Bannor grimaced. “I’d rather spend another few hours on the flight simulator.” He did not rise.
“C’mon, let’s go,” coaxed Caine. “It’ll be more fun than crashing during an unpowered landing. Again and again. Bannor.”
Bannor glared at Riordan. “That’s a low blow. If accurate.”
Caine smiled. Of all the distractions that he and his five conscious fellow travelers had shared during their journey, the flight simulator had been the most useful and the most frustrating. An actual training sim used by the Commonwealth space forces, it was realistic in all regards but one: feel. Karam Tsaami, an accomplished transatmospheric pilot, had tried his hand at it early on. He crashed twice, landed in a heap three times, and then finally put the delta-shaped lander on the ground with only a few nicks and scratches. “It’s bullshit,” he’d pronounced as he pushed away from the controls.
“Why? Because you crashed it?” Hwang’s tone had been almost impish.
“No, Mr. Nobel-Winner Wiseass, not because I crashed it. It’s because you can’t feel anything.”
“You mean, like the crushing impact when you stick it nose-first into the ground?” Peter Wu’s deadpan rejoinders were becoming his trademark.
Tsaami glared at the Taiwanese tunnel rat whose cool competence and valor in Jakarta had ensured that he, too, would be recruited into IRIS. “Wu, has anyone ever told you that you are one hell of a funny guy? Because if they have, they’re liars. Look: this simulator isn’t even a good approximation of instrument flying. This is like — like flying a drone. But drones have all sorts of expert systems, which uneducated idiots call ‘AI,’ to compensate for minor stability issues. This thing”—he jerked a thumb at the console—“is the worst of both worlds. You’re flying an authentically unstable platform but without the real ‘feel’ of being in it. And you’re relying on controls that are less sensitive than a drone’s.”
Caine had been curious. “Then why do they use it as a trainer?”
Karam shrugged. “Look, there’s a lot of details to flying, particularly in a lander. This sim is fine for most spaceside maneuvers. They’re a piece of cake if you can do some basic math or know how to tell the computer to do it for you. Atmospheric flight is trickier, but, unless you’re in dirty weather, it’s still pretty straightforward as long as you don’t try to pull any fancy moves. But reentry? Or fast climb to low orbit? That’s where the job gets a lot harder because that’s where things go wrong most frequently, and you don’t get a lot of warning when they do.”
“Odd, then, how all those quaint twentieth-century space capsules managed to land without computer control. Or without any controls at all.” Hwang couldn’t keep the bait-happy smile off his face.
“Yeah, real odd,” Karam retorted, “since reentry and landing was all they were designed to do. Put them in the right place, at the right angle and speed, and they’ll land. But a platform with lifting surfaces and designed to be capable of launch, landing, and flight in both space and in atmospheres? Those increased capabilities mean increased complexity.”
Bannor had put a hand on Karam’s shoulder. “Ben’s baiting you. He knows all that.”
“Yeah?” Karam sounded dubious. “He’s just annoyed that I like Wu’s food better. Sound about right to you, Pete?”
“Peter,” corrected Peter Wu.
“Yeah, yeah, sure—Pete. But Ben’s just jealous of your cooking, don’t you think, Pete?”
Wu sighed. “Yes, I’m sure that’s it.”
That had been another welcome distraction during the outbound trip: the dueling regional cuisines of China. Wu was Taiwanese. Ben Hwang had dual citizenship, China and Canada, and had grown up eating authentic Szechuan in Vancouver, before living in Canton as a student. The cooking wars between the two men had become twice-weekly events. But before long, it was obvious that while Ben Hwang was more knowledgeable in the different nuances of the many regional cuisines and use of ingredients, Peter Wu had that unquantifiable gift for knowing — just knowing—the moment when the meat had been seared enough, the leeks wilted enough, the peppers sliced finely enough. The final, almost pitiable, conferral of victory upon Wu had come when Ben Hwang had been discovered making a midnight raid on the leftovers of Peter’s cooking, even though the refrigerator was still well-stocked with his own.
Caine rose to his feet to respond, along with the others, to O’Garran’s summons.
Bannor remained seated. Kept reading. Conspicuously.
Ben motioned. “C’mon.”
“You can’t make me go.”
Caine had the sudden impression of Bannor as a quietly intransigent four-year-old. “I can make you go.”
“Yeah? How?”
“Miles O’Garran, your brother-in-arms, is in there with Gaspard. Alone. And you won’t do your part to rescue him?”
Bannor glared at Riordan, sighed, put down his book, and rose. “That wasn’t fair. Lead on.”
* * *
It took Gaspard a moment to notice that Caine and the others had entered the room.
Miles O’Garran came over quickly. “So, am I off-duty, now?”
“Uh…yes. Sure.”
O’Garran nodded tightly. “Good. I’ve got to get out of here.” He shouldered past the others, several of whom had seen him stand unflinching in the face of alien invaders almost twice his size.
“Monsieur—ah, pardon, Captain Riordan?”
Lead from the front. Caine approached Gaspard’s bed. “Yes, it’s me.”
“I am sorry I did not recognize you. My vision is…blurry. Is it possible that the cryogenic suspension has damaged my optic nerve or—?”
Riordan went closer. “Nothing to worry about, Ambassador. That is completely normal.” He knew he shouldn’t, but he added, “Didn’t you read the briefing on cryogenic suspension?”
“No. There was no time.”
— Unlikely, Caine observed silently—
“I must confess: the less I knew about what was going to happen to my body, the less I worried about being frozen as solid as an icicle.”
“Well, Ambassador, had you read the briefing materials, you would probably have worried a lot less. To begin with, you were not frozen.”
“Then why was I just removed from a cocoon originally designed to aid victims of hypothermia?”
“Because your core temperature was lowered to approximately zero point one to zero point five degrees centigrade. And to ensure against any control fluctuations, your blood plasma was replaced with an artificial surrogate containing a limited amount of glycol, genetically adapted from what Arctic cod produce when the surrounding waters drop below freezing.”
“Well, that would certainly explain the taste in my mouth.”
“Yes, that will persist for at least three or four days. Before your own blood was pumped back into you, a glycol cleanser replaced the surrogate to leach the glycol out of your cells. That takes a while, and even so, it’s not perfect. The glycol residue is what causes your blurred vision, as well as dulled sense of taste, numbness in the extremities, loss of short-term memories, and easy disorientation.”
“How long will I be so incapacitated?”
“We began your reanimation two days ago, so the symptoms will be gone the day after tomorrow. You’ll experience marginal sequelae and that lousy aftertaste for another half a week.”
Gaspard sighed. “Delightful.” He looked down his nose at the group of them, but this time, it was probably not arrogance but visual impairment which caused him to adopt what looked like a haughty posture. Actually, Caine reflected, the ambassador was behaving better than he had expected, particularly given O’Garran’s desperate dash for freedom.