Elizabeth Moon: Against the Odds

“Eighteen. They want us to hurry it up—”

“Come on, then.” Half the NEMs turned, as if to head back inside; the others were still obviously guarding the scientist-prisoners.

“Barhide—come on down—” said one of the newcomers. Eight more armed men came down the shuttle’s ramp.

These were much less wary, their weapons now slung on their backs.

“We’re goin’ in to pick up the rest of the cargo,” she heard one of them say, and someone aboard the shuttle—a pilot, she hoped—told them to hurry it up.

With her primary task still the professor’s life, she had no part in the brief, violent struggle that followed, when the NEMs and the other loyalist troops jumped the mutineers and killed them, while the putative rebel NEMS chivvied the scientists toward the shuttle, talking loudly on open mikes. It took less than two minutes, and most of it had happened out of sight of scan from overhead. Margiu scrambled out of her p-suit into the gray shipsuit of the dead enemy, rolled him into her p-suit, and let one of the NEMs haul him out by the legs. She crammed the com helmet on her head, tucking the telltale red hair out of sight, and stalked out onto the runway as if she belonged there.

The cargo was moving slowly up the ramp, with the laboring scientists complaining vociferously that it was dangerous, that it could blow them all up, that they should be careful . The NEMs swung their weapons, threateningly; scientists cringed; Margiu found it hard to believe it wasn’t real. From the unreality of those hours of waiting, when it was real, to this—the reversal confused her, but she found herself playing her part anyway.

They made it onto the shuttle, Margiu and the others working under the scientists’ directions to get the cargo lashed down. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the mutineer flight crew peering through from the flight deck.

“How much longer?” he called.

“They say it could blow us all to hell if it wiggles in flight,” the NEM sergeant said. “And it’s heavy—you don’t want it to shift.”

The other man grinned. “All right, all right. Just try to hurry it up. Admiral wants to boost out of this system now we’ve been spotted . . .”

Margiu turned her head away, afraid her expression would be too obvious. So her half-remembered design had worked, had it? And somewhere, sometime soon if not already, Fleet would find out what was going on at Copper Mountain. At least that had worked, and if she died today, she would have done something worthwhile.

When they had the last of the equipment in the shuttle, one of the NEMs signalled the shuttle pilots—Margiu couldn’t hear what was said, but the sudden lurch of the shuttle made it clear they were moving. Their own pilots, wearing dead mutineers’ uniforms, stood near the front, ready to take over from the mutineers when they had enough altitude and the stealth equipment was ready to use.

They had been airborne perhaps ten minutes—the wrinkled blue sea had become a hazy blue carpet far below—when Major Garson worked his way forward past the pallets and tiedowns to the front. He spoke to the NEM sergeant, and then the waiting pilots. Margiu’s stomach clenched. She glanced at the professor, who was grinning. She wondered if he was ever scared, or if having a constant ferment of crazy ideas protected him from fear.

Only one NEM could fit on the flight deck, but armored as he was, the sergeant should be safe from most weapons the pilots might carry. And they’d shown no concern about their passengers.

The NEM went through onto the flight deck; the first pilot followed closely. Margiu took a good grip of the stanchion; they’d all been warned to get a good handhold, just in case. In case of what, she’d wondered.

The shuttle nosed over sickeningly, and Margiu’s stomach rose to the back of her throat. What was happening up front? Weight slammed back onto her, as the shuttle pitched up, then lifted as the nose dropped once more. She gulped, swallowed, gulped, and just managed not to spew. Someone else wasn’t so lucky. Her imagination raced through scenarios—the mutineer pilots trying to crash the shuttle; the loyalist pilots trying not to let them, the scan crews up on the station reacting to the shuttle’s erratic movements with demands for information. The downward pitch levelled slowly, and weight returned, stabilized.

The flight deck door opened, and one of their own looked out. “He was willing to suicide—” he said shakily. “But we’ve got it now.”

“To your places,” the professor said. Margiu made her way to the rear of the shuttle, and had, from that vantage, a clear view of the actors as they went about their pretense.

Margiu found the experience very unlike watching a storycube, even though she understood the plot: knowing, as she did, that the conversation was faked on one end, she couldn’t help worrying that it was faked on the other end as well.

Surely the mutineers weren’t taken in by the pretense? Surely they would realize soon enough that the cross talk between the supposedly mutinous NEM and the cringing scientist was too contrived to be real? That the irregular alternation of disappearance and reappearance from scan had to be a setup? Surely they would catch on when the ship disappeared that final time, and then there was an explosion . . . She glanced at the professor, who was nodding and grimacing at the “actors.”

What if the mutineers had a vid scan in here? He was enjoying himself far too much to be a real scientist captured by mutineers and forced to betray his side. They could be laughing their heads off up in the station, just waiting the best moment to blow them all away.

But the playlet went on without interruption, and the comments from above indicated that the audience had suspended any initial disbelief. Two of the scientists had uncovered the device and plugged in a control panel of some sort. At the professor’s nod, they did whatever it was that turned the device on and off. Supposedly the shuttle disappeared, partially returned, disappeared, returned, repeatedly. Margiu tried to relax, as the climax neared. She had her assignment, to signal when to drop the trailer with its weapons pods and assorted junk.

“Zed’s on—drop it!” Margiu tapped the crew chief at the tail and clung to the stanchion as he opened the cone and pushed the lever. The shuttle’s nose bobbed up again, as the load slid out, and the marked cable unrolled in a streak.

“And Zed’s on?” Garson asked.

“Zed’s on,” confirmed Swearingen. “We are—we should be—completely invisible, with a computer-generated scan filling the hole as we go.”

Light flared behind them—the first explosion. Then, about the time the debris should hit the ocean, the second. The shock wave from that rocked the shuttle.

“That’ll blur his screens for at least another thirty seconds,” said one of the other scientists.

The shuttle flew on, out across the open ocean where the generated fill pattern should, the scientists thought, have its best chance to work. It had the fuel load to circle the planet, but—as Garson had pointed out—all the airfields would have crew, and might still have intact communications gear. Either loyalist or mutineer, someone would be sure to comment on the arrival of a troop shuttle, and if they tried to communicate themselves, that could be detected from topside.

“We have to assume they’re using the surveillance satellites—if we drop Zed, or open a com hole in it, we’re immediately visible. And vulnerable. We can land this thing anywhere, just about—that’s what a combat shuttle is for, after all.”

Half a world away from the main base at Copper Mountain, a loose gaggle of rocky islands rose from the blue sea. Large and small, rough and rougher, cloaked in grass and trees, they had never been used for anything but occasional shuttle landing exercises. The pilots flew low over several of them, until they spotted the bright reflection of what might be a freshwater stream. That one was much larger than any of the Stack Islands, with a shallow grassy bowl set above low cliffs. The pilots eased the shuttle in vertically, and at last it came to rest.