That was the thing that kept him here now in an office lit mostly by the ruddy glow of Mars swinging regularly by. Nicholas Glendale was used to having answers, to knowing what he wanted to do and how to achieve it. By the time he’d been five, he’d known he wanted to be a paleontologist, and he’d succeeded—beyond his expectations, even.
Then when one of his best students, Helen Sutter, had discovered something impossible and the impossible had turned out to be true—a fossil of an alien creature whose species had built bases across the Solar System in the days of the dinosaurs—he had wanted to become a part of that, follow the dream into space. And he’d succeeded in that, too, and again beyond his wildest dreams.
But now that brilliant student, and her friends—his friends as well—now all of them were gone, and a hundred other people with them. The faces refused to leave, the crew of the half-alien vessel Nebula Storm kept coming and going like phantoms in his mind: Helen, with her blond hair tied back, looking at a dessicated Bemmius Secordii mummy sixty-five million years old; A.J. Baker, irreverent and irrepressible sensor expert whose blond hair, cocky smile, and not-too-well hidden vulnerability had eventually led to his marriage to Helen; dark-haired, dark-skinned Jackie Secord, who’d found the first trace of Bemmie on her family’s ranch and later become a rocket engineer for the first manned interplanetary vessel, Nike; Joe Buckley, brown hair above a face whose lines showed patience and acceptance of whatever the universe threw at him—good or bad. Madeline Fathom, golden-blonde, delicately built, the single most dangerous—and most reliable—person Nicholas had ever met, one-time agent for the least-known American intelligence agency, later Nicholas’ own right hand and married to Joe; Larry Conley, tall and always somehow stooped over as though to apologize for his height, slow-talking but with encyclopedic knowledge of astrophysics.
But Nebula Storm was lost with its crew, as were over a hundred others on the ship she had been pursuing, the immense mass-beam drive vessel Odin, both vessels lost with all hands in what was in all likelihood an act of corporate greed gone utterly insane, or—possibly—a terrible accident triggered by misunderstanding.
And now he had to decide what to do. The others at Ares Corporation—Glenn Friedet, Reynolds Jones, and the rest of their Board—were waiting on his decision as “Director Nicholas Glendale of the Interplanetary Research Institute of the United Nations.”
He snorted at the pomposity of the title and stood angrily, the rotation of Phobos Station keeping him as firmly planted on the floor as if he’d been on Earth. Out of habit he began pacing again. If I keep this up, I’ll wear a hole in the exceedingly expensive imported carpet.
It had all started so simply—as most disasters do. With the discovery of the first two alien bases, one on Mars and one on Mars’ moon Phobos, it had become a virtual certainty that there must be other alien installations, possibly with incalculably valuable artifacts within, waiting for salvage elsewhere in the Solar System. The Buckley Accords gave the first discoverer to, literally, set foot on any other system body long-term rights to exploit resources on that body, within a certain range of that first footstep. That was the starter’s gun on the greatest race in history—a race to discover these new locations and reach them first, claiming those resources for the country—or the corporation—that first placed a human being upon the planet, moon, or asteroid on which the alien base was located.
Larry Conley had made it three-for-three discoveries for the Ares Corporation; his co-worker, A.J. Baker, had made the first earthshaking discovery within Phobos, and later found the pieces of the puzzle that led to a huge installation in Mars’ Melas Chasma region, and now Larry had found unmistakable clues indicating that the minor planet or giant asteroid, Ceres, was the site of another alien base.
Keeping the discovery a secret, Ares and the Interplanetary Research Institute (usually just called the IRI) had prepared and finally launched an expedition to Ceres, locating and setting foot directly above the base—which turned out to be at least as extensive as the one on Mars.
And that, Nicholas thought sadly, was probably the last straw.
The European Union’s flagship vessel, the Odin, had visited Ceres and remained there for some months. Cooperation had seemed to have been established, and many wonderful results had come of it—ranging from the commercialization of room-temperature superconductors