by J. N. Chaney
“Something wrong?” Leira asked.
Conover glanced up the steep slope he’d just descended. “Not sure. I just walked around up top there, looking around…you know, looking around.”
Dash nodded. Conover could see tech and aspects of it no one else could, thanks to his ocular implants. “Did you see anything? You know, see anything?”
“Nope. Just rocks and dirt.”
Leira crossed her arms. “So what was that huh for?”
“Oh. I just expected to see that guy, that Special, down here. Last I saw him, he was keeping watch up on top. He’s not there anymore, though.”
Dash glanced at Leira, who raised an eyebrow. “Not there? You mean he’s gone?”
Conover nodded. “Yeah. I saw him up on a little mound, drinking some water. Looked around a bit. But when I looked back, he was just gone.”
Dash called to Ragsdale, who was watching the winching operation underway. The driver worked the winch gingerly, moving the buggy only a few centimeters at a time. But it was working, lowering the buggy’s back end closer and closer to the ground.
“Do you know where your two guys are?” Dash asked as Ragsdale approached. “Your Specials?”
“Yes. Keeping watch up top.”
“You sure?”
Ragsdale frowned, then touched the comm clipped to a shoulder strap on his cargo vest. “Alec, status?”
“All clear,” came the immediate reply.
“Okay, out to you. Damon, status?”
Silence.
“Damon? What’s your status?”
More silence.
“Damon, report.”
The comm crackled with a reply, but it was the first special, Alec. “Hey boss, I can’t see him. He was there, about fifty meters to my southwest. He’s not down there with you?”
Ragsdale gave Dash an alarmed look. “No, he’s not. Look, you come back to the edge of the ravine where I can see you.”
“On my way.”
“Maybe your other Special, Damon, has just gone to relieve himself,” Conover offered.
But Ragsdale shook his head. “He’d have called in if he had.”
A shout came from the top of the ravine. Dash looked up to see Alec, the other Special, standing framed against the hot sky. Ragsdale waved back at him.
“You did say that there was no wildlife out here, right?” Dash said.
“None really to speak of,” Ragsdale replied. “We’ve been using drones to survey the desert and haven’t seen much. There’s virtually no water out here, after all. So there are almost no plants, which means almost nothing for anything to live on.”
“Haven’t seen much,” Leira said. “Virtually. Almost. The message I’m getting is that there are things living out here, they’re just rare.”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s true.” Ragsdale gave her a searching look. “You think something might have attacked Damon?”
“No idea,” Leira replied. “You’re the one who lives here.”
“On the planet, sure. But not out here in the desert.”
“I think your Special has seen something,” Conover said, nodding up at Alec. The man was indeed pointing at something.
And then shouting something.
And now drawing his sidearm.
Dash could only make a single word among the Special’s suddenly frantic shouts—lockjaws. He looked at Ragsdale, who swore and drew his own sidearm, a big-bore slug pistol.
“What’s a lockjaw?” Dash asked.
“One of those rare living things we were just talking about.”
Dash pulled his own sidearm, the plasma pistol he’d liberated from Clan Shirna—years ago, it felt like, though it was really only a few months?
Dash gave Ragsdale a scowl. “Rare living thing isn’t much to go on. Can you be a little more specific?”
It was Conover who answered, though. “I think he’s talking about those things, right there.”
Dash followed Conover’s pointing finger. Silhouetted against the sky opposite the ravine from the Special, Alec, was a pair of creatures each at least half again as long as Dash was tall. He glimpsed humped, rounded carapaces, jointed legs scuttling through loose soil and rocks, antennae, and pairs of clashing mandibles the size of his arm.
He raised the plasma pistol, sighted over the top, and fired.
A searing flash. An ear-splitting crack. Both creatures were blown to smouldering fragments, but the blast also flung rocks and dirt like shrapnel. Something smacked Dash’s left shoulder hard enough to make his arm go numb. Leira stumbled back, clutching at her thigh. She shouted something at Dash, but all he could hear was a shrill, piercing whine.
