by C H Gideon
“That’s probable,” Styles reluctantly agreed before leaning forward conspiratorially. “Do you think this might have something to do with those…bug things Xi encountered?”
Jenkins shrugged. “It’s possible. The longer we’re down here, the more it looks like the Vorr had ulterior motives for bringing us here beyond the simple facilitation of a secret diplomatic meeting.”
“And they bugged out the minute we arrived.” Styles nodded knowingly before hesitating and seeming to resist the urge to continue.
“Go on, Chief,” Jenkins urged. “What are you thinking?”
“I’ve got Podsy running an analysis on the Vorr shafts,” Styles reluctantly explained. “The thing is…I think they were made from orbit—originally, that is.”
“I don’t follow.”
“If you precisely attenuate a high-powered laser,” Styles explained, “and I’m talking high-powered, the likes of which humanity has yet to deploy, you could drill straight down through an ice crust like this and leave a hole no wider than a few meters.”
“To what purpose?”
“That’s the part I can’t figure out,” Styles replied in obvious frustration. “I mean, if you wanted to explore a subsurface ocean like the one here on Shiva’s Wrath, there are better ways to do it than with a capital-grade laser fired from orbit. And if you were just sniping fifteen ‘somethings’ located on the surface, there would be no need to drill all the way through ten kilometers of ice. Someone wanted to access this world’s relatively-inaccessible ocean, but I can’t figure out why. And without those ice cores, I can’t even tell you when they did it.”
“Only two known species use lasers on the scale you’re talking about,” Jenkins mused.
“The Vorr and the Jemmin.” Styles nodded knowingly. “Which narrows down the list of suspects, sure, but we don’t know enough about their respective histories to have the first clue what they might have wanted with Shiva’s Wrath. For that matter, we don’t know why they would leave it essentially unmolested until DIE came along and started conducting private surveys. Whatever it is that’s valuable enough to make the Vorr and Jemmin fight over it was here long before Terran interests arrived, but they’re only now showing interest in it?”
“An honest-to-God mystery…” Jenkins boggled before chuckling. “Silly me, I thought the worst I’d face were treason charges for conducting unauthorized diplomacy with foreign nations.”
“Instead we’ve exchanged fire with the founding nation of the Illumination League and encountered another seemingly hostile alien species with whom we’ve also exchanged fire,” Styles snickered. “Makes treason look like a cake-walk.”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Jenkins allowed. “Is there anything else?”
“Not from me.” Styles shook his head. “I’ll keep working with Podsy on those drill shafts. Once I know more, you’ll know. I’m hoping to come up with an estimated position of the ship that made them. If I can, it might tell us a little more about who cut the holes in the first place.”
“Keep after it.” Jenkins nodded approvingly.
“Oh,” Styles added as he went to open the hatch, “Doc Fellows was right behind me trying to get time with you.”
“Send him in.”
Styles left Jenkins’ cabin, and a moment later, the battalion’s doctor entered. “Colonel,” the doctor greeted, bearing a data slate that he solemnly proffered.
“Why the long face, Doc?” Jenkins asked mildly, taking the slate and viewing its contents.
“The short version is this.” Fellows sighed, sitting down in the chair opposite Jenkins. “There’s about six times as much radiation on this patch of ice as we anticipated.”
“What?” Jenkins demanded in surprise, and the doctor gestured to the slate. “This isn’t some kind of mistake?”
“I’ve been taking and re-taking surface samples of the ice here.” Fellows shook his head grimly. “Every area I’ve tested, which includes everything in our patrol circuits, has been covered with highly-charged dust that’s already worked its way into everything. Decontamination is going to be impossible. I’ve already run the numbers and checked with the Bonhoeffer’s inventory. There is no way to effectively contain this radiation. The best we can hope for is to sterilize the mech cabins and limit exposure to the crews within them, but the troopers are getting hammered.”
“Can we counteract the effects by upping the dosage of anti-radiation meds?” Jenkins asked in muted alarm.
