by Patty Jansen
Sheydu on the other side of me was already doing that, looking at satellite images of the area. Evi had opened his pack and had taken out a heavy box that I’d not been sure he’d possessed before. It folded out like a concertina into a worktable with a tiny screen which told him which parts to take out of the storage compartment in which order.
Damn it. I’d thought that the only weapons we had taken were our personal guns, and we had no explosives or any of Sheydu’s usual gear, but I’d been wrong. This was some very nifty equipment, and someone had probably passed it to us recently. Like last night, when they went to buy dinner?
I didn’t want to know.
Ynggi watched with big eyes. He had become very handy with equipment and I was of a mind to send him to do some training that cultivated that part of him. In the hands of a Pengali, a simple tool could become a magical item. Pengali had extra-ordinary spatial awareness. It was not for nothing that a number of young urban Pengali had found outstanding success in the Pilots Guild, and that they usually flew the largest of ships.
Soon, we came to a quieter part of the city where there were parks and trees and people lived in nice houses that looked quite pleasant.
We left the city via a six-lane road that was not terribly busy. A special lane was reserved for driverless vehicles like ours, and another lane was dedicated to driverless trucks. While those lanes were well-maintained, because the vehicles needed beacons at regular intervals, the remaining part of the road was not. Traffic barriers had rusted and collapsed. The road surface was rough. The few vehicles that used this lane were owned by the police, military or other services.
We turned off this road to a smaller two-lane road that meandered between hills and farms and the occasional cluster of houses. It was so peaceful that you would never guess that this part of the world had been wracked by conflict for many years.
It was just after midday that the vehicle warned us that we were getting close to the boundary of its operating capability, but we were now almost at our destination.
Sheydu and Reida had been keeping an eye on potential followers for a while.
Evi had completed his construction: some kind of explosive device with a display screen and sensors. It sat on the floor at our feet.
I knew better than to ask dumb questions about whether accidentally kicking it would set it off, but by the same token, kept my feet as far away from the device as I could.
I was distinctly aware of the presence of my gun under my jacket. We might have to use all this stuff soon. Veyada said that the best weapons were those you never had to use, and I agreed with him. This expedition was coming to a pointy end. The whole thing was my stupid idea, although I suspected that Asto—and Asto’s military—very much supported it.
I was even wondering whether Asto had a particular interest in this part of the world. I’d never seen or suspected the presence of so many military people. Was this normal? Did they know something we didn’t? Was it because this part of the world was not a member of Nations of Earth but still had an involvement in space travel?
The bubble car announced a warning that the signal from its base was too weak and it was going to put itself in “preservation mode”. It trundled off the road into a bush and stopped there, the display flashing a red warning.
We got out and pushed the vehicle further off the road, behind a copse of trees. The weather had turned foul, with wind driving sheets of drizzle across the fields.
We got back into the dry cabin to eat some of our supplies. Reida showed us where we were on the map. The depot was across a low hill to our right. We would have to walk a short distance across the fields. He’d spotted no evidence of anyone following us.
We needed to wait until later in the afternoon when it was about to go dark.
Right now, the only enemy we had was the terrible weather, and if we waited, we’d not only have the cover of darkness, but the rain might clear up, right?
Wrong.
It got worse.
The rain lashed against the windows of the cabin.
Only very few vehicles came past, most of them supply trucks without a driver. You could tell when one was about to come over the hill, because the beacon on the side of the road would flash.
One advantage of the truly atrocious weather was that it got dark even earlier than we had planned. But, being from Asto and a warm climate, we were not used to cold, driving rain. In fact, I barely remembered it from my youth in New Zealand.
We got dressed up as warmly as we could. Evi looked like a big bear with his jacket and woolly beanie. Sheydu resembled a scarecrow, since she had covered all her equipment in loose garbage bags to protect it from the rain.
Both Deyu’s and Reida’s clothing was probably inadequate, and we’d find out about it soon enough when they got wet and cold. This was really the worst kind of weather for a Coldi person to operate.
We left the vehicle, crossed the road, and walked along a little agricultural road that led between the fields. The path grew muddy very quickly. Rivulets of water trickled down the rutted tracks where farm vehicles had passed.
When we came over the crest of the hill, our destination came into view, a couple of blocky buildings surrounded by a high fence.
It looked kind of… unimpressive. This was where the drone fragment was held? It looked like a bunch of storage sheds.
The data Reida had received from the military had better be right about this.
The farm road met another path at a t-intersection. We needed to go straight ahead, so we climbed the fence and made our way down through the soppy grass. We huddled under a sheet held up by Evi.
Reida’s scan showed that there was one gate in and out of the compound, and that a couple of communication towers probably held security cameras. We needed to avoid those.
It was time for the invisibility net to come out again.
