The Lost (The Maauro Chronicles Book 3)

by Edward McKeown

  I hesitated. “Maauro, I’d rather not. We’re still pretty nimble even at this velocity. Anything scan pulls up we should be able to react to it and maneuver around. If we slow, we’ll use fuel and we’re far from home.”

  She considered. “Sensible, I concur—though if we come up on a sizeable asteroid we can use it for braking.”

  We headed inward. Despite Maauro’s watchfulness and that of her AI, I stayed on the bridge. Exploring an unknown system was a hazardous business and the disappearance and disaster rate among first-in scouts was still high, despite the safeguards. Maauro remained unusually silent, using a great deal of her processing power. Even for a quantum computer, charting a system using only occlusion and gravity distortion was clearly tasking.

  Olivia and Dusko tended to the ship and their own special concerns. Dusko worked his hydroponics garden and whipped up the meals. Olivia prepared her weapons and exercised even harder. Something I hadn’t thought possible.

  On the third day insystem, Olivia walked into the bridge in her usual set of black leotards and a halter top. “Thought I’d drop in and see how things were going.” She’d brought a tray and some drinks with her and put them down on the arm of my flight chair.

  “One of your energy drinks,” she passed Maauro one of the sweet concoctions. It smelled syrupy enough to induce insulin shock. “No actual deuterium. Sorry.”

  “Well that should have enough calories in it to recharge you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Maauro said, but otherwise did not move. Her air of abstraction remained.

  “Any luck on planets?” Olivia said.

  “Not so far,” I replied, when Maauro didn’t.

  I picked up an iced tea. Olivia picked up the other glass. Her body shone with a fine perspiration.

  “You need to get back to the gym before you get soft,” she said. “Maybe another bout of MA.”

  “Please,” I said. “I need these arms to steer the ship with. You almost pulled the left one out of the socket last time.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You’d fallen better than that before. Guess you got tired.”

  Her hand was very warm through my shirt.

  “Well I’m for a shower. See you for dinner in an hour?”

  “You need not remain on the bridge, Wrik,” Maauro said. “I will call you in the event of a change.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll see you down there, Olivia.”

  Olivia gave me a wink and left. I couldn’t help trailing her with my eyes.

  “Why,” Maauro said in a low voice after Olivia disappeared down the companionway, “do you pretend not to look? If she didn’t want you to, she would not dress in such an eye-catching fashion.”

  “Well maybe that’s the only gym set she brought.”

  Maauro gave me a small smile. “Since I have done the ship’s laundry, I know that not to be the case. She is not wearing that outfit for my benefit, or Dusko’s, so clearly she is trying to attract your attention.” She picked up her sweet drink and sipped it delicately.

  I shifted, uncomfortable as always with such discussions. “I think Olivia prefers to be admired, rather than touched. She also indicated when she first came aboard that she had little interest in joining what she referred to as ‘the confusion.’’ I didn’t mention the more recent conversation on Velsust.

  “That may have changed. You are both young and healthy members of species. Her sexual attractiveness is far above average.”

  “Hey, what about mine?”

  She sipped her drink again.

  “Great, thanks a lot. Anyway hasn’t life been complicated enough with Jaelle and the two of us? Weren’t you just telling me about how you didn’t like having Olivia onboard one planet ago?”

  “The complications with Jaelle are largely of your own making,” Maauro said tartly. “She is a practical being, too practical to live without access to her own kind for all of her life or to believe that you can do so.”

  “But not so practical that she doesn’t resent my friendship with you.”

  Maauro hesitated for a few seconds and I began to repent of having said it. “Jaelle believes in the physical and psychological necessity that, if for nothing else than children, she must share you, as you must share her. She does not see that as optional, so she accepts it. It’s made easier by her culture, a permanent pair bond is rare among Nekoans.

  “She does not consider your relationship with me to be a necessity and thus resents the division of your ‘heart’ between us. I am a part without a place in her view. I am not a Nekoan, which she would not tolerate, nor a human, which she feels she must tolerate. So there is a rivalry between us. It has not overwhelmed our own relationship, but it may someday.”

  “It will be a long while,” I said slowly, “before she forgives the fact that I felt I had to come with you on this trip. I told her it was a much about me as about you—”

  “Did she believe that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you believe it, Wrik?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that just now. But you haven’t answered my question either. You’re encouraging my interest in Olivia. Why?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, and now I knew I heard sadness in her voice, “perhaps I fear that my love for you is selfish. That I am keeping you from something that could be very important to you.”

  “What?” I said. Forget the new star system, now I was really entering uncharted space.

  “I want to be with you,” she said, looking away. “Yet I cannot give you the physical love that Jaelle or Olivia can. Even if I altered my body to permit it, it would merely be a simulation. I have no such drives, nor the body that would give rise to such needs and desires.

  “My love may even be dangerous to you. You follow me into these adventures, these mission and battles, yet you are a frail being. How many more times can you do so without death claiming you? You were missing for two days on the Veru world. I had many long hours to wonder about the morality of what happens between us. Would you not live a longer life if I left you with your own kind?”

