Copper Mountain,
Fleet Weapons Research Facility
A cold wind swept the barren top of Stack Two; Ensign
Margiu Pardalt's eyes ached from squinting into it. Broad
daylight now; the wind had long since swept away the
bitter stench of the seaplane fires. Where were the
mutineers? Surely they would land, to snatch the weapons
they knew had been designed here. Had the message she'd
tried to send using the old technology actually reached
anyone, or would the mutineers get away with their whole
plan? And when would they come ... when would they come to
kill her?
"This is stupid," Professor Gustaf Aidersson said.
Bundled in his yellow leather jacket over his Personal
Protective Unit, with a peculiar gray furry hat on his
head, he looked more like a tubby vagrant than a brilliant
scientist. "When I was a boy, I used to imagine things
like this, being marooned on an island and having to
figure out a way to get home. I had thousands of plans,
each one crazier than the one before. Make a boat out of
my grandmother's porch swing, make an airplane out of the
solar collector, take the juicer and a skein of yarn, two
cups, and a knitting needle and make a communications
device."
Margiu wondered whether to say anything; she couldn't
feel her ears anymore.
"So here we are, on the perfect island, full of
challenges. I should be improvising rappelling gear to go
down the cliffs, and something to construct a sailboat ...
I actually have built a boat, you know, but it was with
wood from a lumberyard. And I sailed it, and it
didn'tsink. Of course, it wouldn't hold all of us."
"Sir," Margiu said, "don't you think we should go back
inside?"
"Probably." He didn't move. "And there is not one
thing on this blasted island to make a boat or an airplane
out of." He gave a last look at the blackened stain that
had been their transport. Then he looked at Margiu and his
mouth quirked in a mischievous grin. "There's only one
thing to do, when the bad guys have all the transport ..."
"Sir?"
"Make them give it to us," he said, and headed inside
so abruptly that Margiu was left behind. She caught up
with him as he went in the door.
"Make them—?"
"It's a desperate chance ... but by God it'll be fun
if it works," he said. He looked around the room at the
scientists and military personnel who were also
stranded. "Listen—I have an idea!"
"You always have an idea, Gussie," one of the
scientists said. Margiu still hadn't sorted them all out
by name. They all looked tired and grumpy. "You probably
want us to make an airplane out of bedsprings or
something ..."
"No. I thought of that, but we don't have enough
bedsprings. I want the mutineers to bring us an airplane
and give it to us."
"What?"
The professor launched into an enthusiastic
explanation. In the few seconds from outside to inside,
his idea had already developed elaborate additions. The
others looked blank.
Major Garson was the first to nod. "Yeah—the only way
to get transport is to get them to give it to us. But it's
not going to be easy. They've got a lot more troops
topside than we have ... they can scorch us with the
shuttle weaponry, for that matter."
"So our first job is to convince them we're not that
dangerous," the professor said. He had taken off his hat
and shoved it into a pocket; his thinning gray fringe
stuck up in untidy peaks.
"Do they even know how many of us there were?" asked
Margiu. "They don't know the planes were full, do they?
Vinet didn't get any messages up to them—"
"No ... that's right. And except during the firelight
last night, we've been mostly undercover. But they'd be
stupid to come in carelessly," Major Garson said. "Never
count on the enemy to be careless."
"But—" The professor held up his hand a moment, then
nodded. "But suppose, using Margiu's radio apparatus, we
give them what looks like accidental clues. We try to
contact them, pretending to be mutineers fighting with
scientists—"
"No, wait!" That was the skinny man with wild black
hair. Ty, Margiu remembered. "Look, they know the
loyalists have the radio now. Suppose we send a message,
like we hope it'll bounce around to mainland, begging for
help. And then break off. And then an hour or so later,
there's a message to them from some of the military
pretending to be mutineers, and then—"
"How would the mutineers know how to use that
equipment?" Garson said. "It's nothing Fleet-trained
people would know unless they happened on it somewhere
else, like Ensign Pardalt. And besides, it's too fragile.
It could get shot up in a firefight."
"Suppose we say the radio's the loyalists'," Margiu
said. The others looked at her. "And we're begging for
help from the mainland, like he said." She nodded at
Ty. "But of course it doesn't come. We sound more and more
desperate—we talk about being hunted by the mutineers,
about the people killed in the explosions of the planes,
and then the food shortages—the mutineers have all the
supplies ..."
"Yes! That's good," the professor said. "And we'll
move the thing around, so when they trace the signal
they'll know someone's trying to stay in hiding—and then
we'll take it underground ..."
"We'll need a visible force of baddies," the major
said. "A squad'll do for that. Local uniforms ... and PPUs
can look like anything, with the right setting. We've got
the suitcoms for local—have to have our people stay in
character."