Chapter Thirty
Sheydu pulled the net out of her pack and gave it, and the belt with the battery box, to Evi. He plugged it in and threw the net over all of us.
Reida cut through the fence until the hole was big enough for all of us to crawl through. Then he tied the sections of the fence back together with a few wire loops so the breach would not be immediately obvious.
So far, so good.
We walked unchallenged to the first of the dark sheds. The wind and flapping bushes kept triggering a motion-sensored light ahead. When it came on, the pool of light showed a concreted yard with yellow lines and a row of military vehicles. Some were ordinary trucks, others were work vehicles with scoops and caterpillar wheels. One of them sat on blocks of concrete instead of wheels. This looked like a place where those trucks were maintained.
We stopped under the overhang of an awning.
The net might stop us from being easily seen, but it didn’t stop the rain. Water ran along the strands and into my hair and from there into the collar of my jacket. I was getting wet and cold and could only imagine what the others felt like.
Reida turned on the screen to re-orient himself. The pale light from the device showed his face glistening with water.
He pointed to a big shed across from where we stood.
Over there?
Well, for one, I’d be very glad to get out of the rain.
Until now, we’d stuck to the shadows close to the buildings, but we now had to cross a fairly large open space.
We came into view of a well-lit guard station a bit further down near the entrance of the compound. People were walking around behind the windows, seemingly oblivious to our presence.
But the upper part of the compound lay deserted. Even so, I doubted we had much time before someone alerted the guards that there was a big hole in their perimeter fence.
We arrived at the shed, which had a large door with a smaller door to the side. The large door was probably operated electronically, but the smaller door had an entry
panel.
Reida made short work of unlocking it. He was really getting very good at this. I didn’t think there were many locks he couldn’t open.
As soon as Reida stepped inside, bright lighting came on.
Ouch. That was painful to my eyes.
Evi pulled the door shut behind us.
We had entered a freight delivery dock. There was an office to the side, and ahead the dark maw of the main hall opened up.
There was no automatic light in this part. We had to use our own lights.
The hall was huge and full of banks of equipment. A broad aisle led through the middle.
Reida led the way, directing his light in between the dark blocky and sometimes spindly, shapes of machines. If I’d had to guess, I would have said they were machines for scans, possibly medical. Each piece sat in its own demarcated lot surrounded by yellow painted lines. Was this perhaps a storage room for these things? It looked like it. None of the equipment showed signs of recent use. There was no sound, no blinking lights.
Sheydu, next to me, had inserted her hand under her jacket, clutching her gun underneath. Her gaze roamed the hall, even if it was too dark for her to see anything.
Evi behind us, who had much better night vision, appeared more relaxed.
We came to an almost empty lot where an object lay on a green sheet on the floor.
My heart jumped. This was the same sheet I’d seen in the news clip, wasn’t it?
“This is it, right?” I asked Reida.
“I’m pretty sure.”
Celia Braddock’s evidence consisted of a tangled mess of metal and bent panels, exposed electronics and wiring. I knew it was the same thing by how the electronics boards were attached to the inside of the hull, as my team had noticed. This made the rocket unsuitable for atmosphere re-entry operations because anything attached to the hull would melt. That meant it was either a short-range vehicle or it was considered disposable, and both options went against anything Asto or gamra operatives would do.
Sheydu, Reida and Deyu got to their knees and crawled around the heap of twisted metal and electronics, taking pictures.
They agreed that this had very little to do with gamra technology.
It didn’t look Aghyrian either. And from what I’d seen of the Tamer Collective, this differed greatly from their technology.
I let my team do their work.
No one spoke. I kept a lookout as we had agreed.
Sheydu and the others used their scanners to capture images of the chips and other inner workings of the device. I took several pictures from different angles while I watched them work.
Damn. This looked Earth-produced, some sort of Pretoria Cartel thing. If so, Minke Kluysters had lied to us when he said that the Tamer Collective couldn’t develop this kind of technology.
But why the attacks? Did the Cartel have a disagreement with New York? Why the attacks on other cities, on Los Angeles, which was in Mexico, on Athens or other countries?
There seemed no political reasoning behind it.
While I stood guard and watched the others work, I was getting progress reports from them. Apparently some parts originated from various gamra worlds.
What the hell?
Reida sent me an enlarged image showing a little transparent part with a piece of circuit board inside that I recognised. I didn’t need to see the diagnostic text overlaid by the program Reida used to identify the part. We used those things in Barresh. They could be programmed with simple routines to perform automatic actions. These things were made in Damarq.
Well…
There was also another part that looked familiar, because it was a type of connector that could be found in almost every piece of electronics that came from Asto.
Who the hell would mix up Asto-made and Damarcian parts?
He sent me another image of a different part, a little tube-shaped thing with a connector on one end. The overlaid diagnostic text said: source unknown.