“We can,” Fellows agreed, “and I’ve already upped everyone’s doses to the maximum allowed per person. But at that rate, we’ll exhaust our supply of meds in fifteen days.”
“Recommendation?”
“Transfer the troopers to the mine sites,” Fellows replied. “We initially thought the mines would have double the radiation we’re seeing out here on the ice, but now the ice is hotter than the rock by nearly that much again. Coupled with the quarantine measures of each mech and its crew, we can maybe double our stay on Shiva’s Wrath before we all start to suffer permanent effects of radiation poisoning.”
Jenkins set his jaw as he asked the obvious question, “Was the ice this hot when we got here?”
“No, sir.” Fellows shook his head firmly. “While the stuff is no longer falling from the sky, it was coming down in such small amounts that it didn’t trigger any of our alarms. My guess is a low-orbit dispersal pattern which blanketed, oh, a five-hundred-mile radius, probably centered somewhere between us and the Jemmin base.”
“It wasn’t the nuke they touched off over our heads…” Jenkins mused, wondering how the Jemmin could have delivered what was essentially a dirty bomb into low orbit without anyone aboard the Bonhoeffer noticing.
“No,” the doctor agreed, “but it probably happened around the same time.”
Jenkins sat back in his chair and considered the situation. If there had ever been doubts as to the Jemmin intentions toward the Terrans on Shiva’s Wrath, those doubts were now eliminated. He had wondered why the Jemmin went silent after killing Gym Cricket, and now he had the answer: they had poisoned Jenkins’ people and were merely waiting for them to retreat or die from radiation sickness.
“All right.” Jenkins nodded decisively. “I’ll contact Sergeant Major Trapper and transfer all non-essential personnel to the mines. We’ll reverse the rest schedule, bringing whoever is needed out here to HQ while resting personnel inside the mines.”
“Do you want me to inform the battalion?” the doctor asked.
Jenkins shook his head. “No, I’ll do it. I want you to oversee the decontamination shed, and make sure to pack each and every mech with all the perishables they’ll need for the next thirty days.”
“That slate—” Fellows gestured to the one he had given Jenkins. “—contains my requisition list. I’ll need those supplies before I can construct the decontamination shed.”
“I’ll call them down ASAP,” Jenkins assured him. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“Colonel.” Doctor Fellows snapped a salute before exiting the cabin.
“May I have your attention…” Colonel Jenkins’ voice crackled through Elvira’s interior speakers, rather than through her headset. Xi recoiled in surprise, realizing he was making a battalion-wide address.
“This can’t be good,” Xi muttered.
“Ten minutes ago, Doctor Fellows informed me that our HQ has been blanketed in a layer of radioactive material,” Jenkins explained, causing Xi’s throat to tighten in alarm. Visions of radiation-poisoned war victims flooded her mind, and for a moment, she thought her heart skipped a beat as she imagined herself with a patchy head of hair and an emaciated physique. “He has already increased our med dosages, and we will begin adjusting battalion-wide protocols to compensate. Within twelve hours, we will have a decontamination shed up and running, where all vehicles and personnel will be scrubbed as clean as possible. After each mech has undergone this procedure, quarantine protocols will be in effect throughout the batt
alion. I know you meatheads like to play in the snow, but fun time’s over. The enemy has violated humanity’s, and even the Illumination League’s, most fundamental war-time conventions. I intend for us to stand our ground and deliver the only appropriate rebuke—right into their teeth.”
Xi felt her neck-hairs stand on end as her CO gave voice to the anger she currently felt at hearing she had been poisoned by the enemy.
“Check with your unit commanders for revised deployment protocols,” Jenkins concluded. “Jenkins out.”
“Is this for real?” Blinky asked, stepping into the cockpit with a concerned expression.
“Seems like it.” Xi nodded irritably, doing her best to project an air of calm and control.
Sarah Samuels pushed past Staubach. “Captain Xi, how can we confirm the Jemmin really used a dirty bomb of some kind?”
“Trust but verify?” Xi quirked a brow in mild approval of the reporter’s suggestion.
