Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  The temperature kept dropping. His electric heater was on max, for all the good that did. The distant shelter sagged under the weight of the snowfall.

  “W-wait,” Rikki said, her teeth chattering. “B-blankets.”

  They wrapped themselves in emergency thermal blankets, as best they could and still keep moving.

  He reached under his mask to tap his headset. “Endeavour.”

  No response.

  “Endeavour,” he tried again, louder.

  Perhaps the crackle in his earpiece intensified for a second. More likely, that was wishful thinking.

  “It’s the storm. There’s too much static for the headset link.” Rikki leaned against him, her eyes wide. “We’re in trouble here, aren’t we?”

  “Things could be worse,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”

  Two steps later, his feet flew out from under him. He crashed to the ground with the wind knocked out of him.

  And started to toboggan downhill.

  And felt a yank as the safety rope went taut.

  And heard Rikki’s gasp of shock and the poof! of snow as she fell.

  Flapping arms and legs, he brought himself to a halt. Rikki tumbled into him; his mask flew off and he choked on snow. Together they slid another few meters before stopping. Coughing, laboring to breathe the thin air, the sky was dimmer than he remembered, or the snowfall thicker. Maybe both.

  From uphill, louder and louder and louder, there came a rumble….

  DOOMED

  (About seventy years earlier)

  2

  A swarm of uniformed police met Clermont on the tarmac. “If you will come with us,” one of the cops said. Her nametag read Petty. Over the whoosh of her breather mask, she sounded tense. “With the governor’s compliments.”

  It did not strike Blake as a request, and he waited to see how Dana would play this. Captain’s prerogative, and all that.

  Dana McElwain brushed off the hand that had presumed to urge her forward. “What’s this about, Officer?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Petty said. “You’ll have to ask the governor.”

  “Who is waiting,” another cop said, gesturing to the first parked cruiser in a long row.

  Petty glared at the man.

  “Are we under arrest?” Blake asked.

  “No, sir,” Petty answered, “but I was told that the matter is time sensitive.”

  That much Blake could guess from the urgent recall from the Belt and their diversion halfway around the world from Clermont’s home spaceport. But the message Dana had shared with him, authenticated but short on details, came from the university. Why the cops?

  He waited again for Dana’s cue.

  “All right,” she said.

  He joined Dana in the backseat of a police cruiser, while Clermont’s lone passenger was directed to the next car in the row. With lightbars strobing and sirens wailing, both vehicles sped from the spaceport. Out the rear window, craning his neck, Blake glimpsed the other cruisers redeploying around Clermont. The cop cars looked tiny beside the ship.

  Westbound toward the New Houston dome, bumps in the road twice sent them airborne. Cursing under her breath, Petty slowed down just a bit.

  The sky, pink and all but cloudless, revealed nothing. Phobos in full phase hung low over the horizon.

  With a soft trill the cruiser finished pressurizing, and Dana slipped off her breather. Mask straps had matted her hair, short and ash blond, to her head. Her eyes blazed, and even more than usual she reminded Blake of a coiled spring.

  “Any thoughts?” she asked him.

  They had speculated about the recall throughout the flight home, any distraction being welcome at two gees. All their conjecturing had accomplished nothing, but to judge from the uniforms left to guard Clermont, the ship was involved.

  In every way but one Clermont was ordinary.

  “Something to do with the DED,” Blake decided, enunciating each letter of the acronym.

  Ordinarily he pronounced it “dead,” if only to pull Jumoke’s chain, but she rode in the trailing cruiser. And inside a careening cop car, he wasn’t about to call anything dead.

  “My guess, too,” Dana said. “What hasn’t the good Dr. Boro shared with us?”

  “I wish I knew.” Blake got the datasheet from a pocket of his flight suit, half expecting Petty or her partner to commandeer the device, or that the cruiser would jam his comm link.

  Neither happened.

  Blake pulled up a news summary; the headlines looked commonplace enough. His message queue likewise had no insights to offer.

