Merchants in Freedom Read online

  “The answer to life, the universe and everything?” she quipped. “I haven’t the faintest idea. If we knew, we wouldn’t be going down there at all. We wouldn’t need to. All I know is that Commander Rogers is set on it, and he’s probably got a point. Anything the Tyrants are this desperate to retrieve has to be worth going after.”

  “And if they decide to turn up while Commander Winter is in the middle of his ice fishing expedition?”

  “Then we do whatever we have to do,” she replied. She knelt down beside the final charge, and reached for the controls. “Charge Eighteen, running diagnostic sequence.” She frowned, tapped a button, and said, “I’m getting a cautionary warning on the arming subroutine.”

  “Checking,” Volkov said. “Looks like some sloppy work on the install. The backups are fine, but given that we’ve got the time, I’ll reinstall the software. It shouldn’t take more than a minute.” As the engineer worked, Mendoza looked around, spotting a solitary figure on the perimeter of the camp, his suit battered and beaten, worn by months of constant use. Rogers. He’d come back down with the first mission teams, and despite a series of strong suggestions from the medical staff, he’d stayed down here until now.

  She glanced at Volkov, then walked over to Rogers, moving to stand beside him, the two of them looking out over the endless wasteland, a sea of infinite whiteness that seemed to reach all the way to the horizon.

  “It’s strange,” Rogers said. “I spent months longing for the day when someone would come and rescue me, get me out of this nightmare, and now that day has come, I don’t feel as though I want to leave. This place feels like home.” Turning to her, he said, “I’ve got a house in Salt Lake City. I can barely remember what it looks like.”

  With a smile, she replied, “After everything you’ve been through, it’s going to take some time for you to get over it. You can’t expect to just brush off the dust and get right back into the game.”

  “It’s not as though we’re going back to Earth, though,” he replied. “I heard what you said to Volkov, and you’re almost certainly right. We’re going in. We’re going to head to the enemy homeworld and throw ourselves against the defenses, on the chance that we might find that one little chink in their armor, their one weakness. Something we can exploit in the hope that we can bring this war to an end.” Shaking his head, he added, “War. Hard to think. When I saw the briefing tapes…”

  “It’s been hard. You’ve had it harder.”

  “Not true,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here on my butt while the rest of you have been fighting for their lives. Based on the casualty reports, my crew would probably have died anyway. This damned mission just advanced their passage to Heaven by a few months.” He looked at her again, his eyes cold, and added, “It was all a lie. This mission was never intended to succeed. I don’t even know why they bothered to send us.”

  “We don’t know that for a fact. We don’t know anything about the situation on Earth. It’s possible that we’re worrying about nothing…”

  “It’s far more likely that you are quite right to be worried, and that Earth really has been suborned by the Tyrants.” Looking back at the endless expanse of ice, he said, “Maybe we already lost the war, and we don’t even know it. Did you think about that? Maybe all of this ended weeks, months ago. There’d be no way to tell, not without running scans on everybody.”

  “We can’t think that way, Commander,” she said. “There’s a way to beat them. There’s got to be a way to beat them. We’re going to find it, and we’re going to win. That’s how this story ends.”

  “You sound as though you are more concerned about convincing yourself about that than convincing me,” he replied. “Maybe there’s an answer here. I was so certain of that. Certain that there was some sort of solution to the puzzle buried here under the ice, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe all of this is for nothing, and we’re just the last kick of the corpse of humanity before it finally meets its rest.”

  Placing a hand on his shoulder, Mendoza said, “We’re not finished yet. Not by a long shot. We know the Tyrants can be beaten. We’ve taken them down twice. All we need is to make it three and we’ve won this war.”

  “Ronnie?” Volkov said. “We’re almost ready.”

  “On my way,” she replied, taking a last look at Rogers before returning to her work. She looked down at the device, and said, “Charge Eighteen, set and locked. Check the circuits.”

  “All nominal,” Volkov said. “Ready for detonation. How’s Commander Rogers doing?”

