Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  "I'm not sure," Strindberg told her. "He contacted me about ..."

  "Never mind," Alexandria snapped. "Get rid of him. I do not want a UN cop running around the base. He cannot have access to an Orion ship or personnel. There are too many loose tongues as it is. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Alexandria cut the connection before Strindberg could think of something else to say. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Greg should be here, her inner voice told her. It would be easier if he was, but then no one would be watching those children on the board. She switched her comm to Kirkendorf's channel.

  "Mister Kirkendorf, I'm heading your way now."

  "Copy that."

  The security chief had messaged her almost two hours ago, explaining that they found something she should see. Strindberg had called just as she was stepping into the ship. She waited for the Vanguard men to move past her and then headed for the corridor. As she took careful steps her mind wrestled with the survey data that said what she was seeing around her was over two-thousand years old yet intrinsically familiar. The metal was titanium, the corridors and cabins were shaped for ... humans. Even the painted labels on hatches— though she couldn't read them— seemed familiar. Intensive scans had determined that, yes, it was a thruster assembly that titled downward directly behind her, and she knew that once they gained access to that section of the ship they would find an Engineering deck and power plant ... of some kind.

  A string of lights lay on the deck at one edge of the corridor, casting her shadow on the opposite bulkhead. She passed what Kirkendorf had said was a machine shop, stripped bare by his men, the only thing remaining was a central table, bolted to the deck with familiar hexagonal nuts the size of her fist. Another ten meters and there was an obvious equipment locker, open and empty— but there was the nozzle and control valve for an oxygen tank set in the bulkhead— it couldn't be anything else.

  The corridor dipped and twisted to her right, there was a rumpled bulge on one bulkhead— crash damage, Ganymede's ice and rock pressing against the hull. She slipped but caught herself against the bulkhead, something pulling in her left side. Gritting her teeth in pain she went on. By the time she reached the cabin that Kirkendorf was using as his 'command post' she was sweating.

  Greg's security chief was leaning over a scattering of tablets on a table like the one in the machine shop. The bulkheads were lined with metal cabinets and whatever they may have contained before they now held Apex equipment and tools. An emergency airlock and bubble were standing in one corner, and through the bubble's thick plastic Alexandria could see a rack of vac-suits and helmets.

  "Alright," she said. "What am I here for?"

  Kirkendorf looked up from one of the tablets he was studying, then said, "Come take a look." The tablet's screen showed a rough map of corridors and cabins. It had been drawn with a stylus and notes were scrawled on it.

  "These are severely damaged sections," he told her, pointing to black areas on the map. Some corridors just ended. "We've managed to work around one of them, and this is what we found." He moved the map and enlarged a section of the grid. "This is a medical facility." The space looked big, encompassing both sides of a central corridor. "It's difficult to reach, but there's something there you should see."

  "I'm really not a surprises kind of girl, Chief," she told him. "Why don't you just tell me what it is?"

  His expression was grim behind the helmet faceplate. "I understand, ma'am, but it's better if you see it, see ... them."

  Alexandria's eyebrows arched ... them. She licked her lips. "Okay, lead the way."

  They passed several open hatches that revealed empty cabins where Kirkendorf's men had already been. One with narrow metal bunks and a pile of frozen blankets, a galley that looked as though a tornado had went through it, a cabin with metal pipes and valves and dark patches on the deck. In a cabin filled with frost covered screens they were pulling terminals from the deck with crowbars and power tools.

  Kirkendorf led her to the end of the corridor, and instead of a hatch there was a hole in the deck with light coming up from it. She realized it was a shaft, for a lift or elevator. The first few rungs of a ladder poked up from below. At the edge she stood with him and looked down. On the deck below a light-plant was propped up awkwardly on a pile of twisted metal. There was evidence of blow torch cutting, but it was old, the blackened metal edges covered in a layer of ice. Someone had cleared a path at the base of the ladder.

