Ishtar Rising (Book 2) - Michael A. Martin [17]
Saadya smiled grimly, then faced Gold again. “You’re right, David. But I’m being even more unfair to your crew.” His eyes lit on the diminutive Bynar, who so far had yet to utter a word. “Particularly you, Mr. Soloman. You stand astride the worlds of Bynars and humans. And because of that unique outlook, you accomplished what no one else could—you rescued everyone on Venus from my hubris. I thank you.”
Soloman nodded, though he seemed uncomfortable with the praise. “It would be wrong to completely discount random chance and contingency, Dr. Saadya. The unorthodox data-handling the situation forced upon me involved a good deal of guesswork.”
“Skillful estimates aren’t the same as lucky guesses,” Saadya said. Soloman looked skeptical, but didn’t seem inclined to argue the point.
Gold shrugged. “Call it luck, or skill, or even kismet if you have to. You’ve still had several very lucky outcomes here, even without completing the atmospheric ‘blowoff.’ ”
Saadya was speechless for a moment. “Lucky outcomes? Name one.”
“For one, no one’s dead, or even badly injured.”
Saadya drew scant comfort from that fact, then felt a paroxysm of guilt at his own callousness. “Including your shuttle crew?” He realized he’d been so focused on the specifics of Project Ishtar that he’d given little thought to the injuries David’s brave engineering staff might have suffered while flying through the atmosphere’s superrotational layer.
Gold made a dismissive gesture. “The shuttle took the worst of the beating. Dr. Paulos here has taken the liberty of letting us tow the Kwolek to one of your docking ports so Gomez and Tev can kludge a few quick repairs together before the da Vinci shoves off. Tev says your shuttlebay has a smidge more elbow room than ours.”
“It seemed like the least we could do, since our own hardware apparently caused at least one of the shuttle’s hull breaches in the first place,” Paulos explained, holding a dark, lumpy, baseball-size metallic object out for inspection. “It seems the Kwolek ran over one of our little reinforced atmospheric probes. Looks like that’s what damaged her comm system when the da Vinci arrived to bolster her power reserves.”
Saadya winced. That was yet another low-probability eventuality he hadn’t spent a lot of time considering. “My God,” he stammered.
“It’s just a scratch,” Gold said. “I’m sure Tev can buff it right out.”
But Saadya wasn’t buying Gold’s breezy denials. He understood only too well the peril of an untoward encounter with a projectile that was plated with a duranium/rodinium alloy. “Your shuttle crew nearly died trying to save this project. Only to see it fail in the end.”
“Quit punishing yourself, Pas,” Gold said. “It isn’t as though we didn’t know you were using atmospheric probes. It was ahftseloches.”
“Ahftseloches,” Saadya repeated, smiling fractionally. “Inevitable bad luck. I thought you said you didn’t believe in that.”
“Inevitable bad luck is the only kind of luck I can usually rely on,” Gold said, staring at his left hand as he flexed and clenched the fingers. Saadya wondered if this was the hand that had been replaced after the recent shipboard accident he’d heard about.
Gold continued, “But bad luck, inevitable or otherwise, doesn’t always end up badly. For example, Project Ishtar might actually be on firmer footing now because of what happened today.”
Saadya could scarcely believe his ears. “That hardly seems likely, David.”
“Listen to him, Pas,” Paulos said, gesturing toward the window and the plumes of ejected material that continued streaming into space. “In just a few hours, we’ve relieved maybe a quarter of a billion years of seismic stress from the planet’s interior. We’ll be thankful for that little boon when the time comes to attach banks of impulse engines to the crust so we can spin this puppy up to a Terran-style diurnal