As Sean pushed himself into the port-side seat, he found himself grateful that the padded couches were designed to accommodate life-support packs. This was only the second time he'd worn a skinsuit. A couple of days ago, he'd had an argument with Cayce, insisting that it was unlikely that they'd need EVA gear for what might well be little more than a quick flyby; the likelihood of actually landing on Hex was considered remote, considering the silent treatment the
danui
had given the
Montero
thus far. Yet the lieutenant was adamant; it was possible that they might attempt to land if they found a reason to do so. If that occurred, Navy regulations specifically stated that skinsuits were to be worn while entering an alien environment.
As always, Cayce was a stickler for following the book. Just one more thing that was irritating about him.
Sean had just finished buckling his harness when Sandy pulled the hatch shut. Mark was making his way down the rest of the prelaunch checklist. He reached to the panel between him and Cayce and snapped a couple of toggles. Green lights lit across the board, and from the lander's aft section came the dull
thrum
of the nuclear engine coming to life.
“Hatch sealed, main cabin pressurized,” Mark said. “Internal power on, comps reset, primary ignition sequence initiated.” He glanced at Cayce. “Ready when you are, Lieutenant.”
Cayce reached up to the com panel above the cockpit's wraparound windows, pressed a button. “
Montero
, this is
Reese
. Pilot reports all systems are green, and we're ready for launch.”
“We copy,
Reese
.”
Again, Sean heard Ressler's voice through his headset.
“Bay depressurization sequence initiated. Main hatch open in ninety seconds.”
“Roger that.” Mark flipped two more toggles. “Umbilicals detached. Starting mission clock.”
Kyra unzipped a thigh pocket of her skinsuit and removed a datapad. She used an adhesive patch to fasten it to the seatback in front of her, then ran a slender cable from the pad to a serial port on the side of her helmet. “Lieutenant, would you patch me into the comlink, please? I need to talk to Tom.”
Cayce pushed a button on the com panel. “You're on.”
“Thank you.
Montero
, this is
Reese
Survey One. Tom, are you there?”
“Right here, Kyra.”
Sean heard D'Anguilo's voice through his headset; everyone in the lander was sharing the same com channel.
“Ready for download?”
Kyra tapped a command into her pad. “Yes, I am. Go ahead.” A moment passed, then data began to scroll down the pad, replaced a few seconds later by a menu screen. “Very good,” Kyra said, studying the information. “Looks like it's all here.”
“What's that?” Sean asked, peering over her shoulder at the pad.
“The data Tom and I collected the last few days.” Kyra ran her finger down the menu, and a window opened to display another set of figures. “This way, not only can I access everything we've already found out, but we can also send new info to each other as we go along.”
As if in response, Anne Smith's voice came over the com.
“I'm linking
Montero
's telemetry to Tom's board. You'll get everything we're seeing from up here, too.”
“Thanks. That'll help.” Satisfied, Kyra touched the pad again, and the display returned to the menu default. She looked at Sean. “Don't expect much conversation from me once we get started. I'm going to be pretty busy.”
D'Anguilo laughed.
“I certainly hope so. If we find nothing but a big ball of chicken wire, I'm going to be very disappointed.”
Sean said nothing but instead turned his gaze toward the oval porthole beside him. The lander bay had apparently just become depressurized, because he looked outside just in time to see the hangar doors start to open. As the massive doors parted at the center and rose upward, raw sunlight flooded the bay. Now that the braking and turnaround maneuvers were completed, the
Montero
was oriented bow first, with its hangar facing Hex. From where he was sitting, though, Sean still couldn't see their destination, only the bay's inside walls.
“Bay doors open,
Reese
,”
Ressler said.
“Ready to elevate cradle on your command.”
“We copy,
Montero
.” Cayce gave Mark a quick look, and the pilot nodded. “Elevate cradle, please.”
