The Dark Colony

by Richard Penn

  ‘Implementing,’ said Tommy. ‘We only had one decoy, what do we do? Over.’

  ‘We will try to kill it, Tommy, it’s all we’ve got. Do a test move to see if it’s tracking you. Over.’

  Tommy briefly applied the lift motors, the most powerful the ship had apart from the main drive, keeping oriented nose on to the incoming missile. There was a brief flare from the missile as it adjusted to the move.

  ‘Abandon stealth, Dancer’, said Lisa. ‘The missile is not fooled. Choose a random orientation ninety degrees to its path, and fire your main drive when it’s thirty seconds out. Maybe it won’t turn in time.’ As she was saying this, knowing it was a desperate measure, she and Sou were lining up to kill the missile before it got there. They drove directly past it, pulling serious gravities to accelerate back along its path towards Dancer. The missile was ignoring them, seeing Dancer as the bigger target.

  ‘Sou, I’ll aim just north of its track. You fire a second behind me assuming it will dodge my missile by going south. I will fire in twenty seconds…ten…five…’ The action was over in two seconds. Lisa’s missile streaked under the bigger robot and away. A tiny dodge from the big robot then took it directly into the path of Sou’s missile, which she detonated manually as she saw the paths intersect. A huge orange bloom engulfed both the boats, dissipating harmlessly to a cloud of smoke and debris. The crew in Dancer heard a brief rain of missile parts on their outer shroud, and then silence.

  ‘Watch your vector, Dancer!’ Sou called, in the silence which followed. In all the confusion of action, they had forgotten they were all headed directly for the asteroid.

  Thus reawakened, Tommy chose a side vector and called it out to the boats before firing, letting them all move gently aside and enter a circular orbit around the asteroid. After the formal calling of situation reports, the boats docked in their accustomed places, and they all assembled in the bridge.

  Nobody knew what to say. They just looked at each other, incredulous that such a crazy action hadn’t killed them all.

  ‘That will go in the textbook, Tommy,’ said Lisa. ‘Under “on no account try cockamamie stunts like this” I imagine.

  ‘I for one am immensely grateful to you all,’ said Shani, hugging Tommy, and there was ‘hear hear’ from the other non-combatants. ‘I count it an amazing victory that we are all alive and well. Captain, permission to break out drinks for a toast?’

  They were safe for now, and done for the day. ‘Permission granted, Shani. Chep, would you mind taking the watch?’ Stjepan was a non-drinker.

  ‘Glad to,’ he said, reaching for a bulb of fruit juice.

  Shani handed out bulbs of port, and they all raised them together. ‘BNS Dancer,’ she gave, and they all replied ‘and all who sail in her.’ It wasn’t the last drink of the evening, as they all recalled the following day.

  They repeated the same ice-mining routine as last time, but with Tommy in the gig and Minah in the blob. Lisa always wanted to cross-train everyone as much as possible, so she’d have more options if… later.

  By the end of the second day, they had topped up their tanks and were ready to go. Once more, they needed a plan, and they came together in the bridge to discuss it.

  ‘That was a lovely stunt, if you like to live dangerously, but it won’t work next time,’ said Lisa. ‘We can assume that one or other of those missiles got off a tight-beam message to Rock Three, so they know we’re here. They’ve heard nothing more, but that could mean a successful kill, or that we survived. They don’t know.’

  ‘Professional evil blokes aren’t optimists,’ said Stjepan. ‘They’ll assume we’re alive.’

  ‘The action with the first missile showed that the stealth shroud works,’ said Lisa. ‘We’re just going to have to rely on it this time, let it take us past them and use the flame-skirts to hide our approach.’

  ‘That gets us there, but then what?’ said Tommy. ‘What do we do when we’re there?’

  ‘Not enough information,’ said Lisa. ‘Any plan we come up with now will be guesswork. We approach, get close enough to see, and decide then.’

  They chose a flight-plan, selecting one which was fairly fuel-efficient so they had some to spare for the fly-past. It would take them another sixteen days before approaching Rock Three. Knitting was resumed, and education, and whatever went on in cabins. Tommy had taken to sleeping in Shani’s cabin now, and Sou and Minah knocked before passing through.

