The Dying Light

by Sean Williams

  * * *

  Roche waited in the airlock as Haid completed the final checks and brought the courier into the optimum position. Her suit was sealed and ready to go: armored, powered, and equipped with enough thrust to repel the moon’s low gravity for several hours in total. The courier would drop her high above and at some distance from the target crater. Using gravity and the thrusters when necessary, she would approach with all due caution under cover of the ion bridge.

  She carried a number of weapons at the ready, plus several concealed in the thigh and underarm compartments of the suit. If she encountered trouble, she would be as prepared as she could be.

  “Drop in two,” said Haid. “No activity. Arc due any time now.”

  “When you’re clear, assume a geosynch orbit and wait for instructions. I’ll switch on my beacon once you’re out of the area.” During preparations for the jaunt, she’d reconsidered her decision to go in completely unannounced. Broadcasting a navigational pulse would let anyone in the area know she was coming without giving too much away. If the worst she was facing was a bunch of outriggers, the suit would be able to take care of her; if not, not even the courier would be much use. “Maintain radio silence once I’m off-ship.”

  “Understood. One minute to drop.”

  She inclined her head so Haid’s view through the airlock camera’s included her face. “And don’t do anything rash while I’m away, okay?”

  A slight laugh filled her helmet. “Trust me, Morgan,” he said. Then: “The bridge is arcing now. Thirty seconds. Hold tight.”

  Roche braced herself against the frame of the airlock, more out of habit than necessity, since the chamber had already been evacuated. A chronometer inside the helmet of her suit counted down the seconds. When it hit five, a series of dull clunks traveled from the bulkhead, along the rigid structure of the suit, and to her ears, then died as she let go and allowed herself to drift.

  The outer door slid aside as the chronometer hit zero, and she kicked the thrusters to life and shot out of the airlock. A minute later, she switched on her beacon.

  Her attention was focused on eyes-up navigation displays in her visor and artificial sight as she accelerated away from the courier; she barely glimpsed the red-tinged, craggy surface of the small moon rolling beneath her. The courier’s engines fired the instant she was at a safe distance, propelling it precipitously away from her. For a brief, disorienting moment, she had no idea where she was.

  Then the moon swung into view, and she rolled herself about so that her legs were pointing in a rough approximation of “down.” She let herself fall, following the navigation prompt rather than trusting her own instincts. Orbital mechanics was difficult enough to calculate without the view she was diving into acting as a distraction.

  Mok... the ion-bridge flashing... Kukumat and Murukan looming impossibly large nearby... and no stars to be seen, apart from one hanging blood-red in the distance. ...

  For a second she felt very small and insignificant, and momentarily regretted her decision to investigate the signals alone. But the feeling was irrational. She knew outriggers would prove a vital source of information on what had happened in the system, before the arrival of Galine Four and after. She had to approach them on their own terms, not cozy and safe within the courier. In their shoes, she would put her faith in nothing less.

  The surface of the moon approached, and she changed her heading until she was flying through near-vacuum above its mottled surface. The ambient temperature, at 125 degrees kelvin, was higher than expected. The forest of hook-trees, or whatever they were, marched without apparent pattern or function over the disconcertingly close horizon. She was tempted to drop lower and examine one at close quarters, but forced herself to concentrate on her mission. One puzzle at a time.

  Five minutes into her flight, she changed course to avoid flying over another crater but didn’t veer so far away that she couldn’t see into its interior. It truly was a shaft, not a crater, about five meters across; radar pulses failed to return, so she had no way of telling how deep it was. The walls seemed smooth, as though machined, but there was nothing else to suggest that the hole served any purpose. There were no ramps or ladders, no elevator shafts or windows, no doors or platforms; it was just a hole, lipped slightly at the top, with nothing inside it. Nothing that she could see, anyway.

  It took her fifteen minutes to reach the target crater—dubbed Shaft-1 on the map produced by the courier’s sensors—which looked identical to the one she had flown by ten minutes earlier. After circumnavigating the edge of the hole and learning nothing new, and feeling slightly bored at her lack of progress, she decided a flare would be her best option. The next arc was due in twenty minutes; she didn’t want to wait that long.

  Backing away and arming the first of six flares her suit was equipped with, she primed it to ignite in a way that would offset the dull red light cast by Hintubet, then fired it from her suit.

  Moments later, a sustained burst of light came from a point high above her and to her right.

  Finally, some color. In the shaft she could make out gray-brown walls descending into the moon, polished smooth by some unknown process. Nothing stood out: no detail of any kind. Swinging the suit higher to get a better view, she eased herself closer to the edge of the shaft and used scanning algorithms to analyze the view in more detail. Almost immediately, she had a result.

  A segment of the visor formed a separate screen and zoomed closer, revealing a glint of reflected light under the lip of the shaft opposite her. Too small and too far away for her to identify, she quickly tagged the location of the object so she wouldn’t lose it when the flare faded.

