He’d seen it time and time again. Being overly concerned about people’s feelings caused unnecessary deaths.
Talbot definitely had emotional entanglements with Commander Kessler. It was as obvious as a slap on the face that those two had some sort of sexual history. Whoever put those two officers on the same ship was just asking for people to die. Vice-Admiral Arinze, the fool, had probably done that, most likely out of ignorance.
However, there was a silver lining to Arinze’s personnel error. The relationship between Talbot and Kessler presented certain opportunities. He would need to manipulate Talbot at some point in the future, and the more he knew about her, the better. He had already begun to mine her feelings for Bandele, and was confident it would pay off sooner or later. As for Kessler, the man certainly wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, but he was unpredictable, which was dangerous enough.
They approached the large inflatable structure and crew tents at a careful pace, the four general sensor units ticking in unison. At one time the tents were set up in neat rows surrounding the larger structure, but most of the tents lay in pieces. Two small generators sat on the ground, but both looked damaged, with several pieces torn away from the machines. A sizable table was overturned and several chairs were scattered and broken on the ground just outside the larger structure.
They split up: Mitchell, the mission specialists and technician looked in the tents, while Webb and Van Zant investigated the large central inflatable structure. As they passed through, Van Zant saw scientific and computer equipment set up on several rows of tables, but some of the tables lay turned over and the equipment sat broken on the floor. Plastic crates and other containers were open, their contents scattered across the floor. More crates sat stacked against the wall. It looked like the structure could be sealed from the environment, but both doors stood open to the breeze. Leaves and dirt had blown inside. Webb panned the general sensor unit over the contents, the steady tick tick tick of the device filling the air.
The party rendezvoused on the other side of the camp. The mission specialists and technicians had not discovered anyone.
“Most of the tents were trashed,” Wuland, the technician, said.
“We saw the same in the larger structure,” Webb said. “It looks like there was some kind of struggle. Why didn't they sleep in the Lalande for safety?”
“You ever been in a Polaris class?” Wuland asked. “The quarters are like closets.”
Mitchell pulled his pockcomp and let the Solstice know what they found. “Let’s proceed to the ship,” he said. He drew his blaster pistol. “Set to non-lethal.”
The mission specialists drew their pistols, while Van Zant brought his blaster rifle to bear. They approached the Lalande at a careful pace. The ship was over a hundred and thirty meters long and twenty meters high. It lay on an open patch of ground about thirty meters from the shore of the bay. The large cargo doors in the central cylindrical section lay open, and crates of supplies lay scattered on the ground near the ship. Long brown leaves, branches, and other refuse were piled against the side of the ship
“It looks like the crates were ransacked,” Wuland, the technician, said.
“It has been this way for some time,” Van Zant said, “several weeks, at least.”
Mitchell led the way up the cargo ramp. Though the day was bright, shadows filled the interior of the Lalande’s cargo bay. This section of the spacecraft was twenty meters in diameter, with multiple cargo anchoring points set into the interior bulkhead. Van Zant pulled out his pockcomp and retrieved the layout of the Lalande.
Scores of crates and several shipping containers still hung anchored to the interior bulkhead. Mitchell led the party up onto temporary catwalks set on top the cargo. A central catwalk with a ladder surrounded by a metal cage led forward and aft. A cargo walker rested on its side, blocking the walkway. A second cargo walker hung from a cargo hook, bound up in a tangle of chains. More leaves and debris covered the catwalk and the cargo.
“There’s no power,” Wuland said. Each of them pulled out a flashlight and shone the beams around the space.
“Mr. Van Zant?” Mitchell said, “You and Tech Specialist Wuland will go aft and check out the engineering section. See if you can get power restored. The rest of us will go forward to check out the labs, crew quarters, and command deck.
We should stick together. Van Zant and Wuland proceeded aft through the catwalk to the steady ticking of Wuland’s sensor unit, the beams of their flashlights penetrating the gloom. Containers and crates of cargo, some open, hung from hooks on the interior bulkhead. A few moments later they entered a large empty space in the cargo hold. A large cargo door lay open to the outside, a ramp leading down to the ground. Leaves and dirt lay on the deck.
