Exodus: Sci-Fi Thriller (The Belt Book 5)

by Gerald M. Kilby

  “I’m not. I just wanted to give the others some space.”

  “Oh.” Cyrus sounded disappointed. “What for?”

  “Seriously, Cyrus, you need to get out more. Did you not see they were having a moment, burying the hatchet, putting the past to rest—whatever you want to call it.”

  “You mean, getting back together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jeez, Steph, what do you take me for? Of course I saw it.” He tapped his optical visor. “You forget, I can see in infrared, and their temperature was definitely rising.”

  He stopped suddenly, bringing his hand to the side of his temple and gesturing to Steph to wait up. “Scott,” he said. “Yeah…what? You serious… For real? Okay, okay, will do.” He signed off and looked at Steph. “Luca has made contact with Miranda.”

  “Good. Is she coming to the festival?”

  “No. Apparently she jacked-in to the data-stream and…well, she thinks there might be a node-runner snooping around.”

  “What, here in Jezero?”

  “She’s not sure. Possibly. But Scott seems to be taking it seriously. He says we should head back to the villa complex.”

  “Screw that. I’m fed up running scared of those ghosts. I’m not spending my last few sols in Jezero hiding away. Let’s just keep going. We can go back later.”

  Cyrus thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s just Miranda being paranoid.”

  They continued walking until they came under a high portico that covered the entrance to the exhibition. The crowd had thinned out quite a bit and they found it much easier to move through this area. As they entered the exhibition, Cyrus spent a moment studying an information screen, figuring out exactly where the artifact was located. They then weaved their way through many decades of Martian history until they arrived at a section dedicated to the very earliest examples of humanity’s efforts to explore the planet.

  “Here it is,” Cyrus finally announced as he came to halt in front of an ancient-looking chunk of space technology around a meter and a half in diameter, with four open flaps like the petals of a flower.

  Steph glanced at this lump of prehistoric metal with mild interest. “So what is it?”

  “That, my dear Steph, is the very first human-made object to successfully land on Mars. In fact, on any planet—way back in the mid-twentieth century.”

  Steph leaned in a little to examine the artifact. “Humble beginnings. Well, we’ve certainly come a long way from that. Hard to believe it was capable of doing much of anything.” She shifted her gaze to the conveniently placed information screen. “Mars 3 Lander,” she read out loud. “I assume the previous two crashed and burned.”

  “Something like that. Although this one only survived for around a hundred seconds. It sent back one gray, fuzzy image, no details.”

  Steph finished reading the information panel on the Mars 3 Lander, then glanced around the rest of the exhibition space. “Anything else of interest?”

  “Sure, lots. Come, let me give you the guided tour.”

  For much of the next hour, the two wandered through the history of Mars colonization before Steph had finally had enough of space junk. They left the exhibition center and headed outside, where they managed to grab an autonomous transport pod—which, as luck would have it, arrived right in front of them just as they were leaving. They clambered in, set the destination for the villa complex, and sat back watching the city slide by.

  Ten minutes into the journey, the transport pod unexpectedly started to glitch, then it shut down completely. Cyrus was first to react, stabbing at the user screen. This seemed to work, as the pod booted up and started moving again.

  “What was that about?” Steph said, more as a question to herself.

  Cyrus was studying the transport pod’s interface screen, stabbing at it a few times with a finger.

  Steph finally sensed from his body language that something might be wrong. “What is it?”

  “I think this pod has been hacked. We’re taking a different route.” He glanced out the side window. Then tried the door. “Shit, we’re locked in.”

  Steph tried her side. No joy. She glanced back at Cyrus. “Can’t you do something?”

  “I’m trying.” He began to disassemble the door panel. “If I can get this off, maybe I can bypass the locking mechanism.”

  But Steph had her own plan. She reached into a pocket in her jacket and pulled out a souvenir she had purchased at the exhibition: a die-cast miniature replica of the Mars 3 Lander. She slammed the pointed end at the side window, and succeeded only in hurting her wrist. It barely made a scratch.

  “That window is quartz. You won’t break it with that,” Cyrus informed her.

  “How the hell are people supposed to get out of here if they’re in a crash?” Steph fished out her comms unit and tried to get a connection—but also no joy. “Damnit, no comms. Can you get anything?”

  “No, nothing. We’re being jammed.”

  The pod began to slow down, veer off the main transport route, and down a dim and deserted slipway. They exchanged a glance. Steph picked up the souvenir and gripped it tight. It might not break the window, but it could put a big dent in a human skull.

  “Where is it taking us?” Steph leaned over to examine the pod’s user interface.

  “Looks like we’re heading toward the western gate. That’s a terminus—it can’t go any farther than that.”

  Cyrus continued to disassemble the door panel while Steph watched anxiously as the transport pod treaded its way through the vast rover park for that sector of Jezero City.

  The pod finally came to a halt in a deserted sector of the park. They both exchanged glances. Steph held the makeshift weapon tight as the side doors of the pod hissed open to reveal several plasma pistols pointed in their direction.

  “Out,” a voice commended.

