“Yep,” Dan agreed. “They forgot about the tunnel. But it’s still here, even though nobody uses it. And so are the access shafts.”
The access shafts had been drilled upward to the outside, on the side of the mountain. The first of the access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down.
“And here we are,” Dan said.
In the scant light from the flashlights that Dan and George played around the tunnel walls, Pancho saw a set of metal rungs leading up to another hatch.
“There’s a tempo just above us,” he said as George started climbing the ladder. “We’ll jack into its electrical power supply to run the dewar’s cryostat.”
“Won’t that show up on the grid monitors?” Pancho asked.
Shaking his head, Dan replied, “Nope. The tempos have their own solar panels and batteries. Completely independent. The panels are even up on poles to keep ’em out of the dust.”
Pancho heard the hatch groan open. Looking up, she saw George squeeze his bulk through its narrow diameter.
“How’re we gonna get Sis’s dewar through that hatch?” she demanded.
“There’s a bigger hatch for equipment,” Dan said.
As if to prove the point, a far wider hatch squealed open over their heads. Dim auxiliary lighting from the tempo filtered down to them.
Even with the little winch from the tempo, it was a struggle to wrestle the bulky dewar and its equipment up through the hatch. Pancho worried that Sis would be jostled and crumpled in her liquid nitrogen bath. But at last they had Sis hooked up in the temporary shelter. The dewar rested on the floor and all the gauges were in the green.
“You’ll have to come back here once a month or so to check up on everything. Maybe once every six or seven months you’ll have to top off the nitrogen supply.”
A thought struck her. “What about when I’m on the mission?”
“I’ll do it,” George said without hesitation. “Be glad to.”
“How the hell can I thank you guys?”
Dan chuckled softly. “I’m just making certain that my best pilot isn’t blackmailed by Humphries into working against me. And George…”
The big Aussie looked suddenly embarrassed.
“I used to live in one of the tempos,” he said, his tenor voice softer than usual. “Back when I was a fugitive, part of the underground. Back before Dan took me under ‘is wing.”
Dan said, “This is a sort of homecoming for George.”
“Yeah,” George said. “Reminds me of the bad old days. Almost brings a fookin’ tear to my eye.”
Dan laughed and the Aussie laughed with him. Pancho just stood there, feeling enormously grateful to them both.
STARPOWER, LTD.
Dan had offered space in Astro Corporation’s office complex for the headquarters of the fledgling Starpower, Ltd. Humphries had countered with an offer of a suite in his own Humphries Space Systems offices. Stavenger suggested a compromise, and Star-power’s meager offices opened in the other tower on the Grand Plaza, where Selene’s governmental departments were housed. Yet Stavenger had not been invited to this working meeting. Dan sat on one side of the small conference table, Martin Humphries on the other. The room’s windowless walls were bare, the furniture strictly functional.
“I hear you’ve been having some problems with hackers,” Dan said. For just a flash of a second Martin Humphries looked startled. He quickly regained his composure.
“Whoever told you that?” he asked calmly.
Dan smiled knowingly. “Not much happens around here without the grapevine getting wind of it.”
Humphries leaned back in his chair. Dan noticed that it was a personally fitted recliner, unlike the other chairs around the table, which were inexpensive padded plastic.
“The leak’s been fixed,” Humphries said. “No damage done.”
“That’s good,” said Dan.
“Speaking of the grapevine,” Humphries said lightly, “I heard a funny one just this morning.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a story going around that you and a couple of your employees stole a dewar from the catacombs last night.”
“Really?”
“Sounds like something out of an old horror flick.”
“Imagine that,” Dan said.
“Curious. Why would you do something like that?”