Ishtar Rising (Book 2) - Michael A. Martin [7]
Soloman spared a quick look toward the console where his paired, data-efficient brethren worked, their strident voices keening in near-desperation.
Even they are beginning to fall behind. How can a crippled singleton hope to do any better?
His head beginning to throb with the fruitless effort of following the figures, Soloman knew that he should not have allowed the bigotry of 1011 and 1110 to affect him to such a degree that he was thinking of himself with the slur “singleton.” He was also rapidly becoming convinced that if another single bit of data were to impinge on his consciousness, his head would surely explode.
His combadge chose that precise moment to speak. “Gold to Soloman.”
Please, not now. “Soloman here.”
“We’re monitoring your situation closely.”
For reasons that puzzled him, the captain’s remark struck Soloman as humorous. He made a mental note to ask Dr. Lense, or perhaps Fabian, about that later. Assuming, of course, that he would be alive later.
“Thank you, sir,” was all he could think of to say in response.
“I’ll give you the bad news first, Soloman,” Gold continued. “We can’t beam anybody back from any of the surface stations at the moment, and the orbital lab is in the same fix. The ‘holes’ in the force-field net that we beamed you through to get you down there are completely closed up now. And the volcanic activity at Alpha Regio is causing too much high-altitude ionization to risk using the transporter at long range anyway; the high-speed atmospheric layer is spreading it around like a yenta repeating gossip.”
Soloman nodded. The seventy-kilometer superrotational layer could blanket the entire planet in volcanic fallout in just four days—and that was without the extra heat-induced acceleration factor already introduced by the force-field network itself. The entire atmosphere was becoming thoroughly ionized by now. “I understand,” Soloman said. “May I infer that you also have some good news to deliver, Captain?”
Soloman thought he heard Gold chuckle, though he couldn’t be certain. “Gomez just evac’d Ground Station Aphrodite with the Kwolek.”
Someone from Ishtar Station must have just relayed the same news to Paulos’s team, since a brief cheer went up among the busy human technicians.
Gold continued: “Gomez thinks that the engineers might be able to reestablish transporter locks on the other ground stations, at least intermittently.”
“That would certainly be welcome, sir.” There was no trace of irony behind Soloman’s words. “But how can that be done without allowing the force-field network to collapse entirely?” Clearly that wasn’t desirable so long as maintaining the force fields remained essential for keeping all of the ground personnel alive.
“Nobody said this was going to be an easy job, Soloman.”
“Captain, we have our hands full just keeping the force fields from collapsing and swamping everyone down here with an atmospheric deluge.”
Throughout this exchange, Soloman continued trying to maintain his grasp on the numbers as they ebbed and flowed across his monitor. His hands fluttered quickly across the keypad, feeding revised instructions to the network, the human technicians, and the other Bynars.
His head was pounding, as though it contained a small animal that was determined to escape. The Bynar pair’s tandem dataspeech had risen to an almost ear-splitting screech. The sound resonated across a gap in Soloman’s being, forcibly reminding him of the easy informational intimacy that had been forever ripped from him on the day 111 had died.
If only 111 were here now. I’m certain the four of us, working as paired pairs, could maintain some measure of control over these variables.
And he could feel that the datastream was eluding him. He was rapidly losing his hold on the numbers. He knew that soon he would input a parameter-change incorrectly, causing two or more of the wavering force-field nodes to fall into each