A faint shudder, then Sean felt the lander start to rise. Through his porthole, he could see the hangar walls slowly fall away. There was a loud, sudden snap against the hull, and he looked through Kyra's porthole in time to see a familiar nylon line float away.
“Aw, damn!” Sandy hissed. “I think I forgot something.”
“Corporal!” Cayce turned his head to glare at her. She didn't say anything, but when Sean glanced over his shoulder at her, he saw that her face was red with embarrassment.
“You didn't detach the tether before you shut the hatch, did you?” Mark was more forgiving than the lieutenant. “Don't worry about it. No harm done.”
The cradle continued to rise until it elevated the lander to a position where it was level with the open hangar doors. When it came to a halt, Mark flexed his hands within his gloves, then grasped the control yoke. “All systems go,
Montero
. Ready for separation. Open cradle, please.”
An abrupt
thump
from outside the lander, then a sensation of floating free. Mark gently pulled back on the yoke, and the lander's reaction-control thrusters silently fired, pushing the
Reese
away from the
Montero
.
“Separation complete.” He reached up and flipped a pair of switches. A faint whirring sound, and Sean glanced out his window to see the port wing lowering into position.
“We copy,
Reese
.”
This time, Sean heard his mother's voice over the comlink.
“You're go for launch.”
“Roger that.” Mark moved the yoke to the right, and the
Reese
made a 180-degree starboard roll. Through his porthole, Sean watched as the
Montero
swung into view, its hangar bay yawning open below them. With his right hand, Mark grasped the throttle bar on the center console. “Firing main engine on three... two... one...”
A faint rumble, then the
Montero
suddenly disappeared. “
Reese
away,” Mark said.
“Affirmative,”
Andromeda said.
“We've got you on our scope. Good luck to you all.”
From the corner of his eye, Sean noticed Kyra giving him a sidelong look. Although his mother hadn't specifically mentioned him by name, she'd doubtless meant her son to be included in her well-wishes. Sean said nothing, and after a moment, Kyra returned her attention to her pad.
Mark let the deorbit burn continue for fifteen seconds, then pulled back on the throttle and pushed the stick forward. As the lander began to descend in a wide parabolic arc, Hex came into view. Earlier in the day, the
Montero
had assumed a low orbit eight hundred miles above the sphere's outer surface. From that altitude, Hex no longer resembled a sphere but instead appeared to be a vast and seemingly endless expanse of hexagons, stretching so far that its horizon was little more than a thin and distant line.
No one aboard said anything, save for a low and awestruck whistle from Sandy. The view stunned everyone into silence. None of them had ever seen anything as magnificent as Hex, or as chilling. After a few seconds, Cayce found his voice.
“All right, people,” he said, his tone uncharacteristically hushed, “we've got a job to do. Stop gawking and get to work.” He looked back at Sean. “Corporal?”
“I'm on it, sir.” Loosening his shoulder harness, Sean reached beneath his seat to retrieve the camera he'd stashed there earlier. Although the
Reese
was equipped with wing cameras, mounted on the leading edge of its port and starboard canards, they weren't designed to pick up anything except what was straight ahead. So it was Sean's task to take close-up shots of Hex as the lander made its flyby, with the images to be transmitted in real time to the
Montero
.
Unspooling a cable from the camera to his helmet, he mounted the unit on his right shoulder and pointed its lens toward the porthole beside him. He swiveled the viewfinder so its eyepiece fit through his helmet's open faceplate, then peered through it. The image he saw was an indistinct blur. “Getting some glare from the glass,” he murmured. “Can we turn off the inside lights, please?”
Mark reached up to the overhead console, and a moment later the cabin fluorescents went dark. There was hardly any loss in illumination, since the sun was shining brightly through the windows, but the glare immediately vanished. “Thank you,” Sean said. “Ready to patch in, Lieutenant.”
“Very well.” Cayce pushed another button on the com panel, and Sean's video output was added to
Reese
's telemetry. “You're on.”