  She lifted herself higher still, in order to look into the shaft while she could. The walls seemed to narrow as they fell away into the depths of the moon, but she knew that to be an illusion. She was certain now that the shaft was artificial: nothing naturally formed could descend so perfectly straight. As far as the light reached into the shaft, she could make out no deviation, no variation at all. Only at the very edges of shadow, deep in the moon, did she suspect that something changed, but even then she couldn’t tell if it was an end to the shaft, an opening off it, or just an optical illusion.

  Then the flare flickered and faded, and all was red-tinged darkness again.

  With the gain on the eyes-up display on high, she flew by instruments around the shaft to where she had noticed the glint of light. When her eyes had completely adjusted, she eased herself slowly over the lip of the shaft. Her suit lamps were no substitute for the flare, but the object was barely hidden at all, and she had no trouble catching a second reflection off it. It consisted of a silver device barely larger than her palm, attached to the rocky inside of the shaft.

  Extending a slender probe, she touched it from two meters away, eliciting no response. Moving closer to touch it with her suit glove, she discovered that it was stuck to the wall by little more than a tacky gel, suggesting it wasn’t a permanent fixture. A simple tug pulled it free, exposing instrumentation on the underside. Roche knew what it was immediately: a simple relay designed to confuse anyone listening in the area, and presumably planted there by the outriggers. Instead of being the source of the transmissions, Shaft-1 was just a decoy.

  As such, it was something of an anticlimax. Nevertheless, it did provide tangible evidence that someone was in the area—someone who was transmitting to others and making at least some attempt to remain hidden.

  “Morgan?”

  Haid’s voice over her suit-speakers startled her.

  “Don’t reply unless you have to, but I’m moving to encrypted channel thirty-one in two seconds.”

  The line went dead abruptly, and she shifted her communications channel to the one he had indicated, wondering as she did why he was calling.

  “I know I’m supposed to keep quiet,” he continued, his voice fuzzy from compression, “but I thought you should know that we’re picking up a faint signal from deeper in-system. It’s in th
at code Cane recognized—the Sol Wunderkind command language. I can’t work out what it’s saying, and Disisto says he can’t either. But the weird thing is, it’s being beamed right at us, from roughly where Galine Four was when we left it. I’d say someone’s trying to communicate with someone else out here, and I’d hate to think what they might be saying...”

  Haid’s voice trailed off into silence as a chill swept over Roche.

  Linegar Rufo was a specialist in antiquities. He knew about the Sol Apotheosis Movement. He knew a Sol Wunderkind was loose in the system. He had mentioned that transmissions had been received from near the jovian pair. He hadn’t actually said the transmissions were from survivors of the Wunderkind’s attack. If he had found some reference to the Wunderkind language in a forgotten archive, and if he suspected that the source of the transmissions would understand it...

  Rufo was trying to talk to the Sol Wunderkind. Not only that, but he believed the Wunderkind was hiding somewhere near Mok.

  Roche thrust herself up and out of the crater, alert for any sign of activity on the moon’s surface. There was none, but that didn’t reassure her. If Rufo was right, then she had more to worry about than just a motley bunch of outriggers.

  She vacillated for a moment over whether to return to the courier or not. Haid would know she was still alive, so there was no need to reply to the signal. To return might just place him and the others at greater risk. And they were all at risk, just from being in the area. If the Wunderkind got his hands on another ship...

  That brought her up cold. What would he do with the courier? He had already abandoned it once. Its slow-jump drive was slag, so he couldn’t use it to escape the system. Likewise with the outrigger spines and Galine Four; no vessel in the system had a working slow-jump drive, except the Ana Vereine—and that, she vowed, would be kept well clear until she was absolutely certain it was safe.

  Potentially, then, the Wunderkind wouldn’t want to make himself vulnerable by exposing himself. That didn’t make her feel much safer, though. An attack on a courier would undoubtedly be noticed; an attack on a single person, however, was something else entirely...

  She decided that it would be best if Haid picked her up. That way they could explore the moon from orbit without risking anyone’s life. And if she was right, if the Wunderkind wouldn’t attack the courier itself, they would all be safe—at least until they actually found him.

  She turned the suit around in a slow arc, angling upward. At the same time, she opened the encrypted communications channel.

  “Ameidio, it’s me. Work out a rendezvous. I’m—”

  An ear-splitting squeal cut her short. The channel was swamped by noise, overriding her signal and any Haid might be trying to send. She hunted for a source of the interference, and after a moment realized it was the transmitter she had left behind in the crater.

  Rather than fly back, she armed the suit’s impulse weapon, targeted and fired. The relay was small and the distance increasing, but with the help of onboard systems, the projectile crossed the gap easily, impacting with a short-lived flash of light.

  The interference didn’t cease entirely, but it did ebb enough for her to hear Haid call:

  “Behind you, Morgan! Behind you!”

  * * *

  As long as she lived, she knew she’d never forget her first sight of an outrigger all-suit.

  It loomed over her like a biomechanical starfish with a ribbed halo surrounding it—almost thirty meters across, drooping slightly in the moon’s low gravity, resembling the frills of an angry lizard. Toward the center were dozens of instrumentation spines and jointed waldoes, all directed at her. In the center was nothing but light: a powerful laser dazzling her despite her suit’s protective visor. An ion beam lifted the all-suit above her, its spray of white fire disturbing the moon’s surface in an angry manner.

