But Rita’s hope was that the Stree observers were focused on bigger things. If they were anything like Humans, they’d be looking for a Goblin fleet…not a few space rocks.
Soon enough, the ground was coming up fast. Rita watched the distant Stree outpost carefully. The second it went below the horizon - and thus no longer able to see her on radar - she decelerated madly, trying to break her velocity before she smashed to bits on the hard rocks below. She had only a few seconds to save herself; if her rocket sputtered at all, she was done.
But it didn’t glitch. It fired exactly as planned until she came to a gentle hover ten yards off the surface of a huge boulder. Sliding sideways to a flat spot, she put down on the surface of the moon.
Automatically, the carrier rocket split in two, leaving her free to crawl out. In her tiny caterpillar aspect, she quickly moved a dozen yards away from the rocket and stopped to take stock.
Twenty yards away she could see Tika’s carrier, lying on the surface in one piece. Even as she watched, it also split, and Tika crawled out.
But there was no sign of Rachel. Using a low power radio pulse, one that couldn’t be heard for more than a few hundred yards, she called for her.
There was a short silence. Then:
Rita looked around and saw a small methane pool nearby. Even as she watched, the tiny caterpillar that was Rachel broke the surface and crawled out of the pool. It made its way toward Rita as they regrouped.
said Rachel, as the methane dripped off her.
Rita chuckled. She knew exactly what Rita meant. Something that only a Human who had lived around dogs could understand.
And with that, she set out for the distant Stree station, now just over the horizon from them. In their three-inch caterpillar aspects, it would be a long walk.
Hours later, the trio reached the perimeter of the Stree station. There was a large central building, with a tall tower going straight up for 500 feet. Rita knew that was the primary sensing station, containing radar, lidar and laser detection equipment, as well as any number of passive sensors and comm arrays. There was another, identical tower on the far side of the moon, operated remotely, to give the Stree 24x7 sensing capability.
From the main building, three covered tunnels splayed out in three separate directions. Each ran a short distance and terminated in a round, bubble shaped dome.
Hajo’s Goblin intelligence team had stated one of these outlying domes contained living quarters for the crew. Another one contained storage space. And the last one contained the life support systems.
Per plan, they were now directly opposite the life support dome.
When Rita surfaced, she found herself just outside the life support dome, right at the point where the dome intersected with the tunnel leading back to the control room. Tika was already there, waiting for her. A few minutes later, Rachel surfaced from the regolith.
Now they separated. While Rita and Rachel moved to the life support dome, Tika headed for the main building.
Slowly and carefully, Rita and Rachel moved up to the dome wall. There, they once again dug down into the regolith. Reaching a point one foot under the floor of the dome, they dug forward three feet and then angled upward until they reached the sealed floor of the dome.
They knew that if these structures were anything like most Human or Goblin space structures, the weakest point would be underneath. Since the regolith supported the building, only a thin, airtight shield of composite sandwich was necessary to form the floor of the structure.
Here’s hoping we’re right, thought Rita.
Boring into the bottom of the structure from underneath, Rita worked for a half-hour trying to make a small hole in the floor of the dome. At one point, she decided it wasn’t going to work. She was just about to call to the others to abandon the attempt when suddenly, there was a slight, high-pitched hissing sound as pressure escaped through the hole, and she knew she had made it.
Rita continued to work, enlarging the hole until it was big enough for her to pass through. When it was, she wiggled her way up through it and was in the life support dome.
Quickly she looked around, assessing. They had chosen their timing to arrive in the middle of the night - midnight, Stree time - and it seemed to have panned out. The room was pitch-black. No one was about.
Rita heard a slight crunch and Rachel’s caterpillar head poked up out of the floor nearby. Crumbs of composite fell off her as she wiggled her way out of the hole she had made.
The two of them scanned the room in infrared and radar. It was clearly life support. Machinery stood everywhere. Most things Rita could identify - a small nuclear reactor, oxygen generators, carbon dioxide scrubbers, rack after rack of emergency oxygen tanks.
Now the next phase of the plan began.
