Wildcatter

Day 401, Continued

Busboy-janitor-gofer Seth tidied away the vacuum cleaner hose, wondering as always if the system vented directly to space. Galley and mess were sparkling clean now, but he wasn’t. He went along to the showers to wash his hands and scowl at his stubbled face and tousled hair.

Normally about this time he laid out dishes for breakfast and loaded the chefs with the correct materials, but he expected everyone to be late appearing today. He also had some questions to put to Control, which never slept, constantly gathering and collating data.

The camel caravan had advanced into the control room under a cloudless blue sky. Going to be fine day—that had been his personal joke for the last year.

“Whittington, I know you own the ship, but this is my seat.” He scooped up the furry squatter and put himself between cat and chair. “Control, show me the hologram of the system again.”

Camel steppe vanished and the planets appeared above the table as before. As sponsor, JC had naming honors, so the gas giant had become Hades, the two ice worlds Niflheimr and Jötunheimr, and Cacafuego’s little satellite was Turd.

“Orbital parameters for the Cacafuego satellite, Turd?”

—Preliminary estimates only, Prospector.

“They’ll do.”

—Mass 1.8 times 10²³ kilograms… Semi-major axis unknown, current distance from planet…

Smaller than Luna but at about the same distance. It would appear as only a very bright star and could not raise significant tides. Then came the data point he had been waiting for:

—Inclination to the ecliptic, between 84º and 85º.

“Stop. Have you estimated Cacafuego’s axial tilt?”

—Observations so far are too brief for an accurate estimate, Prospector.

“Set limits.”

—Between 87º and 92º.

So Cacafuego was a sideways world, tilted over, with its axis in the ecliptic plane. Worlds like that could grow ice caps around the equator, while the poles would have perpetual sunlight for half the year and perpetual darkness for the other half. Life might survive on such a world by hibernation or migration, but conventional theory held that advanced, multi-cellular life forms could not evolve there, meaning that the crew’s dreams of untold wealth were doomed to disappointment. Even primitive slime worlds could provide interesting new compounds, but they rarely repaid their finders’ costs or tempted people to go back for more.

Conventional theory often turned out to be wrong.

Any virgin planet that held life, as Cacafuego obviously did, was worth a visit when you’d invested trillions of dollars in getting to it. So why was Galactic planting warning beacons instead of staking it? Staking fees were nothing to Galactic, and if the initial samples failed to turn up anything interesting, the license could be sold to recoup some or all of the costs to date.

Permanent settlement of Cacafuego was not feasible, and never would be, and no one would ever want to colonize a sideways world anyway. Only the chance of finding exotic organic chemicals unknown on Earth could ever justify the cost of interstellar exploration. Curiosities like starsilk or the Florenian orchids that were the current fad in body decoration could be very profitable, but Golden Hind’s real hope was to take home a few liters of alien muck swarming with strange bacteria, spores, viruses, or whatever might be enough to make it a huge success. The yellow beacon meant danger, but an extreme axial tilt in itself brought no special danger, not in the short term of a wildcatter’s visit. The climate might be a killer, but only over a course of months.

“Show me a blowup of Cacafuego.”

The blue dot swelled, becoming gibbous, until it was about a meter wide, floating above the table like a grotesquely deformed balloon. Golden Hind was still three days out; Seth had not expected so much detail yet. He saw blue, with streaks and swirls of white cloud, shattered fragments of continent in brown and green. There was life there, much life!

The weather looked vicious.

“Climate?”

—Terrestrial categories do not apply. The poles go from super-tropical to total darkness and back again. Islands near the equator appear to carry permanent ice caps.

“Estimated gravity?”

—Turd’s orbit will soon allow a better estimate of the mass, Prospector, but we have already determined that the radius is smaller than first believed and the density abnormally high. Surface gravity is provisionally judged to be about 1.6 gees.

Oh, balls! That was serious. He had been counting on 1.2 gees. He had worked for a year to add muscle and bone and succeeded so well that he had gone from middleweight to heavyweight, but on Cacafuego he was going to weigh almost 150 kilos, about twice what he had weighed back on Earth. How long could he function under those conditions?