"So ... what are we going to do if we get the shuttle?
They can always shoot us down before we get anywhere."
"Not that easy if they come down with one of the
combat troop shuttles, sir," said one of the neuro-
enhanced Marines. "They're hardened and highly
maneuverable."
"Which brings up—who's going to fly it?"
"I'm shuttle-qualified," said one of the
pilots. "Ken's not, but Bernie is."
"If you're qualified to fly troop shuttles, why are
you on seaplanes down here?"
"Fleet has a lot more shuttle pilots than seaplane
pilots," the pilot said, spreading his hands. "Only a few
of us mess around with the old-fashioned stuff."
"Bob ... what about Zed?"
"On a shuttle, LAC size? No problem, Gussie. It'll
fit, and we can use it. Like I said, it'd hide something
the size of this island, let alone a shuttle."
The professor glanced again at Garson. "Then, Major,
if you'll divide us into loyalists and mutineers—giving me
the tech-trained people—and set up a scenario for us to
act—"
"We'll have to do something about those bodies...."
Garson said, and gestured to some of the men.
Margiu had never had close contact with scientists
before this, and if she'd thought about them at all, she'd
had a storycube image of vast intelligence applied step-by-
step to some arcane problem. They would be solitary, so
they could concentrate; they would be serious, sober,
abstracted.
They would not, for instance, waste any moment of
their precious preparation time playing some
incomprehensible game that involved a singsong chant,
puns, and childish insults, dissolving into laughter every
few seconds.
"Your starfish eats dirt," the professor finished.
"Oh, that's old, Gussie." But the others were
grinning, relaxed.
"So now—we're going to get them to bring us a ship,
and then let us fly away?"
"We'll have Zed on—they won't see us."
"They'll see the moving hole where we were,"
Swearingen said. "It's a lot harder to hide things in
planetary atmospheres.
"Not with Zed," Helmut Swearingen said. "We've solved
that problem, or most of it. The thing is, all they have
to do is hit a line across our course—and since we have to
fly to the mainland—"
"Why?" the professor asked; he had found a cache of
candy and spoke around a lump of chocolate. "It's the
obvious thing, of course, but being obvious won't help us
now. At the very least we can zig and zag ..."
"Not forever ... we have to come down somewhere."
"Maybe," the professor said. "And maybe not. Suppose
they think we've blown up or something. We could toss
fireworks out the back—"
"Oh come on, Gussie! The fake explosion while the real
vessel gets away is the oldest trick in the book."
Swearinger looked disgusted.
"Because it works," the professor said. "All it has to
do is distract them long enough for us to make a course
change. Two points define a straight line: they have
takeoff and the explosion. If we aren't at an extension of
that line, they'll have no idea where we are."
"It's ridiculous! It's all straight out of storytime.
I have to agree with Helmut—"
"There's a reason for stories being the way they are,"
the professor said.
"Yes, they're for the stupid or the ignorant, to keep
them out of our way while we do the work ..." Swearingen
said.
"Can you even name one time in real life—not your
pseudo-history—when someone faked an explosion and escaped
in a vessel the enemy thought was blown up?"
The professor blinked rapidly, as if at a long
sequence of pages. "There are plenty of ruses in military
history—"
"Not just ruses, Gussie, but that hoary old cliche of
faking the explosion of an engine, or a ship, or
something ..."
"Commander Heris Serrano," Margiu said, surprising
herself. "When she was just a lieutenant. She trailed a
weapons pod past a fixed defense point, and when it blew
it blinded the sensors long enough for her to get her ship
past. Or Brun Thornbuckle, during her rescue, sent the
shuttle as a decoy after landing on the orbital station."
"You see?" the professor said, throwing out his
hands. "A hoary old cliche still works."
"It works better if you keep them busy thinking about
other things," Margiu said.
"Like what?" one of the others asked her.
"Anything. Because you're also right, if they see the
shuttle taking off and then it disappears, and then
something blows up, they're going to be suspicious."
"So we don't have it disappear until just at the
explosion."
"We have Zed, but the controls aren't that good. Not
yet."
Silence for a long moment. Then one of the pilots
said, "Look—the shuttle will have a working com, right?
The bad guys will want to be in touch with the shuttle
crew."
"Yes ..."
"So we continue our little charade on the shuttle.
Suppose ... suppose we talk about the weapons we've
recovered. We're trying to see how they work—"
"They're not going to believe their people would do
something that stupid."
"Wouldn't they?"
"But—" Everyone turned to look at Margiu. She could
feel the ideas bubbling up in her mind like turbulence in
boiling water. "Suppose the bad guys—ours, I mean—said
they also had the scientists—and they were questioning
them—and they found out one of the things was a stealth
device. And they wanted to try it, to see if it really
worked—"
"That would explain the disappearance. Good, Margiu!"
