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  “And JC Lecanard supervised the building of the ship. Don’t tell me he didn’t add a few little secrets. That champagne he produced last night wasn’t in the manifest. Where’s he got the guns hidden? Have you looked? Control tells me there aren’t any.”

  “It tells me the same.”

  “But?” He knew her well enough to know that there was more.

  Her smile was thin. “There’s a table in his stateroom with a thick top but no drawer in it—wasted space. I can’t find a hidden catch.”

  Seth desperately wanted to hug her. “Thank you … ma’am.” JC’s big cabin was the one place he had never been inside and could never enter. All the others had, but the door wouldn’t open for him. “Ask Hanna to take a look, mm?”

  “I already did, love. Says she can’t find anything either.” Jordan spun around and walked away. She turned at the door. “I did make a mistake tonight. To reverse it now would make it worse. I’m sorry, lover, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. You are by far the best stud aboard, you know.”

  That wasn’t much of a compliment when his competition was two herms and a man forty years his senior.

  * * *

  By the time the crew trooped in for a breakfast, Seth had shaved and showered and dressed. Shorts and tops were color-coded, and his were green. The others were still looking more than a shade under last night’s weather but too excited to sleep longer. Instead of eating in the mess, they carried their food into the control room to listen to Control’s commentary and stare at the holographs while they ate. Maria guessed at the odd axial tilt the moment she saw the cloud patterns, which were all wrong. Much jabber about sideways worlds followed. Apparently several planets with freaky axial tilts had turned out to be profitable, Lorraine especially.

  Seth’s excitement was back. Now he could admit that there was fear mixed in with it, but it was the thrill-fear he knew before fights, and it felt good. Having already eaten, he wandered around with the coffee pot, just listening to the chatter. Even old space hands JC and Reese were bubbling. Jordan seemed to have forgotten their worries for the time being.

  He knew them all well by now and respected most of them very much. JC, Jordan, and Hanna were superlatively good at what they had contributed so far. JC was still a bully and insecure enough to demand formal respect, but he had done an incredible job in organizing the expedition, sneaking advance notice of the hot prospect, and ramming through the preparations in time to use it. He had even been shrewd enough to buy the Armada license as a secondary target, and few entrepreneurs would have managed to talk hard-bitten backers into that. Seth knew Jordan better than he had ever known anyone, and if it were possible to think of marriage to a herm, he would be dreaming of that now.

  Hanna? Hanna was a brilliant navigator. She had a temper, but would always apologize ten minutes after losing it, and she had a needle-sharp wit. The other two had not had a chance to apply their skills yet. Maria he liked very much, and Reese he detested.

  As a bed partner Maria demanded a lot of work and took sex too seriously. She was a fireball when she got going, after all the babble about respect and commitments. And yet, for sheer animal fun, Jordan beat her hands down. Random sex in so small a group should have triggered mayhem, but Jordan’s skill and training kept them all one reasonably happy family.

  Reese, the biologist, was the proof that every family tree has its sap. They were as snobbish as JC and as waspish as an August picnic. They were hypocritical, too. When male, he expected sexual favors, when female she refused to give them, at least to Seth, although JC claimed to have bedded her.

  JC laid down his fork and put the planetologist on the spot. “Maria? Obviously there is life on Cacafuego. Nothing else could put that much oxygen in the atmosphere. So what can possibly have inspired Galactic to declare it dangerous and post a yellow beacon?”

  She stabbed at him with eyes dark and dangerous as obsidian daggers.

  “Radioactivity?” she said. “Cacafuego is abnormally dense, the second densest planet ever recorded. The core is denser than iron, meaning it must contain siderophile elements.”

  “You saying Cacafuego has a heart of gold?” Hanna inquired mildly.