Deyu and Reida broke into a command module that still appeared to be intact, and downloaded a lot of code.
Evi had taken charge of swabbing the surface down for micro elements that could help us determine where the thing had originated.
Then Deyu said, “Have a look at this.”
Her voice was soft, but it sounded loud in the intense silence.
She showed us her screen, which displayed two images side by side of identical electronic parts.
“What about it?” Sheydu asked.
“They’re the same,” Evi said.
“Yes, they’re the same,” Deyu said. “These are not the only parts that are the same.” She brought up another pair, and then another and another. All identical parts.
“These on the left are parts from this rocket here. The corresponding ones on the right are parts I scanned during our visit to the old factory.”
What the….
Like what the actual fuck?
“These are the same people,” I said, my voice hollow. “The missing members of the Southern California Aerospace Corps, or whatever they call themselves now.”
We looked at each other.
“Who even are these people?” asked Deyu.
“They’re are humans, they’re from Earth, and they are likely to be very well organised as a military corps. They all seem to have fooled us into thinking that they disappeared. The craft in the forest in Barresh is not historic. These people disappeared fifty years ago, because they wanted to disappear. Of course they didn’t disappear because someone pulled their funding and they were disbanded and spread out over other scientific organisations. They disappeared because they formed their own militia. And if I’m very honest with myself, I could have known because I might have watched them do it. They were highly trained space scientists and machine operators. Of course they got jobs in space, working for Nations of Earth, which they despised. I watched them plan to kill Chief Delegate Akhtari and flee to a new world when I was a boy. I assumed that because we defeated them, nothing of the sort was ever successful for them. But they could have had other plans, other ships—which they built in the facility we visited. Those ships could have gone to worlds we didn’t know about. If they turned up in Barresh, that’s likely to mean that they tricked the Exchange and if they did it once, they will have done it other times and have hidden in other places. And Earth didn’t know of these worlds because they had no access to the Exchange and all travel went through natural anpar lines. No one who cared would have been able to track where they went.”
“Wait—that’s crazy,” Reida said. “How can we not have known about this? Where are they, if they are not anywhere we can trace them?”
Sheydu snorted. “The universe is an enormous place. You can only find things in space if you have an idea where to look, or if you have a lot of people and a lot of patience.”
I said, “There have been some records of unknown visitors buying things through the Pengali.”
“But we know they were rogue Traders from Asto,” Reida said. “That’s why the Thousand Islands tribe all speak better Coldi than keihu.”
Ynggi was nodding.
“Those, too, but there have always been rumours of other visitors.” Even, I realised with a shock, from within the Pretoria Cartel who had considered these mysterious visitors dangerous. Abri had told me that Robert Davidson had spoken of these people and warned his own people not to stray too far.
And I had assumed that he had been talking about Pengali from the Misty Forest tribe, but although they’d obviously received help to build their modern forest-based technology, they had never come across to me as competent military operators. Pengali fights played out in a gathering of tribes around a set of betanka drums.
After our trip to the Thousand Islands tribe and our discovery of the old SCAC ship, the Pengali tribes were now negotiating.
Well…
Well
, that upended a few assumptions.
“But what are these people doing here, attacking their own country of origin?” Ynggi asked. “Unless I misunderstand.”
“No, you got it right. Their country kind of got the rough end of the stick when Nations of Earth was formed. I’m thinking they want their country back, they maybe want their entire planet back.”
A cold shiver went over my back as I said that, not helped by the wetness of the collar of my jacket.
And I thought of that ship that was coming from the outer reaches of the solar system, that Nations of Earth, the Athens Exchange and the Asto military had all tried—and failed—to communicate with.
What was the bet that this had something to do with that ship? A re-activation of satellites left in orbit to carry out pre-programmed attacks as a warning shot across the bow?
It was not as if we hadn’t seen any of that type of behaviour before.
We were looking at each other by the glow of our readers.
I could see the temptation hovering in their eyes to just say that this was nothing to do with us and that we should let humanity stew in its own mess. Sheydu would want me to say that. She had always been lukewarm about the idea of Earth joining gamra and that feeling had become stronger after Dekker had been voted in as president.
But this did have something to do with us, absolutely, since we had pushed for Earth to become part of gamra, and they had voted in favour.
But from gamra’s perspective, we had just imported a massive problem, the likes of which gamra had never seen.
Namely: a gamra entity was under hostile attack from another entity. The gamra entity being Nations of Earth, unwilling as they were right now to communicate with us. The other entity… I wasn’t sure. Was America Free State in contact with the SCAC about these actions? Were they secretly part of a SCAC pact?
And what did Celia Braddock know about this? If Atlantia had known, why accuse gamra? If SCAC was friendly with Atlantia, why would New York have been the most heavily affected population centre? Or was there a randomness to the attacks caused by the age of the technology and pre-programming done fifty years ago?
