____________________
The trick was to find a way to keep breathing that did not depend on any of the ship’s systems that were designed to keep us breathing.
Sister Pascal found a large water tank that she thought could handle vacuum. For a variety of technical reasons that I didn’t understand, she was convinced that the overall air pressure would be reduced, and not just the percent oxygen. She shunted the water to other tanks, and we unbolted the rectangular access hatch. A problem arose: we could not bolt the hatch back on from the inside, but Pascal had a solution. She tipped the hatch on the diagonal, slid it inside, and showed how emergency sealant could be used to make a crude gasket. After all, they weren’t going to overpressure the living spaces, they were going to under-pressure them: the hatch should self-seal. Pascal estimated that we would have enough air in the large tank to last about three hours.
We filled the tank with towels and cushions and anything else that could be used to improvise crash couches positioned on what should eventually be the ground-side of the ship. Pascal warned us that the shock of landing would be dangerous to anyone not in hibernation. I was about to ask ‘then what about the crew,’ but realized how stupid a question that would be before I asked.
It was an hour before estimated landing and we all climbed into the tank and sealed the hatch. Pascal had inflated some of the space coffee pouches with air and hung them outside the tank where we could see them through the little window in the hatch. Some of them were almost empty, and others filled almost to bursting. She had also put one of the partially inflated pouches inside the visor of a vacuum suit, sealed it up, and hung it facing the tank.
After we had entered the tank, Private Brendan pointed at these and asked Pascal, “what are those for?”
I answered for her. “Unhackable air pressure gauges.”
Realization crept over the face of the big man. “Ah. Right.”
We waited, and nothing happened. That’s OK, I’m regular military and waiting is what we do best. Technician Sandipan had managed to fall asleep, and Sergeant Villers’ spirits had improved enough that he managed to crack a few bad jokes.
After a while I heard a whistle, but it was so faint that I wondered if it was my imagination. The whistle got louder, there was no doubt about it now. There were also vibrations, faint but steadily stronger.
Then Brendan pointed outside the tank. The coffee pouches were starting to swell. The ones that had been completely filled strained at their seams and then popped. The ones that had been partially filled were now completely swollen, and the ones that had been hardly filled, were also starting to swell.
It sounds rather boring, watching inflated coffee pouches swell, but it was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. Because that was when I realized that this wasn’t just a paranoid fantasy on Pascal’s part, but real. The leaders of this expedition really had planned to kill off the crew. Even worse, they had tried to kill me.
The pouch in the vacuum suit remained unchanged, though. Until it suddenly expanded and popped as well. The suit had vented its atmosphere. There should have been safety interlocks to prevent that…
Sister Pascal looked smug. “I told you so.”
“Have I ever mentioned,” said Villers, “just how annoying the phrase I told you so can be?”
“Yes,” said Brendan.
“They’ve opened the ship up to space,” I said.
Pascal shook her head. “Certainly not, that would be a waste. They must have compressed the air into tanks. Get ready, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
From our vantage point we could just manage to see a wall mounted environmental status gauge. It read normal pressure. But then, it was hooked into the central AI, and would display whatever it had been programmed to display.
The vibrations and noise increased. We started to float down into the cushions, and I began to feel the return of gravity. You would think that after floating around like an angel in zero-G that gravity would be depressing, but it made me feel oddly euphoric. It was surprising how much I had missed it. Weightlessness is vastly over-rated.
The acceleration increased, and I was pushed back into the cushions. Then it felt like a giant hand had suddenly pressed down on me, and I was crushed into the cushions.
“That’s the ventral thrusters,” said Pascal. “It shouldn’t be long now.”
It felt like the entire ship was going to shake itself apart. I’ve flown in military transports under fire in bad weather. That can get bouncy, but this was the worst I’d ever been in. Then there was a giant whump and afterwards it got quiet.
And then it got noisy again, but in a different way. Instead of whistles and rumbles, there were groans and creaks. The ship was settling down, and the stresses in the hull were being released.
We looked out the tiny window in the hatch, and the coffee pouches were still swollen. “What if they never turn the air back on?” I asked.
“Then we’re dead,” said Pascal. “But I don’t think so. They’ll need to start accessing the main ship, and ten minutes of near vacuum would have killed anyone exposed.”
We waited, and waited, and nothing happened. I was beginning to worry that we had just delayed the inevitable, when the pouches that hadn’t burst began to deflate. We pried the hatch off of the makeshift gasket and sucked greedily at the clean air that blew in.
“This was fun,” said Villers. “But now what? We’re supposed to be dead, don’t you think that, maybe, someone will notice that we’re not?”
“No, we’re not supposed to be dead at all,” said Pascal. “I suggest that we go to one of the hibernation defrost zones, and hang around, and wait for others to be defrosted and just sort of mingle. We could just claim to have been defrosted on initial landing, by accident.”
“But,” I said, “won’t the ship AI tell them what really happened?”
“Certainly,” said Pascal, “but only if they ask it. And why would the executives know to ask about us if the AI doesn’t tell them first? We should be fine.”
