by John Shirley
The uni took the image in and said, in a woman’s friendly voice, “The planet Pandora.”
“Text,” Marla told the uni. “Pandora history.”
“Mo-om… .”
“Quiet, Cal.” She squinted at the text on the screen. “Okay, here we go, I’ll just pick out some of the main points: ‘Pandora has human-friendly conditions with respect to gravity and atmosphere. Its mineral deposits convinced the Dahl Corporation to set up colonization on Pandora, largely for mining purposes.’ And—says they were also interested in the alien ruins.”
Cal peered over her shoulder at the small image accompanying the text. “Alien ruins? I wish we could see that.” Mostly he said it just to make his mom happy. Partly because he wanted her to lay off him—and also for a reason he wouldn’t like to admit out loud: he loved his mom and wanted her to be happy.
“The alien ruins,” his mom went on, paraphrasing the text, “were thought to belong to the same culture that left similar artifacts on the planet Promethia …”
“Promethia—that’s where we got the new starship tech, everybody knows that.”
“We got faster starships, anyway. Um—‘a large sealed vault on Promethia discovered by the Atlas Corporation contained alien technology and weaponry.’ The Dahl Corporation hoped to find a similar trove on Pandora. Says here that before they could really find it, they kind of gave up—”
“Gave up? Why?”
“Apparently some kind of cyclic change happened on Pandora, and all kinds of local creatures came out of hibernation and started … well, they attacked people, and destroyed a lot of the mining camps. Plus it turned out the best minerals had mostly been used by the aliens thousands of years ago, although there are ‘useful deposits of specialized crystal.’ Says it’s ‘not known if the extraterrestrials who left the artifacts were native to the planet, as none are known to have survived there.’ So I guess they didn’t find as much as they’d hoped for, and the planet was so dangerous the Dahl Corporation basically pulled out.”
“But you said there were settlements.”
“Some settlers stayed. There’s New Haven, some other settlements—but it’s tough down there. Especially because … if I understand what it’s saying here … Dahl brought a lot of convict labor to the planet to do most of the mining work. When they left, they just unlocked the gates of the prison camps and abandoned the convicts. So the convicts are wandering around down there terrorizing the colonists. According to this, a lot of the convict laborers have gone psychotic, right out of their minds. There are still some working factories down there. Hyperion has a robot operation on Pandora—robots, and weapons. Especially weapons. There are more weapons of different types sold on Pandora than on any other known planet …”
“But—nobody ever found the Vault they were looking for?”
She scanned the univiewer, going on to the next page. “Seems like they found some stuff, but not the big discovery—not the Vault itself. Or anyway they couldn’t get close to it … Says there’re conflicting accounts of what happened to that.”
He gazed at the enigmatic orb of Pandora. “So—the Vault could still be down there … somewhere.”
She nodded. “But I wouldn’t want to go and look for it! There are a few scientists—but mostly they stay on the Study Station.”
“What’s the Study Station?”
“It’s the station the Homeworld Bound’s docked at right now—which you’d know if you didn’t have your head in that helmet all day. I guess from up here they can look at Pandora from a safe distance. Even without the bandits from the prison camps and the … good Lord, look at that picture! Is that a human being? Must be some kind of mutation. Some of the bandits are cannibals, it says. Even without that, the animals that roam around down there are as savage as anywhere in the galaxy. Oh—here’s a picture of a rakk. They’re flying creatures—not like a bird, more like a pterodactyl. But they don’t have beaks. Barbed mouth slits, barbed tails. ‘They swoop down and strike without warning.’ Some of them get huge … Oh! Apparently they’re born in a rakk hive … which is a quadruped, bigger than a bus, that sort of spews the rakks out of its mouth. Oh and look at that creature—they call it a spiderant. But it’s a good two meters long, that one… .” Her voice trailed off. “Really quite interesting …”
Cal looked at his mom. She seemed a bit wistful. “You wanted to be an exobiologist. Sounds like you kind of wish you could go down there and study these creatures.”
She sighed. “I was a year away from getting my degree when I quit to help your dad. These creatures are best studied from a distance—like from orbit. They’re just too dangerous.” She smiled wanly. “Believe me—I’m glad we’re not going down there.”