Ragsdale grabbed him, shouting in his ear. “You can’t use that down here!”
Dash shook his head, trying to clear away the pervasive ringing in his ears. Yeah, that had not been a good idea. Down in the ravine, he had no more than twenty or so meters of view. The plasma blasts were just too destructive to fire in such close quarters, and into such loose rock and debris.
The whine faded. Leira had drawn her slug pistol and now banged away with it, pumping rounds into more of the lockjaws. Dash would have called them grossly oversized beetles, but regardless of their name, there were a lot of them, and they all seemed savagely determined to press home their attacks. After holstering the plasma pistol, he drew his slug pistol and added its fire to hers. Ragsdale and Alec joined in. A lot of their projectiles snapped against chitinous carapaces and ricocheted away, but some found their mark, blowing gooey chunks and serrated pieces of jointed legs off the creatures.
“Fall back to the buggy!” Ragsdale shouted, snapping a fresh magazine into his slug pistol. “Fall back now, I’ll cover you!”
Dash grabbed Conover, who’d drawn his own slug pistol but seemed to dither about using it. “Go!” he shouted. “Back to the buggy! Leira, you too!”
Three lockjaws tumbled then slid down the slope into the ravine where they lay still, oozing thick viscous ichor. But a half dozen more swarmed over the crestline.
Leira pulled Conover back with her, stumbling toward the buggy, but stopping short. Conover finally got his weapon raised and opened fire. Leira shouted something and Dash nodded, then slapped Ragsdale’s arm. “They’re covering us, let’s go!”
Ragsdale nodded and followed Dash back. When they reached Leira and Conover, they took up a firing line, pouring shot after shot into the scuttling creatures. Two were down, but the remaining four were fifteen meters away now. Then ten.
“We’ve got to get inside the buggy!” Ragsdale shouted.
Dash glanced back. Viktor and Amy crouched under the rear of the vehicle, which had been winched almost level. Amy had her slug pistol drawn and was staring tensely at the onrushing lockjaws. Viktor held himself ready to unhook the winch cable. As soon as the rear four wheels touched the ground, the driver backed the buggy up, feeding out winch cable as he did.
A throaty, rhythmic booming erupted from somewhere above them. The closest lockjaws vanished among geysers of rock and dust. Dash glanced up and saw Alec standing on top of the buggy, sighting along an auto-gun he’d retrieved from somewhere. Dash swept everyone with a meaningful look, jabbing a thumb at the buggy looming behind them. They all nodded. Taking advantage of the covering fire from the Special, they clambered up the slope and leapt onto the ladder leading back into the buggy. Amy and Viktor were right behind them.
Viktor grabbed the hatch and swung it closed. Before it could latch, something jammed through the opening—a snapping set of mandibles that chewed the air only centimeters from Viktor’s face. Amy turned, lifted her slug pistol over Viktor’s head, and started pumping rounds into the lockjaw trying to get inside.
Dash turned to the driver. “Go! Let’s get out of here!”
The buggy didn’t move.
While Amy and the others tried to help Viktor, Dash raced forward, ducking into the buggy’s cockpit.
“Come on, let’s—shit.”
The driver’s head and shoulders—or what were left of them—had been pulled out of the open cockpit window by a lockjaw. A second of the horrific creatures scrabbled at his body, trying to force its way inside.
Dash put his pistol against the thing’s head and squeezed the trigger, one, two, three times. An acrid stink filled the cockpit as slimy goo erupted from the lockjaw’s shattered head, but not before it managed to gouge a chunk out of Dash’s arm. He groaned, gritted his teeth against the pain, and shoved the dying creature back out of the window. After raising the pistol again, he emptied the rest of the magazine into the lockjaw gnawing on the driver. The creature let go and fell back, then Dash pulled the driver’s body aside and dropped into the seat.
