The abbess is clear on this, Captain: You are to follow orders. If you saw the prophecy then you know the constraints of the Proelian faith, the narrow corridor within which free will is a reality. One of our new candidates had a vision: If you set foot on that planet, you die, and if you die, the future fills with even more death and chaos. It is still written. But your way would result in the death of an additional millions of humans—on Earth and throughout the solar system.
War, said San. You mean she saw the war start prematurely.
He. He saw that you engage in battle, during which your presence is detected by the Sommen. The treaty is breached, and the war begins.
San broke the connection and whispered for the tomb to open. Once it released her, she pulled her undersuit back on and then the environment suit, but paused, staring at the helmet. The thought of yanking it onto her head, of being trapped inside with the smell of sweat and fear made her nauseous. She was about to throw it against the wall when the lieutenant entered, closing the hatch behind him with a thud.
“I get that way too,” he said, pointing at her helmet. “Sometimes I can barely put it on. Especially after we run out of standard meals and have to start eating that nasty recycled porridge. Synthesized amino acids do something to my stomach. Not to mention that more frequent showers would do wonders for morale.”
“Water is everything out here, Eugene. But we sweat the stuff, we sweat gold. Of all the material on this ship, we could lose half of everything else and we’d probably survive, but lose half our water in the wrong part of space? The game is over.”
“I’m not seeing your point.”
San shook her head and glanced at the open tomb. “The Higgins may be alive. Along with my brother. In a few hours we enter orbit around Carpenter with the Jerusalem and I will send Wilson and a large team to the surface. At some point, the Higgins will find us. They will attack because even though we are on the same side, there is a group within Fleet who sees power as the end goal—not as it should be seen. Here we are, in the most dangerous place you could imagine, Sommen space, and a bunch of morons want to make it more dangerous. Just for the sake of power. Power is like water in space: It must be used sparingly.”
“Lots of people see power as the goal, Captain. If it’s not a viable goal, what is it?”
“It’s not just like water, it’s the water source—a moon like the one that killed our Marines. If you see it as the destination, something to be held onto forever, eventually the octopus under the ice will rip you to pieces; you use power, fuel up with it and leverage its influence as the means to a better end before it sours and poisons you.” She sighed, pulling her helmet on and hating the way the speakers changed her voice. “I’m heading to the bridge. The captain wants me there in case the Higgins arrives.”
“What if they never show? That ship took a lot of damage.”
“They will show. But I have a plan that will end them and my brother. I’m tired of playing this game. Let’s get some Marines from the Jerusalem and my team onto Carpenter, and wait.”
“Wait for what, Captain?”
“To spring the trap. We will turn the Bangkok into our version of a stalker bot.”
San sat on the bridge, cocooned within her compartment so that an ocean of mechanical switches and dials surrounded her, inches from her body. She had no idea what many of them did but it didn’t matter; San was there to monitor the team that had deployed, and she watched the images play across her helmet’s heads-up. Wilson and his group had arrived on Carpenter. His camera feed provided the scene she now watched, an occasional burst of static from atmospheric interference making it hard to see.
With the exception of a few oceans filled with ammonia, the entire planet was desert, dead for centuries. The Jerusalem had spent days surveying the surface for any indications of life—Sommen or otherwise—and had found nothing except sand and rock, a sterilized mass of silicon that Sommen texts had indicated was a garden spot for their civilization. Only one spot showed signs of potential habitation. On closer inspection, however, it too looked dead, an area under mountains of sand, where ships’ cameras had mapped structures consistent with an ancient settlement, and Wilson and the others had trekked all day to the spot they now occupied, just at its edge. San had ordered them not to land too close, in case the area was occupied by something their sensors failed to detect. Now her group stood atop a tall dune, where Wilson panted so hard that San knew he was exhausted from the climb, his camera shaking and pointing downward when he leaned over to cough. When he stood up, San gasped at the images.
Below the team, a flat plain extended to the horizon, its surface forming the foundation for a crumbling city. So much sand had blown through that dunes gathered in wide avenues and streets, drifts forming slopes against the walls of oddly shaped buildings. San had never seen such architecture. Twice as wide and tall as similar structures on Earth, the Sommen city rose from its desert in a twisting, spiraled array of monuments to the planet’s death, skyscrapers’ edges worn from what she guessed had been centuries of wind scouring. Even from that distance, San saw the windows were empty, the buildings dark and just as abandoned as the rest of the planet. Wilson’s camera shuddered. When he turned to look behind the group, in the direction from which they’d just come, a strong wind roared across the helmet mic and low ammonia clouds assembled in the distance to form a rolling wall of brilliant white fog.
We’re exposed here, Wilson sent. A storm is coming in from behind us; as hot as it was when we landed, the team at the landing craft are already reporting zero visibility and snow. Temperature dropped fast when Carpenter’s sun started going down.
“Use your radio,” said San.
“Tell me again why you’re not worried about detection?”
“It doesn’t matter right now; our scientists need your data too. Move into the city and wait out the storm there. Do your best to keep your cam on the structures.”