  “Gold is only one element that combines easily with iron. I was thinking of high-weight radioactive elements. If the core is rich in those, then we may expect to find such material in the crust also, exuding radon gas into the atmosphere, making it toxic to terrestrial life. Or the stellar neighborhood may be dangerous—there’s an unpredictable Wolf-Rayet star within a parsec. Or the element mix at the surface may be non-standard: arsenic, cadmium are both toxic and carcinogenic, to name two. There are too many wolves in the forest to start speculating now, Commodore.”

  JC sank back, muttering that none of those factors would endanger a very brief visit. Given half a chance he might start retelling his story of the man-eating mushrooms found by Goede Hoop. “Reese? Any theories?”

  At times the biologist seemed to hold the commodore in almost as much contempt as he did Seth. “Far too many. I could list a hundred factors that can create biological problems on a life-rich world. We don’t have a canary with us. That’s what prospectors are for.”

  Very funny! No one smiled.

  Reese’s sullen grumpiness suggested he was apprehensive—that was a snob word for scared. If Seth agreed to brave the killer planet, the astrobiologist should go with him. Failure to do so might void their contract. Or possibly Reese had decided to change gender and was already having changeover pains, for shrinking a penis by drug-induced apoptosis was no mean ordeal. Why would they do that now? Then Seth saw that JC might find it harder to order a woman into danger than a man. A sneaky cop-out, but only to be expected of Reese Platte.

  As Seth was refilling his coffee cup, JC said, “How does it look to you now, Prospector? Think you can handle that 1.6 gee gravity?”

  “Yes, sir. For a short stay. But the weather bothers me.”

  “Weather?”

  “Storms. Dense atmosphere, high insolation gradient, fast rotation.”

  JC asked what the length of the day was, and Control became pedantic, as it did when human language was exposed as imprecise. The length of the day varied with latitude, for at the poles it was the same as a year, 250.3 terrestrial days. The sidereal period was 19.4 standard hours, so roughly 315 rotations per planetary year.

  “Fast!” Maria said. “And high insolation because it’s closer to its primary than Earth is to Sol. Is why it has all those cyclonic storms.”

  Reese barked, “Oh, damn! Control, what sort of surface winds do you calculate?”

  —Preliminary measurements suggest velocities in excess of 200 kilometers per hour are commonplace, roughly equivalent to Category Four hurricanes. Higher winds are certainly possible.

  “Ha! You can’t put the shuttle down in that, can you, Muscles?”

  “I can put it down, sir. Keeping it down will be the problem.”

  Reese pouted. At some time a surgeon had put a few tucks around their mouth. It looked fine when they were female, but their male lip curled in a perpetual sneer.

  “By the way, the pH on the Number Seven hydroponic tank is low. I want you to clean it out this morning and bring up some lime for it.”

  “Sorry,” Seth said untruthfully. “Can’t.”

  The others were listening, and five pairs of eyes widened in surprise at hearing the worm turn.

  He explained to Jordan. “Today I must make a complete inspection of the shuttle, ma’am. As soon as we have the planet’s parameters nailed down, I’ll have to start putting in hours in trainer mode, simulating flight in Cacafuego’s gravity and atmosphere.” He also needed hours of exercise in it, learning to walk, move, and hit targets with his stun gun.

  JC leered.

  Jordan bristled. The captain almost never showed anger, even when male. “On whose authority? I have not instructed you to prepare for downside activity.”

  “No, ma’am. But GenRegs say I
must do so as soon as the target is sighted.”

  They also said that if, or when, that shuttle launched, Seth Broderick would hold the rank of master and be in effect commander of the expedition.

  * * *

  Gravity in the ship came from its spin. By stopping the elevator at the right place between the axis and the outer rim, Seth could simulate any gravity from free fall to almost three gees. The shuttle port was up at the hub, the shuttle itself protruding from the disk of the ship like an axle. Not bothering with the elevator, he ran up the ladder. By the time he reached the top, he was in microgravity.