  At home this would be the dark of night. He left Rikki a voice message that Clermont had landed, he’d be in the capital for a while, and he’d call her later. It wasn’t as though he knew anything, so why wake—and worry—her?

  He lingered over Rikki’s holo. With delicate features on a perfect oval face, her eyes hazel and slightly slanted, she was exotically beautiful. Her gaze was poised and intelligent. Flowing black hair framed that gorgeous face. And that dazzling smile….

  “Newlyweds.” Dana rolled her eyes.

  He laughed. If he wasn’t supposed to still feel this way after four years, too bad. “More or less,” he told Dana, before folding and pocketing the datasheet.

  The red-and-pink plain gave way to startling splashes of blue, green, yellow, and orange: gengineered lichens patiently breaking stone into soil. Next came long, low greenhouses filled with crops of corn, wheat, and soy. Beyond a kidney-shaped lake, the wind roiling its surface, the road widened to two lanes each way. Traffic began to build, robotrucks from the farms and passenger vehicles alike hastily pulling off the road at the cruisers’ approach. Blake began to distinguish individual buildings inside the Capital dome.

  Half off the road, the two cruisers bounced past the orderly queue at the dome’s main vehicular air lock. They sped straight for City Center with sirens wailing. Cars and trucks scattered at their charge.

  With brakes squealing, they pulled up outside Crimson House, the governor’s office and residence. “You’re wanted inside,” Petty said, throwing open her door. Without her breather, she had a sallow face with unfortunate bushy black eyebrows.

  He and Dana got out. Two meters away, the second cop car was emptying.

  “What the hell did you do, Boro?” Blake demanded.

  The three from Clermont were all Earth expats, but Jumoke Boro was half Tutsi and stood as tall as many Martians. She had a Brit accent Blake found delightful.

  Ordinarily.

  “What do you mean?” Jumoke asked, looking bewildered.

  Dana glowered. “Apart from the DED, Clermont is as mundane as ships come. If not the DED, why the sudden government interest in her?”

  “I don’t know,” Jumoke said. “Look, this wasn’t our first flight. I see no reason for the DED to interest anyone now.”

  Petty cleared her throat. “Come with me, please.”

  “I don’t know,” Jumoke repeated.

  Petty led them up broad stairs to the Crimson House’s public entrance, past the Security checkpoint, and down a long, noisy corridor. No one paid them any attention, not even after they went through a second checkpoint into the residence wing.

  Maybe Jumoke doesn’t know, Blake thought. If the DED were the cause of their summons, would they have been allowed to bicker about it in public?

  At the end of the hallway, Petty shepherded them onto a restricted express elevator. The four of them filled the elevator car.

  The elevator doors opened with a soft chime. “Come this way,” Petty said, pointing.

  “Look,” Jumoke said, “I can’t conceive of a dark-energy emergency, but suppose one is possible. We wouldn’t have been summoned as we were, ‘With maximum dispatch.’ We would have been ordered home using the standard drive.”

  “Taking weeks to get home,” she didn’t bother to add.

  Because while fusion drives could out-accelerate the dark-energy drive, that was true only for
as long as the fuel and reaction mass lasted. The DED—when it worked—just kept pulling energy out of, well, Blake didn’t know where.

  As best he could judge, Jumoke didn’t know that, either.

  “Then why the government seizure of our ship?” Blake countered.

  Jumoke shook her head.

  Rounding a corner they came to a door marked Private. Petty knocked.

  The man who opened the door was all but bald, with vulpine features, ice-blue eyes, and a trim salt-and-pepper goatee. It was a face you wouldn’t forget even if its owner weren’t so often in the news: one of the planetary governor’s most senior advisers, and her liaison to the Civil Defense Authority.

  Blake did his best to ignore politics and doubly so politicians, but having grown up in Massachusetts, Hawthorne wasn’t a name Blake could forget. This was Neil Hawthorne, not Nathaniel, but that was close enough.

  “Dr. Boro, the governor is eager to speak with you,” Hawthorne said. “Please come in.”

  Huh? “Aren’t we all wanted?” Blake asked.

  “Officer?” Hawthorne said.