Shouts of Go! and Now! came from behind, and he slammed his foot down on the throttle. The buggy, already set to reverse, shot backward, bucking and lurching as it bounced over obstacles. Dash desperately hoped that he didn’t just drop the buggy into another hole, especially considering that there seemed to be dozens of lockjaws now swarming around them. More lockjaws, their carapaces cracked and broken, appeared in front of the buggy as he reversed it, crushed under its weight.
Muttering, “Take that, you sons of bitches,” he pulled his foot off the throttle and the vehicle stopped. It took him a few seconds to find the direction selector. When he did, he snapped it to forward, cranked the tiller hard left, and punched the throttle again. The buggy jumped forward, bouncing hard as it swerved away from the ravine. Dash grimly hung on, fingers white around the tiller, ignoring the searing pain of his injured arm and determined to get as far away from whatever lockjaws remained as possible.
“Dash!” Ragsadale barked.
He glanced back. Ragsdale leaned into the cockpit, taking in the dead driver, then said, “Oh, you’re driving!”
“Sure seems like it,” Dash hissed, wincing as a heavy bump slammed more pain through his arm.
“Okay, well, I think you can slow down now. The lockjaws are pretty well behind us.”
Dash glanced at the ravaged body of the driver and shook his head. “Not far enough—not yet.”
9
Viktor studied the data-pad in his lap. “Looks like another five klicks, maybe a little less.”
Alec nodded and eased up on the throttle, slowing the buggy as they approached a wide, sandy depression.
Dash, sitting in the cockpit between them, peered over Viktor’s arm at the display. “The resolution’s not very good. That could be five clicks, or seven—or two.”
“It’s the best we can do with this equipment,” Viktor replied. “We aren’t using our…well, our best, are we?”
“The distance is 4.63 kilometers,” Sentinel said.
“Call it five,” Dash told Viktor, who understood his meaning.
Viktor said nothing, but his jaw tightened. They needed Sentinel in the open, especially given their destination, but Dash was reluctant to give up his final, hidden advantage, despite the loss of two people to the lockjaws.
Dash spoke quietly as they rode on. “Sentinel, has there been any change in the signal?”
“Its strength and location have not changed,” came the immediate reply. Dash felt the Special driving the buggy look at him. “Look, we need better data than we have.”
“Done. I am transmitting a continuous data stream, updated in real time.” There was a pause. “I am always available to augment your data, to the best of my abilities. I do require commands.”
Dash pressed his lips together, eyes cut toward the driver. Speaking to Sentinel wasn’t a bad thing if he was going to try to keep up the fiction that she was a real person somewhere, and not an alien AI. Especially considering that the Special was right here and would be able to hear any of Dash’s responses.
“Who was that?”
Dash glanced back. Ragsdale leaned on the cockpit hatch, his gaze hard. He’d heard it.
“Our colleague,” Dash said. “Her call sign is Sentinel. She’s back with our ships.”
“Not the one called the Slipwing. We scanned it. There’s no one on board. As for that other thing you’ve left sitting on our pad, we can barely even get it to register on the scans, much less learn anything about it.” His hard look went even harder. “So I gather she’s aboard it.”
“That’s right.”
“She’s just sitting inside it. Not leaving it at all.”
“That’s her job.”
Ragsdale continued fixing Dash with that unrelenting mix of suspicion and doubt. Dash didn’t blame him. Again, if their roles were reversed, he’d be pretty pissed too about being left in the dark about things that could be important—even dangerous.
But Dash just held Ragsdale’s gaze for what he hoped was long enough to say that’s all you’re getting out of me, before he looked back to the buggy’s destination.
Viktor angled the data-pad so Dash could see it. The big, fuzzy blotch that had been all they were to detect had been focused down into a spot only a few hundred meters across, near the base of a rugged, broken ridge. Dash could see it, a saw-toothed line of barren rock truncating the horizon to the northwest.
“That way,” he said to the Special driving. “Aim for that saddle, just to the right of the tallest peak.”
The Special looked back at Ragsdale, who just nodded. Then he angled the tiller, turning them onto the last leg of their trip to the wreckage of the Golden ship.
