Life Force, page 6
Mart's attention was on the voice now issuing from his communicator.
"Let's go," he said, kicking his goat into gear. "We've got company. There's an unidentified ship, small, fast, trying a variety of approaches to the planet." He sped toward the facility, and neither of them thought again about the odd echo from the cliffs.
Chapter Ten
Jake Jordan had found several ways to compensate for the fact that nature had shorted him, literally, making him five-feet-eight-inches tall in an age in which six feet was the average height for men and that ancient and honorable sport of basketball now was played with seven-footers at the guard positions. The ultimate macho compensation had been to become a modern mercenary. With no wars to be fought, being a mercenary wasn't always exciting. Mostly, since his was a one-man business, it was lonely and often boring, for it involved doing a lot of traveling in a neat little ship that had been altered from a luxurious space yacht into an overpowered, secretly armed bomb. Although her name did not appear anywhere on her black hull, Jake knew her as the Can Do. She was a sweetheart. Internal stressing enabled Can Do to use sublight trans in atmosphere, and extra shielding prevented her hull from ablating in the extreme heat of such travel. Her G.D. was monstrous, large enough for a small freighter. Her computer power was such that she could trans with a loading time of mere seconds, which is what she was doing when Matt and Teddy arrived at The Shop to lean over the shoulders of the duty man. "What the hell?" Matt asked, as a blip appeared near one of the eyes into space and immediately disappeared.
"He's been at it for a couple of hours," the duty man said. "That's one helluva little ship up there." He pointed. The blip had appeared again, near another satellite, and, as quickly, was gone. "He's just about completed a survey of the sphere of space down to about twenty miles."
"A survey?" Matt asked.
"What else? He's pinpointed every eye we've got up there except these two." The duty man pointed to the screen. "He'll come out right here." There it was, the blip, and then it was gone to appear again near the last uncharted satellite. "Okay, that's the lot. He'll probably make a few more trans just to be sure."
"He moves," Matt said.
"If I didn't have an exact read on his mass, I'd swear he was a Defense Force destroyer. I mean, that's some souped-up ship up there."
"Why is he here?" Teddy asked. "Why is he locating all our eyes?"
"If I were going to make an unauthorized approach, or attack some point on the planet, I'd first find out the planet's alert capacity," Matt said.
Jake Jordan made a couple of high speed circumnavigations of the globe, all his specialized search instruments at max, and, satisfied that he had located all the eyes, zapped Can Do out past detection distance and suspended her in space. The long eyes and sensitive ears he then brought to bear on the planet had Chinese markings. They'd been part of a deal that had turned out to be very profitable, one of the few times he'd chosen to do business with a governmental agency. He didn't trust bureaucrats. He liked to work for the private sector, where there were men who had a cash incentive to keep secrets. But the Chinese gig hadn't been bad, involving nothing more than a courier run. Of course, if the materials he'd been carrying in Can Do's safe had fallen into the wrong hands, say into the hands of a captain of a Defense Force warbird, things would have gotten a little sticky, which is why Jake had demanded as prepayment the state of the Chinese art in long-range eyes and ears.
"I've got to be able to spot a warbird before they spot me," he'd insisted, and he'd gotten what he demanded.
Beauty was revealed to him as being largely empty. One sprawling facility was well advanced, another was just getting underway on another continent, and there were three small ships cruising in atmosphere on G.D.
After being nothing much more than a high-priced messenger for years, moving items too secret or too valuable to be trusted to regular milk runs between planets, Jake welcomed the challenge he'd discovered way to hell and gone out in unexplored space. Someone had buttoned a sizable planet up damned tight. He'd never seen a better positioned set of detectors. He ran the picture on the computer, got the graphic of the globe and put in the detection zones, using U.S. standard, since the power signals from the satellites indicated U.S. manufacture, and whistled. There wasn't a hole anywhere in the envelope.