  The shuttle was a delta-winged cylinder about the size of a city bus and it felt like home to him, his personal domain, where no one else ever trespassed. Access was by a shaft known as the Gut, which led upward from a door at the tail end. Currently the Gut was parallel to the ship’s axis, so he floated along it with ease, going past the biologist’s cabin, the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, and the master’s tiny cabin, to arrive at the nose, a nook known as the cab.

  As he settled into the chair, Control activated the view screens for him. The ship spread out below him like a city plaza. Around the rim like pickets stood the ferrets, the light-speed scout probes, originally twenty-four, now only nineteen. Five had failed to return. Hanna suspected three or four of the remainder might be too badly damaged to use again, but it was better to scout out safe areas, the havens, with an unmanned probe than a manned starship.

  “Initiate complete system check.” He had run the shuttle through ISLA’s entire inspection routine once a month since he left Earth orbit, being far more conscientious than the rules required, so he knew that it was in working order. Lights began flashing on the board.

  —Confirming complete system check, Prospector.

  Cacafuego glowed almost straight ahead, the way Seth was presently oriented, with its star blazing about ten degrees off to port. The heavens were rotating too slowly to notice. There were some very bright stars and emission nebulae in this sky. Orion was a busy stellar neighborhood.

  That dazzling red disk must be Betelgeuse, a star larger than the orbit of Jupiter. Somewhere in roughly that direction, but much farther away, lay Sol and Home World. The thought made him feel painfully insignificant, out here in the Big Nothing. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was needed at all. The shuttle could be operated unmanned and robots could plant flags and collect samples just as well as any human being could. Primitive robots had begun surveying planets almost four hundred years ago. Once an exoplanet was found to contain exotic chemicals or useful life forms, almost all the development work of hunting for more was done by robots, with human overseers staying in orbit. So why did ISLA refuse to issue a development license without evidence of a human presence on the ground, however brief? The best guess was that the public demanded the romance. Prospectors were international stars. Seth Broderick and his like were the modern equivalents of gladiators, charioteers, or jousting knights, and they died to please the people.

  —Inspection completed. No issues to report.

  That had not taken long. Seth was not even being told to clean anything, although Control could be a worse hygiene martinet than a plague-year hospital matron.

  “Prepare for simulated landing on world Cacafuego,” he said, “using current best estimates of conditions. Assume winds of modal strength.” He floated out of his seat to fetch the training suit, a sort of water mattress he could strap over himself in the chair. By pressuring that, Control could simulate the extra weight he would experience during acceleration. By the time he was ready, Control was offering him a partial map of the planet to select his preferred landing site. He chose an easy, flat area, well inland.

  A full simulation would take hours, so he skipped the first three quarters of it. In a real landing he would have nothing to do except give directions at the end, picking a touchdown. Even then, Control would ignore his orders if they were likely to prove fatal. In this first simulation it slammed all the breath out of him in what felt like an impact with a granite mountain, then cheerfully announced that the shuttle had been smashed and he was dead. He was left feeling as if he’d been swimming in a cement mixer. He also felt very stupid.

  “Let’s try the last part again. From first atmospheric contact.”

  * * *

  “And again, but cut wind speed by fifty percent.”

  * * *

  At the fifth attempt, after he had reduced the wind strength by eighty percent, he landed safely, but he needed several more attempts before the simulated wind did not topple the simulated shuttle and roll it away like simulated tumbleweed. Wind was going to be far more of a problem than gravity. The shuttle ought to be chained down the moment it landed, and it was not designed for that. He had no tools to weld shackles to the diamond skin, and atmospheric friction would tear them off during the descent anyway. The shuttle could land on water, but that would probably be even more dangerous.

  “How high do sea waves get here, within one kilometer of land?”

  —Wave height cannot be measured directly at this range, and depends on too many parameters still unknown to estimate reliably, especially the profile of the shore. Higher gravity should reduce wave height but increase their kinetic energy. Terrestrial hurricane waves would be a useful first approximation.

