CHAPTER EIGHTEEN  Survey Service Base, Columbia

The ballistic shuttle settled down on its landing legs; the pilot throttled back thrust to zero and quickly set about securing the ship. Outside, the ground crew was already operating the remote equipment, rolling out an access tunnel, the autofueler wheeling itself into position.

Mac Larson stared out the port at the grounded ship, beside himself with excitement and anxiety. Why couldn't they hurry with that damn access tunnel? No, finally they were pressurizing it—all linked at both ends, it'd open any second.

But there was some unexplained delay, and the airlocks on the lander and the terminal building remained stubbornly shut. A small crowd shuffled around inside the terminal, held back by the rope barrier, patient for the moment but annoyed by the wait. Nothing happening. Mac rushed back to the viewport. The ship just sat there.

Was she even aboard? All the communique had said was that Admiral Thomas was arriving with staff Mac had still gotten no certain word that she had survived the attack. Was this even Thomas's lander? This was supposed to be her, but schedules had been hashed up before. The clunk, clunk thud of a hatch opening came from behind him. He rushed back to the airlock, peered along the access tunnel as far as he could, until it curved away to hide the rest of its length.

There she—no, his imagination was playing tricks on his eyes. How could so many people fit on such a small lander—

And he was over the silly rope barrier and hallway down the access tunnel before his conscious mind registered that his eye had spotted her.

"Mac!" Joslyn dropped her bags and leaped up into his arms.

"Joslyn, you really are alive!"

"Mac, how did you know I was—"

"I didn't. I just hoped. Oh, thank God. Lord, you look good."

"Mac, I would have sent word, but they've gone absolutely potty with paranoia back home, not that I can blame them—" She looked up into his eyes, heedless of all the people coming past them from the lander, and the two of them were in a passionate embrace. Finally, almost reluctantly, they ended the kiss. She reached out and touched his face. "Oh, Mac. Let's get out of this tunnel and get home. With all these personnel coming in, it must be crowded here—"

"Swinging from the rafters."

"—But if we can't get nice, private married-couple quarters, I think I'll scream."

"Cancel the scream. I managed to wangle us our old stateroom and even the adjoining compartment. Just like before. Being XO has its advantages."

^You're Base XO?"

"Flying the second-biggest desk in the place. Privacy I had covered, but I wish I'd had some notice so I could have gotten some kind of meal—"

"Oh, Mac, I've got you, who needs food? But I wanted to send word. I'm sorry, I tried like mad to write and say that I was all right, that I was coming, but Uncle George ordered everything shut down. No mail, no nothing."

"Well, you can tell your dear old Admiral Uncle Sir George Wilfred Thomas that he's taken five years off my life worrying."

"No need/' came a deep and cheery voice behind him. "He's heard already."

Mac let go of Joslyn, turned, and found the admiral grinning at him. He saluted and took the admiral's preferred hand. "I beg your pardon, sir, I—"

"Never mind. To offer a scandalous suggestion, if I was married to my great-niece here and some old duffer kept her away for this great length of time, I'd box his ears instead of saluting. Glad to meet you, Lieutenant Commander."

"Ah, actually, it's captain, sir, but currently serving as a commander. Full commander."

"Mac! Not again! You never could have just one rank!" Joslyn said happily.

"Congratulations, then. But let's get out of this mob. The regs say all these people have to salute me and this tunnel's not wide enough for all these flying elbows. Come along."

Mac was worried that his reunion with his wife would be interrupted by a nice visit with the admiral, but fortunately the admiral had his own reception committee decorously waiting at the roped barrier. Thomas's ship had arrived in orbit under tight security, not identified as his flagship, and the lander had come down with twenty minutes' notice. Captain Driscoll was tied up at the other side of base, but her aide had been able to get away and meet the admiral and see him to his quarters. Thomas was led away from the terminal and into the base proper, and Joslyn and Mac were left to their own devices for the first time in far too long.

For their sake, Thomas was glad to be steered clear of the reunited couple. If ever a pair of young people needed some private time together—and deserved it—they did. In any event, he had his own concerns. "Ensign—I think I'd prefer to go straight to the situation room. I'd like to get right down to business."

"Certainly, sir."

The Survey Service base was a maze of corridors that looked like any base built on a tight budget. The situation room was behind an unmarked, double-locked door, guarded by a beefy marine who demanded Thomas's credentials before she let him through.

Inside, in holo tanks and displays and printouts, the story was told: The Combined League Fleet was slowly, quietly, with as much secrecy and misdirection as possible, drifting into Kennedy's star system. No large concentrations of ships this time—they were dispersed throughout the system, with small formations orbiting every planet in the system, and some ships in free orbit of Kennedy's sun. The neatly labeled spots of light moving in their displays hid no chaos, the calm of the situation room was reflected in the real world this time. No raiding fleet would be able to hit them all at once, worms or no worms.