Wilson started down the dune face, the camera shaking so much that San had to pause the feed in order to see anything meaningful. A chill went up her spine. Each empty window could have held a hidden menace behind its shadows and she wished she was on the surface instead of Wilson.
By the time the group reached street level, the wind had died. When it picked up again, strong air currents raised an unnerving moan as the atmosphere coursed through twisting buildings, hitting openings at just the right angle; she heard the mutterings of Wilson’s companions and even this far away sensed terror in their thoughts. Feelings of accomplishment had never had time to materialize, San realized. This event should have been covered by news stations throughout the Earth system, piped into everyone’s home and then her crew welcomed in Washington, D.C. with street-choking crowds and parades: the first time man had set foot on a Sommen world—the first time man had set foot on any world inhabited by an alien sentient race. Instead, Wilson and his companions videoed everything themselves, their only companions a profound sensation of terror and an approaching storm. They trudged their way between tall dunes, heading toward the closest building which rose from the desert in a slanted, leaning obelisk, its face pockmarked from the passage of time.
“Gravity is getting to me,” Wilson radioed.
San laughed. “We’re engineered for high gees. It’s only a little more than Earth’s.”
“You try dragging your ass through sand in an environment suit, full combat kit, and a pack full of oxygen generators.”
“No water?”
“We left most of it on the landing craft. Only brought enough to keep us going for twenty-four hours. Forty-eight if we stretch it.” Wilson paused, panting, and then caught his breath. “How are things up there?”
“Ship-to-ship transfers are almost complete.”
“Promise me something: You guys will stay safe; that weapon the Higgins is carrying could do the Bangkok easily.”
A Sommen-sized doorway appeared on San’s display; although gnarled by the constant freeze-tha
w cycles that had cracked it, Sommen writing stood out around its frame, carved into the stone.
“What does it say?” Wilson asked.
“Ignore it and get inside; that storm is almost on you. It’s recorded, we’ll check it later.”
This wasn’t the usual Sommen green material, she thought. So they built their homes out of something else.
The building’s inside was dark enough that the team’s helmet lamps snapped on, making the interior visible, but in a grainy sort of way so San had to squint. Wilson and the others stood in a wide hallway, the high ceiling just visible overhead. A thick layer of sand filled the hall. They moved forward until Wilson stumbled, jolting the feed, which restabilized to show a view of the floor covered with an expanse of miniature dunes, beneath which something was hidden. One of the team leaned over to brush sand off whatever had tripped Wilson, exposing an almost full Sommen corpse, mummified and complete except for the lower portions of its legs. Wilson zoomed in. Whatever had taken the thing’s lower extremities had done so in a violent way since the creature had frozen in time, doubled over and its face contorted in what San guessed was either an expression of rage or agony. Maybe both.
“Wait,” Wilson said. He scooped up a bit of sand and dropped it into an oblong device someone else held out for him. A moment later he whistled. “This is odd.”
“What about it?”
“The material covering the floor is only about forty percent silica. The rest is carbon, phosphorus minerals . . . it’s all wrong, San. And there’s something else.”
“I need to know what you’ve got.”
Wilson dropped the box and began backing away, the image panning back and forth at the floor. “Microbots. This whole place is covered with microbots.”
“Sommen?”
“Definitely not. I’ve never seen this design.”
Machinist. San’s fingers flew over the control panel, but she stopped after a sense of frustration took over; she called out for one of the ship’s scientists, who disentangled himself from his cocoon and crawled over.
The captain clicked into San’s headset. “What’s wrong, Miss Kyarr?”
“I need to see what they analyzed, sir.”
“Get Captain Kyarr patched into the data stream from their hand analyzer. Upload it to all our stations.”
San then spoke into Wilson’s channel again. “Don’t move. Whatever they are they’re long dead, probably drained of power and can’t hurt you.”
“Or they’re dormant. Mines waiting for the right signal to wake them up and get them back to work.”
“Wilson, listen to me.” She felt the panic in his chest, and did her best to shunt it aside, not wanting the sensation to infect her too. “They’re dead. If they were still capable of acting, you wouldn’t have a Sommen corpse. It would all be just sand. I’m pulling in your data feed now, and we’re almost finished.” She waved at the ship’s scientist, who gave the thumbs-up and moved back to his station. “Okay, we got it and scientific teams are starting their analysis; keep going.”
“You’re crazy, San. You’re not here with us. This place is creepy as hell even without machinist microbots, and you want us to keep going?”
“You can’t return through the storm; I’m already getting interference from it and you’d risk getting lost or injured in low visibility. The team back at the transports buttoned up to wait it out.”
Wilson’s response came back garbled, lost in static. She was about to say something again when the grainy feed cleared and the team moved forward, continuing deeper into the Sommen antechamber. San silently thanked them. Now, in addition to the video feed a second screen had popped up to show a map, growing in green lines as others in Wilson’s team used laser scans to document the structure’s internal form. The video feed alternated now; it danced between black and white static and barely discernible color images that made her head spin with the strangeness of it all. Wilson had reached the end of the passage, where a gargantuan spiral staircase wound upward, its steps spaced for the large Sommen stride and gouged with their claw marks. She watched the team climb for minutes. They reached a landing where Wilson’s camera showed that the stairs continued upward but to one side a wide corridor opened. It looked shiny in her feed, with different types of stone materials inlaid to form an intricate geometric pattern of circles in shades of green. The team moved into the passage. Their boots clomped as they walked, echoing down the passage, and one by one Wilson’s camera scanned to send images of doorways on either side, their openings blocked by slabs of rock.
