Scouts went into the buildings on both sides of the Cavour offices. If they found any sign of gang activity, they would come out again within ten minutes. No gang activity would see them place a red cloth in the second-floor windows.
Team members entering the square from its various access roads saw two red cloths, and proceeded into the buildings over the next ninety minutes. The regular occupants that were still working under martial law were hustled into a room on the third floor, and held there. Not under arrest, the team leaders assured them, but for their own protection.
In one building, five team members went up into the loft space and quietly cut through the partition wall, clearing a route into the attic above the Cavour office.
Without radio communication – which they knew Roxwolf monitored – the assault sequence was all down to timing. From Chaing initiating the mission, they had ninety minutes to infiltrate the teams into the neighbouring buildings and quarantine their workforces. Fifty minutes to cut through into the attic. A further fifteen minutes to assemble in position; sub-teams in each building behind second-floor balcony windows were ready to launch grapnel ropes and swing across, blasting their way in with grenades, with more sub-teams at the back door to overwhelm any gang guards posted at the rear-alley entrance. Main teams were in the hallway, heavily armed to storm though Cavour’s front entrance.
It was planned down to the last detail, approved by Yaki and the duty assault team captain. And doomed to fail.
*
Roxwolf’s hideaways, of which there were several in Opole, were superbly integrated into their surroundings. In Larncy Square, there were watchers behind the blinds on the fourth floor of the offices, covering the square and the alley behind. Clerks and secretaries in several companies around the square were affiliated with the gangs, with dedicated phone lines into the Cavour office. There were even optical tubes blended discreetly into the architecture, allowing Roxwolf to observe suspicious activity directly.
As the assault team started to infiltrate the adjacent buildings, three separate warnings were triggered before the gang associates moved obligingly to the third-floor quarantine rooms. Thus warned, Roxwolf himself watched the steady arrival of men and women with similar-sized bags. Nobody now was coming out of the neighbouring buildings. A scan around the square revealed new checkpoints had been set up at the far end of the access roads. The already reduced level of government-authorized traffic trundling round the central park was shrinking towards non-existent.
Without warning his underlings (human or Faller) he armed the trips on the demolition charges and opened the secret panel in the sub-basement where he’d lived for the past fortnight. He moved quickly through the dank catacombs that stretched beneath Larncy Square. Retracing the route he’d taken to reach the Cavour offices, he found the narrow service hatch in the wall of a long-abandoned culvert and squeezed through.
A pistol muzzle pressed into the side of his head. Five bright torches came on, leaving him blinking in their dazzling light.
‘Roxwolf, I presume?’ Chaing said cheerfully.
2
Ry Evine didn’t think his heart rate had dropped below a hundred since he arrived on Macule.
Another planet! I’m on another planet – and I got to it through a wormhole!
After they all came tumbling through the wormhole along with the forty-odd machines and cargo pods from HGT54b, he had simply stood there on the cold grainy desert, turning round and round, drinking in the incredible sight.
Actually, the view itself wasn’t so incredible. The terminus had opened in the middle of a brutish metamorphic desolation – all jumbled schistose rocks, some distant worn cliffs. While beneath his feet, the hard-packed granular dirt of the desert rippled away out to the horizon. Colour was minimal, which he found strange, even though there was thankfully more variation that he’d endured on Lukarticar. The ground was contrasting smears of grey with some faint ridges of brown raked in. Above him the thin air produced a sky that was a uniform pale blue, devoid of clouds.
But still . . . an alien world.
Kysandra and Florian stepped through together, followed by another batch of membrane-wrapped machinery blocks that immediately toppled over, dislodging puffs of sand that hadn’t moved in millennia. The terminus with its fuzzy grey edge was creeping across the ground, as a world away its counterpart slid along the full length of HGT54b. Then the last slab-like machine was through, and the eye-twisting dimensional distortion surrounding the terminus underwent an even greater contortion leaving the cylindrical wormhole generator itself standing on the desert, shining weak violet Cherenkov radiation across the sand.