  "That was already here," Kirkendorf said, pointing to the ladder. "I don't trust it. We'll use these." He indicated thin cables running through pulleys that were bolted to the top edge of the shaft where it met the corridor. Attaching the coupling from the cable to the connector on the chest of her vac-suit he pulled it tight and told her to turn around, then as she backed off the edge he began to lower her. It was less than five meters and she weighed less than ten kilos on Ganymede, but when her magboots touched the deck her heart was beating a little faster.

  Kirkendorf came down a minute later, working the pulley cable himself. He uncoupled the lines from their suits and they started down the corridor. They walked for thirty meters, and then a wall of rock and ice came out of the bulkhead, ending the corridor. The string of lights was gone here, and Alexandria played her helmet light across the frozen screen and twisted metal.

  "You can see where they tried to seal it," Kirkendorf told her, pointing to the torn bulkhead. There was a thick, green bulge, forming a line under the layer of ice where the rock met metal. Sealant, she realized. "That's one of things that bothered me about this place."

  "What?" She asked.

  "Until today we hadn't found any bodies."

  That had been strange, but a question they had no answer for, until today, she guessed. Kirkendorf played his light across the rock, moving left and down— there was an opening, a crawl space that had been hidden in the shadows and angles of the rock and ice.

  "Gamit," Kirkendorf suddenly said. "We're at the rock, come assist Misses Reinhardt through."

  A moment later Gamit responded across the channel, "Copy that. I'm close."

  "That space goes all the way through, about ten meters," Kirkendorf told her. "You'll have to go on your hands and knees, and it's slippery. We'll wait for Gamit, he'll help you out on the other side."

  Alexandria winced from the pain in her neck as she bent down to shine her light into the crawl space. The ice had been scraped away, forming ridges on the metal deck, but as Kirkendorf said it would still be slippery.

  "I'm ready, Chief," Gamit's voice said in her helmet speakers.

  Alexandria eased to her knees and stuck her head inside the crawl space.

  "Misses Reinhardt is coming through," Kirkendorf said. "I'll be behind her."

  She couldn't remember the last time she was on her hands and knees ... maybe in the garden in the backyard. God, that seemed like a lifetime ago, and her family was so far away. The crawl space was a dark tunnel of ice and rock with the metal deck under her. It blotted out the bigger picture in her mind, and brought her thoughts to Adam and Jason, and even her biddy mother. Jason was taking what she had thought was a mild interest in journalism seriously and was researching colleges. She had refrained from pushing her preferences on him, offering instead things to look for in a good curriculum and opportunities to network. And now he has a girlfriend that I've only seen on a handcomm. She was asking herself why she was here, on Ganymede, thinking that the bigger picture wasn't the right picture, when her helmet light shone on a pair of magboots a few meters ahead.

  A vac-suited Vanguard officer— Gamit she assumed— helped her up from the deck.

  "This section took a lot of damage, ma'am," Gamit said. "But it's clear further down toward Medical."

  Alexandria looked around, the bulkhead was twisted and buckled for the next twenty meters. In places the deck was ruptured and rock pushed up through the ice coated metal plates. Kirkendorf came through the crawl space and stood
up beside them. "Alright," he said. "Ready?" When she said yes he told Gamit to lead the way.

  "I have a communications tech, the closest thing I have to a tech, down here with Gamit looking over the equipment, seeing what we can take after we clear the corridor," Kirkendorf said.

  She slipped more than once on the uneven surface, but Kirkendorf caught her each time. There was a sense that his hand was right behind her back while she walked, her own hand sliding along the bulkhead to keep her steady. She was winded by the time the corridor leveled out. Gamit led them to an open hatch, he turned briefly to look at her before stepping inside.

  "This whole section appears to be the ship's medical facilities, or hospital," Kirkendorf said, as she turned to the hatch and stepped across the threshold. He kept talking, but she stopped listening as her light rolled across the bodies in the cabin. Against the bulkhead to her left there was a stack of bodies, piled up like firewood, gray, shriveled, and frozen. A few were in vac-suits. Across from them were several low cots, with bodies on them, the blankets covered with frost and only their heads— with hair— still showing. IVs were in two of them, hanging from poles beside the cots.

