She kept her voice low. “Lan and Shayle came to talk to me. Lan’s had one of his ideas again.”
Charlie pushed himself back from the worktop where he had been writing. “What about?”
“Did you know that a probe was disabled at Joburg on the day the Scout made the first contact there?” Sariena asked.
“Was it? No, I didn’t. I was still up in the ship then.”
“It’s still there, grounded somewhere up above the Joburg settlement. With everything that’s been going on, nobody has done anything to retrieve it. Apparently, the probes are equipped to function as mobile emergency relief posts. More to the point, they have a communications system that bypasses the regular net and uses a special band to link via the circling airmobiles to the probe control section up in the Varuna.”
“How do you know all this?” Charlie asked.
“From Lan. Owen and one of the controllers showed him the system when he was up there.”
“Owen Erskine? The guy who got shot?”
Sariena nodded. “Yes. But the thing right now is that Lan’s talking about using it for another try at getting a warning out to Aztec.”
Charlie looked perplexed. “But how can he, if it’s at Joburg?”
“That’s the whole point. He thinks he can get there. But it isn’t like getting from California to Texas and Mexico this time. Everything has changed since then. And he had others with him then. He’ll get his chance, but he needs better odds than these. Shayle agrees. But we’re not Terrans, Charlie. How can we try to tell him what he’d be taking on? It needs someone from Earth, and who was with him then. We want you to try and talk him out of it.”
* * *
“How do you think you’re going to get there?” Charlie demanded. They were standing with Keene on the edge of the pad area, outside the Agni’s shielding wall. Farther away, in front of the silo and pad constructions, a shuttle was being elevated in readiness for launch. Keene turned to gesture back toward the excavations on the far side of Agni, where various vehicles and machines were working.
“One of the general-purpose runabouts. They’ve got the right torque and speed for the terrain, wide wheels to get through the sticky patches, and you could turn one on a dime. Given the kind of going I’d estimate from what I saw with the Scout, I’d say a day, maybe a day and a half.”
“But they’re electric. They don’t have the range.”
“Rig one up like the Scouts. You put a diesel-generator set in the truckbed and drive the motors off that. I figure that thirty-eight gallons of diesel fuel should do it. A regular drum holds over fifty. I plan on taking two.”
“Wouldn’t the generator set need to be secured somehow?”
Keene shrugged. “Drive out for an hour on the fuel cells—which will also mean a quiet start. Then drill a few holes and bolt the set on before switching over to the generator. Okay, so add another couple of hours.”
“You think you’re just going to load up a runabout and drive away? Like no one’s going to notice or say anything? And even if you managed to just disappear, they’d have probes out searching within hours.”
“There are always some runabouts left out at the pad workings. Naarmegen’s group are leaving from there tonight. If I arrange to disappear at the same time, it will seem that I decided to join them at the last minute. Any probes will be looking for the Scout. A runabout’s a lot smaller. And visibility from anywhere above a few hundred feet tends to be pretty hazy and patchy in any case.” Keene nodded decisively. “I think there’s a good enough chance of making it.” He waited, watching the contortions following each other across Charlie’s face, as if somehow able to read from them the thoughts forming within. Finally he emitted a knowing sigh. “Okay, Charlie, I’ll spare you the agony,” he said. “Shayle and Sariena think it hasn’t got a chance, and they asked you to try and stop me because you’re someone that I’ll listen to. Is that close enough?”