Jake dressed neatly, even when he was alone in space. He favored black, and his most worn costume was a modification of Academy in-space wear, black, seamless slacks with an expanding waistband and a comfortable black pullover shirt in silkweave Chinese material, light and uninhibitive of quick movement. He had a shock of black hair and wore a neat, equally black beard. He had a pleasant expression around his eyes, the effect heightened by the grin lines that come to a man who spends a lot of time in space.
The challenge was to find a way past the electronic eyes and ears. That's all that was being asked of him on this trip. But there wasn't a way in. The only way a ship could get through that envelope of protection without being detected was to wait until one of the eyes malfunctioned, and that could be a long, long wait. He didn't have time for that, nor was that a viable alternative for anyone who wanted to approach the planet at a specific time.
There was one other possibility. Among hot pilots everywhere there were tales about some hotshot transing directly into planetary gravity and atmosphere. He'd never met anyone who had done it personally. The teller of the tale was always a fellow who had known a fellow who did it or had known a fellow who had known a fellow who definitely saw old so-and-so trans from space down to within a few thousand feet of the surface. The technique was simple enough. You just measured and entered the readings and pushed a button. The problem was that both atmosphere and a strong gravitational pull could affect the readings and with such small tolerances if a man goofed he would trans into the ground and cause one very nice explosion when the ship materialized in solid rock. Even transing perfectly and coming out in air would be no assurance that one had not been detected, because when a ship came out of trans it became solid and since two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time the air would be displaced, and displaced explosively. Probably, it was thought, the sound would be like thunder or a sonic boom, but no one really knew.
On the ground, meanwhile, The Shop was a busy place. The encroaching ship had disappeared from the eyes in space, but a technician was cranking up long-range detection, that just happened to be the state of U.S. art, and slightly superior to the Chinese long eyes and ears on board Jake's Can Do.
"There he is," a technician said. "About ten thousand miles. He's stationary."
"Let's go," Matt said to Teddy, who followed him, on the run, to the pad where Belle lay sleeping, dreaming, perhaps, of far-flung flights into the neighboring galaxies. "Keep me posted," Matt said, on the run, his communicator open. "Figure me a trans vector from one hundred thousand feet so that when I come out I'll be nose to nose with that dude."
It took five minutes to get Belle humming and ticking, and by then the trans vector was programmed in. Matt took her up easy. It was very dusty there on the plateau and the technicians complained if a ship was careless. Clear, he juiced the G.D. and listened to Teddy call out altitude. The computer took over and counted down and then Belle transed and there was a black ship with silver trim, no name, lying nose to nose not over fifty feet away.
"Now that's cutting it too damned close," Teddy said.
Matt could see the bearded face of the black ship's pilot. He nudged Belle and she snuck closer until no more than five feet separated her from the black ship and Matt could see the startled look on the dark man's face when he looked up and out the port and saw Matt's face.
Jake's hand shot out to the console, his finger on the beam's safety button, then he relaxed. The lad out there was damned good, damned good. It served him right to get caught napping, without even having turned on the ship's detectors. Detectors send out a signal and that signal can be detected, so he'd been running without them while making his survey and had not thought to turn them on when he was finished. Yes, the pilot of that ship sitting five feet from his nose was damned good. He raised one hand, gave a smart academy style salute, and then transed the hell out of there.
"There were no markings on the ship," Teddy said.
"Let's see the tape," Matt said. Teddy pushed buttons and the image of the black ship appeared on a screen, grew, until, on full magnification, the face of the black ship's pilot was larger than life-size.
"Not a bad looking guy," Teddy said.
"If you like woolly boogers," Matt said.
"Sometimes a beard can be a mark of distinction."
"Well, he's gone," Matt said. "I doubt if he'll hang around, now that he knows we've spotted him." He let Belle edge over and nudged her just a bit to put her into free fall toward Beauty.
