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  "Yes. We hope that we can examine at least some of these craters and determine what it is about them that made them worth labeling. The puzzling part is that they certainly aren't the most spectacular and interesting craters. So perhaps A.J.'s guess is right: these are craters that had something interesting in them from a practical standpoint."

  "Tell you what," A.J. said. "I'll have a couple of the Faeries pop away from Phobos for a bit and do some focused imaging and scanning on any of those craters that are in range. Combine that with the pretty heavy-duty info we already have on Mars, and I might at least be able to tell you something interesting about the ones you have labeled on the Mars maps. Do your maps cover all of Mars?"

  "Oh, not even close," Skibow replied. "Perhaps twenty percent of the surface, and thirteen labeled craters in that area."

  "Bring it up and let's see the equivalence on the surface."

  The diagrams from the alien maps showed on the screen, and then faded. A map of Mars appeared, with part of what would be the tropical and subtropical portion of the northern hemisphere highlighted.

  "Okay, I see. Yeah, I think the Faeries can get some decent images and ground penatrating radar shots on that, if the returns can be sorted out. I was getting some returns from Mars initially, but that doesn't mean that all parts of Mars will be equally good for GPR. The geometry might screw me up, too. But we'll see."

  "Aren't you supposed to keep the Faeries researching Phobos?" Helen reminded him.

  "I'm supposed to find out as much as I can about Phobos, the alien base, and anything else I can about Bemmie. These maps and the craters indicated are definitely related to Bemmie and his people. So I figure that if, by doing a little detective work, I can resolve our debate about just what they found interesting about those craters, I'll be just doing my job."

  "True enough," Helen said. "I doubt anyone's going to argue with you anyway, not when you're basically our only source of on-hand investigation for the next couple of months."

  "There are advantages to being virtually indispensable." A.J. grinned.

  "Which is why you shouldn't be scaring us by getting so close to being dispensed with."

  A.J. managed to keep his grin, but it faltered a bit. He'd quietly admitted to Helen that his recent brush with death had scared him, much more than his first, because this one had taken slow days to close in on him. The fire and explosion had been a few moments of pain and panic and effort, and then he'd woken up with the worst behind him. This time his own body had been slowly and inexorably shutting down, cutting off his air and energy.

  "Yeah. Well, that's over, anyway. And we've taken a lot of steps to keep anything like that from happening again." He suddenly blinked and looked surprised.

  "What is it?"

  "Just remembered something I'd completely forgotten about while I was sick. I have to go talk to Ken."

  "A problem?"

  "Probably nothing, but he should know anyway." Helen could tell that there was more to it, but obviously he preferred to keep the information to himself.

  She didn't press him. Part of the reason she and A.J. got along as well as they did was that they gave each other a lot of room. One of the few things she'd found amusing about the tabloids' obsession with her and A.J. had been their constant predictions that the two of them were on the verge of a breakup. In point of fact, their relationship had been remarkably free of much in the way of quarreling—quite unlike the marriage Helen had gotten into for six miserable years when she'd been in her twenties. The one and only photograph the tabloids had ever published that seemed to show them yelling at each other—which they ran endlessly, of course— had actually been a shot of the two of them trying to sing.

  Something which neither of them could do worth a damn, and had proven it that day to their mutual satisfaction. Helen would also allow that part of the reason the tabloids loved that photo was that it had been taken while they were vacationing in Florida and Helen's bikini had been . . . Well, a bikini.

  A skimpy one, at that, even by bikini standards. Helen had only worn it because A.J. had bought it for her and insisted—and she had never worn it since.

  "All right," she said, half-smiling at the memory. "I imagine we've taken up too much of your time, anyway. Dr. Mayhew, Dr. Skibow—"

  "Jane and Rich, please," Jane Mayhew interrupted. "There's only fifty of us. It would be silly to stay so formal, even if I do keep falling back into my bloody lecture-room habits."

  "No problem, Jane, Rich. We'll be moving on."

  "Our pleasure, Helen. Drop by whenever you and A.J. feel like it. Who knows, you may solve our problems again."

  "Well, you helped solve ours!" A.J. said, with a wink at Helen.

  On their way out, Helen said with great dignity: "We didn't have a problem. You did."

  A.J. smiled but didn't even try to make a rejoinder. Clearly, his mind was focused on whatever problem he was taking to Ken. There was as much point in badinage with A.J. when he was in that mind-set as there would be trying to swap jokes with a beaver making a dam—or a five-year-old child absorbed in watching a cartoon.

  Oh, well. They'd still foiled the tabloids, hadn't they? A feat which, with some experience, Helen had come to rank right up there with taking the gold at the Olympics or deciphering the Maya script. Or winning the Trojan War.

