Ishtar Rising (Book 2) - Michael A. Martin [5]
The tank was buffeted from side to side by the increasingly powerful winds. Despite that, P8 Blue felt certain that her plan was going to work. As long as Corsi doesn’t smack into the force fields at the wrong angle on her way back out of here.
“I’ll be damned,” Stevens said with a big grin, looking up from his instruments. “We just caught ourselves eight humans and a pillbug.”
Gomez grinned back. “Tractor beam status?”
“Holding steady,” Tev said.
“Headed for orbit,” Corsi said, anticipating Gomez’s next order. “Course laid in for Ishtar Station. Quarter impulse.”
As they rose through the air, Gomez adjusted one of the console viewers to get an aft view. Below the Kwolek, Ground Station Aphrodite was crumbling and melting into nothingness, shaken apart by groundquakes and consumed by the molten mantle of Venus.
Corsi piloted the shuttle swiftly upward, passing the swirling ochre cloud bands, moving slowly but deftly through the force-field network, and finally grazing the edge of space, where Ishtar Station’s crew managed to beam the people being ferried in the tank to safety.
Gomez keyed the companel and spoke. “Gomez to Captain Gold. We’ve just completed a rather…unorthodox rescue. All crew members of Aphrodite Station are out of danger.”
“Good work, Gomez. Now we just have to save the rest of the planet.”
Gold’s words struck her hard. As Tev beamed P8 Blue back aboard the Kwolek, Gomez’s earlier jubilation had abruptly died. After all, not even both the da Vinci’s shuttles could pull off Pattie’s little trick at all the other ground stations, even if the Nasat engineer could be in two places at once. The planetary force-field network still remained dangerously stalled, geological upheavals threatened to engulf still more of the planet’s crust in very short order, and the transporters remained unable to haul the people stranded elsewhere on the surface out of harm’s way.
Gomez knew that solving those problems had to take priority now that the Aphrodite team was out of immediate danger. Otherwise, she thought, what about the dozen other staffed stations down there? And what happens to Soloman?
She watched in silence as one of her instruments displayed a schematic of the intricately fluctuating nodes and energy lines that made up Project Ishtar’s force-field network. Problem Number One, she decided, scowling at the image.
“You still there, Gomez?” said Gold over the still-open channel, his voice free of static now that the shuttle had made low orbit. Gomez realized with a start that she’d been woolgathering.
“Captain,” she said, suddenly galvanized by a new idea. “I think we may have to try something really risky next….”
Chapter
3
The columns of numbers that speed-scrolled across Soloman’s screen were suddenly anything but understandable, logical, or predictable. The mathematical constraints of the force-field network were quickly taking on characteristics that reminded him of one of the chaotic drad cacophonies to which Carol Abramowitz was so fond of listening. It took all the speed his hands could muster to continue feeding revised force-field parameters into the system in time to prevent a chain reaction of node failures that would have brought half the planet’s dense atmosphere crashing down onto their heads with nearly meteoric force.
And the numbers continued to change at an ever-accelerating rate.
Soloman felt a hard, rolling shock radiating from somewhere beneath his chair. It wasn’t unlike the jolt one might feel aboard a starship during a phaser attack. Groundquake! he thought, nearly falling out of the torrent of numbers that roared past his eyes.
A gabble of nearby voices engulfed him, those of the startled human team members mixing with the shriller-than-normal ultrarapid codespeech of the paired Bynars, who seemed to be struggling every bit as hard as Soloman was to make sense of the swiftly altering datastream.
Then he heard someone shouting above the din. The voice belonged to Adrienne Paulos, second only