Having issued her reminder commands, Rita moved to the oxygen system. Her job was to disable the oxygen supply to the other buildings. If Rachel did her job correctly, no alarms would sound. By removing the oxygen from the station, the entire crew of the station would fall unconscious. Tika would disable the comm systems beforehand, ensuring that no warning could go out, even if one of the Stree realized what was happening at the last minute and tried to call home.
Rita turned her focus to Rachel.
Rachel checked her alarm systems one last time, then called to Rita.
Rita turned off the oxygen system. She opened the emergency vent system in each building to space.
The Stree in the station had three minutes to live.
Chapter Seventeen
Stree System
Moon Tosong - Listening Station #14
Someone was pounding on the door of the life support module. The sound was diminishing, though. It got weaker and weaker, changing from a pounding to a scrabbling sound.
Finally it went away.
Rita looked over at Rachel.
With a clunk, the hatch of the life support dome clicked open.
Rita and Rachel scurri
ed to the hatch, slipped through the crack, and exited out to the tunnel leading to the main structure.
The body of a dead Stree was lying on the floor. His hands were bloody where he had scraped at the door in one last-ditch attempt to survive. To Rita and Rachel in their tiny caterpillar bodies, he looked twenty feet long. Rita couldn’t help but think of the old fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk.
Ignoring him, they ran at maximum speed toward the main control room. Arriving there, they found a room that seemed as big as a football pitch to them in their tiny aspects. Huge chairs and consoles seemed to reach to the sky. Stree bodies lay everywhere. Tika was nowhere to be seen.
They looked up. Peeking over the top of a counter top was Tika’s head, looking tiny compared to the size of the console.
Rita and Rachel made their way to a nearby chair, climbed up the legs, up the armrests, and jumped to the console where Tika waited.
Tika turned to the console and leaned on a button. With a click, it depressed. Twenty thousand klicks away, their support package received the signal. It turned, oriented itself toward the distant moon, and fired its thrusters.
A short while later, the support package had chased down the moon in its orbit and made a soft landing just beside the Stree station. Rita, Tika and Rachel were waiting for it. They moved quickly to the lander and with a sigh of relief, switched back into full-size caterpillar aspects stored inside the lander.
Phoenix System
800 Lights from Stalingrad
Luke was exhausted. It had been a long day. He had spent most of it settling minor disputes between people.
It seemed that in spite of all their planning and organization, they had overlooked one important aspect of government - a judiciary.
The Council members - and Mark as Governor - were strong on executive action. They could plan, organize, and issue orders with no problem. But they had not foreseen the number of disputes that would arise between people and groups.
Carving out a new colony on a raw planet was causing extreme stress among the settlers. Fights were becoming a daily occurrence. People were organizing into cliques, bands, even gangs. Luke’s security team had their hands full. Just to maintain the peace, he was recruiting new members every day to add to his police force.
And Luke had somehow become a de facto judge. Dispute after dispute was brought to his desk to be settled. He’d been forced to set up his courtroom in another tent, to prevent disruption to Mark and the other Council members as shouting groups of settlers were brought in front of him, each group proclaiming the rightness of their side of things at the top of their lungs.
Today he had spent his entire day settling such disputes. People fighting over everything imaginable. Couples fighting over the things couples have fought over for ten thousand years. Disagreements over where people should live. People who refused to work. People attacking those who refused to work, instead of referring them to Security. Fistfights over women. Two knife attacks, as settlers found ways to turn necessary tools into weapons.
And of course, the age-old crimes that hung like millstones around the necks of humanity. Today Luke had also conducted criminal trials for two robberies and a rape. He did it because there was no one else to do it. Everyone else on the Council was busy trying to keep the colony alive, handling food, water, and shelter. Luke had somehow, and against his will, become the Supreme Court of the colony.
As he wrapped up the last case of the day, he felt the burden of his role weighing heavy on his shoulders. This last case had been the rape of a young girl. The perpetrator had been caught red-handed. The evidence was overwhelming. Luke had quickly declared the man guilty.
But then it came time for sentencing. The girl’s family howled for the man to be put to death - to be hung from one of the tall blue trees down by the river as an example to all. It took every one of Luke’s newly appointed court bailiffs to hold back the crowd while the prisoner was hustled out of the court and into the jail - a jail they had not expected to need so soon, one hastily constructed just within the last week.