  27 Sneaking Up

  Three days before their projected arrival, Rock Three occupied more than one pixel in the telescope.

  ‘Something has been puzzling me,’ said Tommy to Lisa. ‘This rock has been known to harbour control for some years, and they will have been able to get a clear spectrum on it, if not an image.’

  ‘Right,’ said Lisa, ‘but they wouldn’t see the colony, surely?’

  ‘We’re assuming they are growing food, though, aren’t we?’ said Tommy, ‘They can’t have stolen enough of our grain to live on without us noticing. Anyway. I’m getting a spectrum on it now, it’ll be out in a minute.’

  ‘They could be getting barges sent from somewhere else, some other colony that collaborates with them? Juewa is in the same dynamic group, isn’t it?’ She hoped Juewa was not involved, her brother and many of her childhood friends were there.

  ‘Yes but…’ the computer had produced the spectrum. ‘Here, chlorophyll, look.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ said Lisa. ‘But how was it missed before? More cover-ups in the control room? I hope not.’

  ‘I have an idea. Actually, I suspected something like this. Suppose you have a station, like the station at Terps. But instead of rotating it every twenty-four hours like we do, you keep it on a fixed plane in space. With a blank face on one side, with no crops on it. You keep that side facing Terps at all times, and we never see the chlorophyll.’

  ‘That would mean the plants never see a night-day cycle,’ said Lisa.

  ‘There are crops that don’t mind that. Rice, for example.’

  ‘But that would put it in shade for part of the year, wouldn’t it?’ By year, she meant the asteroid’s rotation around the sun, five or six earth years.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, I hadn’t thought of that. Grow-lights would take too much power. Maybe a big mirror would do it.’

  ‘Sounds a bit too complex. Good thinking though. I expect we’ll know better when we get a look. What’s the timing on that?’

  ‘We’re on course to fly past the asteroid, passing over its north pole. I have enough data now to place that. I am assuming any surface colony will be on the equator, so the pole is a place they are less likely to look. We will pass about 300 megs to the north of the asteroid, far enough that the safe zone for the fairing covers the rock and any reasonably low orbit around it. We’ll get good pictures as we go by, maybe three metres per pixel. The rest of the plan, I haven’t made up yet.’

  ‘Why north?’ asked Lisa, ‘why not south?’

  ‘No reason, really, I picked one at random.’

  ‘Involve me a bit earlier in future, please Tommy. Making random decisions is what captains are for. Keep me posted.’

  An hour or so later, Tommy found her again. ‘Urgent news. I have spotted that boat again. It was on a slow orbit, and it has not reached Rock Three yet.’

  ‘Hot damn,’ said Sou. ‘I bet it’s got stuff we’d rather they didn’t have. Is there any chance of shooting it down?’

  ‘It’s within range of the slow missiles,’ said Tommy, ‘but they’d be able to trace the orbit back, get a fix on our position.’

  ‘I could take the blob out, fire from somewhere off our track,’ said Sou.

  Lisa thought for over a full minute. ‘No. Our mission is to get clues on their contacts and to rescue the slaves. No risks to be taken beyond that.’

  ‘But—’ Sou was very keen.

  ‘No. Not open for discussion.’ Lisa had been reading about the history of “mission creep,” and what a
bad idea it was to attack anything just because it needed destroying. They’d get the murdering bastard in their own time, Insha'Allah.

  A few hours later, they passed over the north pole of the rock, seeing it only as a tiny dot in the sky. They got clear pictures on the telescope, though, and kept the point of the fairing carefully positioned. There was definitely a radar here, they had been hearing it for hours. There was no sign of it actively tracking them, however.

  As the ‘dark boat’ from Terpsichore approached Rock Three, they heard bursts of radio sound. From the cadence, it sounded like a boat requesting permission to land and being granted it, but there were no words in it, not even Chinese ones. Tommy said the signal was encrypted but not spread-spectrum, like the phones they used at home, so they could detect it but not understand it. It was encouraging that it was the only talk they had heard. If Dancer had been detected, they would be talking about her.