“Why? I mean why didn’t the trans-Neptunian observatories figure that better?”

—The overall mass falls on their error bar, Prospector, but the planet’s density is anomalous, meaning a shorter radius, and therefore the surface gravity is higher. Inverse square law, Control added helpfully.

Seth called for animation, and was shown a few hours’ rotation: a slow twist, then flip back, slow twist, flip back. Clearly the ship was approaching more or less along the ecliptic plane, aimed for about halfway between the planet’s equator and the sunlit pole. Yes, there was ice at the equator. Some of that white might even be sea ice, which would make seasonal migration difficult for marine life.

“Latest estimate of the atmosphere?”

—Oxygen between sixteen and eighteen percent, balance nitrogen, neon, and water vapor. Sea level pressure estimated 1.7 atmospheres.

“Carbon dioxide?”

—Too small to measure at this range. Temperatures indicate it cannot be much higher than terrestrial, but there will be some, because there is chlorophyll.

His body could handle that air as long as he was allowed enough time to depressurize afterward. The oxygen content was lower than Earth standard, but that would actually be a blessing, because the partial pressure would be higher than terrestrial. If he had to, he could dispense with the EVA suit and just breathe through a filter mask to eliminate toxic dust and airborne biohazards.

Tiring of the endlessly repeated twist-flip, he called for a current view of the terminator at highest practical magnification. Like a view of the moon at the half, this gave him a sense of three dimensions, the mountains’ relief being exposed by their shadows. The topography was Earth-like, suggesting plate tectonics, and that boded well for mineral distribution, soil fertility, and the development of life.

“Anything else unusual?”

The disk became an irregular, grainy detail. There was a coast, and an obvious river, and…

—We caught this by chance with our high-magnification scanner, and have not yet established a paradigm for the unusual texture. On Earth it would satisfy our parameters for provisional identification as a city seen in low-angle lighting, but there is too much vegetation to be sure at this distance and in this context.

Seth slumped back on his chair. A city? He was hallucinating, surely.

The rules for first contact overrode everything else, although they had never been applied in practice. Prospecting must cease at once. There must be no communication of any kind, only immediate withdrawal, leaving a beacon where the natives could not detect it. Events must be reported to ISLA, which would compensate the expedition for any financial sacrifice incurred, with a bonus. Plus historical fame to match Columbus’s, of course.

“What color beacon for a sentient species?”

—Purple.

Made no sense! “And Galactic’s is…?”

—Yellow, Prospector, still yellow.

“Holograph dismissed. Down on the floor, monster!” Seth rose and headed for the galley to flip some pseudo-eggs. The cat ran hopefully before him. He must be patient. In a couple of days everything would be clear. It couldn’t be a city, just a trick rock formation. Evidence for intelligent aliens would certainly have sent the Galactic team high-tailing home to Earth with the news, but they would have posted purple, not yellow. He wasn’t going to mention the shadows to the others. Let them find out for themselves.

But all that oxygen and blue water? Damn the little green men! Cacafuego was just too hot to pass up. The odds were very high now that in just a few days, Prospector Seth and Astrobiologist Reese would climb into the shuttle and go downside to that strange sideways world.

After his usual solitary breakfast, he went back to the showers. He had just found his shaver when Jordan wandered in behind him, and for a moment their eyes met in the mirror. She had cleaned off the smudged makeup and brushed out the short golden hair, but she was topless. That was not unusual aboard Golden Hind and he was quite accustomed to seeing her naked in a cabin, a sight that never palled, but even semi-nudity seemed wrong under their present circumstances. She started at the sight of him and stepped quickly into a toilet cubicle. He went to the clothes bins, rummaged for top and shorts in her color, blue, and tossed them over the door to her. Then he went back to shaving.

When he was rich he would have his mess of a face tidied up. His nose had once been straight, his cheek had fallen in where he had lost four teeth to a lucky punch, and the too-recent scar on his forehead had come from a broken bottle. The wonder was not that he had only scored two out of four on the ship, but that such an ugly thug ever scored at all.