"I still think they'd be suspicious."
"Spoilsport." The professor sighed, and rubbed his
balding head. "But you're probably right. Let's see. Our
pseudo-bad guys question the scientists ..." He pitched
his voice into falsetto. "Please don't hurt me—I vill tell
you effryting."
"Good lord, Gussie, what archaic accent is that?"
"I don't know—I heard it on a soundtrack years ago.
Don't interrupt ... so the scientists act like terrified
victims and maybe that can be overheard. And then they
turn Zed on, and it works—"
"And it's still as transparent as glass," Bob said.
"So I'll scratch it up—YES!" The professor leaped up
and danced in a circle. "Yes, yes, yes! Brilliant.
Scratchy, like old recordings, old-time radio—break-up—"
"What?! Damn it, Gussie, this is serious—"
"I am serious. I am just momentarily transported by my
own brilliance. And yours, and Margiu's here." He calmed
down, took a breath, and went on. "Like this: the normal
takeoff, the threats of the bad guys, the terror of the
scientists. But then, when they—we—turn Zed on, it doesn't
keep working. It sort of—" he waggled his hand. "Sort of
flickers. They hear an argument—more threats, more piteous
pleadings, curses at some fool who—I don't know, kicks the
power cable or something. The shuttle is there, then it
isn't, then it is—but always on the same course. A voice
shouting in the background: be careful, be careful, don't
overload it, it wasn't designed for—! And then the
explosion, and then the course change."
A long silence this time, as they all digested what
the professor had said. He mopped his face, his head, and
pushed the crumpled, stained handkerchief into his pocket.
"It does explain everything," Swearingen said. "It
gives them more to think about, more complications."
"It seems to give them more data," said Bob. "But all
the data are false. It might work."
"So what we need is something to make a big bang, that
will look like a shuttle blowing up on the bad guys' scan
from upstairs ... which we can get far enough away from
before it blows that we don't also blow ..."
"Something, yes."
The group dissolved as the scientists wandered off.
Margiu, used to direct orders and a clear set of
directions, felt let down as she followed the professor
down one passage after another. Were they ever going to go
to work? And what would Major Garson think, with her just
wandering around idly watching someone who seemed to have
very little idea what he was doing.
But that, she soon found out, was a mistake. After a
rapid tour of the ground-floor levels of the site, the
professor found Major Garson and began suggesting where to
put what. Garson, meanwhile, was working on his own
pretense. He had divided his troops and assigned the NEMs
to play mutineer.
"If they think the NEMs are mutineers," he
said, "they'll believe that the loyalists are in serious
trouble. Also, the NEMs are so big and bulky that it's
hard to get facial detail when they're in their p-suits
with the head-jacks. That means I can move them around and
have them play more parts."
Margiu glanced at the NEMs sitting around, half of
them sticking odd-shaped patches to their p-suits. One of
them grinned at her. "The bad guys are old Lepescu
cronies," he said. "They take ears from their kills. So—we
thought we'd use an ear shape openly, as a recognition
patch. No one else would." He slid the tube of adhesive
back in one of the pockets.
"Come along, Ensign," said the professor; Margiu
followed him, glancing back at the NEMs who were clustered
there. She hoped they were all loyalists.
Twelve hours later the whole situation felt even more
unreal. Periodically, Margiu and the professor joined
Garson and one of the troops and scuttled rapidly from one
building to another, following a plan of Garson's that had
the loyalists trying to evade the "mutineers." The NEMs
pretending to be mutineers, meanwhile, shot entirely too
close for Margiu's comfort, and shattered all the ground-
floor windows. Far underground, with doors shut against
the wicked drafts from above, the scientists and remaining
troops had organized the collection of boxes, cylinders,
cables, and things that looked like leftovers from a junk
heap onto pallets.
On one of their tours through the working areas, the
professor shook his head over the tarps used to cover the
loads before lashing them down. "It's too bad they
destroyed those seaplanes," he said. "Look—these would
have made wonderful sails, and we could have built a ship
with the frames of the planes."
"No, we could not," Swearingen said. "I can just see
us now, Gussie, setting sail in something you whipped
together with stickypatch and hairs pulled from your
beard. Which aren't long enough to make ropes, in case you
hadn't noticed."
"Rope ..." the professor said, his eyes going hazy in
what Margiu now knew meant a moment of thought. "We're
going to need one really good cable to make this work ..."
"There was cable in the planes," one of the pilots
said. "But now—"
"Spares," said the other. "They had to stock spares
somewhere around here—" He looked around the room they
were in, bare to the walls except for the pallets.
"I know," offered one of the scientists. "What's the
cable for, Gussie?"