  “Longer, maybe?” I replied. “I wasn’t long for the world when you met me. I don’t know that Olivia’s company is much safer in any event. But Maauro, life with you in it, long or short, that’s what I want.”

  “I feel that if I really loved you, I would have left you on Star Central.”

  “I couldn’t have stayed behind. God, I’d have lost my mind wondering what was happening.”

  “Jaelle is right,” Maauro said, looking away. “I do divide your heart.” She sighed, a very deliberate act. Maauro rarely showed any great degree of emotion. Once before had I seen such, when she pulled free of the Predictor on Cimer, near hysterical with grief and pain, with actual tears running down her synthetic face. In at least one of the futures that combination of being and machine had showed her, she had seen my death and, I sensed, something more.

  “You’re thinking of the triple-ringed world, aren’t you?” I added.

  Maauro had seen a ringed world, unlike any in known space, through the Predictor. While she would not say what else she had seen in this one of the many possible futures the Predictor showed her, she’d voiced the one warning. “We must avoid such a place should it ever be found.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “How do I know that this isn’t the system of that world?”

  “If it is,” I said, standing. “We will face it together.”

  She looked at me and her face was troubled and though I felt the same in my heart, I smiled. “See you later.”

  The next day Maauro called all of us to the bridge. When we gathered she turned to us. “I have finished my scan of the system. I find five planets. Two are in habitable zones. Indeed their orbits are unusually close.”

  “A shared or
bit?” Olivia asked.

  “No,” Maauro said, “though about as close as it could be without gravitational effects guaranteeing an eventual collision.

  “There is a Mercury-like planet inward and two gas giants.” She looked at me. “Only the gas giants are ringed and the rings are standard equatorial ones.”

  I nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. Olivia looked at me curiously, but asked nothing.

  “I may have missed asteroid bodies, but certainly no other world, or major moons,” Maauro concluded.

  “Are any of the moons in habitable zones or large enough for an O2 atmosphere?” I asked.

  Maauro shook her head. “If the New Hope came here then they headed for those two worlds in the habitable zone. They’d have shaped course for the one with the closest orbit to Earth’s. That’s where we will go first.”

  “Agreed,” everyone said.

  Two days later, we closed in on the outer world’s orbit. All of us were again on the bridge, staring at the monitor at the bright world ahead. It was further out than Earth’s orbit around Sol and two mid-size moons circled it, one so far that it might have been an accidental capture.

  It was immediately clear something was very wrong.

  “No radio traffic on any band,” Maauro said. “No microwave or other transmissions that I can detect either.””

  “We’re coming up on dayside and just now in visual range. If it were nightside we could at least see if there were lights,” I added.

  “Anything visual?” Olivia added, shifting impatiently.

  “No, lots of clouds.”

  “I do not think we will find power or much of anything else operating,” Maauro said. “I am detecting high levels of radiation for an Earth-type world: Strontium 90 and other elements that indicate a large scale use of nuclear weapons in airburst.”

  “Crap,” Olivia said. “Sounds like it’s been fried.”

  “Let’s see if we can get some better visuals now,” I leaned forward and programmed the scanners. On the main screen, the planet snapped into focus, but all that could be seen were vast gray clouds and immense featureless sheets of shining ice. The world below reflected sunlight like a mirror.

  “Nuclear winter,” Olivia said, from behind my seat. “That was a heavy, heavy strike then. Not just a few tactical, or even theatre weapons. Somebody wanted to put the whole planet down.”

  “Reminds me of what Rainhell’s logs said about Vania after the Conchirri had their way with it,” I said. “If this is like Vania, then the only place anything might survive is about the equator where the ice sheets haven’t reached. I’ll recalculate our orbit so we pass over all of it.”

  Maauro nodded her approval. Stardust’s approach slowed as she caught up to the frozen world. As we settled into orbit, I scanned a major continent at the equator. Its northern and southern edges were glaciated, but the center remained free of ice. The land mass showed the signs of a great burn off. How long ago we couldn’t tell, but nothing green had come to reclaim the scarred wastes.

  “Damn,” Dusko said, “excessive by anyone’s standards.” The Dua leaned against the bulkhead, his cold blue eyes seemed to mirror the world ahead.

  Olivia nodded. “It’s like they were trying to swamp some defenses that either didn’t respond, or weren’t effective and 100% of the attack got through. This is overkill.”

  “Means that whoever did it didn’t plan to land and occupy the real estate,” I added. “Maauro, any idea how long ago this happened?”

  She considered. “A crude estimate would be five hundred years or so. But that has quite a margin for error that embraces the period during which New Hope might have arrived here. If the stardrive they had was only as efficient as the early models humans produced, they could have been out of the galaxy for decades or even a century on some of jumps that took us only weeks.”

  “New Hope carried no significant weapons,” Olivia said.

  “No, whatever happened here was local,” I said. “It would take fleets to do this or massive, long distance bombardments from the inner world.”

  We slid over to the nightside. Night’s reign was undisturbed by any glimmer of light.