Van Zant looked at his pocket computer. “The Lalande’s manifest lists three scout buggies, two surface watercraft, and the sub. This is where they must have been stored. We know where the sub is, but not the others.”
They walked across the empty cargo bay. Wuland pointed at an open hatch. “There’s engineering.”
“Let me go first,” Van Zant said, raising his blaster rifle. He clipped his flashlight to the rifle, stooped, and entered the hatch.
The space was completely dark. The beams of their flashlights knifed through the blackness, revealing only glimpses of the consoles, screens, and other machinery, all dark and powerless.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
“No power whatsoever,” Wuland said. “Wait a minute, it looks like it’s picking up--“
“What was that?” Van Zant hissed. He heard it again: a thump and a scrape. Suddenly, a clanging sound, as if a dropped tool struck the deck, rang through the space.
Silence. Only the sound of their breathing and the tick tick tick of the sensor unit filled the air.
“There’s life in here,” Wuland whispered.
“Woop! Woop-in-woop! Kichi ka ka kanifka!”
Van Zant froze, heart pounding and limbs tingling with adrenaline. His bladder almost emptied, but he managed to maintain control.
“What the fuck was that?” Wuland whispered.
Van Zant’s flashlight beam caught the edge of something flying through the space. He ducked, and heard Wuland cry out in surprise and pain. He pointed the rifle in different directions and the flashlight suddenly illuminated what looked like two eyes in a face.
Van Zant gasped.
The thing remained still, the eyes green and bisected with vertical slit pupils. Its narrow mouth opened.
“WOOOOOP!”
Van Zant pulled the trigger. The flashes of the multiple blaster beams lit up the dark space in staccato bursts of blue light. The pulsing sound of the weapon almost deafened him.
Van Zant tracked the creature with his flashlight. The thing was thin, with long limbs and a tail, and moved around in an upright posture, it’s arms held outward with bent wrists. It moved with swiftness, leaping over the dark consoles and equipment with ease. It made a skittering sound as it moved. As he panned around, his light illuminated another of the creatures, then another.
He pulled the trigger again, spraying the space with blue bolts, the pulse of the weapon echoing through the space. The creatures disappeared into the darkness.
He released the trigger, the sound of the weapon ringing in his ears. He heard a skittering sound. He panned the light through the darkness, the beam glancing off metal and glass.
“Move back toward the hatch,” Van Zant said. “Do you see them? We need to trap them.”
“No,” Wuland hissed. “We need some light.”
Van Zant saw the dull glow of Wuland’s pocket computer and heard the tick, tick, tick of the sensor unit. “I need to find the primary power coupling,” Wuland whispered, “then trace it back to the reactor and the alternate circuit for the batteries.” Van Zant heard the soft tap, tap, tap as Wuland brought up the Lalande’s engineering schematics on the device.
Van Zant heard the skittering sound again. It seemed t
o be coming from all around him.
“Woop! Woop-n-woop! Titter kinzala woop!”
He panned the rifle to his left and pulled the trigger again, illuminating the space with bright blue flashes. When he released the trigger he became aware of Wuland standing on his right.
“How many are there?” Wuland asked
“My guess is at least three.” The flashlight beam illuminated something flying toward them. “Incoming!” Van Zant stepped to his left. Something hard and metal clattered on the deck beside him. He aimed in the direction the object originated and pulled the trigger, the blue bolts slapping and snapping off the metal deck and consoles. “You know where the power coupling is yet?”
“Got it!” Wuland said.
“Okay.” Van Zant stepped back and pulled the hatch shut. “We’re not gonna let these things go. I’ll follow your light. Go nice and slow.”
The light beams jerked back and forth, cutting through the darkness. Van Zant heard the creatures move around, the skittering and tittering loud in the silence. The two men moved with a slow and deliberate pace, stepping over equipment and tools lying on the floor.