There were two levels of emotion in Jake Jordan's head as he halted Can Do half a light-year from the planet. He was chagrined to have been caught out so easily by some dude in a gold and white exploration ship with nowhere near the guts of Can Do. On that level it was his pride that was hurt. On a deeper level, there was a chilling realization that he had goofed rather badly, a goof so flagrant that, had he committed it under other circumstances, he would most probably now be a few scattered molecules being swept slowly down into the planet's gravitational well to burn up on contact with the atmosphere. True, this job didn't have the built-in peril of some he'd done, but he had no way of knowing when he'd be back in some situation where letting a strange ship come nose to nose with him would do greater damage than hurt pride. For example, about once a year he made a run out past Valhalla to the asteroid belt where certain entrepreneurs saw no reason to pay heavy export duties on some very high grade diamonds being mined from an asteroid that contained the core of an ancient volcanic pipe. With the help of Jake Jordan and Can Do, they bypassed both the German officials of Valhalla and the Pax Five customs gentlemen. The squareheads on Valhalla, a poor planet, would have taken a dim view of such activity and would, no doubt, use the state of the German art weaponry on a black and silver ship without markings coming from a known jewel producing belt without Valhalla clearance.
Perhaps, Jordan felt, the smiling pilot of that pretty little exploration ship with the quaint name had done him a favor by reminding him that even in loose situations one could not afford to get slack. On the other hand, who did that smiling son of a bitch think he was, sticking his nose right into the port housing a beam that could have melted him at two hundred miles?
Hot pilots of all eras, from the time of the Wright brothers, have had their pride, and Jordan had his share. It was pride that sent him to the computer, pride that programmed a small trans. It was pride that pushed doubt away and sent Jordan's fingers flying over the console. The computer kicked back his first three calculations as being potentially disastrous, and grudgingly accepted the fourth set of figures with a yellow warning light that showed a marginal safety factor. Can Do transed.
The small black ship came back at just over thirty thousand feet over the southern ocean of Beauty. Her instantaneous appearance pushed air out in all directions with explosive force, but the thunder in the reaches of the southern ocean rumbled over the ice sheets and the faceless waters.
So it could be done, and had been done, transing into atmosphere. He'd come past the planet's eyes and ears, and he doubted if there was a surface detection system. No need for it since the gates were closed so tightly on the near fringe of space. It didn't matter, because now he wanted them to know that he'd breached their guard. It was a matter of pride. He consulted the graphics he'd built of the planet during his survey and his fingers gave Can Do her orders.
Tinker's Belle had made a leisurely descent and had landed on her assigned pad. Matt and Teddy, having shared wonder about why the black ship had been surveying Beauty's defenses, were in no hurry to get back to work. It was a fantastic day, the afternoon having spent its heat and the cool of evening to be sniffed on the slight breeze.
Teddy saw it first. It came from the south, seeming to curve up from the horizon with a speed that made her gasp. By the time she'd called Mart's attention to it, it was growing larger and appeared to be higher.
"Ho—lee," Matt gasped, as the fireball seemed to be coming directly toward him, orange-red at the front, tapering with flames reaching backward like the tail of a short comet.
The thing moved at an incredible rate of speed, flashing over the Reznor complex at an altitude of less than eighty thousand feet, and with its passing— so fast was it moving that the sound came only after the fireball had seemed to climb directly toward the sky and dwindle—came a mighty sonic boom, a heaving, thunderous concussion that rattled windows, sent the few herbivores grazing on the plain into panicked flight, and thundered back from the rocky escarpment to the west.
"A meteor?" Teddy gasped.
"Going straight up?"
There were no human ears to hear the low, moaning sound that came from the escarpment in the wake of the sonic boom. From the southern ocean, from the southern end of the continent, to the north and away the thunderous announcement of Can Do's transpowered atmospheric flight battered the quietness of Beauty.
Teddy was just behind Matt when he burst into The Shop. "What the hell was it?" Matt asked.
"It was making power enough to drive a colonizer ship," the duty man said. "Trans."
"That was a ship?" Teddy asked, not really believing it.
"She'd have to be stressed stronger than a ship of the line, and have a power plant that was something else," the duty man said, "but it was a ship."
Matt looked at Teddy with a wry smile. "He didn't like our sneaking up on him." He turned. "Where did he come in?"
"He didn't," the duty man said. "No detection."
"Impossible," Matt said.