‘I didn’t know they could do that,’ Kysandra said.
‘Inverting the generator location is a standard technique,’ Demitri said. ‘Think of it like turning a sock inside out.’
‘Neat trick.’
Ry finally paid attention to the row of amber icons lined up in his exovision. The air pressure was a third lower than Bienvenido, though that wasn’t an immediate problem for his e-m suit. Background radiation was high. The force field could cope with that, but the e-m suit would have to filter radioactive particles as he breathed in the chilly air. It wasn’t really designed to act as a radiation suit; at the current level his filters would only last a couple of days.
‘What now?’ Florian asked. He seemed somewhat less awed by being on a different world, and a lot more nervy.
‘Now we get some engineeringbots and basic synthesizers up and running,’ Valeri said.
So Ry had to stand around doing nothing while the ANAdroids broke open the crate containing a dozen engineeringbots and began to fuss over the inert forms. It was like being crammed inside HGT54b that first night, with nothing to do except wait. But this time . . . alien world!
Ry went for a short walk – the explorer striding out, making the important first ever human footprints across this new land. There wasn’t much to see or find. The desert was flat enough not to hide anything from sight. Some boulders were scattered about, a few larger than him. Nothing hid behind them. He started circling round, always keeping the glowing wormhole in direct view. After the first twenty minutes, he realized what else was missing. No vegetation – not even desiccated blades of grass or moss. He examined the edges of loose stones, then dug down into the sand a couple of times, trying to find something like lichen or mould. But if there was any, he didn’t recognize it.
But then, Macule had been dead a long time. Radioactive particles were everywhere – in the air, in the ground. And there was very little weather. The ice caps had sucked all the water out of the oceans as they extended their glaciers down to what had previously been this world’s tropical latitudes. After that, the climate became super-stable. It would take a major tectonic event to kick Macule out of its current stasis.
After an hour, he made his way back to the base. The ANAdroids were reassembling the first engineeringbot, the one out of twelve in the crate that needed the least work. A device with a barrel-shaped body one metre high, sprouting all kinds of plyplastic tentacles and spindly sensor antennae. A cable from the wormhole generator’s mass converter was plugged into it, charging the power cells. Three identical engineeringbots lay on the sand beside it, sections of casing removed so their components could be utilized.
As he approached he saw it start up, running through a self-check routine, testing the flexibility of its limbs as if it was in some kind of bizarre yoga class. Once it was ready, it went over to the storage crate it had come from and began to examine the eight remaining bots. Ry blinked in surprise; its tentacles were moving at such a speed they were a blur. The first inert bot’s casing was soon opened, and the tentacles delved inside to continue the technological surgery.
The ANAdroids had moved on to a semiorganic synthesizer. Paula, Florian, and Kysandra were stripping the membrane packaging off a refinery the size of a small car.
‘Are these going to work?’ Ry asked.
‘N
ot all of them,’ Paula told him. ‘But by the time the Viscount left the Commonwealth, our machinery didn’t have many moving parts. They’re not mechanical like Bienvenido’s machines. It’s all field manipulation and electronic processing. The closest thing we have to mechanics is the plyplastic those bots use to manipulate things. So it’s mainly a question of molecular integrity.’
‘We estimate seventy per cent of the equipment in HGT54b is salvageable,’ Demitri said. ‘That will be more than sufficient to construct what we need for the preliminary analysis of Valatare. And the surviving systems should be able to build more new manufacturing systems. This is all we need to begin a Commonwealth-level society.’
‘That and time,’ Kysandra interjected. ‘Which we don’t have.’
‘So when you get a batch of this stuff working, what are you going to build first?’ Ry asked.
‘We’ll start with a simple habitat dome,’ Paula said. ‘That’ll give us a base. The refinery can process silicon direct from the sand, the synthesizer can churn out panels and a framework, and the engineeringbots will assemble it.’
*
He’d been mildly sceptical of her claim, but within an hour there were another three engineeringbots up and running – which was a fascinating exercise of exponential growth to watch as they repaired each other. The ANAdroids had the synthesizer functioning. Within three hours, two-metre hexagonal panels were being produced. The (now five) operational engineeringbots started fitting them together.