Nobody could think of a better plan, so we cleaned up our mess in the water tank, put the vacuum suit back in storage, and clambered over to the local defrost station.
I thought the internal corridors of the ship were cramped in zero-G, but it was even worse in gravity. The designers had made sure that the corridors were passable under gravity, but it was clearly a temporary measure. I kept tripping over flanges and pipes that previously I would have floated past. Nevertheless, cramped or not, the gravity still felt good.
And again, for a long while not much happened. We ate some space rations, and tried to nap.
“The executives will be waking up, along with their security teams,” said Pascal. “It’s important to start the colonization process as soon as possible, but they won’t defrost anybody else until they are secure and in control. I give it three hours.”
Eventually one of the defrost bays started to cycle, and out popped a skinny little guy with a bald head. We helped him recover, and it turned out that he was an atmospheric chemist. His name was Nigel Farnsworth, and in the event that the ship landed on a planet with an atmosphere, it was his job to check for toxins and allergens and whatnot. He was surprised to see us awake before him, seeing as none of us had anything to do. I shrugged my shoulders and said that we were as surprised as he was, the ship woke us up after landing and here we are. Must be some sort of glitch. Farnsworth accepted this and left to find his atmospheric analysis station way up high on the dorsal hull.
I began to hope that we might actually get away with this.
More people were defrosted, and the intricate plan of turning the colony arkship into a bona fide colony began to unfold. As I understood it, the entire ship had been designed to be cannibalized in a specific sequence. Even now work teams were groggily assembling, and starting the process of turning one beached starship into the seed of a thriving metropolis.
I checked the schedule with the ship AI, and my men
and I were not supposed to have been woken for a while yet. Well nothing for it but to hang around until our appointed time, and then slip back into the game.
Oddly enough Pascal did not have a programmed wake up time. I asked her about that, and she said, that was because she didn’t have a specific job listing. I asked then why was she on the ship, and she replied, because someone on the mission planning board probably didn’t want everyone here to die.
Eventually our turn came, and my commanding officer, Captain Reginald Johnson, woke up and took command of our company.
Captain Johnson was a tall black man, and not a bad guy, for a captain. “Lieutenant Trellen, report.”
I saluted, and the Captain returned it. “Captain sir, Lieutenant Trellen here. There was some kind of mix up in the defrost sequence. Sergeant Villers and Private Brendan and myself woke up early, but otherwise we are fine. Awaiting your orders.”
“Very good,” said the Captain. “I want you to assemble the rest of your platoon. Then I want you to start setting up a defensive screen. Coordinate with my staff to pick a sector.”
“Sir,” I said, “are we expecting trouble?”
“We are on an unknown planet in an unknown part of the galaxy,” said the Captain. “I don’t expect anything, but then it’s the enemy that you don’t expect that kills you.”
I’ve always liked this Captain.
--------------------
I started to get my platoon organized, and we reviewed the initial reports of the surface conditions. A bit chilly but not needing full arctic gear. Breathable atmosphere with no detectable toxins or pathogens. So far so good.
My platoon’s base camp was a jumble of prefabricated sheds made of corrugated aluminum. A little cramped, a little shabby, but looking palatial compared to the interior of the arkship. It’s amazing how far a thousand tons of corrugated sheet metal can go. Already the colony ship was surrounded by a shantytown that extended out hundreds of meters, and still growing.
I accessed a video feed from above, and took a moment to marvel at the intricate ballet of the ship deconstructing itself into a colony. Everything had been so tightly packed, and now it was all unfolding, precisely choreographed. Excepting for me and my people, but that’s a detail. The engineers and planners that designed this mission had known what they were about.
The ship itself had slumped as it had landed, as if a slug had been dropped on uneven ground. No ship this big could hold its shape during the stresses of landing on a terrestrial world, and it would never fly again. Fortunately it wouldn’t have to.
Amazingly, the ship flattening out hadn’t affected any critical systems. Pipes and cables had been given enough slack, and some zones designed to crumple so that the critical fusion generators would remain undamaged. Somewhere back on Earth were some very good planners and engineers.
The AI had put the ship down in the middle of a broad flat valley. The floor of the valley was about two kilometers below the mean planetary surface height, which was good because it made it just a bit warmer and the air pressure just that much closer to standard. The area around the ship had been blasted flat by the landing thrusters. The valley was at least 20 kilometers across, so we had an ideal space to build the colony.
The big issue is the darkness. Not only is the planet not near a sun, it’s in a dust cloud. We have night vision sensors, but they only amplify light. Starlight is great, but total darkness not so great, because you can’t amplify what isn’t there. We have thermal imagers, but these are limited in what they can tell you, and not everything has a thermal signature. We’ll probably have to use searchlights and active sensors a lot. I hate shining bright lights and microwaves at the enemy. I’m hoping we can keep a low signals profile.
