or embodiments of despair.
She tore her gaze away from the plow sail and opened an inscape window. In it, she issued the call to awaken the cache.
When they came to Jentry's Envy the first time, they had not done so in just one shuttle. Max had insisted that they fit two for the journey, the second being redundant and packed with extra supplies. It was horrendously expensive and nothing had gone wrong to warrant using it, but every day that they spent out here Rue had been thankful for its presence. When they rode the beam in to Chandaka they had left it behind, to further guarantee their safety upon their return. And Rue had instructed that no one should mention its existence on Chandaka.
She found it after a minute's searching; it had lit up as per her instructions and now appeared like a dim pearl in the night. Rue unclipped herself from the cord that connected her to the plow sail and Lake Flaccid and jetted out to meet it.
Ten minutes later she floated before a console in the cache, orienting an inscape camera so that it showed the wealth of netted food bags and equipment behind her. The picture was lined up perfectly, but she still hesitated a long moment before pinging Crisler. Her head hurt and she had to talk to herself for a few minutes to get her voice to stop shaking.
When she called he responded instantly. "So," he said. "Where are you?"
"I know how it looks," she said, "and that can't be helped. But I'm not your bomber. In fact, I think I can help."
He arched an eyebrow disdainfully. "My life support blows out, you disappear and the next morning there you are in what looks like…" he peered past her, "a treasure trove. What should I think about it?"
"This is our local cache of supplies."
"Supplies? You never told us about any cache," he said.
"Why should I have?" she said, her face hot. "The Envy is my ship; it's under the jurisdiction of the halo worlds. You are visitors."
"And now that you no longer need us, you're sending us packing back to the R.E." He said with an angry nod. "I see."
"No, you don't," she said. "Why would we blow up your life support? We need it, too."
"Do you? Not according to what I see behind you. Plus which, how many other caches have you got stashed around the Envy?"
"Oh yeah," she said with a laugh. "We could have lifted thousands of tonnes of stuff out of Erythrion, right? Infinite amounts. Get real, admiral. We came out here the first time with two balloons full of stuff and we flew into Chandaka with one of them. Do the calculations yourself— it was the best we could do with the energy budget we had. Would you have brought all your material back down from near-c if you were me? And would you have told people that you'd left stuff there? Think about it."
"I've been thinking about it," he said darkly.
"Then you know it doesn't add up," she said. "Why would we blow up the Banshee's life support while most of us were aboard it, if we wanted to scuttle you and send you home? If that were the plan, all my crew would be aboard the cache with me."
"Bad timing?" he said.
"We'd have to be idiots to be even getting ready to do something like that right now— we just got here! If we were going to do it, we would have waited a week or two until we were thoroughly camped out somewhere, say in those rooms Mike found in the lake. And you know perfectly well that all I'm after here is proof that the Envy is going to return to Erythrion at the end of her cycle. We don't have that proof and I don't know how to get it— so we still need you and your scientific team."
"So why did you cut and run, then?"
"You were going to lock me up, weren't you?"
He met her eyes. "No, Rue. I gave you my word and I would have kept it. Do you distrust me that much?"
"I… I had to imagine the worst," she said. "If the saboteur's smart, he'd make it look like we did it. And while we were cooling our heels in your brig, you guys might have found the cache on your own and that would just clinch it then, wouldn't it?"
"So? You're still out there with it. But I have your crew."
Rue made a face and waved a hand at Crisler. "Oh, stop it. Like I said, you wouldn't have my crew if it really had been us who did this. Look, Admiral, nobody wants this mission to succeed more than me. My future depends on it. For that reason, I'm bringing the cache back. We can try to rebuild the life-support stacks with my supplies."
Crisler scowled. "In exchange for…?"
"Nothing! Don't you get it yet? This isn't a negotiation, Crisler. I'm giving you the cache. As a gesture of good faith and to prove that I'm not your bomber."
The admiral's scowl gradually subsided into a frown. "Okay," he said finally. "We might be able to get back on-line with the material you've got there. Then what? I still have a saboteur to deal with."
"It's somebody who doesn't want the expedition to succeed," she said. "Or somebody who desperately wants to get back to Chandaka with news about what we've found here. Which is more likely."
He nodded. "I'd been thinking along those lines myself. Your disappearance threw me— because you're right, it doesn't make sense that it was you. But…"
"What?"
He was scowling again. "We're still in danger. Look, Rue, I'll let your people out and meet you in the boardroom when you arrive. We've got to work out a strategy to deal with this— either find the saboteur or neutralize his effectiveness."
"I'd rather talk about everything in the open— everybody present, no secrets," she said.
He shrugged. "If you want."
"Okay. The cache is pretty unwieldy. I'll be a day or two in getting there."
"We'll send some sleds on ahead to get the critical gear," he said. "Otherwise, we're going to run out of air before you get here."
"All right. Are we done?"
"Yes. And Rue… I'm sorry for my presumption of guilt on your part. Thanks."
"You're welcome." She cut the connection, and felt herself slump in relief. She hadn't been crazy to act this way; that was something to remember.
So was the fact that Crisler could be dealt with. Humming, Rue turned to the task of reviving the rest of the cache's systems.