  “Can we scan for Bexlaw’s ship?” Dusko asked.

  “Only visually,” Maauro said. “The planet has cities buried under the ice and blasted into fragments around the equator. There will be false positives in abundance. The radiation levels are too high for us to pick up the Isadora’s engines even if they were hot.”

  “That is a lot of planet to scan,” Dusko said, “even figuring that they would have put down at the equator if they came in anywhere.” He looked at the grim world with distaste. Even the insular Dua-Denlenn seemed depressed by the world-sized headstone.

  “Unless we pick up something very interesting on our first complete orbit, I see no reason to consider a landing.” I drew an immediate and hearty agreement from Olivia and Dusko.

  “I concur,” Maauro said. “There may be surviving animal life down there, particularly in the seas. We could be overlooking some land animals, or areas of vegetation, but I see no evidence of even small bands of humanoids like the one we found in the lifeboat. There are no towns, no villages, no power generation. If any natives survived down there, it will be in the most primitive of conditions.”

  “We’ll alert Confed when we get back,” I said. “They can send a proper planetary assessment team.”

  “So we head for the inner planet?” Olivia asked, standing.

  “At the completion of the next orbit,” Maauro said. “We will have overflown all of the areas free from ice by then.”

  Nothing showed up at the conclusion of the last orbit and I used the planet’s mass and a judicious burn of our engine to slingshot us toward the inner world. It took a ship day for us to close on this world.

  “This is our last real hope,” I said as we again gathered on the bridge.

  “Yes,” Maauro agreed. “We could risk another starjump outward with our supplies, but it would cut too far into our safety margin. And in any event, we have no clues as to where to go. The Isadora would have been marginal coming even this far. Bexlaw was an obsessive to take such risks.”

  I checked my instruments. “We have plenty of time for dinner before we can get anywhere near visual range. It’ll be at least six more hours.”

  “Sounds good,” Olivia said, stretching as she rose. “If I log anymore chair time on this bridge my butt will fall off.”

  “I would hate that,” I said. I couldn’t help the goofy grin that slipped over my face.

  “Bet you would,” Olivia said. “You know you still haven’t taken me up on that sparring session.”

  “We need everyone operational,” Maauro said. “Your training methods are somewhat rough.”

  “Whoops,” Olivia said. “I better be careful. Wouldn’t want to get beaten up by your girlfriend.”

  “No,” Maauro agreed. “You really wouldn’t.”

  “Now, now,” I said, “Let’s all play nice.”

  “I’m always nice,” Olivia said.

  Dusko snorted and rose and left. Olivia followed.

  “You still think she’s a good choice for me?” I said in a teasing tone.

  “Yes. I do confess to finding it somewhat wearying that every female that takes an interest in you, seems to feel the need to needle me. Doubtless they would feel ill-used if I returned the favor.”

  “Possibly because you would use real needles.”

  “Probably would,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t be any different if the genders were reversed. Probably worse, guys would have come to blows quickly. It’s how we resolve things.”

  “Oh? Dumbly?”

  “Yes, dumbly.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Sounds good,” I said, rising. I didn’t even have to flick on
the AI, Maauro did it automatically. “At least we’ll face whatever is coming on a full stomach.”

  We came up on viewing distance of the inner world in the middle of the night watch. Most of us had catnapped in our cabins, waking when Maauro called us back to the bridge. We came in to find the main screen already focused on the inner planet and at full magnification.

  “Lights,” Olivia said, with a grin, relief plain on her face.

  “Don’t get too hopeful,” I said. “It’s not a lot of lights and they are well separated. Earth or Star Central practically glow on their night sides. Still, we are far out. There may be more to be seen as we close.”

  “I am again picking up indications,” Maauro said, “of nuclear attack, but at a vastly lesser level. No nuclear winter here.”

  “So some chance of life and civilization,” Dusko said. “Maybe even a decent bar or two. Is a casino too much to ask?” He leaned against the bulkhead with a mug of whatever nasty-smelling brew Dua-Denlenn used in place of coffee.

  “There are radio transmissions as well: low power and no visual, Maauro continued. “I can make no sense of it, of course, without mathematical constants, it’s just random noise. With visuals I could pick up enough clues to eventually construct a translation program from gestures and obvious nouns. No chance here.

  “IR and other scans show some anomalies. There are large, dead cities down there. Still intact, but empty of life, heat or power, some show blast damage.”

  “Kinetic energy weapons then,” Olivia said. “Rocks or spheres of dense metals sent down out of orbit, nuclear level damage with way less radiation. Standard if you plan to land troops.”

  “Remember the note that was found with the alien corpse in the lifeboat ‘Help Seddon’ this may be Seddon.”

  Maauro nodded. “It will do for an identifier for now, though Seddon could be a person or something else.”

  The images sharpened as we closed the distance.

  Dusko whistled. “Look at those cities. Whoever built them had no fear of heights.”

  I nudged the sensor and it added building heights to the imagery. I too whistled. “Some of those towers go up one thousand five hundred meters. They’re connected at multiple levels by skybridges and elevated roadways.”