"He came up from the south," the duty man said, "and he kicked in the trans and went just outside atmosphere."
"That leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions," Teddy said. "Why was he here in the first place, and why would he so blatantly announce that he has a way to evade the eyes and ears?"
"You tell me," Matt said.
The Can Do would need a new paint job. She'd lost only a tiny layer of shielding in the showboat flight as a burning fireball through atmosphere, so a coat of paint or two would do it. It was no big deal, since the cost of the repair could be added to Jake's bill. He took her transing as fast as the computer could figure to Earth orbit, sent a coded recognition signal and went down under power, making a splashy landing, coming from free fall to a powered halt two inches off the pad, at a military field tucked almost unseen into the side of a mountain in the Italian Alps. Serious faced, armed men, all taller than he, escorted him across a short area of nonreflecting surface hardener. A long ride on a fast elevator and he was several hundred feet into the bowels of the mountain, sitting down without being asked in front of the desk of a grizzled, unsmiling man in the uniform of the joint intelligence agency of the Pax Five. In his report, made orally—there was to be nothing in writing—he left out his last flight at fireball speed less than fifty thousand feet over the planet Andrew Reznor had named Beauty.
The grizzled, unsmiling man in uniform listened, nodding occasionally, and then he had a look at the printouts from Can Do.
"Animals?" he asked, staring into Jake's intense, dark eyes. "Nothing but animals?"
"You see it," Jake said.
"A planetary alert system to guard animals?"
"A very good system," Jake said. "Anyone who visits that planet will not come as a surprise to those on the surface."
"You have done well," the grizzled man said. "As agreed, the designated sums will be deposited in Pax Five dollars to your numbered account."
Chapter Eleven
After a few weeks, the test animals on Beauty didn't even bother to run when vehicles approached. When they heard the snarl of approaching goats or vans they would raise their heads, switch their tails and— if you were one of those people who attributed humanlike emotions to animals, as Cassie Frost was—say to themselves, oh, well, here we go again. Having been bred and reared on Reznor's game farms, the animals were already accustomed to being pampered, pawed, pricked, and forcefed by humans, but on Beauty the testing seemed to be endless.
His conversational style came, Jack admitted, from what he termed to be a grasshopper brain, meaning that he jumped from subject to subject and competed fiercely for vocal time as if there had been given to each only a limited number of minutes to talk and he wanted his share and someone else's too. But Jack Frost was all business, direct, efficient, when it came to his work, which was and had been since he was a teenager, animals. When personally recruited by Andrew Reznor, Frost had been teaching and doing research at the Auburn School of Veterinary Medicine. In addition to being the finest diagnostician in the field, and very handy as a cutter, he was recognized as one of the top experts in the field of animal behavior. He'd had one big decision to make, for there were to be no domestic animals on Beauty, no pussycats, tweety-birds, puppy dogs. That meant leaving behind a menagerie acquired over years, built of the cringing, bone-protruding, heartbreaking pup abandoned by the roadside, the stray kitten, the unwanted mama alley cat whose stomach protruded with life. It had taken Andrew Reznor exactly five minutes to overcome that objection. He'd merely put a few million dollars up to establish the Jackson Frost Animal Shelter, purchasing a hundred acres of used up cotton land in Alabama as a start. Strays and discards now had a home, scientifically balanced diets, gentle if effective sterilization, and they poured in from all over Alabama and parts of Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia.
Cassie, on the other hand, had been holding her breath all through the discussion of the possibilities of Reznor's plan. She and Jack had met twenty feet below the surface of the sea, atop a dying coral reef in the Bahamas. However, marine life was not her main interest. In conservation circles she was known as the monkey woman, not because of her petite frame or her large, somewhat simian eyes, but because of her interest, which was anything with four legs and a tail that climbed trees and belonged to the orders that included all apes and monkeys. She'd been vacationing in the Bahamas when she swam up over a dying reef, where life was being slowly exterminated by the sewage dumped into the sea from the booming resort towns, to see, first, a balding head, a long, lanky body, and then two curious eyes staring at her through a diving mask.