  “About as well as could be expected given the circumstances,” she replied. “I can’t imagine the sort of hell he must have gone through. I can’t even begin to guess how he must be feeling, and to be honest, I’m not sure I’d ever want to try.” She sighed, then said, “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

  “No argument here. This isn’t the sort of place I’d like to spend my leave.” He paused, then said, “Think we could call it Ortiz Crater?”

  “What, the detonation site?”

  “We’ll need to put something on the map, and even after it all freezes over again, there’ll still be some trace here afterwards, right?”

  “I’ll talk to Commander Winter. I’m sure he’ll approve it.” She paused, looked around the landscape, and continued, “Oddly appropriate name.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mendoza tapped a button on her sleeve, and said, “This is Technical Officer Mendoza. All personnel return to the shuttle on the double. We’re leaving the planet. Last call for Xenophon.”

  Volkov led the way to the waiting shuttle, parked neatly on the ice close by, a pair of technicians racing into the airlock with unnecessary haste. Detonation wasn’t scheduled for more than an hour, and all of the charges had safety features built in anyway. Just in case anyone did anything stupid like stay behind in the middle of a multi-megaton explosion.

  They’d be setting a record. The largest deliberate non-nuclear explosion in history. It had taken Xenophon’s fabricators, as well as those of the rest of the task force, working overtime to get them ready, forced them to cannibalize dozens of other charges to assemble the shaped devices. Even then, it had been a close thing.

  It was going to be one hell of a bang. Risky as hell. They were certain that it would crack the ice, that much was obvious. With this much energy focused on the fissures, there was no question that they’d reach the ocean, but as soon as the water below was exposed to the freezing air, it would begin to ice over.

  On Callisto, it had taken five years to drill a hole down to the subsurface water, and two fusion reactors worked around the clock to power the heating elements that kept it open at all times, allowing researchers the access they needed to complete their work. The same project had failed on Triton, a power failure undoing months of work, forcing the closure of the installation. A lot of careers had been brought to a premature end that day.

  Simply blowing a huge hole in the ice was the ultimate brute force approach to the problem. It wouldn’t last for hours. Minutes was the best they could hope for, and the hastily constructed submersible would have almost no time to complete the improvised mission and return to the surface.

  She climbed into the shuttle, turning to look at Rogers, still standing alone on the perimeter. Gesturing at one of the nervous technicians to go after him, she walked into the cabin, taking the vacant pilot’s seat. It felt strange not to have Ortiz at the controls, and Volkov frowned as she took the helm, tugging off her helmet.

  “Relax. I’ve been flying shuttles since I was fifteen, and I’ve never had an accident yet.”

  “Once is enough,” he replied, throwing switches to begin the pre-flight procedures. “He’s still out there.”

  “I sent Hargraves after him.”

  “I’m sure the kid just loved that. He’s too damned jumpy. They all are.”

  “With that much explosive sitting out there on the ice, I can’t find it in myself to blame them too much for that.”


  “Still, there’s no point getting worked up about it.” He reached for a series of controls, and added, “All system checks complete. Ready for takeoff as soon as the last of our passengers are aboard.” He looked around at the remains of the base, over to the right, and said, “I guess we’re going to finish what Nick started.”

  “It’s going to be one hell of a monument to his memory.”

  “That it is.” He turned to the rear, and said, “Looks like we’re fully loaded. Want to run final check?”

  “Doing it,” she replied, looking at the local sensors. There was no sign of life out there, no heat signatures at all. Everyone was on board, just as they should be. It was just about possible that there might still be a few Tyrants out there somewhere, though based on their past experience, she doubted they would have long survived the destruction of the network upon which they depended.

  “Initiating launch procedures,” she said, firing the lateral thrusters with a light tap, sending them slowly rising from the surface, weaving in the crosswind as she pulled the nose up, throwing the throttle full-open to send them soaring into the waiting sky, leaving a trail of melted ice behind them. She took a last look back at the empty wasteland to the rear, eighteen winking lights denoting the location of the charges that were destined to tear the surface asunder in the near future.