  And—although she'd disapproved at the time and still did— Helen couldn't deny that she wished she'd had a camera herself once. To capture the delightfully shocked expression on a paparazzi's face as A.J. sent him sailing through a window.

  Chapter 33

  "And that's what I found."

  Ken Hathaway felt a leaden weight sinking in the pit of his stomach, as he looked over the code and symbols A.J. was showing to him. "A back door?"

  "Into the main controls. Covers the entire communications grid. I checked, and there's a similar one in the backup. Checked the rest of the systems—well, to make a long story short, someone has managed to compromise the entirety of our ship's systems. There's a back door into virtually everything on board that isn't completely standalone."

  "How did you find this, and when?"

  A.J. looked apologetic. "Actually, I found it a few weeks ago. Right when Doc Wu got sick, he told me how bad it might get, so I started trying to improve our automation. A lot of that being perceptual interpretation, I figured I could probably code it better than anyone else. I ran across a minor anomaly in the comm and sensor grid that led me to the first discovery, and then the others, until I realized that most of the ship must be like this. Then I got sick and . . . Well, forgot all about it until today."

  With anyone else, Ken would have been furious. How could you forget something like this?! For weeks?!

  But . . . That was just A.J.'s nature. The flip side of his ability to concentrate—downside, often enough—was that he could become oblivious to almost everything else.

  "The reactor controls?" Ken had a horrid vision of someone having the ability to cause the entire ship to blow up or melt down.

  "No, actually." A.J.'s face showed some puzzlement. "That's clean as a whistle. Oh, with some of the other back doors, whoever it is could probably get control of the engines and the reactor. But they'd be doing it through the standard interfaces aside from their initial system entry."

  "Any guess as to the purpose of all these compromises? If they don't want to just kill us off, what do they want?" Ken rubbed his scalp. "I've got to call Fathom in on this. We're dealing here with her specialty."

  A.J.'s jaws tightened. "That's exactly why you shouldn't call her in."

  "Huh?" The captain of the Nike stared at the imaging and data processing specialist. "But she's already got authority to access pretty much anything she wants. She's in charge of security, for Pete's sake. Why would she have back doors hidden in the system?"

  "Well, I like the woman, myself. I can't think of anybody who doesn't, really. But then—if you were a security heavy, wouldn't you rather that everyone liked
you instead of being paranoid about you?"

  Ken thought about it for a moment. "Okay, sure, of course I would. Still—"

  "And if you were a security specialist working for the U.S. government, you'd be unhappy about the fact that political horse-trading has made something like thirty percent of the crew foreign nationals, wouldn't you?"

  Ken snorted. "Security specialist, be damned. I'm just a soldier and I'm not happy about it. So . . . yeah, I see your point."

  "And if—note that I say 'if'—you were the sort that felt that clamping a heavy security lid on things was the best policy if we found something really strategically useful, wouldn't you realize that the scientists aren't necessarily going to shut up on their own?"

  Ken saw where this was going. "And if you did, you'd want a way to make sure that you could just make everyone shut up. Even if it meant overriding every system capable of communication on the entire ship."

  "Yep. Especially since you'd have to be worried that even other Americans on board might prefer the 'information wants to be free' path. And that the kinda apolitical captain might back you up . . . and, then again, might not."

  Ken set his jaws. "That's pure bullshit. I'm not into politics myself, that's true. And it's also true that all the years I've spent hobnobbing with you scientific types has made a lot of your attitudes about the free flow of information and knowledge rub off on me. But the fact remains—don't ever doubt it, A.J.—that I'm a professional officer serving in the military forces of the United States of America. Madeline Fathom is the duly-authorized representative of our government in charge of security here, and I would back her up any time she acted in that capacity. Regardless of whether I agreed with her or not."

  A.J. shrugged. "Fine. But you think like a soldier. In my experience—thankfully limited—I really don't think security people have the same mentality at all. So whatever you might know you might do, they wouldn't necessarily think you would. If that twisted grammar makes any sense."

  It made plenty of sense to Hathaway. A.J.'s analysis, now that Ken thought about it, was a lot more plausible than even the imaging and data expert knew. Unlike the rest of the crew, Brigadier General Hathaway had known General Deiderichs off and on for years. While the general hadn't told him much, the way in which he didn't say certain things was a clear warning: Madeline Fathom carried one hell of a lot of weight, possibly even more than Deiderichs himself.

  That meant that whichever intelligence agency Fathom was working for—and Ken suspected it was the HIA, which had more clout than any of them when it wanted to use it—she had what amounted to a direct pipeline to the President. Which, in turn, meant that if the back doors A.J. had discovered did lead back to her, she had the legitimate authority to have them and to use them. That was true regardless of what Brigadier General Ken Hathaway thought personally about the mind-set involved and its readiness to use duplicitous methods.