  Petty motioned toward a sofa along the corridor wall. “Why don’t you two wait here?”

  Once again, her words did not strike Blake as a request.

  3

  Dana McElwain sat tall at her end of the sofa, tuning out Blake’s fidgeting, weighing the possibilities. She didn’t like mysteries, and she really disliked deceit, but an important part of leadership was thinking before speaking.

  Across the hallway, long, slow combers rolled up a digital beach and ran out again. Scraps of seaweed swirled in tidal pools. A crab scuttled across the wet sand. Seagulls soared in the virtual sky. The susurrus of the waves and the faint cries of the birds masked whatever Jumoke and the others discussed in the private office.

  “Jumoke is involved,” Dana finally admitted, “at least in what she chose not to tell us.”

  “Then this is about the DED.”

  “It’s hard to see things any other way,” Dana said, “but there must be more to it. If our recall were only about Jumoke or the DED, why bring in the two of us? We fly the ship, we don’t own it.”

  Blake had no answer for that.

  He had a square face, all planes and angles, more wholesome than handsome. His sandy hair stood up in fashionable spikes; his eyes, blue and deep-set, sat beneath wispy blond eyebrows. He went in and out of wearing a pencil-thin mustache, just as wispy. This month the fuzz was out.

  Blake could be charming, and with Dana he usually was. He could also have a temper. Just then he looked ready to deck someone.

  “Whatever the reason for our summons,” Dana cautioned him, “hear them out.”

  At last, the anonymous door opened. “Captain McElwain,” Hawthorne said. “If you would please join us.”

  Blake had the good sense to keep quiet.

  “And Mr. Westford…?” Dana hinted.

  “Will wait here,” Hawthorne completed.

  She brushed past Hawthorne, prepared to demand answers and, perhaps, an apology.

  Until Jumoke’s deer-in-the-headlights expression stopped Dana cold.

  *

  Dana paused in the doorway, taking in the scene.

  The utilitarian office held a massive oaken desk faced by a shallow arc of padded armchairs. Behind the desk, a floor-to-ceiling clear wall overlooked the city. Sheer white curtains softened the view. Three sides of the room were data walls, all dark.

  A silver-haired woman, native-Martian lanky, dressed in a tailored black suit, sat at the desk: Governor Luella Dennison. The governor came across as flinty in person as on the net, but something unexpected peeked out from behind her eyes. Grim determination.

  To do what? Dana wondered.

  Jumoke, in the leftmost chair of the arc, had turned toward the door. She managed a nod of greeting.

  A man sat beside Jumoke, studying the floor, and Dana recognized him, too. He was short, even by her Earth standards, and stocky, with dark, curly hair, a strong jaw, apple cheeks, and a jagged scar across his chin. Apart from his Mediterranean complexion, he could have passed for a leprechaun.

  Dr. Antonio Valenti had flown on Clermont, maybe four outings earlier, deploying probes for some kind of distributed, deep-space observatory. Dana had learned in one try never to call him Tony. It had been a long flight, in more ways than one. On topics other than gravitational waves, condiments, extinction patterns of marine invertebrates, Paris subway schedules (why Paris, she had no idea), and nineteenth-century Pacific island commemorative stamps, Antonio was a clam.

  It had been a two-for-the-price-of-one excursion, combining deployment of the Einstein Gravitational Wave Observatory for Antonio with another long-range test flight of the DED. So: Jumoke had been aboard, too. Not a coincidence, Dana guessed.

  “If you’ll take a seat, Captain McElwain,” the governor said.

  Dana sat next to Antonio. She tried to catch his eye, hoping for some hint there about the purpose of this gathering, but his gaze kept sliding away from her.

  Hawthorne closed the door before settling into the chair at the opposite end of the arc. He retrieved a folded datasheet from a corner of the governor’s desk.

  “Captain, thank you for coming.”

  “Yes, Governor.” The words had almost come out Yes, sir: old habits coming to the fore.

