hide his dismay as he listened, and mumbled about needing time to rethink the
whole situation. Then, roaring with laughter after Lang was off the line, he had
told the team jubilantly, “This has to mean we’re over the last hurdle! Thanks
to Massey we’ve bluffed the bluffers with their own bluff. Lang and the rest of
them will just be sitting up there in the Orion, waiting for us to call back
while we’re going in over the city. They won’t expect a thing!”
Zambendorf’s enthusiasm had infected the lander’s NASO crew, who were gradually
being won over by a combination of his magnetism and his explanations about the
Orion mission and its real purpose. The team had effectively acquired another
four members and was all set to launch the final phase of the operation that
would make its task complete. The situation could hardly have been more
favorable. In fact it was too favorable. Everything was going too well, Abaquaan
felt. Buried somewhere deep down in the whole intricate pattern was something
that didn’t quite fit—something still too subtle for him to raise to the level
of conscious awareness, but his instincts had detected it. Twenty years earlier
Abaquaan had learned the dangers ofoverconfidence; a premonition kept telling
him that at long last Zambendorf’s turn had arrived to learn the same lesson.
An annunciator on the instrument panel bleeped suddenly, and a symbol on a
display screen began to flash on and off. In the seat next to him, Clarissa
glanced down, flipped a switch to reset the audio warning, punched commands into
the pilot’s touchpanel, and took in the data that appeared on another display.
“We’ve just triggered the outer approach marker,” she murmured as she throttled
back on power and banked the flyer round to line up for landing. “Open up a
channel to ground, and let’s have a profile check.”
Abaquaan selected an infrared view of the terrain ahead and used another screen
to conjure up images of a series of flight instruments. “Steepen to
one-eight-zero, rate five-four, reduce speed to four-twenty, and come round onto
two-five-nine,” he instructed. “Autoland lock-on programed at ten seconds into
phase three of glidepath.”
“Descent monitor and systems?” Clarissa queried.
“Green one, green two, and ah … all positive function.”
The flyer came round an invisible mountaintop and straightened out onto its
final approach and descent into the narrow, sheer-sided valley where the surface
lander was hidden. The valley floor was a sprawling mess of alien industrial
constructions, tangled machinery, and derelict plants, and would blur any radar
echos to overflying reconnaissance satellites sufficiently to conceal the
outline of the lander, which as an extra precaution had been copiously draped
with aluminum foil and metalized plastic. The site was showing no lights, and
electronic transmissions were being restricted to low-power local communications
and ground beams aimed at satlink relays. Abaquaan pressed a button and spoke
into the microphone projecting from his headset. “Hornet to Big Bird. Do you
read? Over.”
The voice of Hank Frazer, the lander’s Communications Officer, replied a few
seconds later: “Reading you okay, Hornet. The landing area is clear here. How’d
it all go?”
“Hi, Hank. Mission accomplished,” Abaquaan replied. “Moses is on his way. No
hitches. How have things been back there?”
The flyer slowed to hover in the darkness, and Clarissa quickly scanned graphics
displays presented by the flight computers. Moments later the vehicle began
sinking vertically. “I think we may have problems,” Frazer’s voice answered.
“Dave Crookes called down from the ship. It seems like he overheard a couple of
army officers up there talking about infantry missiles being issued to the
Paduans specifically for use against the lander if Zambendorf tried any more
tricks with it. Crookes didn’t know what to make of the conversation, but it
sounded serious and he figured we ought to know. In other words it looks as if
Henry may really have those weapons after all.”
In the semidarkness of the flyer’s cockpit, Clarissa and Abaquaan exchanged
ominous glances. “Have they talked to Massey about it?” Clarissa murmured,
tight-lipped. Outside, the tops of fractionating towers and steel pylons,
indistinct and ghostly in Titan’s feeble light, were drifting slowly into view