Ishtar Rising (Book 2) - Michael A. Martin [6]
Or any number of Hesperi, as Fabian might say. Soloman thought this was an odd time for the tactical specialist’s wry sense of humor to start rubbing off on him.
The ground station rumbled and groaned, but stopped shaking within a few moments, at least for the time being. But the vocalizations of the other two Bynars remained shrill—almost panicked, to Soloman’s sensitive ears—as the team continued concentrating on maintaining the wayward force fields.
“Incoming message from upstairs, Adrienne,” someone said. The voice belonged to one of the human technicians, a male human who was working somewhere out of Soloman’s field of vision.
The on-site team leader acknowledged by opening up a comm channel with an audible snap. “Ground Station Vesper here. Go ahead, Ishtar.”
A furious blast of static preceded Dr. Saadya’s reply. “Adrienne, are you and your team all right?”
“We’re all in one piece. But we’ve picked up some pretty severe seismic activity down here.”
“We’ve detected it, too. It’s centered around Alpha Regio, near Ground Station Aphrodite.”
His mind still shooting a numeric rapids, Soloman spared a moment to make a quick calculation. Alpha Regio lay over two thousand kilometers to the southwest of Ground Station Vesper. Whatever subterranean forces had been roused there must be powerful indeed.
“How close is Aphrodite to the epicenter?” Paulos wanted to know.
“Near enough to interfere with our transporter locks there.” Saadya’s voice was getting progressively more obscured and distorted by static, presumably from air that was being rapidly ionized by large-scale volcanic eruptions. “We can’t raise them at the moment. We can only hope they weren’t leveled outright.”
“Dear God,” said Paulos. “Don’t tell me we just happened to execute Project Ishtar on the same day the Big One finally decided to give the planet’s crust a complete pave-over.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Saadya said, an edge of barely contained panic in his voice. “Except that the da Vinci has sent a shuttle down to rescue the Aphrodite personnel before the station is inundated by the magma flow itself. In the meantime, you and your team have to do whatever it takes to keep the force-field network up and running.”
Soloman knew that without the force-field network, Aphrodite’s fate would be sealed, along with that of the rest of the ground stations. There was no way Vesper or any of the other surface facilities could outlast Aphrodite for very long. Should the force-field nodes collapse while still holding millions of cubic kilometers of atmosphere in high-altitude suspension, the abrupt release of kinetic energy as the atmosphere resettled would scour away every structure on the planet’s surface within minutes. The protective shielding would be pulverized and everyone inside would be reduced to vapor without leaving so much as a bone or a tooth to be buried. Soloman shuddered at the thought.
The numbers. Don’t lose your grip on the numbers.
“Understood,” Paulos said, replying to Saadya with an unsteady voice. She, too, must have worked out the consequences of failure. “Let’s hope that shuttle can do some good. In the meantime, it’s all we can do just to hold the force field in place, without either expanding or contracting it.”
The drift of the numbers racing past Soloman’s eyes quickly confirmed that any attempt to use the force-field network to continue moving the atmosphere outward would greatly increase the risk of causing a catastrophic collapse. And the team had never tried reversing the motion of the force fields to create a controlled settling of the atmosphere. Therefore the force fields had to be maintained right where they currently were, half-expanded, so near the fast-moving seventy-kilometer atmospheric layer that it took all of Soloman’s concentration just to continue following and reacting to the