  God forbid the right hand should ever tell the left hand what it's doing. He remembered a wisecrack once made by a fellow Air Force officer: The only difference between the nuts in security and the ones in lunatic asylums is that the security nuts insist their straightjackets have to have clearance and be stamped Top Secret.

  "What a mess," he muttered. "All right, A.J. I won't tell Fathom until you do an initial check to see if she's the one who's holding the back doors. If she is, then it's a moot point. You and I know, and we just forget about it. But if she isn't the one, then we've got a real problem with security and I'm bringing her in right away. And in the meantime, we don't tell anyone else. I'm willing to stretch things that far, but I'm not willing to spread this to anyone except Fathom."

  A.J. nodded. "No sweat. If for no other reason, I don't want Joe to know. Not from me, anyway. You wanna talk about a mess."

  Ken grimaced. To everyone else's surprise—and A.J.'s astonishment—Joe Buckley and Madeline Fathom were often seen together since the voyage had started. By now the two were, if not an item, at least one of the strongest candidates for becoming an item on board Nike. If they were wrong about Madeline, a very nice friendship—or something more—could be torpedoed with no justification. Or, if Joe reacted the other way, A.J. could find his best friend alienated from him.

  "Right. In any event, we need to check all the other alternatives— and immediately. If Fathom's the one with the back doors, she has them on official authority. Which someone else wouldn't—and that would be an order of magnitude worse. We need to make sure, if we can, that that's not the case. In the meantime . . . Have you closed off any or all of the back doors?"

  "Nary a one. But I've booby-trapped them. When someone activates one of them, I'll be able to catch 'em at it. And of course I can always override them now that I know what's going on. That's why you made me the DP head around here."

  Ken gave A.J. a hard look, just short of an outright glare. "Understand something, A.J. If it does turn out that it's Fathom, I'll want you to remove the booby traps. I don't like the idea of her having those back doors, but what I don't like doesn't make any difference. She is in charge of security. But until we know one way or the other, keep them in place. If it's someone else, we do not want those back doors functional."

  A.J. nodded, although Hathaway was quite sure that he had reservations. Reservations strong enough, in fact, that Ken would probably have problems with him if it did turn out to be Fathom.

  But that was for a later day—which might never come.

  In that respect, at least, A.J. obviously felt the same way he did. "Well," the imaging specialist said, "I just hope we never have to find out."

  So do I, Madeline thought to herself as she shut off the recording. So do I.

  Not that it would make a very big difference. She'd been expecting to hear that conversation, or one like it, right around now. A.J. was good, but he was only second-rate as a security specialist. More than good enough for basic civilian or low-level military stuff, to be sure, and he was probably a hell of a cracker if he wanted to be. But when you had the resources to draw on that Madeline did, a second-rater was only going to find what you wanted them to find.

  Everything had to be a double blind whenever possible. One of the best ways of defusing effective resistance was to convince your opponents that they were smarter than you were, always just a step ahead. In this case, she'd arranged for fairly well-hidden back doors to exist—while burying her real back doors far deeper inside the system. It was the same strategy she'd used with respect to her martial arts capability.

  Not quite the same strategy, she reminded herself. It wouldn't do to underestimate A.J. Baker. Her martial arts skills were hers alone, while in this case she was only about as good as A.J. in her own right. Not even that, really, given a level playing field.

  But this wasn't a level playing field, not even close. The HIA could tap the best people in the world when it came to this sort of work. All Madeline had had to do was arrange access for one of them to assist in the coding. He'd done the rest.

  Bugging Hathaway's office had not been difficult. It had been trivially easy, in fact, since no one had been expecting surveillance equipment to be installed aboard Nike. The military people and scientists who made up the crew just didn't think in those terms.

  Now she had to decide if she'd gotten all the use out of the monitors that she could reasonably expect, or whether she should leave them in place. The longer they sat there, the more chance there was that someone would spot them.

  A.J. was, once more, the major threat there. He scattered his Fairy Dust almost randomly at times. And, unlike those in use in engineering and other departments, A.J.'s sensor motes were not merely cutting-edge but bleeding-edge, customized in both their software and sometimes even hardware aspects. In fact, she had to grudgingly admit that they outperformed even the supposedly top-of-the-line stuff she'd been supplied for this mission. If A.J. ever decided to start looking for other sensor motes, she'd be busted. Martial arts was his exercise and computer systems his sideline
, but sensor systems and detecting things that were hidden was A.J. Baker's expertise. He was probably the best in the world at it. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that she could no more beat A.J. on that battlefield than he could beat her in an honest fight.