They stood at the edge of what Dash had first taken to be a sinkhole. And it was a sinkhole, but not one formed because of natural flaws in the bedrock. This one had opened on what Dash thought was clearly the aft-most part of a starship, judging from what looked like the curve of a huge thruster protruding from the side of the hole. Peeking through the detritus at the bottom of the pit was a bright, metallic point—a subsidence from a hatch or access port.
“So that’s your employers’ ship,” Ragsdale said. “It seems awfully big for something we never detected.” He looked at Dash. “You’d think we’d have seen it crashing from Port Hannah. Would’ve put on quite a show, don’t you think?”
“It would have,” Viktor said, “if you had been here to see it. It crashed before you even arrived on this planet.”
“How long before?”
About two hundred thousand years, Dash thought, but just said, “Quite some time. It’s been lost for a long time now.”
“And it only just started transmitting a distress signal.”
Dash shrugged. “I don’t understand why either, but here it is.”
“Yup, here it is.” Ragsdale looked back down into the pit, which was fifty meters across, narrowing to half that at the bottom. The walls were far from gentle, sloping down to a point thirty meters deep, every step an uncertainty. “We’re going to have to use the climbing gear to get down there. The sides of this hole are too steep and unstable to pick our way down.”
Dash exchanged an uncomfortable look with Viktor and Leira. They’d reached a moment, and a decision, that he knew they’d only been putting off, because it just couldn’t be avoided altogether.
“Ragsdale, will excuse us for a few minutes?” Dash said. “I need to confer with my colleagues.”
“Whatever you need to do.”
They walked until they were well out of earshot. Along the way, they gestured to Amy and Conover, who’d wandered a short distance away and were examining something a few meters away from the top of the pit.
“We found a fragment,” Amy said. “A piece of debris that must have been thrown off the thing when it crashed. Conover says he can see them all around here.”
“Not surprising,” Leira said. “That tends to happen when spaceships crash.”
“Actually, what is surprising is just how intact the ship seems to be,” Viktor added. “Something that hits the surface of a planet when falling from space is usually moving pretty fast—as in, trans-orbital fast. It should have been mostly vaporized by the impact. Whatever was left should be no bigger than my hand, if that.”
> “Maybe it was able to slow down before impact,” Amy said.
“It’s Golden tech,” Conover said. “Are we really surprised it survived the crash mostly intact?”
But Dash shook his head. They were getting sidetracked, and they didn’t have time for that. “You know, that’s all very interesting, but not really important right now. What is, is that the ship’s here, we’ve found it, and a lot of it seems to be whole—or in the kind of shape that can be salvaged. As in Dark Metal.”
“Which means we have to make a decision about Ragsdale,” Leira said, nodding. “We can tell him he has to stay back, away from the wreck, blame it on our employers and their secrecy and non-disclosure contracts and so on, but—”
“But he’s not going to put up with that,” Dash finished for her. “Yeah, I know. I think we’ve pushed the guy about as far as we can with all that need-to-know crap.”
“Yeah, well, do you blame him?” Amy asked. “If I was him, I’d know that something big was going on here. Something a lot bigger than we’re letting on.”
“Not only that,” Conover said, “but we’ve been saying there’s no real threat to their colony, or at least downplaying it. But we don’t really know if that’s true, do we?” He glanced back toward the pit. “I can’t see any detail, not from up here. But that ship isn’t just a dormant wreck.” He looked back at Dash, his pale, enigmatic eyes gleaming. “There’s activity down. Power being generated and used.”
“Something’s alive down there is what you’re saying,” Viktor said.
“Alive, as in tech that’s been activated, and is now doing…well, something, yeah.”
Leira sighed. “I know we really don’t want to involve these people any more than necessary, Dash. But I think we’re going to have pull back the veil, at least a bit.”
Dash gave a decisive nod. “Yeah. We are.”
He led them back to Ragsdale, who’d gone back to the buggy and, with Alec, had been unloading their climbing equipment—harnesses, motorized winches, portable A frame-type mounts, safety gear. They both stopped as Dash and the others approached.