  “Who the hell are you?” Cyrus ventured as he stepped cautiously out of the transport pod.

  “Someone who’s going to do you damage if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

  “Go screw yourself.” Steph was not going to be as obliging as Cyrus. She sat in the pod and refused to budge.

  “Get her out of there,” the voice commanded again, and Steph found herself being grabbed by one of the gang. She swung the heavy metal souvenir she had concealed in her fist as hard as she could at the assailant’s temple. He let out a yelp, released his grip on her, and staggered back a step as Steph tried to grab his weapon. But she wasn’t fast enough and took a plasma blast to the chest for her efforts.

  “Steph,” Cyrus shouted, and tried to move back inside the pod to check on her. He was then hit by a plasma blast between the shoulder blades.

  20

  Ultimatum

  Miranda held a hand to her temple as she tried, yet again, to make contact with either Cyrus or Steph. She looked over at Scott and shook her head. “Still nothing.”

  “They could just be somewhere with a bad signal,” offered Scott.

  “This is Jezero City, not some outback asteroid—they don’t have bad signals. Something’s happened to them. I’m sure of it.”

  By now Scott was beginning to agree with Miranda’s assessment. He had learned the hard way never to underestimate the uncanny prescience of her paranoia. While Luca’s message had got him a little rattled, he hadn’t regarded it as a real threat. But now he was beginning to think that Luca may have stumbled onto something that had been in the works for a while. Yet, it had only been a few hours since they’d left the festival, so it wasn’t time to panic just yet.

  “Let’s give it another hour. If we still hear nothing, then that’s the time to think about calling it in.”

  Miranda glared at him, then reluctantly nodded. “Okay, one hour, no more.”

  Scott sighed. “Want a coffee? Looks like we’re not getting any sleep for a while.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  Scott moved back into the villa from the central co
urtyard where they had been sitting and waiting. He tapped the button on the coffee machine and placed a cup under the spout. As he waited, his slate pinged an alert.

  Finally, he thought. That will be Cyrus, I bet. I probably won’t need that coffee after all. He fished the slate out of his pocket and glanced at the screen—it wasn’t Cyrus, nor was it Steph. It was an old-school text dump from an anonymous source. He waved a hand over the slate to read it.

  If you wish to see Cyrus Sanato and Dr. Stephanie Rayman alive again, then have Luca VanHeilding be at these coordinates in two hours—alone (18.4738N, 71.2168W), and await further instructions.

  If we find anyone else with her or if the Martian authorities are alerted, then your friends die. Any deviation from the above instructions will result in the same outcome—your friends die. You have two hours.

  Scott tried to interrogate the message source, but there was none. It was as if it just materialized on his slate, out of nowhere. “Miranda!” he called out. “You’d better take a look at this.”

  She rushed in from the courtyard, sensing Scott’s urgency. He slid the slate to her across the counter. Miranda sat on a high stool and read it, not saying a word. “Goddamnit, I knew something had happened.” She looked over at Scott. “Does Luca know?”

  Scott returned her look for a beat as he thought about the message. “Good question. Why send it to me?” He snapped his fingers. “Unless they can’t reach her directly.” He grabbed the slate, placed it flat on the countertop, and gestured over the screen to initiate a comms link with Luca.

  A few seconds later, a 3D image of Luca’s head and shoulders blossomed out from the screen. She looked very agitated.

  “I’ve just received an old-school text message,” said Scott. “I’ve sent it on to you. You’d better read it.”

  They watched as Luca’s face became ever more distraught as she read the message. “I told you they were here,” she finally said. “Why didn’t you believe me? You should have warned Steph and Cyrus.”

  “We did warn them,” Scott shot back. “But they went wandering off. Steph wanted Cyrus to show her the colonization exhibition.”

  “I think it’s best that we don’t concede to their demands,” Miranda interjected. “We need to alert Aria and get some people on this. They will find them.”

  “No way. If you do that, all that will happen is Steph and Cyrus die.” Luca became more animated.

  “But what other choice do we have?” Miranda reasoned.

  “There may be another way. I could…” Luca’s sentence trailed off, leaving Scott and Miranda hanging.

  “Could what? Hand yourself over? Not a good plan, Luca.” Miranda shook her head.

  “No, I mean…I could try and find them first.”

  Scott and Miranda exchanged a glance. “How you going to do that, given the time available? They could be anywhere.”

  “By doing what I do—jacking-in to the grid. And they’ve already given me a starting point. It looks like those coordinates are for an old mining facility outside the city, not far from the western gate.”

  There was a momentary silence in the conversation. Scott shifted on his feet, then gestured at Luca’s projection. “Okay, let’s say you do manage to find them. Then what?”

  “Then we have options. Just give me a half-hour. If I don’t find them by then, well…” Again, she let her sentence hang, then abruptly closed the comms connection.

  Luca grabbed the neural lace off the desk and was just about to place it on her head when a thought struck her. Should I inform Xenon—now, before I waste time trawling through the data-stream? But that too would be time-wasting, having to explain the situation and persuading him not to do anything rash. It was bad enough arguing with her parents. No time, she decided. Best get going and hope I have what it takes. She jacked-in.