"Towing the explosive," Gussie said. "We don't want to
just drop it ... then we'd have to delay its explosion,
and it'd be below our last visible position. We want to
tow it ..."
"Out the back of a troop shuttle," said the first
pilot, blinking. "I'm beginning to wish I weren't shuttle-
qualified."
"It's doable," said the other. "I did a practice
equipment drop once, and they shove the stuff out the back
with a static line—there's a kind of yank, and then it's
gone ..."
"Fine; you can fly that part of it," said the first.
"What bothers me," said another scientist, "is the
scan analysis of the explosion. If they've got somebody
good up there—and we have to assume they do—then they're
going to expect shuttle components in the explosion.
You've proposed that we use some of the weaponry in
development, and it certainly will make a big enough bang.
But it won't have any shuttle-specific ID. Once they
realize that, they'll know we're still around."
"What kind of stuff would it take?" Garson asked. "Can
we just throw out the life rafts or something?"
"No, it's the explosion itself. They'll expect some
differences, because they'll know the shuttle has exotic
new stuff on it, but the shuttle itself, when it explodes,
would contribute recognizable chemical signatures. The
shuttle weaponry, for instance, would be assumed to go up
with it."
"Why not just add the shuttle's weapons pods to the
tow load?" asked Margiu. Everyone stopped and looked at
her.
"Of course!" The professor, unsurprisingly, was the
first to recover speech. He beamed at her. "Didn't I say
redheads were naturally brilliant?"
"But that would leave us with no weapons ..." Garson
said.
"But we weren't going to fight our way out with the
shuttle anyway," said the professor. "We're just using it
as transport. We know we can't take on a deepspace ship."
Garson chewed this over a long moment. Finally he
nodded. "All right. It makes sense, I just ... don't like
not having them. But as you said, they'll do us more good
proving we're not there, when we are. I'll add that to our
list of priorities once we get aboard. Be sure we have
extra tiedowns and pallets, though."
The troop shuttle made a careful circle around the
island; its onboard scans could pick out details from a
distance that made light weapons ineffective. The NEMS
clustered on the runway with the little huddle of
scientists obviously under guard and the tarp-wrapped
bundles of the cargo beside them. The shuttle made another
approach, this time dropping out a communications-array
bundle. The NEM commander grabbed it and flicked it on.
Margiu could hear what he said, but not what the shuttle
crew answered.
"No—we were mainland based—at Big Tree—waiting, but we
got grabbed for this mission—yeah—no. No, he died in the
first firefight. Got his body, if you want it. I've got
his ears...."
The shuttle swung back, slower yet, and settled onto
the runway. Margiu had not realized how loud shuffles
were, if no one bothered to baffle the exhaust. She could
hear nothing but its own whining roar. The great hatch in
the rear swung down, forming a ramp. Five men came out,
weapons ready. Surely there weren't just five ... no,
there came another five, setting up a perimeter.
The NEMs waved; the newcomers waved back as they came
forward. Margiu could sense the moment in which they
decided it was all right, when their attention shifted
from the "mutineers" to the scientists and their
equipment. Margiu flicked through the channels on her p-
suit headset, and found the active one.
"Got 'em all, did you?"
"Except the dead ones," one of the NEMs said. "Listen,
we've got to get all this aboard—and there's another load
packed up inside. How many personnel d'you have?"
"Eighteen. They want us to hurry it up—"
"Come on, then." Half the NEMs turned, as if to head
back inside; the others were still obviously guarding the
scientist-prisoners.
"Barhide—come on down—" said one of the newcomers.
Eight more armed men came down the shuttle's ramp.
These were much less wary, their weapons now slung on
their backs.
"We're goin' in to pick up the rest of the cargo," she
heard one of them say, and someone aboard the shuttle—a
pilot, she hoped—told them to hurry it up.
With her primary task still the professor's life, she
had no part in the brief, violent struggle that followed,
when the NEMs and the other loyalist troops jumped the
mutineers and killed them, while the putative rebel NEMS
chivvied the scientists toward the shuttle, talking loudly
on open mikes. It took less than two minutes, and most of
it had happened out of sight of scan from overhead. Margiu
scrambled out of her p-suit into the gray shipsuit of the
dead enemy, rolled him into her p-suit, and let one of the
NEMs haul him out by the legs. She crammed the com helmet
on her head, tucking the telltale red hair out of sight,
and stalked out onto the runway as if she belonged there.
The cargo was moving slowly up the ramp, with the
laboring scientists complaining vociferously that it was
dangerous, that it could blow them all up, that they
should be careful. The NEMs swung their weapons,
threateningly; scientists cringed; Margiu found it hard to
believe it wasn't real. From the unreality of those hours
of waiting, when it was real, to this—the reversal
confused her, but she found herself playing her part
anyway.