"Let's go," he said, kicking his goat into gear. "We've got company. There's an unidentified ship, small, fast, trying a variety of approaches to the planet." He sped toward the facility, and neither of them thought again about the odd echo from the cliffs.
Chapter Ten
Jake Jordan had found several ways to compensate for the fact that nature had shorted him, literally, making him five-feet-eight-inches tall in an age in which six feet was the average height for men and that ancient and honorable sport of basketball now was played with seven-footers at the guard positions. The ultimate macho compensation had been to become a modern mercenary. With no wars to be fought, being a mercenary wasn't always exciting. Mostly, since his was a one-man business, it was lonely and often boring, for it involved doing a lot of traveling in a neat little ship that had been altered from a luxurious space yacht into an overpowered, secretly armed bomb. Although her name did not appear anywhere on her black hull, Jake knew her as the Can Do. She was a sweetheart. Internal stressing enabled Can Do to use sublight trans in atmosphere, and extra shielding prevented her hull from ablating in the extreme heat of such travel. Her G.D. was monstrous, large enough for a small freighter. Her computer power was such that she could trans with a loading time of mere seconds, which is what she was doing when Matt and Teddy arrived at The Shop to lean over the shoulders of the duty man. "What the hell?" Matt asked, as a blip appeared near one of the eyes into space and immediately disappeared.
"He's been at it for a couple of hours," the duty man said. "That's one helluva little ship up there." He pointed. The blip had appeared again, near another satellite, and, as quickly, was gone. "He's just about completed a survey of the sphere of space down to about twenty miles."
"A survey?" Matt asked.
"What else? He's pinpointed every eye we've got up there except these two." The duty man pointed to the screen. "He'll come out right here." There it was, the blip, and then it was gone to appear again near the last uncharted satellite. "Okay, that's the lot. He'll probably make a few more trans just to be sure."
"He moves," Matt said.
"If I didn't have an exact read on his mass, I'd swear he was a Defense Force destroyer. I mean, that's some souped-up ship up there."
"Why is he here?" Teddy asked. "Why is he locating all our eyes?"
"If I were going to make an unauthorized approach, or attack some point on the planet, I'd first find out the planet's alert capacity," Matt said.
Jake Jordan made a couple of high speed circumnavigations of the globe, all his specialized search instruments at max, and, satisfied that he had located all the eyes, zapped Can Do out past detection distance and suspended her in space. The long eyes and sensitive ears he then brought to bear on the planet had Chinese markings. They'd been part of a deal that had turned out to be very profitable, one of the few times he'd chosen to do business with a governmental agency. He didn't trust bureaucrats. He liked to work for the private sector, where there were men who had a cash incentive to keep secrets. But the Chinese gig hadn't been bad, involving nothing more than a courier run. Of course, if the materials he'd been carrying in Can Do's safe had fallen into the wrong hands, say into the hands of a captain of a Defense Force warbird, things would have gotten a little sticky, which is why Jake had demanded as prepayment the state of the Chinese art in long-range eyes and ears.
"I've got to be able to spot a warbird before they spot me," he'd insisted, and he'd gotten what he demanded.
Beauty was revealed to him as being largely empty. One sprawling facility was well advanced, another was just getting underway on another continent, and there were three small ships cruising in atmosphere on G.D.
After being nothing much more than a high-priced messenger for years, moving items too secret or too valuable to be trusted to regular milk runs between planets, Jake welcomed the challenge he'd discovered way to hell and gone out in unexplored space. Someone had buttoned a sizable planet up damned tight. He'd never seen a better positioned set of detectors. He ran the picture on the computer, got the graphic of the globe and put in the detection zones, using U.S. standard, since the power signals from the satellites indicated U.S. manufacture, and whistled. There wasn't a hole anywhere in the envelope.
Jake dressed neatly, even when he was alone in space. He favored black, and his most worn costume was a modification of Academy in-space wear, black, seamless slacks with an expanding waistband and a comfortable black pullover shirt in silkweave Chinese material, light and uninhibitive of quick movement. He had a shock of black hair and wore a neat, equally black beard. He had a pleasant expression around his eyes, the effect heightened by the grin lines that come to a man who spends a lot of time in space.
