The Daedalus Incident

by Michael J. Martinez

  THE DAEDALUS

  INCIDENT

  Michael J. Martinez

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  AN IMPRINT OF START PUBLISHING LLC

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  The Daedalus Incident © 2013 by Michael J. Martinez

  This edition of The Daedalus Incident

  © 2013 by Night Shade Books

  Cover Illustration by Sparth

  Cover Art and Design by Victoria Maderna and Federico Piatti

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-473-8

  Night Shade Books

  www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Kate, for her love, support and faith in me

  And for Anna, for teaching me joy and wonder each day

  DATE: 1 Aug 2132

  TO: POTUS, POTEC, UKPM, UKMOD, USSECDEF, SECGEN NATO, CINC NATO

  FROM: VADM Gerlich, CINC JSC

  BC: BG Diaz USAF, LCDR Jain UKRN, P4 Durand JSC

  CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET-GAMMA

  RE: The Daedalus Incident

  The following represents the sum total of our knowledge regarding the incident on Mars that took place between 24-28 July 2132. You have been individually briefed on these matters, but I urge you to read and view the following closely, and please remember we continue to develop new data. I further urge you to follow security protocols to the fullest extent in handling this information, as the implications and repercussions remain incalculable.

  Based on this information, I recommend the creation of a task force to further study these events and, if necessary, defend against future incidents in Sol space. This task force should focus on both Mars and, to the extent possible, Saturn. A holoconference has been scheduled for 2 Aug 2132 at 0900 EDT to further discuss these matters. The quantum cryptography key for the link will be sent separately.

  I cannot stress enough the importance of decisive action in the days and weeks ahead to address this historic incident. I look forward to speaking to you tomorrow.

  VADM Hans Gerlich, GN

  CINC JSC

  CHAPTER 1

  July 24, 2132

  Mars is supposed to be dead, just a big hunk of cold rock hanging in space.

  Right now, though, Mars seemed very much alive—and pissed. Lt. Shaila Jain dashed across a subterranean cavern, dodging boulders the size of shipping crates as the floor bucked beneath her. Maybe Mars wasn’t supposed to have earthquakes like this, but it sure felt she was smack dab in the middle of one.

  Shaila had a decade of experience in the Royal Navy and the U.S./E.U. Joint Space Command, but earthquakes on Mars were definitely new. Nonetheless, her training was enough to get her ass moving. She grabbed her companion, Dr. Stephane Durand, and shoved him toward the center of the lava tube—an immense, circular cavern just underneath the red-rock slopes of Australis Montes. Shaila hoped the center of the cavern would be far enough away from the crumbling walls, so long as the ceiling held.

  “Where’s Kaczynski?” Shaila asked through her comm, her voice echoing slightly inside her pressure suit.

  “He was by the wall,” Stephane said, his French-accented voice quavering. “I do not see him.”

  “Shit. Get under the skylight,” she said, again shoving the young planetary geologist toward the ropes that snaked downward from the opening in the lava tube some fifty meters above. “That ought to be safe, right?”

  Stephane staggered toward the ropes, dodging falling rocks as best he could. “I don’t know. This is all wrong!”

  “Figure it out later,” Shaila said, pushing him ahead. “Jain to Kaczynski, come in, Ed.”

  Nothing.

  They reached the ropes and skidded to the ground. Shaila hoped the pressure suits could handle such rough-and-tumble use, but it seemed more important to get under the opening above them—the only area in the cavern that didn’t seem to be raining rubble. The quickened pace of her breathing was the loudest sound in her ears, echoing around in her helmet and accompanied by the staccato of rockfall vibrating through her suit.

  Shaila ventured a look back to where she last saw Kaczynski, but his suit lights were nowhere to be seen. She thought she could make out a large pile of rocks in the shadows where he stood just thirty seconds ago, but the light from the pinkish sky above did little to illuminate more than a fraction of the immense, kilometers-long cave, and her helmet lamps didn’t add much more.

