The Prison in Antares (9 page)

“I'll join you,” said Snake, walking after him.

It took Pretorius three wasted cups of various liquids to conclude that the Antareans had no interest in coffee or anything remotely like it, so he simply ordered what passed for a pastry and sat down. Snake sat down opposite him.

“I thought you were hungry,” he said.

She shook her head. “No.”

“All right. What is it?”

“I've been thinking about it . . .” she began.

“Oh?” he said, wondering where this was leading.

“Yeah,” replied Snake. “And I've decided to forgive you.”

Pretorius frowned. “For what?”

“Circe.”

“I don't need your forgiveness,” said Pretorius harshly. “It wasn't my fault, and if you were using what passes for your brain, you'd know it.”

“You don't understand,” she said.

“Enlighten me.”

“Why do you think we all agreed to this mission?”

“You were conscripted and had no choice,” he replied.

“You think I had to stick around after the Michkag caper? You think Pandora couldn't have rigged orders transferring her to some other world? We stuck around, and agreed to come on this mission, because if you could bring us all back from the last one alive, given the odds we faced, we figured you could do it again.”

“Everything went like clockwork on the Michkag mission,” replied Pretorius. “Do you know how rare that is?”

“Yes,” said Snake. “But we know how rare
you
are, and we trusted you to bring us all back again.”

“I appreciate the trust, but not the intelligence behind it,” he answered.

“Anyway, I forgive you. Probably we all do.” Suddenly a rueful smile crossed her face. “Except maybe Circe.”

“I didn't think you even liked her.”

“I didn't especially,” admitted Snake. “Hell, I don't like anyone, not even you. But I like the thought of coming back alive.”

“Well, hang onto that thought, because this one looks every bit as dangerous as the last one, and we already know it's not going as smoothly.”

She seemed about to comment, thought better of it, and got up from the table without another word. A moment later she and Irish were standing by the computer while Pandora gave them instructions for tracking the tunnels.

Ortega walked into the galley a few minutes later, figured out what commands were required for some well-cooked meat, and sat down.

“Once we land, we got to program this thing for beer,” he said.

“And coffee,” added Pretorius.

“Damn, I miss
our
galley.”

“This one's safer.”

“Safer?” repeated Ortega. “It can't even cook human food.”

“Yeah,” agreed Pretorius. “But we can orbit Antares Six in it without getting blown out of the sky.”

“Well, there is that,” admitted Ortega. He took a mouthful, chewed vigorously, made a face, and swallowed. “So what are we gonna do when we pinpoint Nmumba?”

“Rescue him, hopefully. Or possibly kill him.”

“I mean, how do we plan to go about it?”

“It all depends on what Pandora finds and what we can improvise from that.”

“Do we snatch him while he's on the car or derail it—always assuming it runs on rails—or what?”

“Damned if I know,” said Pretorius. “Like I say, it depends on what we learn. Also, it's at least remotely possible that he's not even in the tunnels anymore. Someone had to see our ship back on Miga. If they contacted the military on any of the three inhabited Antares planets, they may already have removed him. I'm sure the entire network wasn't built just to keep anyone from snatching Nmumba, so it'll probably keep in motion without a hiccup or a glitch, and we won't know until we board the damned thing, whether in motion or derailed, always assuming it has rails, and indeed there's no reason to assume so.” He paused. “I know time is of the essence, but we just don't know enough yet, and the dumbest thing you can do in enemy territory is just plunge in hell for leather without knowing exactly what you're doing and what lies in wait.”

Ortega sighed deeply. “You're right, of course.” A self-deprecating smile crossed his face. “If I'd been in charge of the Michkag mission, I think I'd have got us all killed.”

“I think I've got something here,” announced Pandora over the intercom.

“Wonderful,” muttered Pretorius. “I may get us all killed yet.” He got up, left the galley, and walked over to where Pandora was sitting at the control panel.

“I've got the network pretty mapped out,” she said, staring at a screen that had nothing but incomprehensible symbols on it. “There are no tracks, no metal that we can follow as it winds around the planet a quarter-mile deep, but because they dug it out of solid rock, the sensors are able to pick up differences between the tunnels, which have some atmosphere, and the surrounding rock.”

“Just looks like gobbledygook to me,” commented Pretorius.

“I'll have a map up in another minute or so,” answered Pandora. “If I did it now, before the sensors completed the survey, it would look like the vehicles were running into walls.” She hunched over the machine, her fingers moving swiftly, her commands sounding more like alien exclamations. Finally she looked up. “Okay, I told it to create a map that we can read, and to put it on the viewscreen.”

And as she said the words, a map of a large section of the planet appeared, crisscrossed and honeycombed with literally hundreds of tunnels. She uttered one more command, and the planet began turning on its axis so they could see and follow the tunnels all the way around it.

“Very good,” said Pretorius.

“That was the easy part,” answered Pandora.

“Oh?”

She nodded. “You want the hard part?”

“Might as well.”

She uttered two more commands, and suddenly tiny figures were streaking through the tunnels.

“One hundred and thirty-seven different vehicles moving all the hell over the planet,” she said. “The trick is to figure out which one Nmumba is on, because it stands to reason that we're only going to get one crack at him.”

The computer beeped, and she looked down at the symbols.

“Make that one hundred and forty-one,” she said.

13

They'd spent almost two hours tracing the routes of the vehicles, which Pretorius persisted in thinking of as trains, without much success. They eliminated twenty-three vehicles where Pandora's computer couldn't find any trace of anything alive, and six more that clearly were carting oversized animals from one location to another. That left more than one hundred vehicles, and from the ship's distance in space the computer couldn't tell a human from any of the varieties of Antareans.

“Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way,” said Pretorius, staring at the screen.

“Oh?”

He nodded. “According to Madam Methuselah, and she's never misled me yet, they've got him on a train that's perpetually in motion.”

“It sounds good,” said Snake. “But it has to stop every now and then, either for fuel, or for food for the crew, or just to let another vehicle finish crossing in front of it.”

“But some of the other vehicles haven't stopped since we've been tracking them,” noted Irish.

“I know,” said Pretorius.

“Then what are you driving at?” asked Pandora.

“The thing we're overlooking is that this is a
prison
train. It's got valuable cargo, more valuable than the Antarean equivalent of cattle or furniture. So valuable that it stands to reason that they expect someone to break into the train, or blow up the tracks or whatever it's running on, or stop it and break a prisoner out in some other way.”

“So?” said Ortega, frowning.

“So they're going to do the best they can to hide their route,” said Pretorius.

“How the hell much can you hide in a subway tunnel?” asked Ortega.

“Maybe a little more than we've been supposing,” said Pretorius. He turned to Pandora. “Can you program the computer to pinpoint the one train—well, one or two or however few; who knows how many prisoner trains they've got—that doesn't repeat its route, that varies it?”

“Varies it how often?” she asked.

“Once the machine's programmed to look for variations, all you have to do is plug in the time frames, right?” he replied. “So start with thirty minutes, then an hour, then an hour and a half, and so on.”

“Okay,” she said. “But it could take a few days. I mean, some of the routes may encircle the planet, and we might not know until they make two complete loops that they're not varying their routes.”

“Anything's possible,” answered Pretorius. “But I think it's more likely that it'll change tracks, so to speak, every few hours, and probably change guards at the same time. You wouldn't want to dump them off half a world from home, and why pay to keep and house them if they're just working regular shifts?”

“It sounds logical,” she said.

“But?”

“But we're dealing with aliens, and who the hell knows what they think is logical?”

“Point taken,” said Pretorius, “and if you or the computer can come up with a better way, we'll use it, but we've got to start
some
where.”

“Okay,” said Pandora, turning back to the controls. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

“Why don't we just shoot and see who shoots back?” suggested Ortega.

Pretorius smiled. “First, they're all a quarter mile under the ground. How the hell are they going to shoot back, even if any of our weapons can get through to them, which I doubt? And what do you do if four or five ground stations return fire? They'll know we're enemies, they'll be able to identify the ship and summon help, and we still won't have a clue which train Nmumba's on.”

Ortega seemed about to argue, then changed his mind and fell silent.

“I have a question,” said Irish.

“Ask,” said Pretorius.

“If Nmumba is as valuable as we know him to be, wouldn't they go out of their way to make the prison train look like every other one?”

“It's possible,” admitted Pretorius. “But if they did, we're out of luck, because it could take months to spot the proper train. So we have to assume that the prison train is handled differently. And there's every likelihood that it is, because first, they're not expecting anyone to go looking for it. He was put here because they figure any rescue attempt will be made two miles deep at the jail. And then there's another likelihood, which is that they don't really expect humans to have commandeered an Antarean ship so quickly, without their being warned of it.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, I don't know which alternative is more likely . . . but I do know which is easiest for us to accomplish our mission, and sometimes that's all you have to go on.”

“I didn't mean to annoy you,” said Irish.

“You didn't annoy me,” said Pretorius. “I want you to question anything that doesn't make sense to you, and if you get a lousy answer, point it out.”

“Unless they're shooting at us,” said Snake.

After two more hours the computer started chattering, Pandora spoke back to it, the others all listened to what sounded like an incomprehensible dialogue, and finally she looked up and turned to them.

“We've pinpointed a vehicle that has changed its route twice,” she announced. “The computer couldn't be sure after just one course change, but now it tells me that there's a ninety-three percent chance that it is indeed altering its route every fifty minutes or so.”

“What kind of readings can you get from the train?” asked Pretorius.

“Six living beings,” she answered. “Until we can get closer, probably below the surface, it can't differentiate the readings.”

“But we
will
know before we attack that Nmumba's on it?” persisted Pretorius.

“We'll know if
some
human is on it,” said Pandora. “But since I don't have Nmumba's exact readings, we won't know for sure that it's him until we board and enter the thing.”

“Okay,” said Pretorius. “I keep calling it a train. You call it a vehicle. I assume tracks, but for all I know it's rolling along on concrete or maybe even floating above it. I assume guards will be positioned at each end, but they may not be. I need to know exactly what the situation is before we act.”

“Agreed,” said Pandora.

“And we can start by finding out how the hell to get underground to begin with,” he continued. “Surely the ship can't fit. I doubt that the little space sleds can. So once we've plotted his route—and yes, I know, it's subject to change—how do we get to the spot in the tunnel where we can either board the thing or stop it?”

“‘Easy' is not in our lexicon,” said Snake with a grim smile.

“Neither is ‘fail,'” responded Pretorius. “Because if
we
fail, so do maybe billions of civilians.”

14

“It'd be nice if people could live on the surface of the damned planet,” muttered Snake, studying the map the large screen was displaying. “Then we could just track them until we found someone who was taking the train.”

“If anyone
does
take it,” replied Ortega. “I mean, hell, it's clearly not going to any desirable location, not on this world.”

“Oh, there'll be underground cities, or at least colonies,” said Pretorius. “Remember, we know there's over a million Antareans living here, and that they've been here long enough to mutate slightly. And they wouldn't have built thousands of miles of underground tunnels or whatever the hell they are, just to endlessly transport the occasional prisoner.” He turned to Pandora. “Are you getting
any
human readings at all?”