The challenge was to find a way past the electronic eyes and ears. That's all that was being asked of him on this trip. But there wasn't a way in. The only way a ship could get through that envelope of protection without being detected was to wait until one of the eyes malfunctioned, and that could be a long, long wait. He didn't have time for that, nor was that a viable alternative for anyone who wanted to approach the planet at a specific time.
There was one other possibility. Among hot pilots everywhere there were tales about some hotshot transing directly into planetary gravity and atmosphere. He'd never met anyone who had done it personally. The teller of the tale was always a fellow who had known a fellow who did it or had known a fellow who had known a fellow who definitely saw old so-and-so trans from space down to within a few thousand feet of the surface. The technique was simple enough. You just measured and entered the readings and pushed a button. The problem was that both atmosphere and a strong gravitational pull could affect the readings and with such small tolerances if a man goofed he would trans into the ground and cause one very nice explosion when the ship materialized in solid rock. Even transing perfectly and coming out in air would be no assurance that one had not been detected, because when a ship came out of trans it became solid and since two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time the air would be displaced, and displaced explosively. Probably, it was thought, the sound would be like thunder or a sonic boom, but no one really knew.
On the ground, meanwhile, The Shop was a busy place. The encroaching ship had disappeared from the eyes in space, but a technician was cranking up long-range detection, that just happened to be the state of U.S. art, and slightly superior to the Chinese long eyes and ears on board Jake's Can Do.
"There he is," a technician said. "About ten thousand miles. He's stationary."
"Let's go," Matt said to Teddy, who followed him, on the run, to the pad where Belle lay sleeping, dreaming, perhaps, of far-flung flights into the neighboring galaxies. "Keep me posted," Matt said, on the run, his communicator open. "Figure me a trans vector from one hundred thousand feet so that when I come out I'll be nose to nose with that dude."
It took five minutes to get Belle humming and ticking, and by then the trans vector was programmed in. Matt took her up easy. It was very dusty there on the plateau and the technicians complained if a ship was careless. Clear, he juiced the G.D. and listened to Teddy call out altitude. The computer took over and counted down and then Belle transed and there was a black ship with silver trim, no name, lying nose to nose not over fifty feet away.
"Now that's cutting it too damned close," Teddy said.
Matt could see the bearded face of the black ship's pilot. He nudged Belle and she snuck closer until no more than five feet separated her from the black ship and Matt could see the startled look on the dark man's face when he looked up and out the port and saw Matt's face.
Jake's hand shot out to the console, his finger on the beam's safety button, then he relaxed. The lad out there was damned good, damned good. It served him right to get caught napping, without even having turned on the ship's detectors. Detectors send out a signal and that signal can be detected, so he'd been running without them while making his survey and had not thought to turn them on when he was finished. Yes, the pilot of that ship sitting five feet from his nose was damned good. He raised one hand, gave a smart academy style salute, and then transed the hell out of there.
"There were no markings on the ship," Teddy said.
"Let's see the tape," Matt said. Teddy pushed buttons and the image of the black ship appeared on a screen, grew, until, on full magnification, the face of the black ship's pilot was larger than life-size.
"Not a bad looking guy," Teddy said.
"If you like woolly boogers," Matt said.
"Sometimes a beard can be a mark of distinction."
"Well, he's gone," Matt said. "I doubt if he'll hang around, now that he knows we've spotted him." He let Belle edge over and nudged her just a bit to put her into free fall toward Beauty.