  She flipped a switch on her suit gauntlet. “Jain to McAuliffe, priority one. Come in, McAuliffe, emergency priority one.”

  The radio crackled before McAuliffe Base replied. “McAuliffe to Jain, Adams here. What’s up, chief?” It was 2nd Lt. Rory Adams, U.S. Army, the ops officer on duty.

  Even in the middle of a crisis—or perhaps because of it—Shaila bristled at the informality. “We are in an earthquake, repeat, we are experiencing an earthquake. Kaczynski is missing. Send the crash team to this position. Over.”

  A few moments of silence. “Say again, Lieutenant? You’re in an earthquake?”

  “Dammit, Adams. This is not a drill! Scramble the emergency response team NOW! Reply, confirm and get it done! Over!”

  “Right, ma’am,” the young lieutenant replied shakily. “Confirming your emergency. Scrambling crash team, ETA to your location 15 minutes. Over.”

  “Jain out,” she grumbled, stabbing at the switch on her gauntlet again. “Still with me, Steve?”

  “I am,” Stephane said tentatively. “Sensor readings are very strange. I cannot find the source of this quake.” Shaila was surprised to see him waving his sensor pack over his head, taking readings of the cavern even as it threatened to flatten them both.

  “Get down!” Shaila said, pulling his arm back toward the floor. “How long is this going to last?”

  “It should have ended already. This feels big.”

  A rust-red boulder the size of a small car crashed down two meters away, sending a wave of reverberation through their pressure suits. “No kidding,” Shaila said. “Kaczynski, come in. Kaczynski, we are not reading you, over.”

  Still nothing. Shaila ventured another look around, only to see broken rock covering at least half of the visible cavern floor. Their suit lights, covered with red dust, no longer allowed them to see the walls of the cavern clearly. The cave felt like it was closing in on them, threatening a final crescendo of plummeting rock that would make them a permanent part of Mars’ long and ancient history.

  And then, just as suddenly as it started, the tremors stopped. A few final rocks skittered down the piles of rubble in the cavern before silence reigned once more.

  “Reading normal again,” Stephane said after a few moments. “No seismic activity.”

  Shaila climbed up on all fours and pushed herself to her knees, carefully breathing in and out to clear her mind and check for any immediate injury. “You sure?”

  “No, I am not sure,” Stephane said as he clambered ungracefully to his feet, hands trembling as he tried to adjust his sensor pack. “I have no idea what just happened, or why. There has not been this kind of activity on Mars for a million years. Was Kaczynski taking core samples?”

  Shaila slowly got to her feet, testing each joint as she did so. “Don’t know. First things first, though.” She did a quick visual scan of her suit, finding no visible tears and all systems normal. She did the same for Stephane; he had only been on Mars for six weeks, and the pressure suit was still both a novelty and a burden to him. Seeing his suit remained in one piece, Shaila grabbed his helmet and swung his attention toward her. “All right, Steve. Let me see you.”

  He looked confused, his attention a
lready back on the walls and ceiling of the lava tube. “What for?”

  Shaila saw his green eyes were focused, and there were no bruises or blood anywhere on his face or head. “Making sure you’ve got your wits about you. Do I look all right?”

  At this, the Frenchman smiled. “I have always thought so.”

  “Stow it.” Shaila grimaced slightly and gave his helmet a good rap with her gauntlet. In his short time on base, Stephane’s reputation as a flirt was already well established. At least he bounced back quickly. “Let’s find Kaczynski.”

  That task was far more daunting. In their frantic dash for the skylight, they had covered a good eighty meters very quickly, aided by the low Martian gravity. Their lights only managed about twenty meters or so of illumination, while the lava tube itself was fifty meters in circumference, slightly flattened at the bottom and top from the billion-year-old lava flow that had carved it.

  They split up, each of them walking back up the cave along one wall, sensor packs at the ready. Unfortunately, the mining sensors were limited in both scope and range—they had to satisfy themselves with heat readings, and even then they were good only to about thirty meters.