  “Have you seen the piece of junk they’ve hammered together for the mission?” Volkov asked, as Mendoza guided the shuttle onto its orbital path. “It looks like something a group of kids would throw together in shop class. I don’t know what Moore thinks she’s doing.”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” she replied, turning to glance at her co-pilot. “And I’d ride it in a cold second if I had the chance, and so would you.”

  “Me? No way. I’m the cautious type. I don’t believe in suicide missions.” He looked down at the surface again, and added, “There’s no future in them. None at all.” He paused, a faint smile on his face, and said, “I might have been talked into it with a certain crazy man in the pilot’s seat.”

  She smiled, reached for her microphone, and said, “Shuttle Nine to Xenophon. Shuttle Nine to Xenophon. Do you read me?”

  “Reading you loud and clear,” Bianchi replied. “I’ve been monitoring the telemetry, but for the purposes of the official record…”

  “Understood. For the record, all charges are set and secure, all systems are ready. All personnel have been evacuated from the surface and the site is clean. You can launch the submersible as soon as you are ready, Commander.”

  “Thank you, Shuttle. We’ll be commencing the operation as soon as we pass over on our next orbit. Request that you get into a lower orbit and set up for an overflight. We might as well get all of the information that we possibly can out of this, and it’ll help us work out just how long we’re going to have until Hell freezes over again.”

  “Roger that, Xenophon, will comply. We’ll set up a telemetry link so you can get the best possible sensor pickup upon detonation. Shuttle out.” Turning to Volkov, she said, “Not so bad after all. We might not be on the mission, but we’re still going to get front-row seats.”

  “Just like my Uncle Gregor. He won front-row seats to a Dodgers game one time. They were really nice. Even paid for the operation.”

  “Operation?”

  “His teeth got knocked out by a ball that got through the protective screen. One in a million chance. They even let him keep the ball afterwards.” Glancing at Mendoza, he added, “There’s a moral buried in that story.”

  “Not very deeply,” she said. “We’ll be careful.”

  “I hope so,” he replied. “My uncle never could eat steak afterwards. I only hope we get off so lucky.”

  Chapter 12

  Winter climbed into the cramped vehicle, ducking to avoid banging his head on the hatch. The hastily-constructed submersible was unlike anything he had ever ridden before, the cockpit of an enclosed buggy with a hardened sphere wrapped around it, a single, seemingly ludicrously small propeller on the back for propulsion and a pair of ballast tanks strapped on either side. The top held a standard docking clamp, though with the hatch removed.

  As he settled into the couch, Moore leaned in, and said, “As soon as you’re sure everything is normal, we’re going to weld you in. That means we’re going to have to cut you out once this party is over.” She paused, and said, “I need your formal approval to do this, Commander. It’s all got to go on the record for the frankly inevitable Court of Inquiry.”

  “If I live to face it,” Winter replied, “it will only be as a result of your outstanding work. I approve, Lieutenant. Seal us in.”

  “Hey, one second,” a technician said, tossing in a small holdall. “Two flasks of coffee and some sandwiches. Might get cold down there.”

  Morgan looked at the food, then up at the young engineer, saying, “Thanks for that, Spaceman, but if we’re down there long enough to have lunch, something has gone seriously wrong. Are the charges all set, Lieutenant? Everything set down there?”

  “Mendoza sent the word on that a few minutes ago. We’ll be getting everything set shortly. It should be one hell of an explosion down there.” Shaking her head, she added, “We’ve got so many uncertainties, Major. We haven’t got a concrete idea just how long we’re going to have under the ice. Our best guess suggests thirty-two minutes, plus or minus five.” She paused, then continued, “That assumes a shuttle hovering over with its thrusters, melting what we are hoping will be a fairly thin surface layer.”

  “Fairly thin?” Morgan asked.