“Something like that,” Samuels said guardedly.
“Well…” Xi mused sarcastically. “We could gather up some surface ice in cadmium-lined containers for later testing, or we could pop a section of the top-side hull off and stuff it in a box somewhere in the hope the Bonhoeffer can retrieve and analyze it, or...”
Samuels gave her a withering look. “Captain, if you don’t intend to take my question seriously...”
Blinky’s eyes lit up. “Or we could pull the Geiger-counter from the med-kit and test samples of surface ice against samples taken from a meter down?”
Xi rolled her eyes, but in truth, she was glad he had taken the initiative after she’d left the proverbial door wide open for him. “Well…I guess you could,” Xi said grudgingly.
“But what about breaking quarantine?” Samuels asked with mild concern.
“It doesn’t matter until after we scrub the mech,” Xi shook her head. “This cabin is already full of irradiated dust. Once we’ve cleaned Elvira inside-and-out, we can’t re-open the hatch without re-contaminating the interior.” She twisted her mouth into a bemused smirk. “I guess that means you’re going to have to choose where you’d like to ride out the rest of this mission, Ms. Samuels.”
Samuels returned the smirk. “We’ll just have to wait and see how things shake out. I’ve grown rather fond of Elvira and her crew, after all.”
“Great…” Xi said with patently false enthusiasm, turning back to her HUD and sarcastically muttering, “Really, really great.”
8
Offense vs. Defense
“Those are way too fragile to be packed like that,” Podsy barked, driving his forklift over to the drop-can in bay four. “These are the last of our radiation meds, Gong,” he explained, mustering as much patience as possible while dealing with the hard-headed grease-monkey. “They need to be packed in orange, drop-rated containers to make sure they survive the landing.”
“The green boxes have more interior volume, Chief,” Guo Gong argued. “We can put three times as many doses in the same space by using them.”
“The green boxes are less protected, so three times nothing is still nothing,” Podsy snapped. “I’d rather deliver half of the drugs safely than all of them like that—” He pointed derisively at the stacks of green-boxed meds. “Use the orange pipes, like I said fifteen minutes ago, and with any luck, we won’t miss our drop.” He checked the drop-timer above the can, which showed just seventeen minutes to delivery. “Let’s move, people,” he urged, clapping his hands as loudly as possible while the recalcitrant Guo grudgingly did as ordered.
His shift had been on-duty for fourteen hours, which was nothing as far as he was concerned, but they were beginning to fray at the edges. For most of Third Shift, this was their first deployment. They had responded well to the pressure of the situation, but a few rough edges still needed to be sanded down.
A Second Shifter drove a forklift past, carrying a positioning gyro for a Scorpion-class-compatible SRM mount.
“Hold up,” Podsy called after the crewman, causing her to stop and make eye contact. “Is that for Elvira?”
“No, Chief.” She shook her head. “This is for Devil Crab 2.”
“Lift it up so I can see the plug mount,” he urged.
She hesitated before doing as told, and once she had lifted the meter-square device high enough that he could see its underside, he shook his head irritably.
“Devil Crab’s control cable uses a thirty-one-pin connector, not a Scorpion’s standard twenty-six like Elvira,” he explained as he turned his forklift toward a nearby workbench. “We never got around to re-standardizing Crab’s connectors after Durgan’s Folly. Take it over to the bench,” he urged. “I’ll re-do the connector, but you’ll have to help me.”
She complied, and he did his best to lean out of his forklift’s seat to gather the needed supplies.
“Tell me what to get, Chief,” she said when it became painfully clear he was moving far too slowly.
“A size fourteen stripper—” He gestured to the tools hanging above the bench. “—and a same-size set of crimps.”
She retrieved the indicated tools while Podsy carefully opened the connector end and peeled back the wires, one by one, before clipping the whole thing off and tossing it into the re-usable parts bin. It took him less than two minutes to replace the twenty-six-pin connector with the proper thirty-one. Without needing to be told, the Second Shifter brought a test box and plugged it in to verify its status.
