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  "How can you call it a waste when we're using them? Besides, it was my grant money to spend. I was sure I'd have an occasion to use them for something. I'll admit, I didn't expect it to be something this big."

  "You think the Faeries have the ability to move doors like those?" Jackie asked doubtfully.

  "Not sure, really," A.J. admitted. "Maybe not. The systems were set up to be maximally configurable, and I'm going to be selecting the highest mechanical advantage. And using three of them at once, if I need lots of force."

  "What if something goes wrong? You don't want to lose three Faeries."

  "I don't want to lose one Faerie. But it's not likely I'll lose any of them. Even if it goes badly, the worst I'd expect to happen is that they'll blow the manipulators or break them. They're not going to explode or anything silly like that." He pursed his lips. "A shame, in a way. If I could make them blow up, then I'd have a way to open at least one of the doors even if the manipulators don't do the trick. I'd originally planned for them to have Fairy Dust dispensers, but the sensor mote design ran into problems and had to be scrapped. They'll be up and running for the real mission, no doubt, but for this venture it just wasn't in the cards."

  "No way to get whatever mechanism opened them in the first place to work?"

  A.J. shook his head. "I don't think anything in this base is going to be workable any more. If the colonel's scenario is correct, something went wrong to keep these doors from opening in the first place. So even if the power was on, they'd be jammed shut anyway."

  "Then what are the odds of them being openable now? Wouldn't the survivors have tried?"

  "First, we don't know there were any survivors. Second, on the ones I'm interested in, I don't see any signs of heavy prying or other forcible entry attempts. And third, after all this time the seals and other things may have become fragile, turned to dust, or otherwise changed in their basic nature enough that force which couldn't move them before can do so now."

  "What about vacuum welding?"

  He shrugged. "There's a lot of different materials involved here. I don't think that will be a factor. Speaking of welding, I'm still playing around to see if there's some way I can get some kind of welding or cutting electron beam out of one of my babies, but I'm not hopeful. There are limits to the configurations I can get."

  "When do you think you're going to try to get one of these closed doors to open?"

  "Not for a while yet. We want to explore as much of the base as possible with all Faeries running before we risk damage to any of them. Oh, yeah," A.J. brightened again and waved his hand to activate some commands, "here's the real important jackpot aside from the discovery of the century."

  The screen in front of them flickered, then showed another Faerie-eye point of view, drifting down a different corridor. Before it a large doorway loomed, mostly shut but with about two and a half feet of space on the one side where the apparently rotating valvelike door had stopped. The Faerie slowly drifted down to that level and spent a few moments making sure it could fit through the opening. Satisfied, it began to move forward again.

  This room was huge. The "floor" slanted slightly in what would be the "downward" direction, but soon the smoothness vanished, replaced by a chaotic mass of dark brown and black, with occasional white streaks. The floor was rippled and scalloped and extended back into dimness, with deep hollows and narrow columns connecting it to the ceiling. The scalloping was almost scalelike, in some places. Much of it was dull and absorbed light almost like a sponge, making the range of vision even shorter than normal.

  In a few spots there was a bright glint, a shine from something smooth. That seemed more common toward the rear, which was confirmed as the Faerie cautiously continued farther into the huge room.

  "What is that?" Jackie asked finally, as she watched the images wend their way through an increasingly narrow and hallucinogenic set of passages of the dark material.

  "Mud," A.J. answered with satisfaction. "Looks like it's more water towards the back, more dirt towards the front, which makes sense. It's been subliming away for a long time through that door and these passages. But even after all that time, there's still a hell of a lot of water there. Our unknown visitors were possibly aquatic, or amphibious, because this seems awfully excessive for a reservoir but very sensible for something like a staff mudbath/swimming pool/whatever combined with a main water supply. From the surveys I've done, I think there's enough water left in this room to fill a cube a hundred meters on a side."

  "A hundred . . . That's a million metric tons of water!"

  "And all in one easily accessible chunk. Run it through a filter and I think you'd be able to drink it. Unless our extinct friends left some very long-lived bacteria behind. But I doubt if any diseases they had are something we could catch, anyway."

  "So Phobos Base is definitely a go."

  Colonel Hathaway smiled. "You could say that, Jackie." His wristphone buzzed. "I have a meeting to go to. There may be one both of you want to attend later, in a few days."

  "No offense, Ken," A.J. said. "But I doubt I want to go to any meetings."

  Hathaway's smile widened. "You'll want to go to this one, I think. See you people later, I have some business to attend to." As he turned to go, he paused. "Oh, and Jackie—this is under complete nondisclosure. You can't even tell anyone back at the labs, at least not yet."