  She retreated, and it followed. Her sensors registered an incoming transmission, superimposed upon the jamming signal.

  “Identify,” was all it said, its tone coldly artificial.

  She aimed numerous weapons on the laser source. Behind it, instruments made out the shape and location of the central thorax, a pressurized pod large enough to contain a single Human and the equipment it needed to survive for a lifetime in space.

  “Identify yourself,” she replied.

  Movement to one side caught her eye: another all-suit, its extensible antennae unfurling as it approached. It too fired a laser at her location, this one at a slightly different frequency to the other.

  “Identify!”

  Roche’s suit issued a warning as a third laser hit her—this one from farther up. The three combined lasers were threatening the integrity of her faceplate; much more of this and she would have to opaque the helmet, or risk being burned and possibly even blinded.

  “Identify!”

  Roche sighed resignedly. Surrounded by three all-suits, she was hardly in a position to be defiant.

  “Morgan Roche,” she said, “ex-COE Intelligence and commanding officer of the independent vessel Ana Vereine.”

  “The Dato ship?” asked a voice that was hostile but at least Human.

  “By design only. It no longer serves the Military Presidium.”

  “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

  “You should’ve asked yourself that before you asked me anything at all.”

  “Indeed,” chuckled a second voice, a female contralto. “So, why are you here?”

  “I’m looking for survivors.”

  “Why?” The voice of the third outrigger was male and sharp with suspicion.

  “We picked up a distress call.”

  “We didn’t send one.”

  “Well, someone did.” Roche suppressed an urge to snap. “Regardless, I need to know what happened in this system so we can stop it happening elsewhere. You can help me do that.”

  “How very commendable,” said the first voice. “Your superiors must be proud of you.”

  “I told you: I’m independent. I don’t have any superiors.”

  “You come looking for us in a COE Intelligence courier vessel, wearing a COE Intelligence suit, and you expect us to believe that you no longer work for them?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” said Roche. “And really, does it make any difference who I work for?”

  The waldoes on the third all-suit shifted. “I think we should space her,” said the accompanying voice.

  “Private channel, you idiot,” said the second outrigger, all humor gone.

  For a moment the outriggers ignored her, only the slight motion of waldoes and antennae betraying the fact that some sort of interaction was taking place. Clearly the all-suits acted in much the same way as normal bodies for their inhabitants, with a peculiar form of body-language to match. Only the lasers didn’t shift, aimed squarely at Roche through the helmet of her suit.

  After a minute of silence, she opaqued her faceplate and had the suit display the view artificially. Haid was pinging her, sending her a repetitive signal through the interference to let her know he was watching and ready to act if needed. That was reassuring, but she wanted to keep him out of it if possible; she had to earn their trust on her own, without using force.

  The outriggers shifted around her. She tensed, ready to defend herself if attacked. Instead, two of the lasers dimmed, then snapped off. After a few moments, the third did likewise.

  “We’re taking you to a quorum,” said the second outrigger.

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are and kill the interference so I can talk to my crew.”

  “You’re in no position to make any demands,” said the third outrigger.

  “For the last time, Yul,” said the second, “shut up and let me do the talking. She’s here to help us.”

  “I’d like to,” Roche cut in. “Insofar as I can, at least; if you’ll let me.”

  “Exactly. I’m Idil, and this is Yul and Eli.”

  Now the lasers we
re off, Roche could see the all-suits properly. Mil’s was painted entirely in a color that might have been orange but looked pink in the light; Yul’s had four silver bands around its midriff; Eli’s was angular, almost rhombohedral in shape.

  “We’re from Long Span spine. Auditor Byrne says you can talk, but the ship you came here in is not to change its orbit. If it comes near the spines, we’ll retaliate.”

  Roche grunted as the interference faded. She used the same encrypted channel Haid had requested earlier.

  “Ameidio? You there?”

  “Yeah,” came Haid’s voice. “You okay?”

  “Fine. They’re taking me somewhere to negotiate. I don’t want you to do anything else but wait until I come back.”

  “How long?’ he asked.

  She relayed the question to the outriggers.

  “A couple of hours,” Idil said. “Or never. The quorum may decide it doesn’t need your help. And if so, it might not let you return to your ship at all.”

  Roche privately doubted the outriggers’ ability to damage her suit, but wasn’t keen on testing her theory just yet. “Give them three hours, Ameidio, then use your judgment.”

  “Will do.”

  “And if you hear from the Box, tell it to stay away. We don’t want the drive falling into the wrong hands.”

  “I understand,” said Haid. “And should anyone make a move on me, I’ll get the hell out of here, but I’ll try contacting you first. Any idea where they’re taking you?”

  “To one of the spines, I guess. They haven’t said.”

  “Well, I’ll keep the channels open.”

  Roche turned her attention to the outriggers. All three suits were oriented toward her, their antennae spread wide like eyes watching her intently.

  “Okay,” she said, readying her suit to take her up into orbit, toward the spines. “Let’s go.”

  But instead of up, they took her down.