He had just reached the sandpaper on his chin when Jordan emerged, decently clad. No doubt she had started the change pills already, but no results would be showing yet. She was still a boyish woman with small breasts and narrow hips, but she excited him more than the voluptuous Maria ever did. He knew every pore in Jordan’s skin intimately, the pink nipples and aureoles, faint pubic hair almost invisible against her pale skin. He hated the thought of those breasts shrinking even more, the slightly enlarged herm clitoris swelling into a workable penis.

He turned to face her as she came closer. Not too close, though.

“I screwed up tonight,” she said.

Of course she had. The captain’s job was to inspire the crew, which Jordan did with good humor and fine people management skills. Unlike Reese or JC, they phrased every order as a request and never pulled rank on the lowly gofer. The whole crew liked them, but no one doubted that JC had chosen Jordan Spears because they avoided confrontation. Unfortunately a face-off was sometimes necessary, and tonight the herm had blinked.

“No, you didn’t,” he said.

“Yes, I did. I should not be changing over.”

He shrugged. “You made the right decision, love… ma’am, I mean. No one knows more about fighting than me, and you never go into a fight with a monkey on your back. If you feel happier tackling Old Ugly as male, then you are quite right to change over.”

“But it’s a retreat, and he’ll know it. Damn it, he can’t overrule me! He can’t even overrule you, if you have good cause to refuse to go downside. I can handle that big ape without having to grow a cock. It’s not fair to the others: you, Reese, Maria.”

“Is he sane?”

Sidetracked, Jordan stared at him for a moment. “Be more specific.”

“A trillionaire, sixty-two years old. What’s he doing out here in the Big Nothing? Escaping from too many ex-wives?”

“Looking for the Great One, the world-shaking triumph to crown his career.”

“And if he fails, he’s busted. Loses everything. I worry a little about that.” Was that true? Was JC sane?

“You could handle him if he turned violent,” she said. “You’re a fighter, an ex-bouncer. He’s big but he’s three times your age.”

“The first time we met you told me I was the best applicant and yet you’d been frightened he wouldn’t accept me. That why? You thought he would red-pencil me because I could take him down?”

Jordan shrugged and put on her professional calming smile. “JC’s not the type to go berserk, Seth. ISLA tests everyone for that.”

“You’re not the type to buckle under when a fat old bully shouts at you. Galactic’s not the type to run away from danger. I sure as hell aren’t, either. But I like to cover the bases. Let’s talk about firearms.”

Jordan nodded quickly, as if she’d expected the question. “All according to GenRegs. I have a stun gun coded for captain’s use only. In the shuttle you have one plus a blazer, neither of which will work inside the ship.”

“And JC Lecanard supervised the building of the ship. Don’t tell me he didn’t add a few little secrets. That champagne he produced last night wasn’t in the manifest. Where’s he got the guns hidden? Have you looked? Control tells me there aren’t any.”

“It tells me the same.”

“But?” He knew her well enough to know that there was more.

Her smile was thin. “There’s a table in his stateroom with a thick top but no drawer in it—wasted space. I can’t find a hidden catch.”

Seth desperately wanted to hug her. “Thank you… ma’am.” JC’s big cabin was the one place he had never been inside and could never enter. All the others had, but the door wouldn’t open for him. “Ask Hanna to take a look, mm?”

“I already did, love. Says she can’t find anything either.” Jordan spun around and walked away. She turned at the door. “I did make a mistake tonight. To reverse it now would make it worse. I’m sorry, lover, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. You are by far the best stud aboard, you know.”

That wasn’t much of a compliment when his competition was two herms and a man forty years his senior.

By the time the crew trooped in for a breakfast, Seth had shaved and showered and dressed. Shorts and tops were color-coded, and his were green. The others were still looking more than a shade under last night’s weather but too excited to sleep longer. Instead of eating in the mess, they carried their food into the control room to listen to Control’s commentary and stare at the holographs while they ate. Maria guessed at the odd axial tilt the moment she saw the cloud patterns, which were all wrong. Much jabber about sideways worlds followed. Apparently several planets with freaky axial tilts had turned out to be profitable, Lorraine especially.