  Dennison glanced down at her desktop. “Please confirm that I have this right. Born into a military family, 2093, in London. Twenty-five years in the UW military as a pilot, mustered out with the rank of commander. Several commendations for meritorious service and bravery.”

  “Space Guard,” Dana clarified. Dad had raised her on heroic tales of the evac after the Tycho City dome collapse. Absent an interplanetary conflict, the Space Guard operated apart from the United Worlds armed forces. “Customs enforcement. Asteroid tagging and deflection. Mainly I flew search and rescue.”

  “Most notably, rescuing fifteen survivors from the cruise ship Logan.”

  From what had remained of the Logan. Dana still sometimes bolted awake in a cold sweat, trembling with the memories of threading a path through the debris field, of the flotsam—and vacuum-bloated corpses—caroming off her hull, of matching course with the tumbling, wobbling stub of a ship left after the drive explosion.

  She had worse nightmares of the derelicts she hadn’t gotten to in time.

  “Yes, Governor,” Dana said.

  “You emigrated to Mars in 2140. Why?”

  “No profound reason, just good opportunities here.” And after so many years off Earth, no way did she want to retire to that gravity.

  “For the twelve years since relocating here you’ve done lots of work as a pilot. For the past seven years, you’ve been a test pilot for Percival Lowell University.”

  Clermont was a typical inner-system runabout, suitable only for short-range jaunts, and that’s what the university bought her for. The university operated field stations around the world, most often under contract to the Terraforming Authority, facilities to and from which she and Blake carried supplies and people. They also provisioned bases on Phobos and Deimos and, now and again, outposts in the Inner Belt.

  Basically, Clermont was a delivery truck.

  When the Astronautical Engineering Department requisitioned a ship on which to test fusion-drive enhancements, some green-eyeshade type in the provost’s office determined that a ship the university already owned averaged only three days a week in use. Why buy a ship for occasional engine trials, when another ship more often than not sat idle?

  Five flights later, it was the DED that came up for trial. And from that series of tests, without a clue why, Dana found herself here.

  “Close enough,” she said.

  “Has anyone ever had to rescue you?” the governor asked.

  “No, Governor. Nothing has ever come up that my engineer couldn’t fix. He’s good.”

  “Hawthorne, what do you think?” the governor asked.

  “I’m
sold,” he said. “But as for Westford…”

  Dana squared her shoulders. “Do you have a problem with my colleague?”

  “Something of a Don Juan, don’t you think?” Hawthorne said. “A bit immature?”

  Shipmates, especially aboard a vessel as small as Clermont, don’t keep secrets. Dana knew all about Blake’s shipboard affairs and the girl on every world, but those days were past.

  To Dana’s way of thinking, her friend had met the right woman and grown up. By the time Rikki’s ship had landed on Mars, she a passenger in steerage returning home from a graduate program on the Moon, the two were engaged. He had quit his job for the cruise line, filed to immigrate, and taken a position with Dana, set for happily ever after.

  Nothing about this situation had the feel of happily ever after.

  Dana had kept her tone neutral. Now she put an edge in her voice. “Even if that were true, how is that relevant?”

  Governor and adviser exchanged a look. “Perhaps it’s not,” Dennison said. “Neil, bring in Westford.”

  Blake started at seeing Antonio, but sat beside Dana without commenting.

  “I appreciate your patience, Mr. Westford,” Dennison said. “If you wouldn’t mind reviewing a few details for me?”

  “If I can,” Blake said.

  “Born in Boston, 2120. Spacecraft engineer by training. Five years as ship’s engineer aboard commercial space liners, servicing—”

  “Is this a job interview?” Blake interrupted. “Respectfully, what’s this about?”

  “It’s about deciding whether to tell you what this is about,” Hawthorne shot back.

  “If everyone will be patient just a little longer,” Dennison said. “Commercial flights among Earth, Earth’s moon, the L4 and L5 habitats, and Mars. Certified to maintain life-support systems and fusion drives. Promoted to senior engineer in 2145. Demoted ‘for a poor attitude’ within the year. Reinstated in 2147 just in time to resign.”

  “And we’re done here.” Blake stood.