  As they passed far enough beyond the rock, they were able to fire up the main drive hidden by the skirts, gradually turning their vector into a straight fall away from Rock Three, and then slowing and reversing their motion.

  In the meantime, they covered the walls with the pictures they had taken of the colony, and settled down to make a plan.

  As they filtered in to the bridge, each of the team swore in a different language, then sat and stared. It was totally different from what they had expected.

  ‘I expect you pilot types know what you’re seeing there,’ said Stjepan. ‘Care to enlighten the ignorant?’

  ‘I had been expecting something like the surface colony, a hall, some farm tunnels and a hangar,’ said Shani. ‘This seems completely the wrong shape.’

  ‘It looks like the fairytale castle at Disneyland Phobos,’ said Minah. They could all see what she meant. Even in the blurred image it was clearly a cylinder, taller by far than it was wide. Put pointy bits on it, and it would be a castle. Spread around it on the crater floor, just like at Terpsichore, were farm tunnels and a hangar.

  ‘I have to apologise,’ said Tommy, ‘I missed something really obvious coming in. The rotation axis of this rock is pointed straight at Terpsichore. The north pole, that is. Anything in the southern hemisphere, we’d never see. Simple, I’m afraid.’ He didn’t say, though Lisa figured out, that the random decision to go over the north pole rather than the south had probably saved their lives.

  ‘Is that co-incidence?’ asked Lisa, ‘could they have moved it that way?’

  ‘Well,’ said Tommy, ‘it’s hard to say what is possible. Because that thing is not a station or a colony. It’s a ship.’

  Now everyone around the table looked shocked.

  ‘But…’ said Minah, ‘that means they have—’

  ‘Nuclear power,’ said Lisa, grimly. ‘Folks, this is not a criminal gang, it is an act of war.’

  ‘They didn’t want the plutonium for a thermal generator, they wanted it for a breeder reactor!’ said Tommy. ‘That’s a huge amount of power. Megawatts. Only the Navy has ships like this; they can get anywhere in the Belt in less than a year.’

  ‘There is only one thing for us to do,’ said Lisa. ‘The Navy must be told about this, they must deal with it. Reluctantly, we have to abandon our mission.’

  Tommy, Minah and Shani all spoke together, all saying ‘No!’ They all started to give different arguments, but Lisa held up a hand. Stjepan looked as if he would have done the same, but he had schooled himself never to contradict the captain in public. Both the relationship and the mission were vital to him.

  Sou raised a finger and Lisa let her speak. ‘Captain, with respect, this is a deadly important question and it needs to be discussed. We will follow orders, but everyone deserves to be heard.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Lisa. ‘Fair enough. I’m not going to send you all off in a small boat for disagreeing with me. But my concern is this. That thing has unknown weaponry, infinite power, and it would be death to confront it. If we die without getting a message out, we unleash it on the belt. Once launched it could destroy the station and everyone we love.’

  ‘I have an idea’ said Tommy. Tommy always had an idea. Lisa suspected that if they all died, it would be from trying out one of Tommy’s ideas. ‘We have the slow missiles, which are effectively bottle rockets. If we launch one of those with a radio transmitter on it, it can be half a gig from here before it broadcasts a message, and they couldn’t infer our position from it. Send it with a recording, and some pictures, then at least the navy knows what they are up against.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Lisa. ‘after this meeting, proceed with that. It makes sense even if we decide to retreat. Suggestions, please.’

  ‘I have no plan,’ said Shani, ‘but I will say this. Those poor little girls and women are still in that horrible place. I will be very… distressed if we simply sail away and leave them. If we have any chance at all, I am willing to die in the attempt.’

  There was a solemn pause. By unspoken agreement, they went around the table to the left. ‘What she said,’ said Tommy, never wordy unless he was talking about machines.

  ‘I agree,’ said Minah, ‘that we should make plans. A suicide mission is morally indefensible, but if we have any chance of success, we should try.’ Her people were from Israel.

  ‘I will follow the captain,’ said Sou, ‘whatever she decides. But we should plan, and if we can, we should act.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Stjepan. ‘I believe that my patients are in that dark place, and I hope to be able to treat them.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Lisa. ‘This orbit is bringing us towards the Rock, and I believe it will be unsafe to remain in it more than three hours. At the end of two hours, we will review the plans and make a decision. Tommy, send off the flare. Minah, give him a hand. Stjepan, lunch please. Shani, keep the watch.’

