Deepsix

"What then?"

He took a deep breath. Exhaled.

Several members of her team were waiting below in the area they'd newly designated O Deck for the Outsiders. "Let me get back to you."

He was back in five minutes. "All right," he said. A detail of the assembly blinked onto one of her screens. "The shafts are regularly spaced. Eight on the perimeter. Six on the i

The detail rotated, illustrating.

"If you look straight through it, there's only one position in which five shafts line up. We'll use one of the outer shafts from that position."

"Which one?"

"That's easy enough. One end of the assembly is pointed directly at the center of Deepsix. Have someone stand on top of the assembly. The shaft at the top that matches up will be the Alpha shaft. The one we use."

"How do we determine the top of the assembly?"

"Easy. Reckon from the planet. From the north pole. North is the top."

"Are we sure everyone will be able to find the north pole?"

"They won't have to. Instruct the pilot to align the shuttle so that the north pole equates to topside." His brow wrinkled. "I can't see any reason why it won't work."

"That's good, Gunther," she said.

He laughed. "That's why they pay me the big money." He thought about it some more. "Arrange things so all the teams make the mark at the same time. Don't forget the assembly's moving."

Beekman had just finished describing his solution to Marcel when his screen lit up. It was Mark Bentley, a fellow planetologist whose specialty was gas-giant cores. He was currently director of Moonbase's Farside Observatory, and a longtime close friend. In his spare time, Bentley was an accomplished amateur actor.

He looked unhappy. "I wouldn't want you to misunderstand, Gu

Beekman knew that. A substantial number of the experiments weren't even ru

"Call it off."

Beekman was shocked. "What?"

"Gu

"You always have been."

"The chance to watch this thing close up, it's too much to let get away. Gu

Beekman was surprised at his own reaction: Bentley was not necessarily wrong. From one point of view.

"Let it go," he continued. "You know what's going to happen: Something'll go wrong, the operation won't work, they'll all die anyhow, and we'll be left looking like idiots because we came all the way out here and got nothing."

"Mark, what would you have me do? We can't just write them off."

Bentley was quiet for a long minute. He knew. He understood it was not an easy decision. "I think they've been written off. By events. Somebody needs to point that out to Marcel."

Beekman felt a terrible weariness creeping up his insides.

"I'm not the only person here who feels this way, Gu

of getting them off, I'd say go ahead. I wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd be willing to go along with it. But this isn't a decent chance. It's a gesture. And that's all it is. It's being done so when we go back, Clairveau can say he did everything he could. You know as well as I do that you can't make this work."

"I think we can," he said.

Bentley continued as if he hadn't spoken. "We won't have another opportunity like this. Not in our lifetimes. Maybe not in the lifetime of the species."

Beekman didn't know what was right.

"How the hell are we going to explain this when we go home?" demanded Bentley. "No we didn't save them, and no we didn't see the event. We were there, but we were busy."

Beekman wondered how authority on Wendy ran in such a case. Beekman was the project director, charged with ensuring that they made maximum use of their time and resources to record and analyze the event. Marcel was the ship's captain.

"Talk to him. Clairveau'll listen to you."

XXVIII

I'm always interested when a large-scale project is successfully completed. My own research shows that, in any organization numbering more than twenty-two people, no single person can ever be fbund who completely understands what's going on.

— Gregory MacAllister, Gone to Glory

Hours to breakup (est): 44

Pindar and Shira climbed into a shuttle and watched the launch doors open. Outside, a few hundred meters,away, they could see the assembly. It looked like a group of unco

The patch over the pilot's pocket read bomar. "Klaus," he said stiffly by way of introduction. His ma

But the truth was Pindar barely paid any attention to the pilot He was captivated by the alien structure, its parallel tubes reaching toward infinity, vanishing finally in the stars.

Behind them the big luxury liner began to move. It accelerated, drew away, and its vast bulk dwindled and disappeared. It was, he knew, headed for the asteroid. Bomar advanced on the assembly, turned along its flank, braked, and coasted to a stop.

"Okay," he said. "You two are on."

It was an electric moment. Pindar activated his e-suit. Bomar

checked him, adjusted something on his back, and then looked at Shira. "Looks good," he said.

"Don't we get a go-pack?" asked Shira, eyeing the thruster harnesses stowed in the utility locker.

"Negative." Bomar's somber features softened with amusement. "You don't need one. Just do what you're supposed to and don't fall off."

"Right," said Pindar. His own voice seemed to have deepened somewhat.

Bomar opened the i

"Absolutely," said Shira.

"This is not something to smile about. Please get it right the first time. I don't want to have to do a lot of paperwork." He exhaled and looked like a man who wasn't used to accommodating amateurs. "They got your next of kin?"

That question had been on one of the forms. "Yes," said Shira.

"Keep it in mind while you're out there. All right, let's go."

Shira and Pindar had arrived at Station One. There was no brace there, nothing to hold the shafts together. They were 320 kilometers from the asteroid, the rock that had provided the counterweight to whatever space station had once been attached. Their assignment was simply to climb on board, select the correct shaft, and mark it.

Shira was not a classic beauty. Her ears were a little big, her nose a little long, and the e-suit handicapped her by pressing her rich brown hair down against her scalp. But she was nevertheless attractive in a way he couldn't formulate. She was self-possessed, methodical, seemed quite adroit at laughing at herself. And perhaps most enchanting of all, she showed no apprehension whatever about going outside. "Come on, Pindar," she said, picking up her utility pack and throwing it across one shoulder. She led the way into the airlock. When the i