  Shaila walked carefully over the rubble, brushing away rocks with her boot so she could firmly plant her foot on the floor with each step. After about fifty meters of slow progress, her sensor pack’s readings went from blue to red. “Got him. Heat signature twenty-five meters ahead,” she reported. “Up against that wall there…let’s see.

  “Oh, shit.”

  She hadn’t been imagining that pile of rubble after all. The heat reading—presumably Kaczynski’s, unless Mars had other, far stranger surprises in store today—was coming from the same heap of rocks. Shaila immediately took off for the pile, leaping across the stone-strewn floor.

  “Be careful, Shay!” Stephane said. “I do not know how stable this area is now!”

  She did her best to arrest her speed, but was barely able to slow down before plowing into the rock pile. “Take a look at this. You think we can move this rubble safely?”

  Stephane came up behind her, picking his way slowly across the cavern floor. “If we are careful. If you come across something large, let me know. Otherwise, dig from the top as best you can, or push it backward away from us.”

  Together, they started moving debris. Despite the lower gravity, it was still hard work—the rubble pile was nearly three meters high, and some of the rocks required the two of them to heave-ho together. But they made steady progress, and the pile disappeared even as their white pressure suits took on a dirty reddish tint.

  “I see white!” Stephane said excitedly.

  Shaila followed his pointed finger and saw a bit of pressure suit peeking out from under the rock. “OK, let’s take this slow. Get him uncovered as best you can.” She flipped her comm over to the base channel again. “Jain to McAuliffe, confirm we have a man down. Repeat, Kaczynski is down. What’s the ETA on medical?”

  “McAuliffe to Jain,” Adams responded. “I have medical en route to your position. Should be there in five minutes, over.”

  “Roger that,” she said as she dug. “Alert Billiton it’s one of theirs. Jain out.” Kaczynski worked for Billiton Minmetals, the second-largest mining company on Earth. Billiton had been mining on Mars for nearly a decade, paying JSC for the use of McAuliffe Base as a staging ground as they explored—and exploited—the planet’s resources.

  Carefully digging with their gloved hands, lifting rocks rather than shoving them, the two astronauts finally found the outline of Kaczynski’s unconscious form, his limbs splayed out. Shaila methodically checked his suit. Unlike the JSC pressure suits, which were bulky relics of days gone by, the Billiton suits had all the bells and whistles—integrated heads-up displays in the visors, modular sensor units implanted in the frame, tiny holoprojectors to display data embedded in the gauntlets and chest. Damn lot of good it did Kaczynski now, though, since the electronics were shot. At least his helmet appeared to be intact. She ran her hands over his entire body, looking for signs of rupture in the tough composite fabric of the suit.

  There. A small tear, about six centimeters wide, on the lower left torso. The rocks must have created the rip, and then covered it up to keep his suit pressure from dropping too rapidly. But she could now see a light breeze emanating from the tear where Kaczynski’s air was escaping. She dug into the carryall pouch at her side and pulled out a roll of silvery tape.

  “What is that?” Stephane asked.

  “Duct tape,” she replied, a slight smile on her face. “Don’t leave Earth without it.” Shaila always thought basic JSC training should include a lecture on the proud history of duct tape in space. She pulled off a piece and slapped it onto the rip, then spun off a few more strips to make sure the seal would hold. “I want to get it around him to seal it off better, but I don’t want to move him without the crash team here.”

  Shaila checked the rest of Kaczynski’s suit as best she could, but found no more ruptures. She hooked her suit’s oxygen tank to his suit for about a minute to give him more air and pressure. At least he still seemed to be breathing.

  Meanwhile, Stephane had resumed surveying the cave. “This is incredible,” he said, eyes intent on his sensor pack. “There are no fissures, no signs of stress fractures anywhere. I cannot even find where most of this rockfall came from.”

  “Could Kaczynski have caused this?” Shaila asked. She wondered if Kaczynski had been on one of his infamous drinking binges the night before. Bootleg liquor was the number one commodity on McAuliffe, perhaps even more valuable than the deuterium-laced “heavy water” mined from the Martian ice caps.