  She shook her head. "Ken, that's asinine. There's no way you can keep a lid on this very long. A few more days, maybe. But not much longer. Don't they realize that?"

  "I think they do, Jackie. They're trying to decide how they want to approach it, and the time pressure is not helping. I'm trying not to add any pressure on our side. People, we can afford to wait. As you say, they can't keep this secret very long. When they do make that decision, I want them to think of us as the people who didn't give them a hard time over it. Capice?"

  Jackie couldn't quite stifle a giggle at Hathaway's excellent "Mafia Don" accent, though his appearance didn't lend itself to the impression. "Okay, I get it. If we're the good boys and girls, they'll want to keep us all on the inside of whatever gets done."

  "Exactly. So help me by not giving me any flack, and keeping A.J. from indulging his revolutionary impulses. Gotta go—important people waiting in my office."

  As the door closed behind Hathaway, Jackie turned a mock-stern gaze on A.J. "No trouble from you!"

  "I gave him my word," he said, a little sulkily, plopping into a nearby chair. "He doesn't need anyone to watch me."

  "Oh, lighten up, A.J. You're getting to do your work, and you don't have to do much in the politics. Or would you rather have Ken's job? He's supposed to be in training for the Nike mission, but he's ended up being a part-time politician just to keep everything moving smoothly so that he can be on Nike when we launch."

  She debated with herself, then sat down next to A.J. "You had your dream, you know. Remember how much it hurt to lose it?"

  She could see he didn't quite understand where she was going with this, but he nodded, lips tight. The memory was obviously still painful, many months later. "Well, Ken has a dream too, a silly one that he's told to a few of us, the ones he was sure wouldn't laugh. You know what that dream is?"

  "Well, no. He doesn't know me well enough to talk about anything like that."

  "Ken's always dreamed of being the captain of a spaceship. And he just might make it. He's the highest-ranking military crew candidate right now, and he's got the training for it, and Nike is just about big enough to actually need a real boss. So if he seems a little uptight about anyone throwing a wrench into the works, remember he's on the edge of his dream too."

  After staring at her a moment, A.J. smiled slowly. "Captain Kenneth Hathaway, commanding, NASA Exploration Vessel Nike . . ."

  "Don't you dare make fun of him. Or tell him I told you. Or I'll—"

  "Whoa, hold your horses. I was about to say 'that does sound cool.'" A.J.'s expression was grave. "Don't worry, I can respect a sill
y dream like that one."

  Chapter 16

  The moment Madeline Fathom entered the office of the director, she knew the situation was unusual. Highly unusual.

  Even given that the intelligence agency she worked for generally handled the most delicate issues of national security, it was still unheard of for the National Security Adviser to sit in on a meeting between the director and one of his field agents.

  She was especially surprised to see this Security Adviser present. George P. D. Jensen. The common wisecrack was that his middle initials stood for "plausible deniability."

  For the past two decades, due to a curlicue in the confusing welter of laws which had replaced the Patriot Act after its repeal, Madeline's agency had wound up becoming the preferred agency of choice for American presidents when they wanted to maintain as low a profile as possible in a security matter that was likely to become publicly contentious. The official name of the agency—Homeland Investigation Authority—was meaningless. Its critics commonly referred to the agency as "the President's Legal Plumbers." And the agents of the HIA itself joked that their motto was The Buck Vanishes Here.

  "Please, Madeline, have a seat." With his usual old-fashioned southern courtesy, Director Hughes had risen to make the invitation. "I believe you've met Mr. Jensen before."

  "Yes, sir, I have." She and Jensen exchanged nods after she sat down in one of the chairs in the lounge area of the director's large office. Madeline's nod was courteous; Jensen's was so curt it bordered on rudeness.

  Jensen had not risen, needless to say. Even by the standards of Washington, D.C., the National Security Adviser was punctilious when it came to maintaining the pecking order. Superiors did not rise from their seats to greet subordinates, period; not even when the subordinate in person was a very attractive woman in her early to mid-thirties.

  Not that Madeline cared. Bureaucrats came; bureaucrats went. She had her own motives for the work she did, and the approval or disapproval of people like Jensen ranked nowhere on the list. She was reasonably polite to them, as a rule, simply as a practical convenience.

  There was silence, for a moment. As Madeline waited, she considered the seating arrangement. Director Hughes was sitting in a large armchair directly across the coffee table from her. Jensen was sitting to her left, on the couch. That was unusual, also. Normally, when she and the director met, they did so sitting across from each other at his large desk in the corner.