Sean pointed the camera out his window again, this time tilting it downward so that he could record what was beneath the lander. He had to refrain from gasping out loud. One of the hexagons lay directly below, and what had once been tiny was now immense. The biopods were enormous cylinders, each a thousand miles long and a hundred miles in diameter, joined together by spherical nodes fifty miles in diameter. Dull grey, they were featureless save for a row of black panels running along their dorsal midsections.
From the lander's present altitude, Sean couldn't see the far side of that particular hex; the cavity at its center was big enough to encompass even Coyote's largest continent. But the fact that he could make out two biopods of the nearest adjacent hexagon was enough to remind him that there were trillions of them, each one the same size.
He apparently wasn't the only person to be amazed. Through his headset, he heard an unintelligible yet nonetheless astonished babble of voices. Then his mother's voice came online:
“Sean, is that you operating the camera?”
He hesitated. “Yes, it is.”
A pause.
“Nice work. We're impressed.”
“Thank you, Captain,” he said, his tone deliberately cool.
“No, really... This is utterly breathtaking.”
A dry chuckle.
“And that's just what we're seeing on the bridge screen. I can only imagine what it's like for you.”
Despite himself, a smile stole across Sean's face. “It is awesome, all right. Iâ”
“Sean? Corporal Carson, I mean.”
The new voice was Tom D'Anguilo's.
“Don't mean to interrupt, but there's something down there I'd like to see a little more closely. Can you zoom in toward the center of the hex you're heading toward?”
“Wilco.” Pointing the camera toward the open middle of the hexagon, he touched the magnification stud. As the viewfinder image grew larger, he saw what had drawn D'Anguilo's attention. The hexagon's center wasn't as empty as it seemed; instead, it appeared to be crisscrossed by cables or wires. From the lander's altitude, they were so narrow that they became visible only when sunlight touched them from a certain angle. Resembling the strings of a tennis racket, they were tightly strung from one side of the hexagon to the other, making up a dense net where they intercepted one another.
“Structural cables?” Sean peered at them through the eyepiece. “That's what they look like to me.”
“Could be,”
D'Anguilo said,
“but... Whoa! Did you see that!”
A shimmering, translucent blue wave had just raced across the cables. Resembling St. Elmo's fire, it was gone in half a second. It repeated itself a few moments later, but in a different part of the hexagon's inner perimeter.
“Am I imagining things,” Kyra said, “or did I just see an aurora?”
“Could be,”
D'Anguilo said.
“I'm picking up faint electric discharge from them. I think they have another purpose besides structural support. Perhaps they're radiators ...”
“I don't think so.” Kyra pointed to a false-color image of one of the biopods on her screen. “I'm picking up infrared emissions from those panels on the backs of the pods. If the pods have radiators to shed excess heat, you'd think that's where they'd be located.”
“She's right.”
It was Rolf Kurtz's turn to chime in.
“The panels are probably radiators. If that's so, then the cables must have some other function.”
“Maybe they're magnetically charged,”
D'Anguilo said.
“The biopods may not have magnetic fields to ward off cosmic radiation the way planets usually do, so the cables perform that function.”
He paused.
“That's just a guess, of course.”
“It's a good one,”
Rolf said.
“You may be right. But we're not going to know for sure unless we get a lot closer.”
“I agree.” Cayce hadn't spoken much until then; apparently he'd just remembered that he was in command of the sortie. “Captain Carson, I'd like to fly through this hexagon and see what's on the other side. With your permission, of course.”
Andromeda didn't respond at once. Sean pictured his mother sitting in her chair on the bridge, weighing all the options.
“What do you think, Sergeant Dupree?”
she asked at last.
“Do you think you can make it through without endangering your craft?”
Mark studied the small screen on his center console where the image from Sean's camera was displayed. “I believe so,” he said after a moment. “The cables appear to be spaced pretty far apart. It'll be a little tricky, but so long as I match course so that we have the same lateral movement, I should be able to pass between them. I'll have to get the timing just right, though, and...”