Emancipation

by Jason Paul McCartan

  The next few minutes were nerve-wracking, but there was no sign of the Shiveen. The rover came out of the other side of the valley without incident. Jack closed the gull-wing side doors but not the rear door. If anything were following them, he wanted Anderson to be in the position take them down.

  “So far, so good,” said Jack. “Another hour and we should be there.”

  Caroline’s rover showed up on the long-distance radar about five clicks out. The rest of the ride was tense and Jack used the time to consider options. He’d tried to contact Morales and the Dauntless using his alek, but there was too much ionizing radiation in the air to cut through. Even the repeating transmission from the Dauntless cut in an out intermittently.

  “Bandura, any way to get communications back?” asked Jack.

  “Negatory, Boss,” she replied, checking over the remaining drones she had that were scattered over one of the rover’s workbench. “Not unless we get can these storms to subside.”

  “I thought alek communications couldn’t be affected by radiation.”

  “They’re usually not. But this is ionizing radiation - it changes the way things work at the molecular level. Long story short, the radiation is messing with the quantum computer in our aleks. There’s some auto-correct built-in, but even that can’t overcome decoherence.”

  “But we’re inside a hardened vehicle.”

  “Ish. Still enough low-level effects to screw with things. Including our bodies. Especially our bodies. That’s why we get issued radsol.”

  Jack checked his radiation level. He was showing at two rems. He wouldn’t need to take any radsol until he hit at least five rems. How the hell was anyone able to stay on this planet without getting incredibly sick and dying? New Macedon had to have been hermetically sealed. Now it was open to the whims and winds of the planet. With the atmosphere engine on Pallas IV out of commission and Shiveen ships in orbit, there was no more change coming to this world any time soon.

  Jack slowed the rover.

  “We’re only a few minutes out from these survivors, but I don’t want to take any chances. Let’s make sure we’re geared up.”

  He looked over at the black bag containing Stone. If he didn’t do this right, it could be him or Anderson or Bandura in the next one. Or even one of the civilians. They should have brought more coffin bags with them.

  The first ninety days of a new officer’s military career were the most difficult according to his instructors at officer school. They were a probationary period, a training period, a period when new officers could screw up perhaps once or twice. It was the typical washout period, and the period when most new officers got themselves killed. Most marines hated being led by “ninety-day wonders”, a name that had stuck even as humanity and then panhumanity reached beyond the stars. The ninety days period was a constant in all the armed forces. A crucible. Surviving those ninety days meant that you knew what you were doing, or at least had found out the hard way, and you weren’t going to get yourself or others killed.

  When everyone said they were ready, Jack pushed the rover forward again. Ten minutes later, he slowed it as they got close to the other rover.

  It was sitting at the base of a small hill. Dust had accumulated under and around its wheel base, more or less hiding the wheels from view. There were not exterior lights on, and the tinted glass at the front of the vehicle gave no sign anyone was inside the vehicle.

  “See anything, Bandura?” asked Jack.

  “Nothing bad.”

  “Can we use a drone to check it out?”

  “Winds are too high. It’d just get blown away.”

  “I guess we do this in person then.”

  Jack paused for a moment before powering down their own rover, the constant low whine that had accompanied the drive disappearing as the vehicle shut down. Jack looked down at the bag containing Stone, wishing that he was still alive and being the one giving orders.

  “Well, here goes nothing.”

  “Right behind you, Boss,” said Bandura.

  Jack nodded at Anderson, who clambered out of the rover first, struggling to get his large weapon and body out of it. Jack followed him outside, and Bandura followed him.

  There were fewer than fifty feet between the marines’ rover and Caroline Tao’s, but every step closer was taken slowly, softly, scanning the area for hostile movement. The fireteam had already been surprised once and Jack wasn’t keen on it happening a second time. The Pallas IV wind whipped around the marines and got in their eyes, but none of them pulled their masks and goggles down from their helmets, the distance was so short.

  Anderson now stood with his back against the rover outside, covering the entire area with his arc of fire.

  Jack reached the other rover and banged his fist against it.

  Moments passed before the door to the rover opened and Caroline Tao stood in its frame.

  “Doctor Tao?” he asked.

  “Who else were you expecting?” she retorted.

  9 Meeting The Scientists

  The inside of Tao’s rover was barely big enough to contain both scientists and the marines, with Anderson and Nowak taking up most of the space.

  “Okay, Doc,” said Jack. “What have you got?”

  “Silas,” Caroline said. “Please display the summary of item P4S1766 holographically.”

  “With pleasure,” said Silas, vocalizing from the small speaker built into his containment unit. Above the desk, a holographic display leaped into life, displaying what to Jack looked like a three dimensional scan of something blobbish, with lots of data around it.

  “How much do you know about xenoarcheology, Private Conway?”

  “It’s just Jack,” said Jack. “A little. Basically, it’s about digging up alien planets.”