The worms. The damned, horrible, nightmare worms. Thomas shivered, felt a twinge in the pit of his stomach. The worms would visit his dreams for the rest of his life. Even now, in the order of the situation room, the very thought of them raised his hackles. Worse than the worst delirium tremens he had ever had.

Wide dispersal in space was vital in protecting against the vermin. They were not immune to vacuum and neither, as it turned out, were the eggs. The eggs could survive maybe thirty seconds in zero pressure. A raider, a saboteur, might get a few ships with the damn things, but the Combined Fleet itself would be safe. Even so simple a thing as rigging Eagle for flag ops had been a challenge. No one really liked the idea of using a carrier for a flag, not after Britannica, but the plain fact was that there was no other combatant ship that could carry all the specialized gear and equipment, to say nothing of billeting the specialists who would use that gear. No one really discussed the fact that the USS Yorktown had stayed behind in Earth orbit.

Combined League Fleet. In a more romantic age, it would have been called the Grand Fleet, perhaps—named by a sailor awestruck by its mighty size, and not by a bureaucratic technician who saw the numbers and not the ships.

Never had so many spacecraft, under so many flags, been joined together in one task. A procedure for coordinating their movements should have taken years to invent, but this was wartime, and those same soulless technicians had come up with the computer programming and the comm system in weeks. Practice at simply talking ship-to-ship, working through the Babylon of languages and the dozen standard radio frequencies, was the most important thing for these craft at the moment, and would be until the Search teams finally located the enemy.

You could hear the capital S in Search when people talked about it. Nothing was more important; and yet it had to be done by the tiny number of ships that could be equipped with the proper sensing devices. After over a month of round-the-clock effort by the Brazilians, their detection stations were just arriving at Columbia and would be heading out in a day or so. So far, only about fifteen target systems had been checked. Nothing so far.

Far Shore was still out there, and so were Vasco da Gama and Jodrell Bank. One of them might have succeeded. But for Sir George, it was time to do little more than wait.

Except for one project, and Sir George was following it closely. It was based on what some of the scientific johnnies had said about what was to be found at the barycenter of a binary star system.

It was a frightening idea, and a daring one. But try as he might, Admiral Thomas could think of no reason why it would not work. The research team had already come up with operational recommendations.

They gave it the code name Bannister. It seemed to Thomas that the deadliest schemes always had innocuous code names.

Joslyn tried to let herself fall into the blissful mood of a happy, romantic reunion, and even succeeded to a certain extent. But there were too many things on her mind for her to manage it completely. Mac didn't seem to notice her worries, though, and she was very glad of that.

What about their new admiral, dear old Sir George? Their lives were in his hands now. She loved her great-uncle, but she worried. She knew him better than anyone else in the fleet, knew his strengths and weaknesses, and even she had no answer to the central question: Was he the man for such a command? If not for the foam worms, he would have had a major victory in his pocket at Britannica. Was that just luck, chance, or had old Sir George simply been given his first decent chance after a lifetime of being shunted aside?

And she worried about the drinking. She managed to keep his boozing under some control, but she couldn't be there all the time. How much worse would it make things?

But more than anything else, the death of the Impervious preyed on her mind. She resolved never to talk about it with her husband. Mac was already prepared to believe his words had cost them the Imp. It would be hard enough to convince him that wasn't so, that the Guards' plans must have been laid before he said anything. Joslyn was glad he hadn't seen that nightmare with his own eyes, glad that he couldn't know it was even worse than he imagined it being, or there would have been no convincing him.

And she herself had no desire to remember—though the disaster came into her thoughts, unbidden, time and time again. The nightmare trip from aux control to the emergency airlock, after the worms had done their worst and the Imp was dead, that was burned into her mind for all time. She could still hear the horrible shriek of the air roaring out the lock when they blew the outer door while the lock was full of air, because the pumps were dead. She could still see Ensign McCrae dying, strangling, screaming in silence before their eyes because the worms had eaten a hole in his suit somewhere. She could see the waiting cutter, framed by the worms that had gotten into the lock's vent system and so been sucked out with the air. The worms' ghastly, flaccid bodies bursting in the vacuum, and the cutter's lasers burning anything that even looked the size of a worm before it would allow them aboard.

And, the worst of it, somehow, the look on Sir George's race when they had half-dragged him out of the Imp's lock and into the cutter. The Imp had been more than his ship for ten long years—she had been his life, his hope, his plan for salvaging something out of his life's work. Now she was scrap metal, the grisly grave for hundreds.

Had she, Joslyn, done the right thing then? Aboard the cutter, she had handed him the bottle of gin, and let him drink as much as he would. What the worms had done to Sir George's world was more than any man should be expected to race, and Joslyn could not begrudge him his means of escape. But should she have given him one more lesson in hiding from failure?

Was he the man?

If she had known about Bannister, she would have worried even more.