  Alexandria swallowed.

  "As you can see," Kirkendorf said. "This is not an alien ship."

  She stepped further inside, turning to the human corpses to her left. They were wearing uniforms with patches and insignias and more of the strange writing.

  "What is that," she asked, pointing to a metallic device on the arm of one of the corpses.

  Gamit stepped over. "That? It's a cybernetic modification, of some kind. Ann here, that's what I call her, has had most of her arm replaced. The bone is artificial and there's a network of threads from the device running up her shoulder and down to her fingers. You can see them with a medical scanner." He bent down, looking at Ann closer, then added, "Many of them have these modifications, seem pretty extensive. Legs, spines, a couple with cranial implants."

  "Many? There's more?" She asked.

  "At least three more cabins full of them," Gamit replied. "There's even a morgue, it's crammed with bodies. But here's the interesting part ..." He pointed to Ann's head. "The shape of her head, it's rounder. It's like that for all of them, and on average they're taller than we are, with thinner bones."

  Alexandria realized she was staring, wide eyed, at Ann. Blinking she ran her light over the rest of the corpses. There were dark stains on many of their uniforms, one was missing an arm, another with a sunken face, bandages were wrapped around the neck of the body beside that one. Victims of the crash. How logical and reasonable it all seemed, when the whole thing was unreasonable. She took in the details, her mind trying to rationalize empirical survey data against what she was seeing. How can there be twenty-two hundred year old humans here?

  "I need this whole crater rescanned, deeper radiometics, carbon testing ..." she said out loud.

  Kirkendorf shifted. "We don't have the equipment for that, ma'am."

  "I know," she replied, mild, distant. She would have the right kind of equipment here, if not for those blasted nosy miners. This is too soon. "And we don't have the time." She turned to Gamit. "Can you find out how old these corpses are?"

  His eyebrow cocked for a moment and he said slowly, "I can make some educated guesses. Ann here was probably about thirty-five, but with the changes in physiology ..."

  "No," she said. "I mean their absolute age. The ice in the crater was melted and reformed between twenty-two to twenty-five hundred years ago. Are the corpses that old?"

  "Ahh, ma'am, I'm just a former corpsman turned security wonk. That's above my pay grade."

  Alexandria squeezed her eyes shut for a second and took a breath. Being upright for so long was beginning to take its toll. She cursed under her breath. There was no short term solution here. The important thing was to be ready for Shultz's team when they arrived. They wouldn't have a lot of time to explore and scavenge the ship for whatever they thought might be useful, she needed to do that for them.

  "Alright," she said. "This is sidetracking us. Regardless of what we're dealing with, aliens or time travelers, we need to stay on task and get as much equipment to the top as we can. For now, we leave this mystery behind."

  32 - Jung

  "This is Connie Sawyer, and I'll be right back with more on the possible alien threat, on Ganymede."

  From his rack, in the cabin that he shared with Desmond and Armand aboard the courier, William Jung watched newsfeeds on his handcomm. He flipped to the next channel.

  "... live outside Apex headquarters in New York City now. As you can see UNSEC vans are parked on the curb, and there are guards at the entrance performing retinal scans. The interesting thing is that Charles Rathbone, Apex's Media Representative has denied claims that something was found on Ganymede. According to him, it's business as usual, and UNSEC is just flexing its muscle by conducting a random investigation of business practices."

  Off camera, from the station the anchor started asked questions.

  "John ... John, have you been able to contact UNSEC authorities there in New York? What did they have to say?"

  On camera the reporter, John, frowned and shook his head. "Unfortunately Captain Ellis, the precinct's Superintendent, was not available for comment and no statements have been issued from his office."

  It appeared that the sabotage at the Apex plant on the Moon and the explosion of Harmony dome was old news. Jung closed the newsfeed and sat up, putting the handcomm in the pocket of the utility coveralls he had taken to wearing during the trip from Mars. They were more practical in this environment, and Gerhard hadn't given him a lot of time to pack. His selection of clothes was limited.