There were two levels of emotion in Jake Jordan's head as he halted Can Do half a light-year from the planet. He was chagrined to have been caught out so easily by some dude in a gold and white exploration ship with nowhere near the guts of Can Do. On that level it was his pride that was hurt. On a deeper level, there was a chilling realization that he had goofed rather badly, a goof so flagrant that, had he committed it under other circumstances, he would most probably now be a few scattered molecules being swept slowly down into the planet's gravitational well to burn up on contact with the atmosphere. True, this job didn't have the built-in peril of some he'd done, but he had no way of knowing when he'd be back in some situation where letting a strange ship come nose to nose with him would do greater damage than hurt pride. For example, about once a year he made a run out past Valhalla to the asteroid belt where certain entrepreneurs saw no reason to pay heavy export duties on some very high grade diamonds being mined from an asteroid that contained the core of an ancient volcanic pipe. With the help of Jake Jordan and Can Do, they bypassed both the German officials of Valhalla and the Pax Five customs gentlemen. The squareheads on Valhalla, a poor planet, would have taken a dim view of such activity and would, no doubt, use the state of the German art weaponry on a black and silver ship without markings coming from a known jewel producing belt without Valhalla clearance.
Perhaps, Jordan felt, the smiling pilot of that pretty little exploration ship with the quaint name had done him a favor by reminding him that even in loose situations one could not afford to get slack. On the other hand, who did that smiling son of a bitch think he was, sticking his nose right into the port housing a beam that could have melted him at two hundred miles?
Hot pilots of all eras, from the time of the Wright brothers, have had their pride, and Jordan had his share. It was pride that sent him to the computer, pride that programmed a small trans. It was pride that pushed doubt away and sent Jordan's fingers flying over the console. The computer kicked back his first three calculations as being potentially disastrous, and grudgingly accepted the fourth set of figures with a yellow warning light that showed a marginal safety factor. Can Do transed.
The small black ship came back at just over thirty thousand feet over the southern ocean of Beauty. Her instantaneous appearance pushed air out in all directions with explosive force, but the thunder in the reaches of the southern ocean rumbled over the ice sheets and the faceless waters.
So it could be done, and had been done, transing into atmosphere. He'd come past the planet's eyes and ears, and he doubted if there was a surface detection system. No need for it since the gates were closed so tightly on the near fringe of space. It didn't matter, because now he wanted them to know that he'd breached their guard. It was a matter of pride. He consulted the graphics he'd built of the planet during his survey and his fingers gave Can Do her orders.
Tinker's Belle had made a leisurely descent and had landed on her assigned pad. Matt and Teddy, having shared wonder about why the black ship had been surveying Beauty's defenses, were in no hurry to get back to work. It was a fantastic day, the afternoon having spent its heat and the cool of evening to be sniffed on the slight breeze.
Teddy saw it first. It came from the south, seeming to curve up from the horizon with a speed that made her gasp. By the time she'd called Mart's attention to it, it was growing larger and appeared to be higher.
"Ho—lee," Matt gasped, as the fireball seemed to be coming directly toward him, orange-red at the front, tapering with flames reaching backward like the tail of a short comet.
The thing moved at an incredible rate of speed, flashing over the Reznor complex at an altitude of less than eighty thousand feet, and with its passing— so fast was it moving that the sound came only after the fireball had seemed to climb directly toward the sky and dwindle—came a mighty sonic boom, a heaving, thunderous concussion that rattled windows, sent the few herbivores grazing on the plain into panicked flight, and thundered back from the rocky escarpment to the west.
"A meteor?" Teddy gasped.
"Going straight up?"
There were no human ears to hear the low, moaning sound that came from the escarpment in the wake of the sonic boom. From the southern ocean, from the southern end of the continent, to the north and away the thunderous announcement of Can Do's transpowered atmospheric flight battered the quietness of Beauty.
Teddy was just behind Matt when he burst into The Shop. "What the hell was it?" Matt asked.
"It was making power enough to drive a colonizer ship," the duty man said. "Trans."
"That was a ship?" Teddy asked, not really believing it.
"She'd have to be stressed stronger than a ship of the line, and have a power plant that was something else," the duty man said, "but it was a ship."
Matt looked at Teddy with a wry smile. "He didn't like our sneaking up on him." He turned. "Where did he come in?"
"He didn't," the duty man said. "No detection."
"Impossible," Matt said.