  Forget marine landing.

  He called a halt. He was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and battered by Control’s enthusiastic simulations. Small wonder: he had been in the cab for an astonishing ten hours. He shed the training suit and hung it back in its cupboard.

  —First Officer Finn requests admittance.

  “Open door!” He stared in surprise as the door slid aside and Hanna’s green eyes and freckled smile came floating up the Gut to him. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, my lady?”

  “We began to wonder if you’d done a bunk.”

  He gave her a hand to steady her over the awkward threshold and turned the master’s chair—the only chair—to her. She accepted it as a handhold but did not sit; he crossed his legs and floated in front of her. “Not yet,” he said. “I’m an obsessive guy. Once I start doing something, I can’t stop until I’m satisfied.”

  “So I’ve heard.” That was as close to a mention of sex as he had ever heard Hanna utter.

  Pity, that. Hanna still inspired fantasies. Jordan, that first day, had promised him four tickets in the lottery. Two of them, Maria and Jordan when female, had proved to be all a guy could hope for. Hanna and Reese were not even also-rans. They stayed in the gate.

  “As a complaint?”

  She ignored the question. Hanna was a puzzle. At thirty-two subjective age, she was slightly plumper than was fashionable but very comfy to look at. This was her second voyage into the Big Nothing. Her first had been a routine and uneventful return to a known world, but the ship had encountered some time slip and she had collected eight years’ wages, which had made her independently wealthy. She was always gracious, although she had no use for stupidity. Normally she was so prim and reserved that she seemed almost stupid herself. In fact, she had a laser sense of humor, but most of her barbs would slip by unseen unless one watched for them. She was a genius at interstellar navigation, and when she said that Galactic must have cut dangerous corners to get to Cacafuego first, he believed her.

  “Seth, dear, I came to remind you that the planet is still flying a warning flag. If JC insists you go downside and you obey him, Jordan and I will lose our licenses and ISLA will confiscate the Mighty Mite shares we hope to earn.”

  “I would never let that happen to you!”

  “Then why are you wasting all day up here? Jordan cooked dinner for us.”

  Seth realized that he was starving. “What did she produce?”

  “Chili con pseudo-carne, one of my favorites. I didn’t know it was on the machines’ menu.”

  “Because I don’t like beans,” he admitted. “But if there’s any left, I’ll make an exception.”
r />   She moved to block the exit and almost overshot it. “First tell me what you’re plotting!”

  “I plot not, Your Firstness.” Private chats with Control did not count, and Hanna could command a replay of those if she wanted to pry. “JC was right in saying we should go in for a close look. Then we can work out what the threat is. Or let Galactic’s beacon tell us, as it should do very shortly. I’m gathering information. After that we can make our own decision.”

  She stared at him suspiciously for a moment, and he sensed the penetrating academic mind she usually concealed. “You think you already know.”

  He nodded. “I’ve a theory. The weather down there is Satanic. Maybe Galactic lost a few shuttles and decided the grapes were sour. If that’s all it is, then the only one at risk will be me.”

  “And Reese.”

  “If they want to come, yes.” Seth still did not expect heroism from the biologist.

  “Be honest. What are your odds of landing safely?”

  “Not bad, if we pick a calm moment. I’m working on it.”

  Hanna smiled. “I know you are. Now come along. We saved some chili for you.”

  He straightened his legs, but continued to float. “Wait. You’re rooming with JC just now.”

  Green eyes glinted. “Platonically, of course.”

  He couldn’t resist the opening: “You mean he’s impotent?”

  “No, I do not! Don’t you ever think of anything else but lust?”

  “I just spent ten hours without doing so, and the strain is telling. I’m told that in JC’s stateroom there is a table with a thick top but no drawer.”

  She waited, studying him. “And?”

  “I suspect a secret drawer. I’d like to know what’s in it.”

  “You want me to spy for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. What do you think he’s got in there?”

  “Weapons.”