  Watching newsfeeds was a practice of politicians, and that's how he spent most of his time aboard the courier. That, and working on what long-distance bureaucracy he could using his handcomm and the terminal crammed between the racks against the cabin's rear bulkhead. Pulling on his magboots he stood and took four slow, clunky steps to the hatch. Desmond and Armand, and even Susan had gotten used to the microgravity and floated, pulling themselves along the ship most of the time, but he preferred the more dignified method of walking.

  Opening the hatch he stepped out into the corridor, and immediately heard the sound of the exercise machine. He turned in its direction. Compton's 'observer', the woman sergeant, was using it. Rivulets of sweat ran down her neck and shoulders as she pulled on the restraining levers and pumped her legs on the machine's peddles. Sometimes she wore a leg brace, from an injury sustained at Cydonia Depot, but she didn't have it on today. She looked his way, took a hard breath, and then unstrapped from the machine. Despite the exalted classification of 'state' courier, the small ship didn't have a dedicated gym, just the single exercise machine that unfolded from the bulkhead and blocked the corridor when in use. The sergeant's eyes fixed on him for a moment before she nodded and hit the release for the exercise machine and pushed it back into the bulkhead. Then she moved out of his way. It was easy to see the suspicion in her eyes. She was either a bad poker player, or didn't care to hide it. In either case, while she was always professional, Jung could tell that she didn't like him, and by extension he knew that meant Gerhard as well. He nodded in return and eased past her, she pulling herself by handholds on the bulkhead, and he walking, his magboots clicking on the deck.

  As he continued on down the corridor, Jung wondered if her dislike of him, or more accurately the suspicion he saw in her eyes, was because of something she discovered at Cydonia, during the ambush that had been designed to capture one of the FMN cells. Agreeing to Compton's plan and letting him set the bait in the Government communication systems that would draw out a cell and expose them at the depot had been a risk that could have exposed him, and Gerhard as well. But, it had been a necessary one. Refusing Compton's plan would have made the Colonel suspicious, and that too could have led to exposing their ties to the FMN. As it was, the ambush had proved disastrous, killing some of Compton's soldiers, and
several of the FMN cell members. He refused to think of them as terrorists, because they were, in reality, a resistance. Though, the winning side in this conflict, between Mars and Modi's UN, would get to choose whichever label they wanted.

  That day, when Compton had delivered his after action report of the ambush, he and Gerhard had half expected to be arrested— thinking that the Colonel was building up to that point as he talked, but that was not the case. They had no leads, and as the weeks drew out and interviews were conducted with the family and friends of the cell members that were killed during the ambush still nothing had happened, at least to them. Compton became a subject of the media, most of it not good. There was talk of a court-martial.

  Yet, the sergeant's eyes stayed with Jung. He could feel them on the back of his neck as he walked to the galley hatch and opened it.

  Inside, the three scientists were around the small table, sipping coffee from boxes. Susan shared a cabin with the sergeant. She hadn't said anything about it, but he wondered what the atmosphere was like in there. Did the sergeant's suspicious looks extend to the science team?

  "Hey, Chief," Susan said, raising her coffee to him. "Come on in, and pull up a seat, or just float if you like. Frank said we have time for coffee before maneuvering for orbit."

  Frank had sent him the same message from the Flight deck. He could use the coffee, and hoped there would be time to pee before the crushing gravity of flipping and braking flattened his bladder.

  "Thank you, I believe I will," he said, and Armand turned to the counter and pulled a coffee out of the cabinet and put it in the heater. They made space for him at the table and he moved in between Desmond and Susan.

  "So, what'd you think we'll find down there?" Susan asked him. "You think it's a ship?"

  "I don't know any more than you do," he said, frankly. There had been no further communication from Reinhardt, or Gerhard, on the matter. He had watched her message a few times on the long trip, and while he didn't think Apex's CEO would make this kind of offer on a lark, he couldn't glean anything from her expression or words that wasn't obvious. She was tired, in pain, and whatever she had found she believed it would help Mars ... and herself. There was no mistaking that, she was helping herself.