It took Zac a long moment to recognize Rans Veritas. His old patrol partner was standing in front of the wedge-shaped transport in the shuttle hangar of the Homeworld Bound. Rans had changed—gotten chunky, red-nosed, and balding. The layered, rugged, dirt-streaked outfit he wore, goggles pushed up on his head, seemed more suited for the dusty plain of the wasteland below than a spacecraft. Didn’t they have a laundry on Pandora? “Rans!”
Hearing his name called, Rans seemed to cringe, then he looked nervously around the echoing, metal-walled hangar—and spotted Zac.
“Zac!” Rans came limping toward him, wide face split in a grin, and they shook hands warmly. “You haven’t changed much.”
“Oh, I’m an old married man now. I’ve slowed down a lot.”
“Not too much I hope.” Rans lowered his voice, eyes shifting around nervously. They were alone except for a self-operating forklift carrying supplies into the shuttle cargo bay and a single shuttle crewman hurrying toward the station’s bar. “You’ll need some guts, Zac—it’s a great opportunity but it’s going to take nerve.” Rans’s face twitched, and he gnawed a knuckle, as his eyes darted around again.
“There’s a commissary for the crew—no one in it right now. Let’s talk there.”
“Good, good, lead the way …”
Zac noticed Rans limping again. “You okay there?”
“Yeah—yeah that’s a big parta the reason I can’t go after this myself. Don’t get around as well as I used to. Skags jumped me, tore up my leg. Almost didn’t get outta there alive. We got some good medical rebuilds planetside, from ol’ Dr. Zed, but they ain’t free. Can’t afford it right now. Wouldn’t’ve been able to get to orbit here, except I had a trip ticket left over.” That facial tic twitched again.
They went through the glass doors and into the commissary. It was a low-ceilinged, overlit room filled with plain white plasteel tables and orange chairs, the farther wall inset with snack and drink dispensers.
“Have a seat,” Rans said. “I’ll—oh, uh, say, you got any cred? I’m busted.”
“Oh—here, take this. We talked about the advance so you can have it now …” Zac passed him the smart voucher for a thousand dollars. It hadn’t been easy to raise the money. He’d had to sell his late father’s collection of computerized insects.
“Great, great!” Rans took the card, used a fraction of it to buy a chocolate bourbon at the dispenser, brought it back to the table. “I need a drink, bad … got the shakes again …”
Zac had heard about Pandora Syndrome. Lots of settlers on the planet suffered from a specialized PTSD. The constant fear of predation, Psychos, and bandits was traumatic.
They sat across from one another in the bright room, Rans sipping the booze and glancing at the door with twitching eyes. “So uh, let’s get right to it. When we talked on the subspace gabber, I toldya maybe I’d found the Eridian Vault but I couldn’t get it to it myself. Well—turns out, it’s not Eridian. It’s something else.”
“Now wait a minute, Rans, you said—”
“I know, but hear me out. It’s an old alien ship—an ET crash site. I saw it, I took pictures, and I found a xenotech who could analyze them for me. He confirms it! It’s alien, pure offworld stuff—but it’s not Eridian. Far as m
y guy can tell, it’s from a civilization we’ve never seen before. I used up the last of my cred talking to this guy and I’m not sure I trust him. Now, Atlas has hired some mercs to find this thing. They know the general area within a hundred klicks—but not exactly where it is. Guy named Crannigan, ex–Crimson Lance, real pain in the ass—he’s their man. We gotta find this thing before he does, Zac. We’ll take it to their competitors, you and me, we’ll go right to Hyperion, they’ll pay double to keep it away from Atlas! There’s gotta be alien weaponry on that ship Hyperion could retro-engineer!”
“A crash site, huh?”
“You got it. Now it just happens the crash site is under a kind of overhang in an old volcanic cone—so the Study Station can’t see it. Only me and you know where it is!”
“If you’ve got photos, that might be proof enough for Hyperion …”
“Could be faked! You’ve got to get in closer, retrieve an artifact out of there. Take the real goods to Hyperion! You and me, we’ll split the take!”