Seth’s excitement was back. Now he could admit that there was fear mixed in with it, but it was the thrill-fear he knew before fights, and it felt good. Having already eaten, he wandered around with the coffee pot, just listening to the chatter. Even old space hands JC and Reese were bubbling. Jordan seemed to have forgotten their worries for the time being.

He knew them all well by now and respected most of them very much. JC, Jordan, and Hanna were superlatively good at what they had contributed so far. JC was still a bully and insecure enough to demand formal respect, but he had done an incredible job in organizing the expedition, sneaking advance notice of the hot prospect, and ramming through the preparations in time to use it. He had even been shrewd enough to buy the Armada license as a secondary target, and few entrepreneurs would have managed to talk hard-bitten backers into that. Seth knew Jordan better than he had ever known anyone, and if it were possible to think of marriage to a herm, he would be dreaming of that now.

Hanna? Hanna was a brilliant navigator. She had a temper, but would always apologize ten minutes after losing it, and she had a needle-sharp wit. The other two had not had a chance to apply their skills yet. Maria he liked very much, and Reese he detested.

As a bed partner Maria demanded a lot of work and took sex too seriously. She was a fireball when she got going, after all the babble about respect and commitments. And yet, for sheer animal fun, Jordan beat her hands down. Random sex in so small a group should have triggered mayhem, but Jordan’s skill and training kept them all one reasonably happy family.

Reese, the biologist, was the proof that every family tree has its sap. They were as snobbish as JC and as waspish as an August picnic. They were hypocritical, too. When male, he expected sexual favors, when female she refused to give them, at least to Seth, although JC claimed to have bedded her.

JC laid down his fork and put the planetologist on the spot. “Maria? Obviously there is life on Cacafuego. Nothing else could put that much oxygen in the atmosphere. So what can possibly have inspired Galactic to declare it dangerous and post a yellow beacon?”

She stabbed at him with eyes dark and dangerous as obsidian daggers.

“Radioactivity?” she said. “Cacafuego is abnormally dense, the second densest planet ever recorded. The core is denser than iron, meaning it must contain siderophile elements.”

“You saying Cacafuego has a heart of gold?” Hanna inquired mildly.

“Gold is only one element that combines easily with iron. I was thinking of high-weight radioactive elements. If the core is rich in those, then we may expect to find such material in the crust also, exuding radon gas into the atmosphere, making it toxic to terrestrial life. Or the stellar neighborhood may be dangerous—there’s an unpredictable Wolf-Rayet star within a parsec. Or the element mix at the surface may be non-standard: arsenic, cadmium are both toxic and carcinogenic, to name two. There are too many wolves in the forest to start speculating now, Commodore.”

JC sank back, muttering that none of those factors would endanger a very brief visit. Given half a chance he might start retelling his story of the man-eating mushrooms found by Goede Hoop. “Reese? Any theories?”

At times the biologist seemed to hold the commodore in almost as much contempt as he did Seth. “Far too many. I could list a hundred factors that can create biological problems on a life-rich world. We don’t have a canary with us. That’s what prospectors are for.”

Very funny! No one smiled.

Reese’s sullen grumpiness suggested he was apprehensive—that was a snob word for scared. If Seth agreed to brave the killer planet, the astrobiologist should go with him. Failure to do so might void their contract. Or possibly Reese had decided to change gender and was already having changeover pains, for shrinking a penis by drug-induced apoptosis was no mean ordeal. Why would they do that now? Then Seth saw that JC might find it harder to order a woman into danger than a man. A sneaky cop-out, but only to be expected of Reese Platte.

As Seth was refilling his coffee cup, JC said, “How does it look to you now, Prospector? Think you can handle that 1.6 gee gravity?”

“Yes, sir. For a short stay. But the weather bothers me.”

“Weather?”

“Storms. Dense atmosphere, high insolation gradient, fast rotation.”

JC asked what the length of the day was, and Control became pedantic, as it did when human language was exposed as imprecise. The length of the day varied with latitude, for at the poles it was the same as a year, 250.3 terrestrial days. The sidereal period was 19.4 standard hours, so roughly 315 rotations per planetary year.