"He came up from the south," the duty man said, "and he kicked in the trans and went just outside atmosphere."
"That leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions," Teddy said. "Why was he here in the first place, and why would he so blatantly announce that he has a way to evade the eyes and ears?"
"You tell me," Matt said.
The Can Do would need a new paint job. She'd lost only a tiny layer of shielding in the showboat flight as a burning fireball through atmosphere, so a coat of paint or two would do it. It was no big deal, since the cost of the repair could be added to Jake's bill. He took her transing as fast as the computer could figure to Earth orbit, sent a coded recognition signal and went down under power, making a splashy landing, coming from free fall to a powered halt two inches off the pad, at a military field tucked almost unseen into the side of a mountain in the Italian Alps. Serious faced, armed men, all taller than he, escorted him across a short area of nonreflecting surface hardener. A long ride on a fast elevator and he was several hundred feet into the bowels of the mountain, sitting down without being asked in front of the desk of a grizzled, unsmiling man in the uniform of the joint intelligence agency of the Pax Five. In his report, made orally—there was to be nothing in writing—he left out his last flight at fireball speed less than fifty thousand feet over the planet Andrew Reznor had named Beauty.
The grizzled, unsmiling man in uniform listened, nodding occasionally, and then he had a look at the printouts from Can Do.
"Animals?" he asked, staring into Jake's intense, dark eyes. "Nothing but animals?"
"You see it," Jake said.
"A planetary alert system to guard animals?"
"A very good system," Jake said. "Anyone who visits that planet will not come as a surprise to those on the surface."
"You have done well," the grizzled man said. "As agreed, the designated sums will be deposited in Pax Five dollars to your numbered account."
Chapter Eleven
After a few weeks, the test animals on Beauty didn't even bother to run when vehicles approached. When they heard the snarl of approaching goats or vans they would raise their heads, switch their tails and— if you were one of those people who attributed humanlike emotions to animals, as Cassie Frost was—say to themselves, oh, well, here we go again. Having been bred and reared on Reznor's game farms, the animals were already accustomed to being pampered, pawed, pricked, and forcefed by humans, but on Beauty the testing seemed to be endless.
His conversational style came, Jack admitted, from what he termed to be a grasshopper brain, meaning that he jumped from subject to subject and competed fiercely for vocal time as if there had been given to each only a limited number of minutes to talk and he wanted his share and someone else's too. But Jack Frost was all business, direct, efficient, when it came to his work, which was and had been since he was a teenager, animals. When personally recruited by Andrew Reznor, Frost had been teaching and doing research at the Auburn School of Veterinary Medicine. In addition to being the finest diagnostician in the field, and very handy as a cutter, he was recognized as one of the top experts in the field of animal behavior. He'd had one big decision to make, for there were to be no domestic animals on Beauty, no pussycats, tweety-birds, puppy dogs. That meant leaving behind a menagerie acquired over years, built of the cringing, bone-protruding, heartbreaking pup abandoned by the roadside, the stray kitten, the unwanted mama alley cat whose stomach protruded with life. It had taken Andrew Reznor exactly five minutes to overcome that objection. He'd merely put a few million dollars up to establish the Jackson Frost Animal Shelter, purchasing a hundred acres of used up cotton land in Alabama as a start. Strays and discards now had a home, scientifically balanced diets, gentle if effective sterilization, and they poured in from all over Alabama and parts of Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia.
Cassie, on the other hand, had been holding her breath all through the discussion of the possibilities of Reznor's plan. She and Jack had met twenty feet below the surface of the sea, atop a dying coral reef in the Bahamas. However, marine life was not her main interest. In conservation circles she was known as the monkey woman, not because of her petite frame or her large, somewhat simian eyes, but because of her interest, which was anything with four legs and a tail that climbed trees and belonged to the orders that included all apes and monkeys. She'd been vacationing in the Bahamas when she swam up over a dying reef, where life was being slowly exterminated by the sewage dumped into the sea from the booming resort towns, to see, first, a balding head, a long, lanky body, and then two curious eyes staring at her through a diving mask.
