That got on Bruno’s nerves: Muddy’s tone was, as ever, grating and whiny and filled with terrified self-pity. And yet, there he was, acting to save the Queendom while Bruno himself sniveled and sobbed on the couch. How humiliating! How base! The thought only made him cry harder.
“Mercury isn’t a small place,‘’ Vivian Rajmon observed.
“Indeed,” Muddy said, “and we’ve only a few minutes to decide where to begin.”
“We look for deep-black solar collectors, you said. Super-absorbers?”
“C-c-correct. But even those will be small, compared to the size of a world. Even with the best sensors and algorithms, we are hindered by simple geometry. Searching the entire surface could take hours.”
“Hours,” Cheng Shiao brooded. “With Sykes ready to open fire upon us at any time. I’m surprised he hasn’t already!”
“Perhaps he isn’t looking,” Vivian said. “Perhaps he’s busy hatching some new villainy. ”Then she paused, and came over to Bruno’s bedside. She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed. “It must be hard, Declarant: all of us drawing upon you so desperately, in your hour of need. Even your own duplicate is doing it! But we’ll be there very soon. Will you join us for a moment?”
Finally, at these words, Bruno felt the flow of tears begin to ebb. Not so much because Vivian had requested it— although he’d had a little soft spot in his heart for her since she was eleven years old—but because he didn’t want to arrive at their destination and have Marlon see him weep. Absurd, of course, since Marlon had probably seen Muddy weep for twenty continuous years, had in fact coaxed tears from a Bruno until he became a Muddy, over and over and over again. But he supposed the mind didn’t need to work rationally, so long as it worked.
“Oh, forgive me.” He sniffed, wiping his eyes and nose with a sleeve.
“Of course,” she said gently. “Of course we do.”
He consoled himself with one thought: that the Sabadell-Andorra Earthquake had been an accident, an act of God. Inevitable, really, and buried back in an age when death— especially by accident—was still the norm. These more recent deaths were something else entirely: caused. He glanced up: Mercury was fully visible, already as large as a mottled gray apple in the view, and growing visibly.
He sat up and tried wanly to bring some of the iron back into his voice. “Do… forgive me, please. The loss of so many, including Her Majesty, has… well. Yes. You know as well as I. But of course we’ll be to the planet in a few minutes, unbalanced or no. An unfortunate property of time is that it can’t be made to wait.”
Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said, “Our enemy, of course, has the same problem. Things are moving quickly. If we’re as quick, we may very well land safely. Visually, Marlon will be looking straight into the sun for us, which ought to confuse even quite sophisticated sensors. And gravitationally… well, let’s just say this ship has an unusual—and decidedly minimal—signature. And if he really isn’t looking, if he does presume us dead, we may be able to slip right in.”
“He’ll see us in orbit,” Shiao protested, “if we’re forced to scour the surface for signs of him.”
Bruno, still sniffling a bit, pinched himself on the chin. “Hmm. Well. We needn’t search the entire planet, surely. He must have his energy converters on the daylight side right now, after all. And his beam weapons as well, since they can’t fire through the planet.” He sat up straighten “In fact, he must have had collectors on the daylight side continuously for the past several weeks. Either that, or very, very large batteries, and since the former is much easier…”
“What’s to say the power source is near the base?” Shiao asked skeptically.
“Efficiency,” Deliah said, ticking the answers off on her fingers. “Safety. Cost. Time. Light-lag. Marlon may be a good faker, but in private he is—demonstrably!—not a very patient person. He’s gone to a lot of trouble over this, but I doubt he’s gone to any extra trouble, or put up with any suboptimal equipment, or otherwise made things harder on himself than they absolutely need to be.”
Fighting dizzy nausea, Bruno nodded. “Indeed. I quite agree.”
Muddy was huddled at one of the hypercomputer interfaces, tapping figures in madly. “Mercury completes a revolution every fifty-eight days, an orbit every eighty-eight. Daylight lasts eight and a half weeks at the equator, so we’re looking pole to pole in an arc from the eastern terminator to thirty degrees west of the noon line. But to be consistent with observations, the g-gravity lasers couldn’t be within, er, thirty degrees of the north pole, whereas from the south…”
Bruno looked up again, saw the planet there in the bow window, fully illuminated from edge to edge like a full but strangely altered moon because they were flying toward it almost straight up out of the sun, their grapples locked on the planet’s equator. Indeed, the planet was as wide as a dinner platter, and widening rapidly.
“The base should be’s-s-somewhere in here,” Muddy said, and on the window a green, crosshatched area the shape of a kidney bean appeared, covering less than a fifth of the planet’s sunward face. “Initiating telescopic survey.”
Shiao glared up anxiously through the window. “How long will this take? Should we think about plotting an orbit solution?”
“I am still experiencing widespread malfunction,” Sabadell-Andorra answered. “Gravitational stresses have fractured millions of my wellstone fibers.”
“Oh, God,” Deliah said. “Is hull containment in danger?”
“Not imminently. Unless there are further stresses. But my computing power and reliability are markedly degraded.”
“Oh, well, no problem about that.” Deliah’s voice dripped irony.
Then Muddy spoke up. “Survey complete. There are a number of reflective prominences right here, surrounded by a bank of’s-s-superabsorbers.”
On the window, superimposed over the planet’s surface and the bean-shaped highlight, a red X appeared.
“Yes? Goodness, lock the grapples to it,” Bruno said, his blood rising. Part of him hadn’t really expected to find anything—their chain of suppositions was rather long—and another part had expected, long before now, to be burned out of the sky by some silly weapon or other. But logic existed for a reason, because it carried you inexorably toward truth. When properly applied, of course, but by now that was a matter of long habit.
“Grapples may harm the base,” Deliah said excitedly. “Disrupting local gravity, interfering with his grav-projection mechanisms… It could be just the edge we need.”
“A double edge,” Shiao cautioned. “It’ll alert him to our presence, and in fact pinpoint our exact location.”
“Irrelevant,” Muddy said. “Unless we mean to d-destroy the base using ourselves as a projectile, we must begin deceleration at once.”
Indeed, moments later the gravity switched off, and everyone went flying into the air as the Sabadell-Andorra wheeled around them, orienting its grapples toward the sun. Above, the window dimmed again to prevent the sunlight from searing them all. Then gravity returned, and they all came crashing back down in an assortment of uncomfortable ways.
“Blast,” Bruno said, pointing vaguely. “Everyone into your couches, please. Unfold those, yes. We now have—alas!— enough seats to accommodate everyone.”