  Caroline smiled. She was used to hearing that kind of dismissive talk about her field of expertise.

  “If you want to be crude, yes. Until we encountered the Shiveen, my field of xenoarcheology had been about finding signs of intelligent alien life. There’s been plenty of alien life found in the worlds the Sphere has expanded into, and some of it being close to sentient, but there’s been no discovery of truly alien settlements or ruins.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s still much the same, unfortunately. Even in the past five years since we’ve known about the Shiveen, we’ve rarely come into contact with them, and we’ve found nothing to show that they’ve created short or long-term settlements in this area of the galaxy.”

  “Which means they’re transient and not from around here.”

  “Possibly. Or they were and abandoned the area. What do you see on the holo there?”

  “Not much. Looks like something organic?”

  “Look closer.”

  Jack looked at all the information displayed, searching for what Caroline wanted him to find.

  “Okay, so it’s alien. Is this Shiveen?”

  “I believe so, although there are some subtle differences from data collected on the Shiveen. Mostly different protein sequences in the DNA of it. It’s ancient, according to the survey data from the area. But there’s something else. Look again.”

  Jack did.

  “I’m not seeing anything, Doc.”

  Caroline sighed audibly.

  “Silas, enhance the embedded unknown object by a factor of ten.”

  An area of the holo display enlarged to show the outline of something triangular deep within the mysterious Shiveen blob. It was small, perhaps only an inch in diameter, but deep within the center of the mass.

  “Okay, what is that?” asked Jack.

  “Frankly, I don’t know,” said Caroline. “It’s not Shiveen and matches nothing we have in the database. From everything I can tell, it’s made of a metal alloy we’ve never encountered before. I can’t tell exactly until I open it up. And I can’t do that just yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “A few reasons. I don’t have the proper equipment here to examine it properly. I
t may not be as inert as it seems, so it needs to go into quarantine first. Plus, this is the only sample I’ve found like this. And if this is what I think it is, our employer wouldn’t be happy with us finding it.”

  Jack drummed his fingers against the top of the desk. What was a xenoarchaeologist doing working for a mining company, especially one that was still terraforming the planet? Is this the reason that the Shiveen had attacked — there were ancient Shiveen somethings here on the planet they were defending? That seemed too far fetched for Jack to accept.

  “Okay, Doc. I’ll bite. Why not?”

  “Because that would mean the end to their contract to transform the planet. And these companies pay big money to get control of a border planet like this. Once it’s up and running they get a small percentage of all planetary revenue each year, which are worth trillions of credits.

  “But the discovery of a second sentient alien race trumps that.”

  “What did you say?” asked Bandura.

  “A second alien race,” said Caroline. “I believe that the fragment inside that Shiveen artifact comes from a new and unidentified race. It’s made of a metal composite that we’ve never encountered before, something that doesn’t occur naturally, at least not according to the rules of the cosmos that we all live by.”

  “But you can’t be sure,” said Jack.

  “No. Not until I open up the Shiveen artifact and extract it. I’ve got the others in my team looking for another artifact like this one so I can examine this one.”

  “I thought you said it needed quarantined,” said Jack.

  “It does,” said Caroline. “I’d examine it off-planet. And before I reported it to my employer. You being here complicates things now.”

  “Doc,” said Anderson, who was now leaning against the inner rover wall, his arms crossed. “The Shiveen being here complicates things. We’re just here to make sure you don’t all dead.”

  “That’s right,” said Jack. “Our orders are to secure survivors and get them back to the Dauntless.”

  “I can’t leave my research,” said Caroline. “This may be just as important as first contact was.”

  Jack chewed on his bottom lip. His orders didn’t explicitly say he couldn’t bring back more than just any remaining survivors.

  “What do you need to take?”

  “The sample we’ve discussed, and a few others. I have some other samples back at the science station.”

  “Sorry, Doc. We’re not going back there.”

  “But…”

  “No buts. We’ll recover the other members of your team and then ship out in a single rover to be collected by our dropship. I don’t dare risk us exposing ourselves to the Shiveen any more than we have. We already wasted the triad that took out the science station, and there’ll be more coming to investigate why those three haven’t come home yet.”

  At mention of the science station, Nowak, who had been sitting quietly, his shoulders rolled over, his posture slumped, began sobbing softly again. Jack nodded in his direction.

  “Will he be okay?”

  “Who knows, Private? Grief is different for each of us.”

  “He needs to be okay. I don’t have enough people to leave him behind and keep him safe until we get your other team members.”

  “I’ll speak to him,” said Caroline.

  “Please do and get your research together as quickly as possible.”

  Caroline made backups of the research data and encoded them onto biocrystals. She discreetly gave one copy to Nowak and kept one copy for herself, putting the biocrystal into a small synthetic leather pouch that she wore around her neck for just such a purpose.

  “Silas,” she said. “Set up a purge for all data in this rover, but wait until I give the command to do so.”