  “The fact of that matter is, Major, that we really don’t know either way just what is going to happen when we hit the button. We can make a series of assumptions, but we just don’t have the people or the equipment to do any better than that. I’m afraid we’re just going to have to wait and see.” She gestured at the hatch, and added, “We’re ready to launch as soon as we’ve sealed you in. Transit is estimated at about fifteen minutes. Detonation two minutes before landing. We can abort at any time until we let you drop.”

  “Last chance to change your mind, Joe,” Winter offered.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” He smiled, struggling with his straps, and looked up at Moore, saying, “Break out the welding torches, Lieutenant. Let’s get this done.”

  With a nod, the engineer slammed the hatch closed, and a loud whine sounded through the confines of the cabin as she quickly began her work, a resounding report following from above as the docking clamps locked into position. Winter reached for the communicator, throwing a control to put the broadcast onto the ceiling speakers.

  “Winter to Bianchi. We’re ready for the drop.”

  “Roger that. You are cleared to launch.”

  It felt strange flying as nothing more than cargo. The shuttle struggled through the hatch, heavy under the unbalanced load, pausing for a second to deploy the one-shot heat shield that would protect the submersible from the stresses of atmospheric entry. Assuming that all went well. An assumption that neither of the people sitting in the submersible were comfortable making.

  The engines roared, the shuttle cruising into position, setting into attitude for the safest possible landing. Winter tapped a control, bringing up a view from an orbiting probe, zooming the image to get the best possible shot of the landing zone. The eighteen winking lights were just visible, the charges ready to do their work, to burn a hole in the ice large enough for them to slide through. A countdown clock flickered into life on the viewscreen, counting down the seconds remaining before detonation, a number falling awfully rapidly. Winter settled into the couch, glancing across at his friend, his hands resting on the controls.

  There had been no time for training or testing. No time to run the usual array of simulations before the mission. Just a brief familiarization with the basic controls. Most of them were familiar enough, minor modifications of systems they’d both used a thousand times, but there were sufficient changes
to make the cabin seem strange, regardless of the cramped condition.

  “All systems go, as far as I can tell,” Morgan said. “Life support is good for eighteen hours. Doesn’t seem like much.”

  “We had to keep the weight down, Joe, and besides, if this goes wrong, we’re not going to need any longer than that. If we’re not back on Xenophon long before that runs out, then we’re not coming back at all.”

  “True, I guess, but there’s no need to dwell on it,” he replied with a smile. “You ever done anything like this before?”

  “There aren’t a hundred people alive who have,” Winter said. “I don’t think there’s been a manned under-ice expedition in years.”

  Tapping the console, Winter said, “This is what I signed up for.”

  “Ice fishing?” Morgan quipped.

  “No, damn it, strange new worlds, all of that. Adventure. We’re doing what nobody has ever done before. We’re going to see things no human has ever seen, and in all likelihood, never will again. That means something. Something special, something extraordinary. Something wonderful. Even in all of this misery and despair.”

  “Christ, I wish I had that sort of faith,” Morgan said.

  “Don’t you feel any of that?” Winter asked.

  Morgan looked at the viewscreen, and replied, “Maybe I did once. A long, long time ago. It got comprehensively beaten out of me by the system, a piece at a time.” He paused, then added, “Perhaps it isn’t too late to change, though. I envy you. Not your job. Your attitude, despite all of this.”

  “One life, one death, Joe. All that matters is how we live that life. Sooner or later, we’re all going to take the final step.” Looking around the cabin, he added, “This, this is how I wanted to live. And when all of this is over, this is how I’m going to live, and I don’t care what anyone else says about it. Maybe I’ll just point Xenophon out into the darkness and see what’s there.”

  “Xenophon to Shuttle,” Bianchi’s voice said, echoing over the ceiling speakers. “You’re entering the upper atmosphere now. We’re advancing firing time by eighty-five seconds. That will trigger detonation in seventy-five seconds, mark. Hang on. If our figures are even remotely correct, this is going to get a little rough.”