"A pilot?"
"I thought I'd do that myself. All the pilots are technically due for downtime, anyway."
"Um. Actually, Doctor, your theory sounds a lot more believable than anything else I've heard this afternoon. When do you want to leave?"
"Just a minute, Colonel," Perez cut in before Hafner could speak. "I don't know whether you two cooked up this bafflegab smokescreen together or whether it was a solo effort, but it is not going to get you out of answering my charges of mismanagement."
Behind Perez, Hafner took a half step forward. "Unless you have a couple of advanced degrees I don't know about, I'd suggest you keep blanket assessments to yourself," he told the Hispanic shortly. "I know what I'm talking about, and I doubt very much that you do."
"And as to your ridiculous charges—" Meredith began.
"Why don't you come with us tomorrow, Cris?" Carmen interrupted suddenly.
All three men looked at her. "To Olympus?" Perez frowned. His eyes flicked to each of the others, as if looking for a trap. "Why?"
"Why not? It would give you the chance to see Peter test his theories. You could be sort of an unofficial observer for the Council."
"The Council doesn't need any observers there—unofficial or not," Meredith growled.
Perez sent a tight smile in the colonel's direction. "Your point is well taken, Miss Olivero," he said, bowing his head briefly. "I accept. With the doctor's permission, naturally."
Carmen shifted her eyes to Hafner. "Peter?"
Hafner's expression was that of a man facing a tax audit, but he shrugged fractionally. "As long as he stays out of the way," he said. "We're leaving before sunrise, though—I want to be ready to start climbing as soon as it's light enough."
Perez's smile this time had a trace of bitterness to it. "Those of us who work the fields are used to rising early."
"Um." Hafner's irritation seemed to soften a bit. "Well, be at Martello by four o'clock. Colonel, thank you for your time and permission on this. I hope we'll have some answers for you when we get back." He took Carmen's arm and together they left the office.
"You're invited out, too," Meredith told Perez.
"Of course." The Hispanic walked to the door, paused with his hand on the knob.
"But this matter is not settled, Colonel. Miss Olivero's efforts to sidetrack me have merely postponed the inevitable." Turning, he wrenched open the door and strode through it.
Deliver me from demagogues. With a sigh, Meredith let himself sag from the straight-backed military posture he'd adopted for Perez's benefit. Once, he'd thought this command would be the sure way to that long-awaited general's star; later, as the survey reports came in, his optimism had waned, replaced by grim determination. After today—
After today, he'd be lucky to keep his eagles. Or his butt.
But until the scapegoat-hunters in Congress got to him, he was still in charge; and neither hell, high water, Perez, nor Astra itself was going to change that.
Picking up the missing-items printout again, he began making a list for the Aurora to take back to Earth.
Chapter 9
The early morning air was relatively cool, but nothing, Perez decided, compared to the chill in the flyer's cockpit as the expedition burned through the sky toward Olympus. Carmen's scientist friend—Hafner—clearly still considered Perez an unnecessary bit of luggage, and had rather pointedly taken the copilot's seat, leaving Perez to rattle around in back with the three soldiers and Hafner's assistant. Perez hadn't argued; he'd simply folded out the emergency jumpseat behind Carmen's station and settled in, ignoring Hafner's order to find a safer seat.
The view was lousy, and as his presence seemed to put a damper on Hafner's talkativeness he didn't learn anything useful. But he'd long since learned that distinction was a vital ingredient of power, and for that reason alone he would willingly have put up with the jumpseat. Actually, he found the situation rather amusing as well.
Still, it was probably a good thing the trip was short.
The eastern sky was glowing but the sun not yet up when they landed south of Olympus's cone. The climbing equipment, Perez noted with secret relief, was the kind suited to straightforward trips up easy slopes—apparently the more advanced rock-climbing skills weren't going to be needed here. Whatever else Hafner might be, he was a decent organizer: ten minutes after landing, their route pointed out to them on map and terrain and the equipment distributed, they began to climb.
And five minutes later, they had their first casualty.
"How does it feel?" Hafner asked as he carefully removed Carmen's left boot and felt the skin below.
"About like a twisted ankle always feels," she snorted, tight-lipped with pain and anger. "Damn. Of all the stupid times to fall over my own feet."
"Better now than later," Hafner countered. "It'll be easier to get you down to the flyer from here."
"I'll be all right." She struggled to her feet and eased some weight onto her left foot. She managed not to wince, but she didn't leave the weight there long, either.
"Uh-uh." Hafner shook his head. "Nothing seems broken, hut you're not going to be walking on that foot for a while, let alone climbing mountains." His eyes swept the group; settled briefly on Perez, then moved to one of the soldiers. "Sadowski, help Miss Olivero back to the flyer and stay with her."
"Yes, sir." The man stepped forward and put his arm around her waist.
Reluctantly, Carmen shifted her grip from Hafner's arm to Sadowski's shoulder.
"All right. But keep your radios on, okay? I want to hear what you're doing."
"Sure," Hafner nodded. He waited until the two of them had taken a few steps downslope before turning and starting up again.
They climbed for another half hour in relative silence, most of the conversation between Hafner and his assistant, Al Nichols. The technical jargon was annoyingly cryptic, but Perez got the impression they were making a catalog of anomalies to be found on and about the volcano. Apparently, Hafner's contention that Olympus was something other than it seemed was still open to debate. A
sliver of sunlight broke the horizon, and with the official coming of day Perez felt his step lightening, raising his spirits along with it. A southerly wind began whispering at his back, as if Astra had noticed the tiny band and was offering her help. At this rate they'd be at the summit in no time—
He almost bumped into Hafner as the geologist abruptly stopped. "What's up?" he asked, his growing contentment changing to irritation at the near-collision.
Hafner turned, and the look on his face made Perez's eyes narrow. "What's wrong?"
"Don't you feel it?" Hafner shot glances at the other three, now grouped around them. "Don't any of you feel it? We're light—we're too light."
"We are climbing a mountain—" Perez began.
"Al—stopwatch," Hafner cut him off. He dug a heavy-looking hammer from his pack and was holding it in front of him and a few centimeters above his head by the time Nichols had the watch ready. "This is just about two meters up; Astra's gravity is about three percent under Earth's"—he tapped his wrist calculator—"so it should take about point six five seconds. Ready; on one: three, two, one."
Perez had never paid much attention to things like this; but even to him the hammer's fall looked somehow wrong. Nichols's slightly choked report merely confirmed it: "Point eight two."
Someone swore gently. "Try it again," Hafner said. "Three, two, one."
This time it took point eight five second to hit the ground.
"You must have calculated wrong," one of the soldiers suggested.
"No," Nichols said. His eyes were darting everywhere, squinting when he faced south into the wind. "No, I checked his numbers. For it to take point eight second to fall, it'd have to start three meters up. We're not making an error that big."