  Tommy rattled around his stores and came up with a camera mounting and a message laser, sending Minah off to the gig dock for a missile, thankfully minus the fuel tanks and the warhead. He starting tinkering with those while continuing to contribute to the discussion. For a while, this was a silent one, with people consulting charts and writing things down. Minah seemed to be surplus to Tommy’s requirements, so she started a list of priorities.

  Sou and Lisa had been studying the surface map and orbit diagrams, and Sou was the first to speak. ‘As I see it, we have three main classes of option; frontal attack, hide close by and hide far away.

  ‘I would like to eliminate frontal attack right now. As soon as we reveal ourselves we get in a space fight like the one at Rock Two, and the ship may well have a high-power laser that can just blast us to vapour.

  ‘By “hide close by” I mean take Dancer somewhere within a click or two of the ship and land it, hiding somewhere on the surface. We could come in under their horizon, the other side of a crater wall, like that little boat did on Terps. The problem is, the closer we get to the enemy, the better the chance that the fairing fails to hide us. It’s lovely when the pointy end is in the right place, but she would stand out like beacon side on.

  ‘By “hide far away” I mean find a spot well clear of the ship and hide on the surface there. All operations near the ship would be done with the blob and the gig. This is still risky, but not as bad. It makes the rescue operation hard to imagine, but it does allow us some close-up spying.’

  ‘Didn’t we lose the stealth capability on the gig?’ asked Stjepan. ‘It’s not going to be much use if they can spot it ten clicks away.’

  ‘Also,’ said Minah, ‘you are talking about hiding on the surface. How is that possible? Surely from space the wings will be seen straight away.’

  ‘I have an idea for that,’ said Tommy. ‘You’re not going to like it, though.’

  ‘All your ideas are lovely,’ said Shani. ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Basically, we fly into a cliff and cause a landslide,’ said Tommy. He carried on before they shouted him down. ‘What I mean to say is, we find a crater wall with loose material on it, land Dan
cer and remove the fairing, then detonate some charges in the cliff. Bring it down on top of us.’

  ‘But without Dancer we are stranded on this rock!’ said Sou. ‘What do we do then, ask the enemy for a ride home?’

  ‘It does not destroy Dancer,’ said Tommy. ‘This is a small asteroid, the material weighs next to nothing in this gravity. It’s a technique rockhounds use when they are prospecting a rock.’ The fact that rockhounds were renowned throughout the Belt for taking insane risks did nothing to improve the reaction.

  ‘You said “remove the fairing” – why?’ asked Sou. She seemed to be taking the idea seriously, which brought the others around a little.

  ‘Two reasons,’ said Tommy. ‘I want to use some of the material to build a new fairing for the gig, and the rest would be a shelter, forming a tunnel behind Dancer, so we can get in and out.’

  ‘Tommy,’ said Lisa, distractedly, ‘what the hell are you making there?’

  ‘Oh this?’ said Tommy, ‘it’s a self-contained message gun. It has a camera and a laser in it, reaction wheels, see?. When it gets clear, it will scan the sky to locate Terpsichore, point at it and send off a message. I need to do some coding on it, and I can’t do that if people are talking. May I go to another room?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Lisa. ‘That’s brilliant.’ Or crazy, or both. She moved aside too, to record a briefing of what they had found, for the colonists and her bosses. It would say nothing of their location or their plans.

  28 Buried Alive

  While there was still ninety minutes to Lisa’s deadline, Tommy launched the flare out of the stretcher airlock, and returned to the bridge. Discussion was centred on the “hide far away” option, and everyone seemed to assume it was agreed.

  ‘Attention please, everyone,’ said Lisa. ‘We must not get carried away. I need clear proper rationale for this plan before we commit to it. Tommy, get figures on rock density, roof load bearing, avalanche speed. I want a simulation, with numbers. Shani, work with him, check his sources and his sums.’ And his enthusiasm. ‘Tommy, I also want to know how fast we can remove the fairing and set up that shelter you are sketching.