“Fast!” Maria said. “And high insolation because it’s closer to its primary than Earth is to Sol. Is why it has all those cyclonic storms.”

Reese barked, “Oh, damn! Control, what sort of surface winds do you calculate?”

—Preliminary measurements suggest velocities in excess of 200 kilometers per hour are commonplace, roughly equivalent to Category Four hurricanes. Higher winds are certainly possible.

“Ha! You can’t put the shuttle down in that, can you, Muscles?”

“I can put it down, sir. Keeping it down will be the problem.”

Reese pouted. At some time a surgeon had put a few tucks around their mouth. It looked fine when they were female, but their male lip curled in a perpetual sneer.

“By the way, the pH on the Number Seven hydroponic tank is low. I want you to clean it out this morning and bring up some lime for it.”

“Sorry,” Seth said untruthfully. “Can’t.”

The others were listening, and five pairs of eyes widened in surprise at hearing the worm turn.

He explained to Jordan. “Today I must make a complete inspection of the shuttle, ma’am. As soon as we have the planet’s parameters nailed down, I’ll have to start putting in hours in trainer mode, simulating flight in Cacafuego’s gravity and atmosphere.” He also needed hours of exercise in it, learning to walk, move, and hit targets with his stun gun.

JC leered.

Jordan bristled. The captain almost never showed anger, even when male. “On whose authority? I have not instructed you to prepare for downside activity.”

“No, ma’am. But GenRegs say I must do so as soon as the target is sighted.”

They also said that if, or when, that shuttle launched, Seth Broderick would hold the rank of master and be in effect commander of the expedition.

Gravity in the ship came from its spin. By stopping the elevator at the right place between the axis and the outer rim, Seth could simulate any gravity from free fall to almost three gees. The shuttle port was up at the hub, the shuttle itself protruding from the disk of the ship like an axle. Not bothering with the elevator, he ran up the ladder. By the time he reached the top, he was in microgravity.

The shuttle was a delta-winged cylinder about the size of a city bus and it felt like home to him, his personal domain, where no one else ever trespassed. Access was by a shaft known as the Gut, which led upward from a door at the tail end. Currently the Gut was parallel to the ship’s axis, so he floated along it with ease, going past the biologist’s cabin, the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, and the master’s tiny cabin, to arrive at the nose, a nook known as the cab.

As he settled into the chair, Control activated the view screens for him. The ship spread out below him like a city plaza. Around the rim like pickets stood the ferrets, the light-speed scout probes, originally twenty-four, now only nineteen. Five had failed to return. Hanna suspected three or four of the remainder might be too badly damaged to use again, but it was better to scout out safe areas, the havens, with an unmanned probe than a manned starship.

“Initiate complete system check.” He had run the shuttle through ISLA’s entire inspection routine once a month since he left Earth orbit, being far more conscientious than the rules required, so he knew that it was in working order. Lights began flashing on the board.

—Confirming complete system check, Prospector.

Cacafuego glowed almost straight ahead, the way Seth was presently oriented, with its star blazing about ten degrees off to port. The heavens were rotating too slowly to notice. There were some very bright stars and emission nebulae in this sky. Orion was a busy stellar neighborhood.

That dazzling red disk must be Betelgeuse, a star larger than the orbit of Jupiter. Somewhere in roughly that direction, but much farther away, lay Sol and Home World. The thought made him feel painfully insignificant, out here in the Big Nothing. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was needed at all. The shuttle could be operated unmanned and robots could plant flags and collect samples just as well as any human being could. Primitive robots had begun surveying planets almost four hundred years ago. Once an exoplanet was found to contain exotic chemicals or useful life forms, almost all the development work of hunting for more was done by robots, with human overseers staying in orbit. So why did ISLA refuse to issue a development license without evidence of a human presence on the ground, however brief? The best guess was that the public demanded the romance. Prospectors were international stars. Seth Broderick and his like were the modern equivalents of gladiators, charioteers, or jousting knights, and they died to please the people.

—Inspection completed. No issues to report.

That had not taken long. Seth was not even being told to clean anything, although Control could be a worse hygiene martinet than a plague-year hospital matron.

