by M. D. Cooper
Fazir handed Erin an EV suit, and she checked it over before putting it on. Fazir seemed to have done a good job in adapting the suit.
Erin wondered what was eating him.
The seals on Erin’s suit closed. The others were ready too, so Fazir led the group to his specially constructed launch site. The portal slid open. Outside, a simple platform with railings was fixed to the PETER.
They were looking directly out at inky black speckled with hard points of light. Their side of Athens was facing Canaan Prime, which hung heavy and solid in space. Athens’ surface was bright in daylight six hundred kilometers below.
It was a long, long way down.
Lark and Reiko’s skiff had shrunk to a mere dot, barely distinguishable against the planet below. The drones were slower and therefore larger, their forms bulky and irregular compared to the probe equipment slung beneath them.
Erin felt rare fingers of nervousness reaching inside her. Not usually fazed by daring feats, this one was giving her the willies.
With those words, Fazir leapt. He hung in the near-weightlessness for several heartbeats before beginning to float gently toward the brown, green, and brilliant blue ball below.
He opened his suit’s wings—probably for effect, seeing as there was no atmosphere to glide on. His silvery, spread-eagled shape grew smaller.
Now that it came to actually taking the plunge, Hal, Leif, and Jere’s behavior was not matching their earlier eagerness. All three men were hanging back, holding onto the railings of the launch platform.
Jere seemed to take this as a challenge.
This appeared to spur Hal into action. He pushed himself away from the hull and launched into space, issuing a
Erin smiled at the man’s antics.
said Jere.
He stepped to the platform’s edge and jumped off, executing some forward rolls before spreading out his limbs. He fell away backward, waving.
Erin waited a moment before following him. She took two long steps forward and then, with the third, hit nothingness. She was floating and slowly dropping.
By this time, Fazir was a winged, silver doll against the round jewel of Athens. The other engineers increased in size according to their proximity to Erin. They looked like they were having a good time, swooping like birds of prey and performing aerial acrobatics.
Lark said.
There was a pause before her teammate answered.
Erin continued to fall, building speed, wondering what Reiko had been doing. The woman’s explanation rang hollow, but Erin couldn’t figure out what other motivation she might have had for wandering off. There wasn’t anything where Lark was setting up a probe except, as Fazir had said, hot mud. Maybe Reiko had only been trying to find out what would happen if she disappeared for a while.
The tug of Athens’ gravity was growing stronger. Erin checked her speed. She didn’t want to activate her a-grav pack too soon, or it would take forever for her to reach the surface. One of the Transcend’s engineers had gone AWOL already; she didn’t want to give anyone else a chance to do so.
Erin twisted sideways, spinning parallel to the planet’s surface. Athens rotated into view, and along with it, the other divers, though the one farthest beneath her wasn’t much more than a speck. She had lost sight of Fazir entirely, until she used her augmented vision to seek him out.
Time to catch up to everyone.
Erin fired her a-grav emitters to slow her orbital velocity and push her closer to the planet below. Her speed increased, and she caught up to and passed a Transcend engineer. From his size, she guessed it was Leif. When she passed the next one, she caught a glimpse of him waving. Then she passed the third. Only Fazir was now below her.
She reached the upper edge of the planet’s troposphere and increased the a-grav field, shielding herself from the buffeting winds, and slowing her descent to a more manageable speed.
She’d settled down to a sedate two hundred kilometres per hour when something slammed into her, and her world spun out of control as she was sent twirling end over end. Space and Athens swapped places at dizzying speed.
She fought to regain control, firing the EV suit’s propellent devices in the opposite direction of her spin, which decreased her spin.
When Erin finally stopped spinning, she was surprised at how close she was to the planet’s surface. Comms were arriving from all her companions, asking after her status. The one Erin heard over all the others was Leif’s.
Leif had managed to hit one of only two objects in all the airspace nearby.
Erin didn’t know what stunt Leif had been
trying to pull, but it was obvious he was lying.
The exercise of fixing the PETER had suddenly become a lot more serious. More than ever, Erin had to work to maintain a diplomatic friendliness.
She said to Leif,
CHAPTER SEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 04.18.8942 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Planet’s surface
REGION: Athens, New Canaan System
Lark and Reiko’s work on installing the probe progressed in near silence. The mid-air collision, or as Erin mentally referred to it, Leif’s barely disguised and poorly executed attempt on her life, had thrown a pall on the general mood.
After he and Erin had arrived at the site, the visiting engineer apologized so repeatedly and profusely that it became irritating and embarrassing to Erin. She had to snap at him to make him stop. Reiko frowned in disapproval. Lark pretended not to notice, focusing on the drilling.
By the time Jere, Hal, and Fazir had also arrived, the awkwardness had turned infectious, and the newcomers quickly succumbed to the disease. Leif’s ‘accident’ had redrawn the line between the two teams of engineers.
Drones from the PETER were already depositing more probes and drilling equipment at pre-designated sites across the landscape. Erin doled out the work, taking care to pair New Canaanite and TSF engineers, and skiffs settled down nearby to transport the engineers to the other sites.