“I don’t know—you told me it was Eridian—”
“Stop obsessing about that, dammit! This is even better! Listen, all you gotta do is wait till the Study Station is over the area—less than an hour from now. Then you take a DropCraft, give it the coordinates, drop almost right on top of the thing. You’ll hop out, grab a few artifacts, get back in the DropCraft, hit return, bing-bang-boom it’ll bring you up here and you’re on your way. We’ll be rich! Now—I got all the info you’ll need right here …”
“I dunno, Rans, sounds pretty risky. What can I expect to run into down there?”
“What? Oh-h-h—a rakk or two, or a skag whelp, little bitty spiderant maybe. There’s a gun on every DropCraft, don’t even worry about it.”
The DropCraft bay was in the bottom level of the Study Station. Zac walked along the semiflexible transparent corridor, thirty meters long, between the ship and the station, glancing up through the shield glass at the moon over Pandora. He felt naked, exposed to space here, though a filtering force field insulated him from damaging radiation. He heard a whirring sound, glanced over his shoulder—something was flickering in the air back there: a small, disklike flying security drone. Was it following him? No big deal—probably it routinely patrolled the Study Station.
He entered the station proper, nodding to two scientists at a scanning monitor, and crossed hastily to the elevator. Theoretically, passengers on the Homeworld Bound had the run of the station while it was docked here, but the scientists always seemed annoyed by tourists.
He took the elevator down, thinking he heard that whirring again, this time coming from the elevator shaft overhead. Probably some servo noise.
He found six shiny DropCrafts lined up on the lowest level, in release bays. The little vessels, no bigger than a flying car, could be rented by the hour. His was craft number one.
DropCraft One was an iridescent teardrop-shaped vehicle designed mostly for emergency escapes, but it could be used for a quick visit to a narrow-gauge area. It carried just enough fuel for one trip straight down and one back up.
He would have to confess all to his wife—but only when he had the goods. Once he’d succeeded, actually had the money coming in, she’d be delighted. He hoped.
Zac hadn’t succeeded at much in recent years. He was a trained engineer, but he had a tendency to take shortcuts in getting the work done, just so he could get the paycheck and move on to the next job. It’d worked until that portable bridge had gotten stuck halfway, stranding a dozen people between skyscrapers for three hours. The portable bridge had teetered in the air, might have crashed if he hadn’t flown over there on a quickchopper and reprogrammed it.
Zac felt a sick gnawing doubt as he climbed into the DropCraft’s cockpit, buckled himself into the seat, and read the coordinates into the navigator. Could Rans be setting him up? Was it all about the “advance” he’d given him for the landing coordinates? Rans had been a reliable guy in the old days, but he seemed different now. He stank of desperation.
Crazy chance he was taking, even if Rans was on the up-and-up. Zac was leaving his wife and son in orbit, and heading down to a hostile planet. True, he’d only be planetside for a few minutes. But there were risks—probably more than he could know. It was a planet of imponderables.
“Destination fixed and confirmed,” said the craft’s computer. “Close heat shield hatch and press ignition.”
That whirring came overhead, unmistakable this time.
He looked up, spotted the small, spherical drone hovering nearby, angling itself as if about to dart down at him.
So it had been following him. The expert Rans had shown the pictures to must’ve shared them with someone else. Maybe he’d shown them to an operative of the Dahl Corporation, or Atlas. And they might not want this little expedition moving ahead.
“Uh, I do have ship-to-planet landing permit,” Zac told the drone. Which was true—he was legal to take a quick trip to the surface. “And I did a transfer rental for the DropCraft …”
The drone didn’t respond. A red light started flashing on its top. Zac knew what that meant.
He had to get out of here. He fumbled at the console, found the tab marked Hatch Close/Auto Ignition, and thumbed it. The shield hatch hummed closed—but not before the drone zipped in. It hovered inside the DropCraft, whirring angrily to itself right in front of his eyes, the red light now flashing with furious rapidity.
“No, wait—!” Zac said as the airlock closed over the DropCraft—and the bottom dropped out of the DropCraft bay.