Now Luke was faced with a dilemma. He had always opposed the death penalty. Throughout his life, he had never understood how two wrongs were somehow supposed to add up to justice.
Yet the small colony had no prison. There were no resources to house and feed prisoners for any length of time. It was something they had simply not thought of in their planning process. Keeping prisoners would tie up valuable resources needed for their survival.
Wrestling with the problem, Luke stepped out of the tent to see his daughter Tatiana coming toward him. He waved at her, and she turned and came over to him.
“Hi, Pop,” she called. “How goes the new job?”
Luke gave her a face. “It sucks. Actually, I’d like to talk to you about it if you have time.”
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s grab dinner at the commissary and you can tell me all about it.”
They made their way to the cafeteria, grabbing pseudo-plastic trays and wending their way through a long line to get their food. The food trays, like everything else made locally in the colony so far, was some kind of carbon compound - it was the easiest thing for the microbots to generate directly from the soil and the atmosphere.
Sitting down at a table, Luke looked at his daughter as they began eating.
“How’s my granddaughter?” he asked.
“She’s fine, happy as a clam,” said Tatiana. “She doesn’t know we’re in a dire situation - every day is an adventure for her.”
“Yeah. Nice to be a child if you have to go through this. I hear Misha and some of the other dads have got a day-care thing going.”
“Yeah. There’s quite a few single parents with small children who have to work away from home. Doc Winston, for example. She’s our most experienced doctor. She set up the hospital in Block Five, and she’s supervising the setup of small clinics in some of the other apartment blocks. But she also has two small children. There’s dozens of other people in similar situations. So Misha and some of the other people got together and organized a day-care system. Now every apartment block has a day-care. Misha goes around from one to another all day long, checking on things, working out bugs, ensuring that the workers are doing a good job. Marta tags along with him and she just loves it. She thinks she’s the one in charge. She goes running into every day-care ahead of Misha and starts giving the staff the third degree.”
Luke grinned. “That’s my granddaughter, alright.”
Tatiana pursed her lips.
“So. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Well,” Luke began, then paused. “It’s a bit of a tough issue.”
“Spit it out, Dad,” Tatiana said. “Don’t stand on ceremony.”
“Well. We have a convicted rapist in the jail right now. He raped a little girl. The family wants the death penalty. They’re howling for blood. Tomorrow morning I have to pronounce sentence. If I don’t sentence him to death, there’s gonna be trouble.”
Tatiana looked at her father across the table. She was well aware of his feelings toward the death penalty.
“You don’t want to kill him, do you?” she asked.
> “I think it sets a bad precedent. If I sentence this first one to death, the floodgates are opened. Soon enough, people will demand the death penalty for more and more crimes. It’s a slippery slope. Like in the Old West, when they killed people for stealing a horse, or in the Middle East when they stoned women to death for adultery. I don’t want our new society to end up like that.”
“But?”
“But we have no facilities to keep a prisoner. I have no intention of wasting our precious resources to build a prison and staff it to keep criminals. We simply don’t have that luxury.”
“So what do you propose?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I thought maybe you might have some idea.”
“Actually, I do. Something you may not have thought of yet.”
“What?”
“Have you ever talked to Tika about the Goblin approach to capital crimes?”
“No. The subject never came up, I guess. I didn’t even realize the Goblins had criminals.”
“Not many. Their incidence of crime is about one ten-thousandth of what Humans experience. But still, they have a few. And some of them are what we might call capital crimes.”
“So what do they do with them?”
“They sentence them to become a ship AI. They get loaded into a starship brain and aren’t allowed to return to android form and re-join society for one thousand years.”
“Wow. That’s a long time.”
“Well, yeah. But not if you’re an AI.”
“So. Do you think the Goblins would do that for us?
“Sure. Send him back to Stalingrad on the next return transport. Have the Goblins convert him to an AI. He can drive a starship for them for the next thousand years. Then we’ll see how he feels about attacking little girls.”
“Assuming Humans are still around in a thousand years.”
Remnants: Broken Galaxy Book Five Page 12
