“I hope you’re right, Father,” Gene Harker replied. “I really hope you’re right.” He stood there for a moment, trying to bring up his biggest concern diplomatically. Finally, he decided head-on was best.
“Tell me, Father. If you’re down there, and it’s the difference between one of our lives and one of the poor wretches down there, could you decide? Could you actually act to keep Socolov from death or rape or whatever, or even one of us from having our brains bashed in?”
“The truth? I don’t know, Harker. I don’t think I will know until and unless I face it, and I know I might. None of us truly knows what is within us until an action is forced, do we?”
“Well, at least it’s an honest answer,” the Navy man responded.
“Call it off, Colonel.”
The big man with the deep voice continued to look over terrain maps on the console in front of him but did say, “Hello, Harker. Glad to have you with us.”
“I’m not with you, or against you. I just think you’re going to do what you wouldn’t do before. You go in, and you’ll kill people—that’s part of the job. But Socolov and Chicanis are liabilities in any ground movement and you know it. Take them, and either they will die or the mission will fail as we keep saving their necks.”
“I note you now said `we,’ which makes me correct. And I can’t call it off. I couldn’t even call off the action that got me early retirement. Those people still went in, remember, and they still died. This is even clearer. They are going in with or without us. If they go in without us, they will surely die. If they go in with us, they will probably die, but something might come of the effort. Look on the bright side.”
It was a pretty cold way of looking at things, but it was also hard to argue with. “Is this trip really worth it?”
“Krill thinks so. This Dutchman thinks so. The preliminary examinations of the historical record suggest that they might have had something. We’ll know more once we get into Hector.”
“Hector? You’re going to the little moon?”
“Initially. That’s KriIl’s and the two brains’ jobs. The actual weapon is supposed to be there, still hidden away in bunkers. If it’s there, then it is worth going down for the codes. If it is not there, then we all go home—or, more likely, we all get to find out if we can blow the Dutchman before the Dutchman blows us away once he has no use for us. But I’m not going to abandon it if something’s there. Someone with an incredible amount of guts died, probably in a nasty way, to get us that information. Do you know how long the burst was that got all that data out that Krill’s now looking over?”
“No.”
“About six seconds. After that, you can actually see the damping field kicking in to intercept and gobble up the power, and not incidentally target the sender precisely as well. A six-second transmission. We won’t even have that. It’s doubtful whether, now that it’s been done once, the Titans will leave anything with surface access unmonitored. I’m certain they could drain the entire planet of power if they wished; it’s just too much trouble and no profit. Our objective is to bring the codes out without activating them. Once we do, once storage becomes active energy—watch out!”
“Do you really think even the likes of us can hack it down there, Colonel? Give me my combat suit and I’ll take on an army, but bare-handed…”
“I have no intention of being down there bare-handed,” N’Gana responded. “However, there will be both vulnerabilities and limits. You were Commando, right?”
“Yes. A while ago.”
“You’re still a Commando and you know it. It’s in the blood. If you’d quit and gone into the diamond business or started dirt farming, maybe not, but you stayed in. I think you’re probably very good, Harker. Both the sergeant and I were Rangers. Much the same sort of thing. Each of us, deep down, thinks the other’s training wasn’t quite up to our own, but we know how even we really are. What was the final exam for you, Harker? In individual rather than squad training.”
Harker gave a mirthless smile. “They stripped us down to our underwear and dropped us on a hellhole of a planet with only what we’d have coming out of a lifeboat. The pickup point, the only one on the whole damned planet, was almost three thousand kilometers away by land and sea. We either got there whole and called for pickup or we failed.”
“Fairly similar with us. We dropped as a squad, fully organized, but the problem and objective were the same. Did everyone in your class make it?”
“No. I understand that, out of twenty-five who were eventually dropped, six never checked in.”
“Well, my losses were a bit worse,” said N’Gana, “That’s why we volunteered. Nobody had to do it. Even down to that last drop, anybody could have said `No!’ and nothing more would have been said about it. They’d have simply rotated back. But we went. By that point anybody who’d freeze had already been pressured or threatened out. We did it then. This will be no different.”
“Maybe. I was nineteen real at the time and I thought I was immortal and, after that full course, some kind of superman as well. I’m a lot older now, and I’ve been shot up a lot of times and scraped up a few more.”
“Well, I’m nearly fifty real, and I believe I could do that course again. I have yet to be defeated by Doctor Socolov’s simulator program, and I see nothing so far that would suggest that this is not doable. I would agree that the odds are almost nil that we will all survive, and slim that any, let alone most, of us will make it back to be picked up. But I don’t see anything here that skews the odds any worse than the Ranger examination course.”
Harker sighed. “Colonel, I had an electronic direction finder, I had a small sidearm, a medikit, and a few other things when I did my exam. No matter what you say, I know you had similar as well. I’d love to try the Doc’s sim, but it’s only a guess. Nobody’s come back from being down there.”
“The Dutchman has people who have managed the trip, or so he says. It is not easy, but if it can be done by pirates, then it can be done by me.” He paused. “I do wish that you could try the sim at a high level, if only for me to judge how out of practice you might be, but there will not be time. We are to board the corvette in just over three hours. Since there is a great deal of risk simply activating a gate—let alone coming in-system—near Titans, this will be the start of it. Hector first, then, if it’s all there, we go down and the rest remain on Hector. You are in, or you remain right here. You have one hour to decide. After that, there will not be time to allow for your supplies.”
“An hour!”
“I think you would be most useful to us, Mister Harker,” the Colonel said quite smugly. “And I think having come this far uninvited, you could not resist going the rest of the way. Not someone with your service record and awards.”
Harker didn’t have to think too hard on this part. “I’ll go, at least as far as the moon, just to see what the hell this is all really about. But going down there, on a Titan world—that I won’t promise.”