even as the rest of the team made their way inside.
Andrew helped Nastasia climb aboard. She was carrying a small satchel. As she entered the first alcove, the satchel she was clutching onto fell from her hands. It hit the deck with a soft exploding sound, and the contents skittered across the floor.
Embarrassed and slightly annoyed, she moved quickly to gather the scattered belongings. Andrew bent to pick up a small white inhaler that had shot halfway across the alcove.
“Give me that!” she said frantically.
He looked up surprised and handed it over immediately. It was a standard, flat white inhaler used by people with asthma or other lung disorders. In fact, a lot of drugs were delivered as aerosols these days; it was simple, cheap, and sanitary.
“Sorry,” he said briefly. “Just trying to help.”
Nastasia colored for an instant, then composed herself. She took the inhaler from him as if she was receiving an offering. “I apologize,” she said, her Russian accent thicker than normal. “I am slightly embarrassed by my…condition.”
“No need to be,” he said. “I—”
“Come on, people,” Simon said sharply. “Let’s get moving!”
All the team members—now the crew—had assigned tasks, and they got to them now with a sense of renewed urgency. There was little conversation and no time for small talk. The pressure was mounting.
It took less time than they had anticipated to convert the experiment monitoring consoles that lined the bridge into actual work stations for team members who were taking over for the sidelined AIs. In less than an hour, Andrew and Ryan had rigged an eighty-inch holo-screen just in front and above the captain’s chair to deliver a direct feed of the visual data that the wireless cameras were receiving from outside the ship—a virtual picture window of the forward view, eighty degrees wide, just as Max had insisted on. He could even pan left and right an additional fifteen degrees each way, for a full one-hundred-twenty degree arc.
“That’s more like it,” he muttered as he ran his forward-facing holo-screen through its paces.
Barely more than an hour after boarding, the new crew of Spector was released to explore their tiny quarters and prepare for entry into the frigid Southern Sea. Simon, Max, Hayden, and Andrew found themselves alone on the bridge.
“Do you think we should tell the crew before we do it?” Andrew asked Simon.
Simon had thought it through. “No. There’s nothing they can do but worry.”
It was time to activate the power source—the incredibly powerful, dangerous energy system that had caused the military and the British government to make the decision to send the Spector halfway around the world for its initial test.
It truly was black-and-white decision, Simon knew. The power plant would either work as planned, or a fraction of a second after activation it would vaporize everything within a quarter-mile sphere of the source-point, leaving absolutely nothing behind—not even hard radiation.
Simon glared at the panel that would do the work. “So?” he said. “Turn it on.”
Hayden looked up at him from the console and said, “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” he said grimly.
“You’re positive?”
“Hayden, for god’s sake, just do it.”
Hayden smirked. “I activated the damn thing two minutes ago. We’re fine.”
For one instant everyone froze. Then Andrew burst into laughter, and everyone else joined in.
Everyone but Simon. There was nothing to laugh about—not yet. And one ugly task still lay ahead.
He forced a thin smile and said, “Max? We’d better get this done.” Then he turned away and drew Max to a far corner of the bridge while Hayden and Andrew double-checked the power curves.
“You’re sure there’s no other way to do this?” Simon asked his old friend.
“I’ve been over it and over it,” Max said. “And no—there’s not. Look, Donovan seems like a good man; I’m as sorry as you are. But even if the weather were better—and it’s not going to get better, Nastasia says, not for at least a week—we can’t have the Munro operating that winch and powering up those systems in broad daylight, or even in the dead of night.” He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“It’ll work out okay, Simon,” he said. “Everyone will be fine.”
Simon nodded. What was to come was certainly the worst part of their mission so far.
He turned and told the others to finish the prep checklist and to double-check the full operational capabilities of the forward and aft cutting tools. Andrew and Hayden both nodded obligingly. “We’re going to talk with Donovan for a moment,” Simon told them. “Then…we’re off.”