“These doors are covered with writing too. Should I translate them?” Wilson asked.
“No. For now I want you to cover as much ground as possible; move to the end of the passage, then see if you can open one of the doors.”
The team crept forward. San noticed the coil guns now, their long barrels visible in the periphery as Wilson moved forward, the map showing that by the time they reached the corridor’s far end and another staircase, the team had travelled over a hundred meters. Wilson turned, pointing his helmet cam at a doorway.
“How about this one?” he asked.
San nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see her. “Do it.”
Wilson moved forward; when he touched the slab, it opened without warning, crawling sideways on some hidden mechanism to vanish within walls. A cloud of dust billowed into the hallway, blinding the cameras for a second and making San’s screen flash bright yellow with its reflection off the helmet lamp.
The room was smaller than San had expected for creatures as large as the Sommen, and as Wilson panned she got a sense that it consisted of a series of round and square spaces, interconnected with stone couches and wall notches that reminded her of the Roman catacombs in her memories—the places where Proelian ancestors buried their dead. White flakes of ammonia ice billowed in from a single open window. Wilson was about to turn and leave when his camera stopped on something. In a dark corner of the room sat two Sommen. At first San thought they might be statues; the pair were much smaller than any Sommen she’d encountered, far too short to be warriors and not the withered frames of priests. Both were dead, mummified and accumulating ammonia snow on their shoulders.
“Those are children,” San said.
“My god. This place was some kind of nursery.”
Wilson moved closer; he reached out with a gloved hand and when he touched one’s shoulder the thing collapsed into a pile of dust, its bones protruding at odd angles.
“I’ll take some samples,” said Wilson. “Then we can . . .”
San’s control panel lit up with warning lights and her weapons engineer clicked in. “Captain, a plasma weapon just fired on the landing craft, planet-side. All vehicles on Carpenter have been destroyed.”
“That’s the Higgins,” San said. “How the hell did it enter this system undetected? I thought we had drones spaced everywhere; you told me there was no chance it could get through without us knowing!”
“Confirmed, the Higgins. The Jerusalem has no solution on it but she’s firing missiles anyway; her captain hopes the targeting drones can guide them in. It’s firing again, Captain.”
San switched onto Wilson’s channel. “Wilson, get out of there. Take your team outside and disperse.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Now!”
“San, the storm has gotten worse; if we go out there now . . .”
Wilson’s voice snapped off with a radio shriek, replaced by the empty hiss of static. She tried reaching him again. After a few attempts the weapons engineer clicked in again, his voice cracking with the agony of knowing.
“Captain, they fired on the team at the Sommen city, Miss Kyarr’s team, the structure they were in; it’s all gone; no survivors. The whole group has been vaporized.”
San felt nauseous. She concentrated on the screen, which now filled with static, hoping that Wilson would come back.
“What are you orders, Captain?” someone asked.
/> San’s grief welled up from a deep place, one so dark that she’d had never dreamed of its existence, so heavy that it threatened to collapse her into a single point of matter.
“Execute,” the captain said. “Execute the plan. The mission is over and our priority is to now take out the Higgins. I’m so sorry, Captain Kyarr.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Did we get her?” Zhelnikov asked.
Win felt the man’s joy. It merged with his own sense of accomplishment, his Sommen-like mind urging him forward into conflict. He had to calm himself, focusing on breathing and whispering a mantra.
“Well? Did we?”
Win shook his head. “No. I can still sense her. She is enraged and in mourning, both, because we vaporized her excursion and one of the Proelian theurgists. Her friend.”
“One down, one to go.”
The Higgins’s captain interrupted. “Incoming missiles. Judging from their trajectory, they’re from the Jerusalem—other side of the planet, but within range in thirty minutes.”
“Will they hit us, Captain Markus?” Zhelnikov asked.
“Negative. We’ve done a quick burn from our firing location and are now running silent. Their targeting drones have gone active but so far we’re out of their sensor range. Our sensors are shot, though, so the tactical picture isn’t as good as we’d hoped. Data from the few sensors that work suggests their missiles won’t get close enough to fix or track.”
Win couldn’t shake the feeling: something was off. He scanned the tactical display, looking for her at the same time he subconsciously reached out into space, grinning and feeling his way along the waves of emotion she jettisoned like refuse; grief and anger had forced his sister to drop her guard. She was no warrior. This was a mistake he’d capitalize on, one which he wished he could have rubbed into her face, smearing her with the humiliation of defeat and then sending the Proelian to meet their father. The waves snapped off. San realized her error, he thought, and Win pounded his acceleration couch with a weak hand.
Tyger Bright Page 27