  Of course, that would have required Jensen to sit on a chair no larger or more comfortable than her own. Can't have that.

  The director suddenly beamed at her. He was a short, plump man with iron-gray hair and good-natured features. The iron-gray hair was real; the good nature was off and on; and the beaming smile brought her to full alert.

  This one's going to be a bitch.

  The National Security Adviser spoke. "There's a . . . situation, Agent Fathom."

  Politeness had its limits. "There's always a . . . situation. Honestly, why do people talk that way?"

  Jensen's face tightened. The director laughed. "You'll have to excuse Madeline, George. As I told you, she came into our world from the wrong direction. Understands our language, but doesn't speak it at all."

  So they'd already been discussing her, including her personal history. Madeline wasn't surprised, but the knowledge didn't make her any happier. Be a bitch got ratcheted up to be a pure bitch.

  The director shifted his good cheer back onto her. "I assure you, Madeline, this one really is a . . . situation. Unique, I assure you.

  Utterly unique. We need someone to be there to watch over our interests—our country's interests—when many of those there, even on our side, won't have nearly so, shall we say, clear a vision of what must be for the future."

  Madeline was a bit relieved. While the director was often given to dramatic little speeches, he rarely indulged in hyperbole. The assignments she liked were those in which she was really dealing with important issues of national security. Unlike most of her assignments, she thought sourly. Which, stripped bare, usually involved nothing more substantive than the petty internecine warfare practiced by Washington's spaghetti bowl of competing bureaucracies and security and intelligence agencies.

  She put up with the second for the sake of the first. The government might be everyone else's scapegoat, but Madeline Fathom owed it her life.

  "Show me, sir."

  "You have your VRD on? Excellent. Watch. And then we shall talk."

  After she'd watched everything, she had to take off the VRD glasses to stare. "Are you serious, Director?"

  "Never more so, my dear."

  She shook her head in disbelief. "This thing cannot be kept secret long."

  The National Security Adviser's expression had never quite lost the tightness that her earlier wisecrack had put on it. Now, it came back in full force.

  "Let's not be defeatist about this, shall we?" he snapped.

  Madeline gave Jensen a glance so quick it was almost rude. As if flicking away a fly with her eyes.

  The director intervened. "George, save that silliness for public speeches, would you?"

  Hughes was still smiling, but he was also letting the steel show. He'd been the director of the HIA through three and a half administrations—and both he and Jensen knew that he would still be the director when the current administration was gone. For over two decades, Hughes had done such a good job of balancing the demands of security with the need to tread lightly on the liberties of the public that even the HIA's critics were fairly civil in their attacks. The political classes in the nation's capital considered him well-nigh indispensable—a status that was definitely not enjoyed by national security advisers who'd held their position for less than two years.

  "I told you already—Madeline is one of my three best agents, overall, and without a doubt the best one for this assignment. She's got a better technical education than Berkowitz or Knight, and, unlike them, she's single and has no family ties."

  In the brief, silent contest of wills that followed, Jensen looked away first. "Still," he grumbled.

  Hughes wasn't about to let him off the hook. "Still . . . what? I do hope that the President has no illusions that we can keep this situation a secret for more than another day or so—and that he understands the consequences if it appears to the public, when it does finally surface, as if we were trying to hide something."

  His face now pinched, Jensen stared at the opposite wall and said nothing. Madeline knew the man was not actually stupid, so she was quite sure he understood the realities of political life. But "not stupid" and "faces facts readily" weren't the same thing. The Security Adviser was obviously still in the throes of the standard bureaucratic reaction to all unpleasant news—isn't there some rug we can sweep it under?

  "You remember the endless ruckus over UFOs and Roswell Area 51?" Hughes' shoulders heaved in a soundless laugh. "Well, I can guarantee you that'll seem like the hushed tones of the audience in a fancy symphony hall compared to the hullaballoo you'll be facing— if there's even a hint that the administration tried to suppress the news beyond the initial few measures that any reasonable person will accept as minimal security precautions. And I won't even get into the international repercussions, since that's not really my province." Relentlessly: "But it is yours, isn't it?"

  Jensen finally took his eyes from the wall. "Yes, I understand all that! It remains the case that we have no idea what we may discover in that alien installation. There could well be items of tremendous military significance."

  "Of course," Hughes agreed, inclining his head. Smoothly, the gesture slid from being a polite nod of accord to a pointer at Madeline. "And that's precisely what Ms. Fathom will be there for. Making sure the wheat doesn't get mixed up with the chaff, so to speak."