“Just up here,” Wuland said after they had moved after for several moments. “There. Now to the left three meters. Okay, give me a couple of minutes.”
The creatures skittered around them in the dark. Van Zant never saw how close they got. As he panned his light around he caught glimpses of them, but he didn’t fire his weapon. Wuland had removed a panel from the bulkhead and shone his flashlight into the space, then opened his toolkit and got to work.
“Okay,” Wuland said after several minutes, “one more thing.” With a click the emergency lights illuminated the space with a red light. The technician looked up from where he knelt at the side of a console. “We just have battery power.”
The creatures jumped down off the consoles and hid, tittering and whooping.
Van Zant knelt and pulled his pockcomp off his belt. “Mitchell. You getting power?”
“The lights just came on,” Mitchell’s voice crackled over the device.
“Wuland says we just have battery power.”
“That’ll do for now.”
“Good.” Van Zant clipped the pockcomp back on his belt. “Okay,” he whispered, “we’re gonna stun at least one of these things and give Webb something to study. If we kill one, he’ll have something to dissect.” He rose and looked over a console. Machinery, piping, wiring, and computer equipment lined the walls and hung from the ceiling. It looked like much of the equipment had either been damaged or partially disassembled or both. Tools, lengths of pipe and coils of wire, along with bits of machinery and circuitry, lay scattered on the floor.
Van Zant knelt on the deck again. “What happened here, Wuland?”
“Just a guess, but it looks like someone or something was pulling stuff out looking for parts.”
“Can it be fixed?”
Wuland looked at Van Zant. “It will take days of work just to account for all the parts, and you're making things worse by shooting all the consoles. Who knows if we can get it working again?”
Well, sorry! Van Zant looked around. “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to cover you as you move forward and open the hatch to the cargo area. Then I’m going to move around the systems in here, herding the woopers forward. You see one, you shoot it. Don’t let it any of them get out. Okay?”
Wuland’s eyes gleamed. “Okay.”
“And don’t shoot me.” Van Zant rose and looked around the compartment, then rested his rifle on the console in front of him. “Go.”
Stooping, Wuland moved to the forward part of the compartment with caution. The skittering and tittering of the woopers filled the air. Van Zant figured they were somewhere over on the starboard side of the compartment.
Van Zant saw Wuland open the hatch to the cargo compartment then disappear behind a piece of equipment. He pulled up the collar of his coveralls, rolled down his sleeves, and pulled out a pair of gloves from his belt and put them on. He hoped these measures would be an effective defense if the woopers tried to bite him.
Who knows what sort of filth or poison these creatures have in their mouths?
He grasped his rifle and started to move across the compartment. He tried to stoop enough to remain hidden behind the consoles and other equipment. He followed the tittering and skittering sounds, pausing to look in every direction before hiding behind the next console or piece of equipment.
He saw one drop down from some low piping set into the ceiling. It stood about five meters away, facing the opposite direction. Van Zant got a good look at the creature. It stood about a meter high. It had a thin body and held its long arms over its head. The legs looked short and the feet small, and he saw it lean forward and move a meter away from him using its knuckles. The creature’s long prehensile tail curved over its back and head. The tip of the tail looked to have a stinger or sharp point on it; it dropped and almost brushed the top of the creature’s head. Relatively large flaps stuck out of the size of the creatures head, and it looked like it had a skin composed of fine scales.
Van Zant knelt and raised his blaster rifle. About to pull the trigger, he felt something drop down on him from above.
He swore and dropped his rifle; he tried to lift the netting from his body, but his arms just seemed to get more and more tangled. He shouted in fear as he fell over. The netting drew tighter, entangling his legs. One of the creatures appeared above him. Its face was long and narrow, the eyes large with vertical slit pupils. It opened its mouth and hissed at him.
“WULAND! SOME HELP HERE!” As he swore and struggled to get free from the net, he felt a sharp pain in his neck. His vision blurred and he tried to touch his neck, but the netting cinched even tighter.