  She knew that this was her crossing the line, breaking the rules that her employer set. When she took the samples off-world for examination without alerting the mining company about them, purging the rover of all electronic records of scans would seem like a minimal infraction. Her big concern was whether this Private and his fireteam would keep quiet about it. There was something about him that made her want to trust him, although she felt that he was a little too green. This was confirmed when Anderson carefully carried in a black body bag into the rover, laying it down carefully and strapping it down.

  “The previous fireteam leader,” said Jack. “Shiveen took him out at the science station.”

  “And you got put in charge?”

  “Something like that,” he said grimly, looking lost in his own thoughts.

  Death had never worried Caroline, because she’d never thought about it much nor encountered it much. She had lived her life in academia, content to have a few close friends as she did her research, until she found that the only way she could do much new work in her field was employed by one of the big planetary terraforming companies. Not only did that give her enough money to continue her research freelance, but it also meant she could be there to make sure companies didn’t destroy important finds.

  Like this one, the one underground here on Pallas IV.

  What would the company do if they knew about it? Close it up again? Destroy it? Nothing? Hardly likely. What if they already knew about it, and that was why she had been assigned to this survey site? The mining companies were just corporations, and corporations always wanted to outdo their competition. What she found could be worth a fortune to the company that could mine it and research it, if nothing else from the patent rights alone.

  She shook her head. That idea was pure fancy. There was no way that was the case.

  Or was it?

  The marine called Bandura had kept Nowak occupied, having him help her move across various supplies from the other rover to Caroline’s. She was thankful for that small show of support. Nowak was brilliant, but had always been a loner until Erica came along. With someone to share his work and life with, he had blossomed as a person. Being honest, she worried that Erica’s death would break him. Having never been in love herself, she didn’t understand how all that stuff worked. Nor had she ever had any interest in it.

  “Private Conway?” she said. “I think we’re ready to go.”

  “How long will it take to get to the rest of your team?

  “About four hours. We established it in a secure location underground, not too far from our first initial finds. It’s deep enough that we can still be in mesh contact as long as the ionization in the air isn’t too bad.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to the other team members?”

  “A day or two ago. I had Silas monitoring for transmissions from the others, but they’ve been quiet. That’s not unusual, though.”

  “Okay,” said Jack. “Gather what you think you may need, but no more than that. Everything else stays here for the evac, and we’re only bringing back what we need to.”

  Jack looked at the body bag laying strapped down and wondered how soon he’d end up in one of them. If the Shiveen found them, it was possible they’d all just be killed and left to decompose in the irradiated winds of this new world.

  Not exactly what I signed up for, he thought to himself.

  Stepping out into the wind, which had died down a little, he looked around. Apart from the two rovers, everything else was rock and dust. In the pastel-red sky with a hint of blue in it above, two moons hung, one low in the sky, the other high. At any other time, Jack would have found that stunning, but at the moment he had more pressing concerns.

  Four hours to get to the base camp, an hour to shut it down, then another four hours to get back. An additional two hours as a buffer. That was a lot of time to use up while on a planet under alien attack. There was no telling when, or eve if, the Dauntless would be back, but Jack wanted to make sure he was back above ground and iwith the rest of the marine platoon before that happened. He didn’t want his small group to be exposed too long to possible Shiveen attack or to be left behind. If they were lucky, they’d be able to stay
undetected until they were collected, but the chances of that were low.

  There was a loud boom in the distance. Jack looked up in the sky and saw three long trailing chemical lines in the sky several klicks away. A Shiveen fighter triad, probably scouting and trying to hunt down the panhumans that had arrived on the planet. How many triads had the Shiveen deployed for that? All it took was for one of them to pick up the rovers and come and investigate and it would be over for Jack’s small group.

  “We need to move now,” he said. “Shut down both rovers and head towards the base camp. Doc, you stay behind Anderson and point him towards that opening you talked about. Bandura, keep Nowak with you. I’ll watch the rear.”

  Everyone followed his directions without retort. He may not know what the hell he was doing, but he could at least pretend for a little while.

  The trek up the escarpment followed a marked trail using ropes and florescent flags to show which path to take. It took less than twenty minutes for the small party to come upon the opening into the ground.

  It was nothing more than a large hole in the ground, at least twenty foot tall and oval, leading into complete darkness. Jack could tell that it wasn’t natural, with some very defined borders. He switched on his helmet headlamp and saw steps descending inside the hole.

  “The Shiveen did this?” asked Anderson.

  “That’s what we think,” said Caroline. “Though by all indications it’s ancient. At least a millennia old.”

  Anderson activated his own helmet flashlight and peered into the darkness of the opening.

  “Looks like there’s a tunnel,” he said. He started for the steps.

  “Hold on, Anderson,” said Jack. “Bandura, how many drones do you have left?”

  “Less than ten,” she replied.

  “Can you set up three or four of them to fly ahead of us and map out the tunnel as we descend?”