“All right, all right. I didn’t ask for a lecture.” Dag Korin raised bushy eyebrows at Chan. “Chatty devil, this one — always has been. So what do you think? Land on the off-shore shelf?”
“If we can. But how do we maneuver to get us there? We can’t use our drive under water.”
“We weren’t told that was a problem, so I assume know-it-all has it figured out.” Korin again pressed the button to transmit an oral command. “Computer? Go ahead, dump the goddamn shields.”
THAT ACTION HAS ALREADY BEEN INITIATED FOLLOWING YOUR EARLIER APPROVAL.
“Then take us to where the Stellar Group ships are sitting out the storm. Put us down near one of them — not the Angel ship, though. I can’t stand the sight of those bloody upstart artichokes.”
THE WATER IS TOO SHALLOW FOR THIS SHIP AT THE LOCATION OF THE PIPE-RILLA VESSEL. WE CANNOT APPROACH CLOSER THAN NINE HUNDRED METERS TO THE SHORE. HOWEVER, BEING IN WATER ALSO HAS ADVANTAGES SINCE THE SHIP IS PROTECTED FROM WAVE ACTION. WHEN THE STORM SUBSIDES YOU MAY BE ABLE TO LAUNCH A TWO-PERSON AIR-BREATHING PINNACE FROM OUR UPPER LEVEL. WARNING: THE EXTENT OF POSSIBLE DAMAGE TO THE PINNACE IS UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME.
“Fine. Go ahead and set us down in the best place you can find. I want to launch a couple of unmanned orbiters, too, as soon as possible.” The General turned back to Chan. “That computer talks too much, but in this case it has the right idea. Always keep your head down until you know the situation. Even if we had weapons and our shields in place we’d still be vulnerable. We’re like a shark on land or a tiger under water — misplaced. Staying alive is about the best we can do. I need an airborne overview.”
Chan nodded. “If the pinnace hasn’t been too damaged we’ll have plenty of volunteers to fly it as soon as the storm lets up. Who do you think, Deb?”
They had hardly spoken during the hours while they waited for the Link transition, but in those hours their relationship had changed. It seemed natural now to ask her for advice and assistance.
She thought for a few moments. “Chrissie and Tarbush? They’ve been working together for years, and they’re the best observers we have.”
“That was my thought, too. We should find them aft. All right, General?”
“Hell, they’re your people, Dalton. Do what you need to do. I’ve got my hands full trying to make sense of this garbage. Computer, what sort of a halfassed picture do you call that ?” Korin gestured at the main screen, which showed a bizarre undersea terrain etched in black and silver.
WHAT YOU ARE SEEING IS AN IMAGE CONSTRUCTED USING THE ULTRASOUND RETURN SIGNAL. THERE IS NO WAY TO GENERATE TRUE COLOR FROM SINGLE-FREQUENCY SOUND DATA. WOULD YOU LIKE FALSE COLOR TO BE ASSIGNED ON THE BASIS OF IMAGE LOCAL TEXTURE MEASURES?
“How the devil do I know, until I’ve seen it? Give me another minute to look at this one.”
As Deb and Chan left the room, the view on the big screen began to change. The ship was beginning a slow rotation, heading east and then north toward the coastal shelf. Like a great crippled whale, the Hero’s Return sought a haven on the seabed.
Chan took a final look back. Dag Korin was scowling again, hunched over his console and arguing with the ship’s computer. Tully O’Toole stared open-mouthed at Elke Siry, in open admiration.
And Elke?
She alone of the people in the room — probably of all the people on the Hero’s Return — seemed happy , her attention fixed on the torrent of data flowing across the screens. Her expression remained one of blissful exaltation.
Chan had been exactly right in his assessment of the ship’s computer. It controlled almost every aspect of the Hero’s Return operations, and it could do almost anything — except knowingly risk the lives of humans.
The shedding of the massive defensive shields was slow and systematic, accompanied at every step by calculations of the ship’s new density distribution, center of mass, and barycenter. The curve toward shallower water was gentle, an arc many kilometers across, imposing minimal stresses on the ship’s structure and auxiliary thrustors. Storm conditions at the surface were evaluated constantly, together with more analyses of the blue sun that now appeared occasionally through breaks in the cloud cover.
The humans on board knew nothing about any of this, nor did they need to. Life support and life protection involves a million functions, most of them as essential, automatic and unnoticed as the flow of blood through a crew member’s arteries and veins.
The computer was also able to obtain readings from the air-breathing pinnace fixed to the outer hull. The little craft, as feared, had been fatally damaged in shedding the defensive shields, and would no longer fly. The computer began its countdown for the other requested action. Two unmanned orbiters were to be launched from the depths. Their mission: to monitor the surface and sky of the planet and return their findings to the ship. The General had placed no restriction on the timing of the action, except to say it should be done as soon as the storm eased sufficiently. He knew that the computer was better able than any human on board to decide appropriate values for “sufficiently.”
Three hours later, the Hero’s Return sprawled its cumbersome mass along the seabed, a little less than six hundred meters away from the Finder . The storm still raged, but on the seabed all was peaceful. Darkness was approaching, above and in the depths. The computer again checked the status of all onboard systems, then it switched to rest-period protocols.
The recreation center on the Hero’s Return had been designed on a large scale. Three hundred crew members could play there, with robot opponents if no humans were available, at everything from chess to table tennis to sumo wrestling.
The group around Chan Dalton had tucked itself away into one dimly lit corner. Business was over. The situation on the ship had been reviewed and reviewed again. Only one thing seemed clear: weather permitting, Chrissie Winger and Tarbush Hanson — to their delight and Danny Casement’s mild irritation — would take an air-breathing pinnace up and out at first light.
Danny’s half-hearted “I didn’t come all this way just to sit around” had been countered by Deb Bisson’s “All which way? We don’t know where we are yet — and we won’t, until someone can take a look at the star patterns.”
“It’s only a two-person craft, Danny,” Chrissie added. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of work for everyone once we get out of this steel can. We have a whole planet to explore. When we started out we didn’t know if humans could live anyplace in the Geyser Swirl.”
“The pinnace could hold three. They often do.”
Danny was standing up. Chrissie went across to him, looped one arm in his and the other in Tarbush Hanson’s, and led them toward the door. “Say it all again, Danny. Maybe you can talk the Tarb and me into your coming with us.”
When they were outside the recreation hall Danny Casement stopped and stared at Chrissie with suspicion. “Why do you want to talk out here? Chan and Deb need to hear anything we agree to. Do you really mean there’s a chance I can convince you?”
“Not in a million years. Sorry, Danny, but it will be just the Tarb and me in the pinnace.” Chrissie took his hand in hers. “You’re a big success with women, I know that. But sometimes I wonder how, because you can be as dense as Pipe-Rilla shielding.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. Don’t feel too bad, though, because Tarb is no better.” Chrissie nodded her head toward the closed door of the recreation hall. “Back there, couldn’t you tell that Chan and Deb were just itching for us to leave? Couldn’t you see that things have changed between them?”