His stomach seemed to fly up to catch in his throat as the DropCraft plummeted out the lower hull of the Study Station and into orbital space. On autopilot, the craft veered down toward the atmosphere, as the security drone, now inside the cockpit with him, slipped to hover near the navigational unit on his left. He grabbed at the drone—but it fired a short, sharp laser into the craft’s navigational unit.
A crack, and smoke drifted up from the blackened unit, choking the cockpit.
Zac coughed, turned in his seat, grabbed the whirring disk—it sparked, jolted him, punishing with electricity. He held on, raised it over his head, smashed it down into the bulkhead of the cockpit. It cracked, gave out a last, sad hum, its red light going out.
He tossed the drone aside and stared out through the transparent heat shield as the DropCraft plunged into the atmosphere—spiraling out of control. Red-and-blue-streaked vapors were swirling over the little vessel, flames guttered up around its prow … as it veered sharply down toward the planet’s surface.
Marla and Cal were in the little stateroom, with its three sleeping snugs, its small table and chairs, its single viewscreen showing a digital image of space outside with the planet they were orbiting—or in-flight entertainment. Cal was flicking through the entertainment guide as Marla went again to the door and opened it to look down the corridor.
No Zac. He hadn’t gone to the bursar’s office—she’d called there and they hadn’t seen him. What was he up to?
“Looking down the hall’s not gonna make Dad come back sooner, Mom. He’ll be back. Anyway it’s embarrassing, you doing that …”
“I know, Cal, I just …” A chime sounded from her handbag, sitting on a shelf by the door. She hurried to it, and answered the fone on the uni. “Zac?”
At first all she heard was static, and a kind of roaring. Then she heard Zac’s voice, only half-audible. “… not on the ship … not on … I’m on a DropCraft.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m calling you on ship-to-ship but the signal’s weak, technical problems, there was sabotage … Craft out of control …”
“Did you say sabotage? Of what?”
“The DropCraft was …” Static, roaring. “… I’m transmitting my landing coordinates to you so you can arrange for someone to pick me up … this thing’s not going to make it back …”
“Landing coordinates for what? Zac—tell me you’re not going down to Pandora!”
/> “No turning back now … there’s a treasure there … crashed ship … ET site … going down to … Oh shit, this thing’s on fire … Marla, maybe I shouldn’t have sent you those coordinates. They might go after you on the …” Static. “… that I love you … I’m sorry I went behind your back and … just tell Cal that I …”
Static, roaring.
“Zac!”
The uni’s polite digital voice said, “Call ended.”
Marla tried calling him back—the fone couldn’t find a return number.
“Mom? Did you say Dad was going down to …”
A blaring alarm interrupted him, the ululating siren breaking off for an announcement. “Evacuate ship! All passengers to Study Station! Passengers take Airlock Three to the Study Station! Do not gather luggage! Go immediately! This is an emergency! Evacuate ship! All passengers to …”
“Mom—what’s going on?”
“Never mind, we’re getting out of here—” She grabbed her shoulder bag and hustled Cal ahead of her, down the hallway.
“Wait, Mom! Stop pushing! I just want to get my mindtouch!”
Was he really worried about a VR helmet at a time like this? “Forget that thing and just move! Hurry!”
They rushed down the corridor, down a ramp to an elevator. They took the elevator to the main corridor, the two of them breathing hard, side by side, during the short ride. “Our room is a long ways from Airlock Three,” she said, putting one arm around her son. “It’s the other side of the ship. Hurry!”
The elevator doors opened and they hurried down another corridor, turned a corner, went down another ramp, then a short flight of stairs. They reached the main corridor down the center of the ship, and saw a panting ship’s steward, a round-faced little man in purple coveralls, his popeyes made even more so by panic as she rushed from a side hall.
“Go!” he gasped as he passed them. “Get to Airlock Three!”
“What is it?” she asked, hastening after him. “What’s going on?”
“Those things behind me—those damn drones! Someone’s overridden the security drones—they’re sabotaging the ship!” He pelted on ahead of them. She glanced back—saw four disklike drone bots flying along, their tops blinking, lasers licking out from a node on their undersides, the energy beams hitting power conduits along the corridor. Wherever the beams struck, the lights went out, section by section, so that the corridor was being consumed by darkness, a bite at a time.