The diagnostic completed in a few seconds and all indicators flashed green.
“Good work.” He nodded approvingly, high-fiving the crewman before urging, “Now get it over to the can.”
The next ten minutes flew by as his team finished loading for the drop. Gong even managed to get the radiation meds correctly packed and secured with a minute to spare before the doors closed and the overhead lift mechanism began conveying the drop-cans to the launch tube.
Each can was loaded into the tube’s airlock, which could hold eight such cans simultaneously, and soon Chief Rimmer broadcasted through the area.
“Initiating drop in five…four…three…two…one…can one away…can two away…can three away…” he intoned with the consistency of a metronome until, finally, all eight cans were out of the tube and en route to the surface of Shiva’s Wrath.
During ejection, Podsy sat at the same workstation that Rimmer had previously used to grant him access to the Bonhoeffer’s sensors. He began poring over stored sensor data, specifically the information surrounding those fifteen Vorr shafts. He needed to access the Bonhoeffer’s main processor for a few minutes to crunch the numbers, and for that, he would again need Chief Rimmer’s access codes.
“All cans down,” Rimmer said grimly. “Can Four’s braking thrusters failed and the impact exceeded green box tolerances. What was green-packed in Four?”
Podsy made brief eye contact with the wide-eyed Gong, but Podsednik had no desire to rub the crewman’s nose in it. Everyone made mistakes; the trick was learning from them.
Podsy switched on his workstation’s two-way intercom and replied, “Nothing perishable other than a few desalination filters, sir. All the radiation meds were orange-tubed by Mr. Gong.”
“Good work, Gong,” Rimmer congratulated while Gong suddenly looked ashamed, but Podsy needed to focus on his sensor feeds.
“Chief Rimmer, a word?” Podsy asked over the intercom.
“On my way.” The chief appeared at Podsy’s side a few moments later. “What is it?”
“I need to run some simulations,” Podsy explained. “These laser-drilled shafts were cut from orbit, but I don’t know the laser’s point-of-origin. I need access to the Bonhoeffer’s main processor for at least three minutes, maybe as much as five, to run the simulations and get a clear picture.”
“So, what’s the problem?” Rimmer asked bluntly.
“I need your access codes, sir,” Podsy said warily.
“Not anymore you don’t.” Rimmer shook his head. “General Akinou
ye personally approved my request to have your privileges upgraded. In fact, you probably have greater access than I do at this point.”
Podsy blinked in confusion. “Why would he do that, sir?”
“The general’s been doing this a long time, Chief.” Rimmer smirked. “If there’s one thing a lifelong CO like the general can spot a click away, it’s talent. And any CO’s first job is to put the people under him where they can do the most good and then give them what they need to succeed.” He clapped Podsy on the shoulder. “Carry on, Chief.”
Too surprised to intelligently reply, Podsy said, “Thank you, sir.”
He then refocused on the task at hand and began running simulations with the hope that they would paint a clearer picture of who burned those holes in the ice on Shiva’s Wrath.
“My son was right,” Xi heard a deep, gravelly voice call out from beyond the decontamination shed.
Xi turned to see what might have been a slightly-older clone of Tim Trapper Jr. emerge from the other side of Elvira, which was getting a thorough scrub-down by a team of PDF soldiers apparently serving out some kind of disciplinary sentence under Trapper’s watchful eye.
“Excuse me, Sergeant Major?” Xi asked.
“He said you were a lot like my daughter,” Trapper Sr. explained as he appraised Elvira with every purposeful, yet leisurely-looking step he took around Xi’s mech. “He was right. Have to say, though… Between you and me, I prefer your taste in vehicles to hers.”
Xi was intrigued. “You don’t like TFMC dropships?”
“Not as far as I could throw them,” he spat, meeting her eyes and sending a shiver down her spine at the uncanny resemblance between father and son. “Though I’d be the first to admit it’s mostly because she rode one to her death. A person can learn to accept a profound loss, Captain Xi, but it’s unreasonable to expect that person to forget it.”