“Prepare for simulated landing on world Cacafuego,” he said, “using current best estimates of conditions. Assume winds of modal strength.” He floated out of his seat to fetch the training suit, a sort of water mattress he could strap over himself in the chair. By pressuring that, Control could simulate the extra weight he would experience during acceleration. By the time he was ready, Control was offering him a partial map of the planet to select his preferred landing site. He chose an easy, flat area, well inland.

A full simulation would take hours, so he skipped the first three quarters of it. In a real landing he would have nothing to do except give directions at the end, picking a touchdown. Even then, Control would ignore his orders if they were likely to prove fatal. In this first simulation it slammed all the breath out of him in what felt like an impact with a granite mountain, then cheerfully announced that the shuttle had been smashed and he was dead. He was left feeling as if he’d been swimming in a cement mixer. He also felt very stupid.

“Let’s try the last part again. From first atmospheric contact.”

“And again, but cut wind speed by fifty percent.”

At the fifth attempt, after he had reduced the wind strength by eighty percent, he landed safely, but he needed several more attempts before the simulated wind did not topple the simulated shuttle and roll it away like simulated tumbleweed. Wind was going to be far more of a problem than gravity. The shuttle ought to be chained down the moment it landed, and it was not designed for that. He had no tools to weld shackles to the diamond skin, and atmospheric friction would tear them off during the descent anyway. The shuttle could land on water, but that would probably be even more dangerous.

“How high do sea waves get here, within one kilometer of land?”

—Wave height cannot be measured directly at this range, and depends on too many parameters still unknown to estimate reliably, especially the profile of the shore. Higher gravity should reduce wave height but increase their kinetic energy. Terrestrial hurricane waves would be a useful first approximation.

Forget marine landing.

He called a halt. He was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and battered by Control’s enthusiastic simulations. Small wonder: he had been in the cab for an astonishing ten hours. He shed the training suit and hung it back in its cupboard.

—First Officer Finn requests admittance.

“Open door!” He stared in surprise as the door slid aside and Hanna’s green eyes and freckled smile came floating up the Gut to him. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, my lady?”

“We began to wonder if you’d done a bunk.”

He gave her a hand to steady her over the awkward threshold and turned the master’s chair—the only chair—to her. She accepted it as a handhold but did not sit; he crossed his legs and floated in front of her. “Not yet,” he said. “I’m an obsessive guy. Once I start doing something, I can’t stop until I’m satisfied.”

“So I’ve heard.” That was as close to a mention of sex as he had ever heard Hanna utter.

Pity, that. Hanna still inspired fantasies. Jordan, that first day, had promised him four tickets in the lottery. Two of them, Maria and Jordan when female, had proved to be all a guy could hope for. Hanna and Reese were not even also-rans. They stayed in the gate.

“As a complaint?”

She ignored the question. Hanna was a puzzle. At thirty-two subjective age, she was slightly plumper than was fashionable but very comfy to look at. This was her second voyage into the Big Nothing. Her first had been a routine and uneventful return to a known world, but the ship had encountered some time slip and she had collected eight years’ wages, which had made her independently wealthy. She was always gracious, although she had no use for stupidity. Normally she was so prim and reserved that she seemed almost stupid herself. In fact, she had a laser sense of humor, but most of her barbs would slip by unseen unless one watched for them. She was a genius at interstellar navigation, and when she said that Galactic must have cut dangerous corners to get to Cacafuego first, he believed her.

“Seth, dear, I came to remind you that the planet is still flying a warning flag. If JC insists you go downside and you obey him, Jordan and I will lose our licenses and ISLA will confiscate the Mighty Mite shares we hope to earn.”

“I would never let that happen to you!”

“Then why are you wasting all day up here? Jordan cooked dinner for us.”

Seth realized that he was starving. “What did she produce?”

“Chili con pseudo-carne, one of my favorites. I didn’t know it was on the machines’ menu.”

“Because I don’t like beans,” he admitted. “But if there’s any left, I’ll make an exception.”

She moved to block the exit and almost overshot it. “First tell me what you’re plotting!”