“DAMN IT!” He twisted his body and turned his head, but only caught glimpses of his attackers. Weakness came over him, and he ceased to struggle. His thoughts grew fuzzy and he tasted something metallic.
I’m Dr. Paranoid; how could I forget to look up?
Chapter 5: Submerged Danger
Though the submersible could reach a speed of one hundred kilometers per hour on the surface, Kessler slowed down so Dr. Vargus and his assistant could take readings with the sub's sensors. They followed the course which the sub had drifted over the previous weeks, crossing over a hundred kilometers of open water, to approach the chain of islands.
“It's relatively shallow here,” Vargas said, “maybe two hundred meters.”
“What does that mean?” Kessler asked.
“The light from the stellar primary can reach the bottom. It's called the neritic zone, or the photic zone. In the oceans of most class 1 worlds it is where the majority of the life exists, the ecosystem based on microscopic chlorophyll bearing microorganisms.” Vargas paused. “Salinity is about two point five percent, with sodium and chlorine ions the most abundant, followed by magnesium, calcium, potassium and sulfur.” He paused again. “Hello! We've got a relatively high concentration of vanadium, much higher than in most class 1 oceans.”
“So what?”
“Unknown, so far, but vanadium serves as a catalyst in enzyme production for many biological systems.”
“Well,” Kessler said, looking out of the front viewport, “there is definitely life here.” The lower quarter of the viewport was submerged. The water outside the craft teemed with what looked like jellyfish. Scores of the hand-sized diaphanous polyp structures hung suspended below the waterline. The creatures moved away from the sub at the last moment as the craft pushed through the water.
“The numbers have increased as we have approached the islands,” Vargas said. “Must be their primary habitat.”
“I did see a few floating around when I inspected the sub,” Kessler said, “but not this many.”
“Initial water samples reveal a complex microbial and chemical environment in the water,” Drucker said, “but we can't fully characterize it with these instruments; we'll need the S
olstice’s labs.”
“Did Dr. Kanas make any notes?” Kessler asked
“Yes, it looks like he didn't find out too much more than we have,” Vargas replied. “How far to the big island?”
“About ten klicks.”
“Kanas was most interested in that island because of it's size, it says here in his notes.”
“Well, it's pretty big,” Kessler said, “much bigger than the islands around it.” He punched a few keys on the front console, adjusting the navigational radar and sonar. “Using data from the radar and the satellite network, the island is about twenty klicks in diameter, its highest point about three kilometers above sea level.”
“Look at the shape of that thing,” Drucker said. “It's almost perfectly conical, like the top of an egg.”
“Yeah, that's weird,” Kessler replied. “I'm gonna ping it with sonar.” He punched a button and a loud tone sounded through the sub. “There we go; signal is returning.” He tapped a few keys on the console. “The island extends over a hundred meters almost straight down to the sea floor.”
“I'll construct a 3-d image using all available data,” Vargas said. His fingers flew over the keyboard. “The island is round, with almost no irregularities. Like the top of a cone sticking out of the planet's crust. I've never seen anything like it.” He tapped a few more keys. “The other islands are exactly the same shape, just smaller.”
“Look at this,” Drucker said as he tapped on his keyboard. “The satellite data shows the islands form chains in the shallows of the oceans. No island exists in water deeper than a hundred a fifty meters. These shallow regions extend in arcs across the face of the planet.”
“If the geology of this world is the same as other planets in the same class,” Vargas said, “these shallow regions could be the accretionary wedge or the volcanic arc of a subduction zone. If that hypothesis is correct, then on one side of the shallow regions we should see a deep trench.”
“Well, there's no trench on this side,” Kessler said.
“According to the sub's log, it looks like Dr. Kanas and his student descended on the other side of the island,” Vargas said. “He may have reached the same hypothesis and was looking for evidence. I suggest we do the same.”
The Dreaming Oceans of San Miguel Page 3