  “I doubt it. It may be possible, but this was a very large quake. This little sensor here is limited, but I am sure the rockfall is everywhere in this cave. Look around.”

  Shaila poked her head up around the rock pile. While the memory of the cave prior to the tremor wasn’t exactly burned into her head, the walls and ceiling still seemed as they were before. She could still see the geologic strata neatly outlined along the cave wall—the same strata that had both Stephane and Kaczynski excited when they first arrived. The ceiling likewise seemed to be intact, without any major indentations or cracks. It seemed, overall, there was simply more rock in the cave, as if the gods had taken a big sack of stone and poured it into the lava tube.

  “So what do you think?” she asked Stephane.

  He threw up his hands, which struck Shaila as a very Gallic gesture. “I have no idea. We were in an earthquake that should not have been, and now there are rocks that should not be here.”

  Before she could respond, Shaila’s comm crackled again. “Levin to Jain, come in. We’re at the skylight.” Dr. Doug Levin was McAuliffe’s chief medical officer, and his voice was pure Brooklyn.

  “Jain here, doc. Kaczynski was buried under a rockfall. He lost some pressure in his suit, but nothing too bad. I’m worried about moving him.”

  “Roger. I’m coming down with a body board.”

  “You sure about that, doc? Steve and I can get him strapped down if you want,” Shaila said. She knew Doug Levin met the bare minimum of JSC’s fitness standards.

  The portly doctor was already making his way down the rope. “Be nice to me, girlie,” Levin said. “At least the gravity’s low. I’ll bounce, right?”

  “Just make sure we’re only coming back with one casualty, not two,” she said.

  Levin managed to make it to the cavern floor without incident and only a handful of expletives. The board was lowered down a moment later by the other members of the rescue team. The doctor wobbled his way over to Kaczynski and slowly bent down to examine him, medical sensors in hand. “Hard to tell with the suit on, but he doesn’t seem too bad. No spinal injuries at least,” Levin finally said. “Nice job taping him up. Let’s get him strapped in.”

  Levin and Shaila gently lifted Kaczynski out of the rubble and onto the board. She used more duct tape to secure him tightly, and gave his
torso a few more loops to make sure the leak wouldn’t get worse. Stephane volunteered to help Levin carry Kaczynski back to the ropes.

  Shaila went to follow them, but something in the rubble caught her eye. She turned back to where Kaczynski had fallen and saw another fleck of white. Fearing another, larger tear in Kaczynski’s suit, she quickly bent down to brush the rocks away.

  There was nothing there.

  Yet, unbidden, she heard her own voice in her head, somehow distinct from her normal train of thought: “You know, that could be where I found it.”

  Scowling, she ran her hands through the rocks and dirt once more, but came away empty handed.

  “Jain, get over here. I need your help rigging this board up,” Levin said over the comm.

  Shaila ran her hands through the dirt one more time before responding. “Yeah, all right. I’m coming.” She stood up, reflexively brushed her gauntlets clean, and headed back to the skylight.

  She could’ve sworn she saw something. Oddly enough, it looked like paper.

  “I need to get out of this cave,” she muttered to no one in particular.

  CHAPTER 2

  February 18, 1779

  Father,

  You have often asked me about my life in service to His Majesty’s Navy, and I have endeavoured to tell you as much as I can, but often detail escapes me in the telling. So it is upon the occasion of my first assignment as second lieutenant that I have decided to keep a journal of my time aboard HMS Daedalus and make it a present to you when next I return.

  Daedalus is quite typical of frigates in His Majesty’s Navy, boasting 32 guns and a crew of some two hundred souls. She is an older ship, but with fine lines and quick handling regardless. I hear tell of engineers and alchemists who would alter the design of our Void-going vessels, but ever since the Spaniard Pinzon ventured off Earth for the first time in 1493, it seems such talk has resulted in little. Be it sea or Void, Daedalus handles true, and to my eyes, needs no alteration.