Erin took a short walk away from the group while they waited a few minutes for the additional skiffs. The more she thought about Leif’s behavior, the more she got the sense that she was being played; no one as dumb and thoughtless as Leif was acting could have achieved the position of a highly ranked engineer.
Lark and Fazir could be wild and reckless, but when it came down their job, they knew when to be serious. They wouldn’t have accidentally crashed into someone when planet diving—on the remote chance that they had, they would have made a sincere apology and left it at that. They certainly wouldn’t have come out with idiotic and disrespectful remarks to their boss.
What Leif had done could have killed her. Was his intent really murder? What would that achieve?
Erin wondered if Leif had been trying to trigger a diplomatic crisis that might lead to active hostilities. Perhaps the Transcend was trying to find an excuse to attack New Canaan.
She could only guess that Leif was playing an elaborate game, the intent of which wasn’t clear. She decided to ask the opinion of someone much smarter than her.
Putting aside concern over Leif, Erin took a look around at where her short walk had taken her. She wished Isa was around to see this part of the Badlands; the region was more settled than the site of their hiking trip. Trees had colonized the rich, volcanic soil decades previously, and between rocky slopes and lakes, thick forests flourished. From where she stood, Erin could see a clear lake, the steaming, transparent water stained cerulean by minerals. Around the lake’s edge ran a wide strip of brilliant orange.
Hearing the skiffs land, Erin turned and walked back to the other engineers.
Their work that day comprised setting up the equipment and supervising the drilling into the crust before inserting the probes. After the initial setup, there was actually little to do until it came time to insert the probes. Occasionally, a drill might hit something unexpected, like an upswelling of magma or a pocket of pressurized gas, and in such an instance, the rig would communicate with Walter, and he and Erin would select an alternative site. But these occasions were rare. The work mostly involved a lot of waiting around, sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a skiff.
By the time evening approached, the tension between the two teams had eased somewhat. The tedium of the work made it hard for them to avoid speaking.
Hal and Jere told some funny stories over the Link about Admiral Iysra, and Fazir related some of his and Lark’s exploits on Athens. Erin was alarmed to hear they had been wearing their heat-resistant suits and sitting on geysers, waiting to be thrust tens of meters into the air. She rolled her eyes as she listened, while hearing the laughter of the Transcend’s engineers.
Monotony sure drives smart people to do dumb things.
Darkness was falling, and all the probes had been inserted. The engineers returned to their original landing site.
As everyone was packing up, Fazir said to Erin,
said Erin.
“Hey, what do you say to grabbing some beers?” Fazir asked the group.
“You want to go to Delphi?” asked Lark before any of them could answer. “I guess that could be fun. It’s an interesting place, at least the first few times.”
“I should warn you,” said Fazir to the Transcend’s engineers, “Delphi’s rough and ready. On the edge, if you know what I mean.”
“I like the sound of that,” Hal said. “Let’s do it.”
“On the edge sounds good to me too,” said Jere. “I’m in.”
“Erin?” asked Fazir. “You’re coming as well, right?”
Wherever the Transcend engineers went, Erin had to follow.
“Sure, I’ll come along. But let’s not stay out too late, okay? We’ll need to be sharp in the morning to interpret the data the probes pick up overnight.
”
“Yes, Mom,” said Leif.
Erin gave him a look that froze his juvenile grin.
CHAPTER EIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 04.18.8942 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: En route to Delphi
REGION: Athens, New Canaan System
Erin accompanied Hal in a skiff to Delphi while Lark went with Reiko and Leif, and Fazir gave Jere a ride.
“I guess that must be it,” said Hal.
They had been cruising alongside a low mountain range for several minutes, heading for the coordinates Fazir had given Erin, before Hal spotted the anomaly in the regular slopes. An opening like a gigantic mouth yawned in the mountainside.
Now that Hal had drawn her attention to the spot, Erin noticed a two-story structure sitting on one side of the rocky aperture. Smaller buildings dotted the lower half of the mountain.
“Yeah, looks like it,” she replied.
“You haven’t been here before?”
“No. I live on Carthage. Until I came here to work on the PETER, I’d only ever been to Athens on family vacations. We usually go to Attica. I’d never heard of Delphi until Fazir mentioned it. It’s still pretty volatile out here, as you’ve seen.”
She spied a lot in front of the hamlet’s main building and flew the skiff down to it, wondering what sort of place Fazir had brought them to. Despite the short space of time she’d known the man, she had a handle on his style and knew to expect something out of the ordinary.
When she took a closer look at the drinking establishment, she was not disappointed. ‘On the edge’? Delphi looked like it was barely clinging to existence.
On her first visit to Athens, Erin had stayed in a fully traditional hotel suite in the style of ancient Earth. That had meant no environment control of the rooms via the Link, as well as gorgeous natural materials like wood and silk, and old-fashioned, perfumed, luxurious toiletries.
What confronted her now was also the old tech, or perhaps no tech, of bygone times, but in a different way entirely. The walls of the building were roughly plastered, as if the constructors that created them had been badly wired, and the roof looked like the next storm would take it off. Shutters hung askew from the windows. Even still, Erin could see a surprising number of people inside.