Six hours after arriving on Macule, Ry and the others were sitting inside the ten-metre-wide geodesic dome, eating a meal from their packs. A simple filter pump was pressurizing the hemisphere with clean air. Five of the panels were transparent, allowing Ry to see the ANAdroids and eight of the engineeringbots (the full reclaimed complement) working on the rest of HGT54b’s cargo. The sun was already sinking behind the jagged horizon. He was surprised how the sight of it made him sleepy, but then he’d been awake for at least twenty-five hours.
‘Do you think the Faller-seibears set off the second bomb after we left?’ Florian asked as he activated his sleeping bag.
‘Without question,’ Paula told him. ‘They were heading straight for the Viscount, and they only had one purpose.’
‘Anala would have seen it go off,’ Ry said miserably. ‘Or the devastation it caused. But she wouldn’t know we survived.’
‘I certainly hope not,’ Paula said. ‘That’s what coming here was all about. Everyone has to think we’re dead.’
As he was falling asleep, Ry wondered how Anala was doing, if her capsule had made it through re-entry. If the recovery ships had picked her up okay. The kywhale was the biggest thing ever sighted in Bienvenido’s ocean; suppose the Fallers had started eggsuming them? One of those leviathans could swallow the Liberty capsule whole. He closed his eyes, telling himself he had to stop these punishing thoughts.
*
When he woke up several hours after dawn, the scene through the transparent panels was completely different. The engineeringbots along with the ANAdroids had assembled another three domes – one considerably larger than the rest, which held the wormhole generator. Two engineeringbots were putting up a fourth, the largest yet. Five synthesizers and three refineries were up and running.
‘We need more raw materials,’ Paula said as they ate breakfast. ‘The mineral content round here isn’t particularly varied, and we really need a source of hydrocarbons.’
‘Valatare?’ Ry suggested. ‘I thought that’s what the floaters were for, to supply Commonwealth industrial systems with the hydrocarbon gas in a gas giant’s atmosphere.’
‘That’s a bit extreme for a first step,’ Paula said. ‘When we do open the wormhole to Valatare, I want to be sending through a flock of sensor satellites to scan it properly.’
‘Water would also be useful,’ Valeri said. ‘There is a quantity bound up as ice particles in the desert sand, but melting it, then filtering it out, is a somewhat crude operation. Locating a frozen lake or stream would be preferable.’
‘The neumanetics have produced some additional sensor systems for you two,’ Paula said, handing Ry a sphere of silver-white plyplastic the size of his head. A second was given to Florian.
Just as Ry was about to ask ‘What’s this?’ the sphere’s micronet linked to his u-shadow. Function graphics ran along his exovision. ‘A spacesuit? Wonderful.’
The sphere unfurled like a chrysalis into a slithery overall that looked a lot tougher than Ry’s original e-m suit. He put it on, and waited for it to contract round his limbs and torso. The hood which crept round his head was completely transparent. Monitor icons lit up green.
They trooped through the cylindrical airlock and Ry began to appreciate the real potential of the Commonwealth manufacturing machines. Four quad-karts were waiting for them, little more than a saddle and handlebars suspended on black composite struts between four thick tyres with electric axle motors. But they looked quite tough enough to handle the rugged desert terrain.
Ry slung a leg over the saddle, unable to keep the grin from his face.
‘You can use your u-shadow to accelerate and brake,’ Demitri said, ‘but steering is purely manual. And we don’t have skill memory inserts for driving, so take it easy out there.’
‘Got it.’ Ry was rather disappointed there was no manual throttle on the handlebars. ‘I’ll manage.’ He pointed at the low cliffs, eager to see a different aspect of Macule, however trivial. ‘I’ll take north.’
‘Okay,’ Paula said. ‘I’ll go east. Florian, you take south, Kysandra, west. Remember, this is just a scout round for material. If the ground gets difficult, don’t try and get through, just turn aside and scan a different area.’