The priority was to get a perimeter screen in place. We unloaded the first of the scout drones and set them on their way. Tiny flying robots the size of hummingbirds were first. Hundreds of them flew out, vanishing into the dark as they left the glare of the spotlights around the ship. They spread out to a range of a hundred kilometers. As one of three platoons, we had a sector that was a third of a circle. I followed the positions of the scouts on my terminal. There was no problem with their dispersal, and no suspicious contacts. So far, so good. We would follow up later with longer-range drones, and weapons emplacements. Eventually we would have to establish a satellite net, but at least we weren’t completely naked and blind on the surface anymore.
The big problem was space technician Sandipan. She didn’t have any job assignments, she was still limping badly, and she was just trailing around after us. It was kind of sad, like those feral dogs that sometimes try to latch on to you in the field in the hopes of finding a home. Still, she was trying to be helpful, even though she knew absolutely zero about anything that we were doing.
People should have wondered why there were no assigned jobs for members of the ship’s crew after planetfall. Maybe people did, but they didn’t say anything.
Brendan was showing Sandipan how to unpack and prep our standard model medium scout drone, and the small woman was obviously thrilled to be doing something useful. I was entertaining the fantasy that maybe I could retrain her as technical support for our company. She was clearly smart and hard-working and a little extra tech support never hurt any soldier that I ever knew. Then we had a visit from executive security.
All hands attention. The speakers blared, and we all dropped what we were doing and stood up ramrod straight. A half-dozen enormously tall men walked into our staging hall. They wore black suits with black ties, but their bulging chest muscles ruined the lines of their lapels. These were secret service, the elite, and each of them outranked all but the highest generals of the regular army. Groomed for intimidation, they could take any three of us regular soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. They would be armed with miniguns, and have body armor, while our personal ammunition was still under lock and key as we were just regular soldiers and not to be trusted with live ammo unless the enemy was right in our face.
In private all of us regular soldiers hate the secret service. Very in private. For all of their big muscles, big muscles are not what an army is about. In the field, in a fair fight, these glandular goons wouldn’t stand a chance against a regular professional army unit like mine.
But then, we’re never going to get a fair fight against these goons. Because that is how the system works.
A somewhat smaller, but even more lethal looking, member of the secret service entered after the regulars had taken up their positions. “Who is the ranking officer here?” he asked.
I stood up even straighter. We don’t salute these agents, that’s not protocol. At least when you salute a regular army officer, he acknowledges you back. With the executive branch, respect is all one-way.
“Sir, Lieutenant Lysis Trellen, commanding officer of the first platoon, 3243rd Interstellar Company.”
“Trellen,” said the head agent. “I read a report. You woke up early, didn’t you?”
“Yes sir. Some glitch in the scheduling program, I hear, but my unit is all present and accounted for.”
The head agent looked at me strangely. “Well. That’s alright then, Lieutenant.” He pointed to Sandipan. “But what is that woman doing here?”
If I tried to stand up any straighter my spine would crack. “Sir, that’s technician Sandipan. Again, probably some sort of scheduling mix-up. She’s helping us prep the scout drones until it all gets sorted out. She’s very useful.”
The head agent hummed to himself. “Well. This is somewhat irregular. All jobs are precisely assigned. We are going to debrief technician Sandipan. You may carry on, Lieutenant.”
Two of the regular agents approached Sandipan. They cuffed her hands behind her back and led her away. She had the terrified look of a mouse that has been caught by a cat: she knew that she was dead, but couldn’t do anything about it but wait for the inevitable.
Private Brendan was standing next to me, and I could see the muscles in his neck
twitch.
As the secret service agents filed out I whispered to the big private: “Brendan. Don’t do anything stupid. There is nothing to be done.”
Brendan waited until the last of the agents had left the room, and then he whispered back to me: “Don’t worry, sir. I won’t do anything stupid. You’re the officer. That’s your job.”
5. The Lesser Redoubt
“The military textbooks tell us that the primary weakness of a permanent fortification is its very permanency. Because of this it is often easier to go around a fortification and, with the rise of mobile warfare in the beginning of World War II back on ancient Terra, this became the standard offensive choice. However, on this planet, that’s a non-issue. If the enemy goes around us, we win.” – General Lysis Trellen, attributed.
Given enough time and energy, a cybertank can process raw minerals into metals and ceramics and build anything – but starting from scratch, that can take a very, very long time. The refined metals that the armored suits provided me with allowed me to repair my main weapon in just three days, as I had promised, and we headed off to the Lesser Redoubt.
I was trundling at a steady 60 kilometers an hour. General Trellen’s company of 98 armored suits was spread out around me in a loose escort formation, easily loping along with a smooth and efficient rhythm. Six members of the scout company ranged farther ahead, their relatively lithe forms reminding me vaguely of hunting dogs. I still wished that I had my own units, but though less capable than my usual, it was reassuring to have a screen. I mean, a cybertank entering combat without escorts is, well, almost indecent.
We were all in short-range radio contact with each other. I opened a private channel to Trellen.
Hello General Trellen. Four hours down, and 16 to go, at this pace. How are you and your men holding up?
“We are doing just fine, Old Guy. This is well within our design parameters. No malfunctions, and our energy reserves are still nearly full. And yourself?”
Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6) Page 6