“I plot not, Your Firstness.” Private chats with Control did not count, and Hanna could command a replay of those if she wanted to pry. “JC was right in saying we should go in for a close look. Then we can work out what the threat is. Or let Galactic’s beacon tell us, as it should do very shortly. I’m gathering information. After that we can make our own decision.”

She stared at him suspiciously for a moment, and he sensed the penetrating academic mind she usually concealed. “You think you already know.”

He nodded. “I’ve a theory. The weather down there is Satanic. Maybe Galactic lost a few shuttles and decided the grapes were sour. If that’s all it is, then the only one at risk will be me.”

“And Reese.”

“If they want to come, yes.” Seth still did not expect heroism from the biologist.

“Be honest. What are your odds of landing safely?”

“Not bad, if we pick a calm moment. I’m working on it.”

Hanna smiled. “I know you are. Now come along. We saved some chili for you.”

He straightened his legs, but continued to float. “Wait. You’re rooming with JC just now.”

Green eyes glinted. “Platonically, of course.”

He couldn’t resist the opening: “You mean he’s impotent?”

“No, I do not! Don’t you ever think of anything else but lust?”

“I just spent ten hours without doing so, and the strain is telling. I’m told that in JC’s stateroom there is a table with a thick top but no drawer.”

She waited, studying him. “And?”

“I suspect a secret drawer. I’d like to know what’s in it.”

“You want me to spy for you?”

“Yes, please.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. What do you think he’s got in there?”

“Weapons.”

“No.” Hanna pushed out of the chair and floated over to the door. “Come to supper…”

He caught her arm. “First tell me what he does have hidden in there.”

“Porn,” she said, turning away to hide her blush. “And stiffener.”

There was plenty of chili left. Seth took the whole pot plus a spoon and went into the control room. Everyone else was there, gathered around the console table. Above their dirty dishes floated Cacafuego, ballooned to about two meters. Half lit, half dark.

He was greeted with welcoming smiles from all except Reese, who despised people who ate out of cooking pots, which was probably why Seth was doing it.

“Hanna tells us you can land on the planet!” JC boomed.

Seth nodded with his mouth full and sat down. He didn’t mention how risky it would be. Maria filled up her empty glass with red wine and pushed it over to him.

Between mouthfuls of chili he said, “What’s new?”

“It’s mid-July in the northern hemisphere,” she said. “Roughly, it is. We’re calling that side north; it’s pretty arbitrary in this system. But the axis is still pointing almost directly at the star, so the other hemisphere is in darkness.”

“Overall it’s a hot world,” Jordan said. “Permanent ice on most equatorial landmasses; a lot more ice in the southern hemisphere, but that’s seasonal. That big island near the north pole—JC’s named it Greenland—is reading more than fifty degrees Celsius in the shade.”

Reese next: “And the only shade is under trees, if there are any trees. Unending sunshine for about half the year; humidity close to a hundred percent. Oh, the biota that baby must have!”

Jordan called for a map. The globe projection became cartographic, with green, brown, or white lands in a uniform blue ocean, names in black. Clouds and the day-night distinction vanished. About a third of the southern hemisphere had not yet been visible to Golden Hind’s sensors, and remained blank. Most of the world was ocean, more than Seth would have expected—he would have to ask Maria about that. Small equatorial ice caps were starkly obvious.

Voices began arguing about landing sites, gloating over the prospect like children in a toy store. They were all assuming that the shuttle could meet its design parameters, going downside twice, visiting four sites each time. Seth knew otherwise.

He must catch some sleep before he was due on watch. He finished the last of the chili, drained the wine, and began collecting plates. When he tried to take Reese’s glass, the astrobiologist grabbed it away from him and pulled the bottle to safety too.

“This happens to be a perfect Feigned 2223 Chateau Lavoir classic Bordeaux! It cost hours of simulation. It is to be sipped and savored, not swigged like some ghastly cola.” Even Reese was rarely so bitchy. The knowledge that he might have to go downside on an allegedly killer planet must be working on his nerves.

Seth shrugged. “It all comes out of the recycler. I pissed it four days ago.” He was letting the sneers get to him, but in his case that was due to excitement, not fear. The difference was quite obvious, at least to him.