Ry wondered if Florian also thought the Commonwealth woman to be very schoolmarm-ish. They way Paula spoke from some unassailable height of knowledge, how she expected everyone to do as she said – even Kysandra had stopped questioning her. Part of being an excellent officer was adopting a tone of authority; he’d learned that well enough in the regiment. He wondered if he should start questioning things, but her attempt to find some kind of benign alien armada imprisoned in a gas giant was so far beyond his comprehension he knew he’d just wind up looking foolish, and then do exactly as he’d been told.
Ego doesn’t matter. I’m on another planet. And if everything goes right, I might even see Valatare close up – and possibly save Bienvenido, too.
He carefully ordered the quad-kart to accelerate and practised the steering, braking, turning left and right. In a minute he was confident enough to announce he was ready.
The four of them sped off from the base. The sensors dotted across Ry’s spacesuit and the quad-kart’s struts scanned a wide swathe of ground as he went, recording the mineral composition. It was mostly silicates with some traces of iron, but he began seeing veins of ice – presumably underground streams from a time before the nuclear winter.
Avoiding stones and boulders took up a lot of concentration. The cliffs were about six or seven kilometres from the domes, but he didn’t risk throttling the quad-kart up past fifteen kph, and often didn’t go more than five or six if the ground was particularly difficult. He certainly couldn’t take a straight path.
‘You know what I think?’ Florian asked through the general link. ‘I think this is the bottom of an old ocean. I mean, there is nothing here, no signs of buildings or trees, not even rubble. And that cliff Ry’s heading for, that could be the shoreline.’
‘We’ve driven three kilometres,’ Paula said. ‘The odds of finding ruins or artefacts in that distance are minuscule. Based on particle decay, the ANAdroids estimate the natives had their nuclear war over thirty-five thousand years ago. The chance of any structures remaining is minimal. The war, the climate shift, entropy – these are not our friends.’
‘Viscount survived three thousand years in the cold,’ Florian said, ‘and that was just one ship. Something of this civilization must be here.’
; ‘It will be, but badly decayed to the point it may be unrecognizable. And remember, you shouldn’t judge the previous civilization by human standards. Some aliens the Commonwealth encountered are very alien indeed. And not everyone goes down the industrial–mechanical route we took. There are some who have very biological-oriented societies – they literally grow their own houses and implements. In which case there will be nothing left but dust.’
‘It would be difficult to grow nukes, wouldn’t it?’ Ry asked. ‘Good point,’ Paula admitted. ‘They certainly had machines somewhere.’
‘We should have brought some ge-eagles with us,’ Kysandra said. ‘They’d have scanned half this desert by now.’
‘If we don’t find what we want, we’ll manufacture some,’ Paula said.
Ry was so intent on evading all the natural obstacles littering the desert that he didn’t notice the slim indentations until the quad-kart had been driving over them for twenty metres. The sensors weren’t reporting anything interesting, so it took him a while to realize what he was seeing. The quad-kart braked sharply at his command.
‘Er, I’ve got something here,’ he announced over the general link. The others accessed his vision feed. The indentations were slim rectangles about seventy-five centimetres long and ten wide, always running in two sets twenty centimetres apart. They were everywhere – curving round in wide spirals, running over themselves so often it was impossible to follow a continuous line. Some were worn down and barely recognizable, while others were sharply defined.
‘They look like caterpillar tracks,’ Kysandra said.
Ry climbed off the quad-kart and squatted down to study the marks. They had the same temperature as the rest of the desert. When he prodded one of them with a finger, it was just as solid as the frozen sand it’d been pressed into. ‘I don’t think these are thirty-five thousand years old,’ he said uneasily. ‘Not even the older ones.’ His gaze was drawn to the cliff, now just a kilometre away. It wasn’t high, maybe seventy metres, its crinkled face a dull grey-brown with some odd white marbling running in jagged patterns at steep angles.
Night Without Stars (Chronicle of the Fallers Book 2) Page 68
