“I am most curious,” Doctor Takamura put in. “What sort of thing was this Priam Lens? Some sort of death ray? It certainly sounds like one of those cheap thriller ideas.”
“Some sort of thing in space. I really don’t know,” the diva told her. “I sang. My great-great-grandson and my two great-great-great-granddaughters were into all that. They’re all gone now.”
“On Helena?”
“No, not all of them. A different story for a different time, perhaps. But I knew little of this save that the projects were going on.”
“You did, however, recognize Priam’s Lens by name when I mentioned it,” van Staaten noted. “And I am certain that you are not here with these people on a whim. You have checked out the partial data I sent you. You know it is true. You know that I may be able to give you the location of the prototype of the Priam’s Lens project codes.”
“You also claim to be able to get in and out of Titan-controlled worlds. I assume that is on the polar sweep worlds?” N’Gana put in.
“Yes, that is true. The sweep worlds are the ones. Fortunately, Helena is such a world. It does, however, present particular problems, since the gravitational effects of the two moons in opposition orbits keeps the ocean very churned up and very dangerous at many times during the year. It is not an easy body to navigate under the best of conditions.”
“That is true,” Father Chicanis acknowledged. “We found working underwater to be far preferable to surface work, although it is possible to sail them if you are good enough and have a good enough craft.”
“Ah, yes. Father Chicanis. Good of you to be along. Understand, though, that you cannot work submerged under today’s conditions. While the overall force fields that drain all power from anything we can build tend to lose some effect just below two meters, that does not mean they have no effect. And if power is applied, rather than simply idled, it sets off alarm bells and you’re dead. That’s why even the underground and underwater installations went. That leaves you with non-powered surface travel as the only way. You cannot land on the continents or within the continental shelf’s limits. Those are constantly under monitoring and observation by the Titan grid. Non-powered craft, however, generally escape detection if at sea. The wave action and tidal forces appear to foul up their precise locators. But my people can get in. They do get in, and out, and quite often, if there’s something there we really think is worth the risk. The price is pretty high if they fail, though.”
“Priam’s Lens, or at least the prototype, is, I gather, on Helena? Probably on Atlantis?” Chicanis guessed.
“Wrong, Father. The prototype is rather large, in fact. It is built right into the smaller moon, Hector. I’ve been there myself, although that in itself is no mean feat, and I’ve examined the ruins. It’s still there, all right. It’ll take some work to get it up and running, but it is there. It does not, however, have any power. Whatever power there was seems to have been drained by the Titan attack force as it came down to the surface of the mother planet.”
“Then the records—even any instructions, commands, procedures. They are gone!” Takamura groaned. “Whatever computers they would be using would have died themselves for lack of any power, even a trickle charge!”
“You, too, are wrong, Doctor. That is a bad habit of your group. I hope you guess better once you are in action. There is a minimal trickle charge there, or so my information states. Not enough to be read by almost any instruments we have, and probably not by the Titans, either, but it’s there. Just barely enough. The trouble is, as I said, it’s incomplete. Much of the targeting and serious program debugging was going on on the surface in an underground research facility on the Eden continent just outside a city named—hmm, let’s see—Ephesus. How—Biblical. I sent a team in there to see what they could find. Nobody made it back out, but one of them managed to get out quite a bit of data.”
“Yes? How?”
“Remember what I said about indetectable trickle charges? Seems a few standby combat facilities, mostly fed by geothermal rather than fusion or antimatter, which would have been detected and sucked up, survive and are sort of turned on. Their residual hum is below the noise threshold of the Titans’ monitoring grid, or so my computers aboard my ship theorize. Of course, if they are ever used, then the Titans will be on them in a moment and that’s the end of that. One of my men was able to get to one. He knew by that point he couldn’t get out, that they were on his trail, and he made the decision to broadcast and hope that I’d pick it up, at least through the rescue ship waiting for him to make it to an area between sweeps. We got it, and, since then, nothing else. I’m pretty sure they got him, too. But that’s what I have here, ladies and gents. Real live data out of an interface with a dead man who was down there. It contains a great deal of data, but he didn’t get everything because he didn’t know what it was he was supposed to get. You, Madame Sotoropolis, have the family Karas databases. You know. I can trade you the where and the how, and a way in and out if you are good enough.”
“And what is it you wish, Captain van Staaten?” Captain Stavros asked suspiciously.
“I want control of the weapon. I want control, not the Navy, not the incompetent Confederacy, not the cowardly and defeatist types who now run things.”
“A weapon that can destroy Titans?”
“I have no idea if it will destroy them. I would like it to, but it may just hurt them. It may even merely annoy them, cause them pain. Whatever it does, I want it. I alone will decide where it shoots and what it shoots. I alone will give the commands. That is my price and it is not negotiable.”
Colonel N’Gana, along with several of the others, wasn’t overly concerned with this demand. After all, once the weapon was activated, once it was used, what could the Dutchman do anyway? Still, he had to ask: “Why do you think that we can get in and get the data from the surface when your people couldn’t? Why do you think we can make it out when you can’t?”
“I have no idea if you can do it, Colonel. If I thought it was easy, I would have done it myself and not needed any of you. When you do the cybernetic link and see what all was sent, you will understand what the purpose of each member of your team is. Some of it should be obvious.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Admiral Krill put in. “You expect us to go down and retrieve whatever your people couldn’t and then sit there and make this thing in the moon work. And then you expect us to just give you the trigger?”
“I do, and you will. You see, whether it does the job or not, the moment you shoot whatever this thing shoots and strike a Titan ship or base, well, you are really going to get their attention. There are seven primary bases down there. The moment I fire and hit one, the other six are going to know just exactly where it came from. Now, just who do you propose to fire that weapon?”
N’Gana sighed. “I, for one, agree with him, but it shows why this is stupid. He is certainly right that as soon as one of them is wounded, killed, blown up, whatever it does, the others are going to come after the source, and they won’t have far to go; a moon isn’t something you can move out of range easily. So, assume we go down. Assume we get everything we need to make it work. Assume we get back up with it. All big assumptions. One shot, then it’s over. So what? What will we have accomplished? All that for just one target? It might as well not work at all!”