  If Steph and Cyrus were at the colonization exhibition, then that was the best place to start. She burst out from the institute’s narrow bandwidth confines and into the data chaos of Jezero City, making a beeline for the exhibition center’s data-stack. She dug down through layer upon layer of historical data-dumps, seeking out anything with a timestamp for an hour or so ago, then began scrubbing through the video feeds until eventually she found them. She scrubbed forward until she thought she had lost them leaving the center. But an exterior security camera caught them entering a transport pod.

  Okay, she thought, this is good, this is good.

  The pod was autonomous, so that meant she needed to access a higher-level AI protocol, and that meant she would only be one level away from Aria—she must to be careful here. The crudeness of the neural lace was also beginning to frustrate her as she tried to identify the transport systems in the cacophony of data. At this rate she would just have to take a guess, a risky move. Yet with time ticking by, she was quickly running out of options.

  She tried several data-routes in quick succession until she eventually stumbled upon the right stream and followed it all the way to its source. Here it spun out into a thousand different threads, each one controlling a different set of pods. This is going to take forever, she thought. But she gradually narrowed it down to only those around the exhibition center at the time Steph and Cyrus were last seen.

  When she finally found it, node-runner fingerprints were all over it. They had used a quick and dirty hack to reroute it to the western gate rover park. And, as far as she could tell, it hadn’t stopped at any time before that. But this was as far as she could go. She found nothing showing them getting out of the pod or where they might have gone.

  Damn, she thought. Lost them.

  Next, she tried starting from the coordinates in the message; maybe there was something she could follow there, some way to join the dots. But it turned out to be a completely derelict site, abandoned a very long time ago. Nothing there was even remotely habitable. It was a dead zone.

  Yet, maybe it’s not dead? she thought. Maybe there’s some structure out that they’ve got functioning again?

  Still, the message did say await further instructions. That would suggest that this might not be the ultimate destination, just a feint to confuse the trail.

  At this point Luca considered giving up. The neural lace was frustrating her, and she seemed to have come to a complete dead-end. Yet she still had some time, so she gave it one more go. She started back at the terminus of the transport pod at the western gate rover park.

  Did they transfer into a surface rover? she thought. Maybe to take them out to the mining facility—or somewhere else?

  She tried to find out what rovers, if any, had exited back out onto the surface after the pod arrived—there were several. But as she checked the ID of one particular rover, which was identified as belonging to the Yanai family, the data had a fuzzy quality to it. She suddenly realized it was under active node-runner manipulation.

  “Goddamnit.” She whipped the neural lace off her head and took a deep breath. That was close, she thought. By tracking a data point currently under node-runner control, she may have exposed herself. But she had found them. She now knew with reasonable certainty where Steph and Cyrus were. All she needed to do now was find out where that surface rover was going. But that was no simple task. If she tried to track it directly, then she would almost certainly be discovered. She had to find another way.

  She slid the neural lace back on, wishing she had her old one, notwithstanding its deadly payload. But she had to make do with the tools on hand—and time was running out.

  A Yanai-family rover under node-runner control, Luca mused. That doesn’t make any sense. Only the VanHeilding Corporation has access to node-runners.

  Rather than try and track it directly, she cross-referenced its ID and discovered that it was part of a ship’s inventory—a luxury, state-of-the-art interplanetary transport. Yet when she went looking for the ship, there was no record of it landing on the planet. Even more curious, this ship was very similar to the one that had attacked them while en route to Mars. />
  That’s when it struck her: Could it be that they were actively concealing a ship somewhere on the surface of Mars? Even masquerading as a different family in case anyone got too close? Was it even possible to accomplish such a feat right under Aria’s nose? Yet the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. It would require a team of highly skilled node-runners, but it was theoretically possible.

  The revelation shocked her. The sheer audacity of it was hard to comprehend. What hope did she have in the face of such skill? With the dull instrument she was using, she would be no match for them.

  Yet the lives of her friends were at stake; she had to try. So with a deep sense of trepidation, Luca tried to figure out where this rover was going without blowing her cover.

  Since it was moving along the main Jezero-to-Syrtis highway, she decided her best bet was to track it by hacking into the terrestrial navigation beacon network. By doing this she would be keeping her distance; she would be several nodes removed from the runners controlling the rover.

  She eventually picked it up a few kilometers outside the city and followed it heading west for a time. But at some point near Nili Fossae, she lost it—it just veered off-road and disappeared, vanishing without a trace.

  “That entire area west of Jezero is full of old mining facilities, decommissioned a long time ago. Could they be using one of them? Maybe underground?” Miranda gestured at a 3D rendering of the Nili Fossae trench that blossomed out of a holo-slate in the villa complex.

  It had taken Luca around twenty minutes to track down the possible whereabouts of Steph and Cyrus. But when the rover vanished, there was no point in wasting more time on the search, so she contacted Scott and Miranda and gave them an update.

  “It’s possible,” said Luca over a comms link. “But my feeling is they’re actually hiding a ship out there.”