And yet . . . here he stood.
Weatherby smiled even as his hands began to tremble. Daedalus had plummeted from the sky, but she had enough of her wings left to bring them safely to the ground.
Almost safely.
“Weatherby!” Finch shouted from behind him.
The lieutenant turned to see Finch rapidly working upon someone, with Anne and St. Germain aiding him. Dr. Franklin was just starting to sit up, so it was not him.
Morrow.
Weatherby rushed to them and saw the captain unconscious upon the deck. A piece of wood some two inches thick jutted out of his thigh, and he was bleeding profusely about the head.
“Report,” Weatherby stammered as he knelt at the captain’s feet.
“Head wound, severe,” Finch said dispassionately. “The leg will keep. I need to stop the bleeding. Have you curatives on you?”
Weatherby reached into his coat and produced three vials, his last. “Can you save him?”
“I don’t bloody know,” Finch said. “My lab?”
“Destroyed,” Weatherby said.
Finch looked up and spotted James picking himself up off the deck. “You there! Help us move him below!”
James scurried over and, with Weatherby’s help, moved Morrow into the great cabin, where they laid him upon his dining table. The odd angle of the ship made working more difficult, and Finch swore a great deal as he administered curatives and struggled to save Morrow’s life. In that, however, he had the help of not only Anne, but the Count St. Germain as well—and despite no longer having his miraculous little stone, the Known Worlds’ foremost alchemist was no mere orderly.
Weatherby and James left the doctor to his work, staggering out of the great cabin and up onto the main deck. There were other wounded, some severely. “James, please ask Miss Baker to come out and tend to the others,” Weatherby ordered.
A few minutes later, Anne had enlisted two of the men to help her begin a triage of wounded. The butcher’s bill had grown larger on the landing—six dead, another eight unaccounted for, and a score wounded.
Including the captain.
Weatherby walked slowly up to the quarterdeck, his mind reeling. He was greeted there by Franklin. “How is Sir William?” he asked.
“We cannot yet say,” Weatherby said dully, looking out over the wreckage of the Daedalus.
Franklin regarded the young man closely. “Was it not the great Bard who said, ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them?’”
“I believe it was, sir,” Weatherby replied. “Twelfth Night, if I’m not mistaken.” He had no notion of how he had managed to remember that.
“Well, then,” Franklin said, “I feel the only question before you now is whether you were born to it or shall merely arrive at it now. For I have no doubt, Thomas, that you possess your share.”
Weatherby turned to regard the old alchemist with a wan smile. “Whether or not I possess it, I suppose this is my lot.”
“Cagliostro is out there,” Franklin said, laying a grandfatherly hand on Weatherby’s shoulder. “We must finish what we came here to do.”
Weatherby nodded soberly. “So we shall.”
Finch tells me that Morrow will live, but that he is not likely to regain consciousness for several days. So it is that, in the space of mere hours, I have gone from second lieutenant to acting captain. It is roughly mid-morning here on Mars, and soon I will lead a force of men on an overland march to the Martian temple, accompanied by Dr. Finch and the Count St. Germain. There we will hopefully find Cagliostro and, I pray, stop him from whatever evil plot he has in mind. It is doubtful we will make it in time, for our best estimates put us at least six hours away from the temple. But we must try.
This is not how I expected to serve King and Country. My zeal and enthusiasm of mere months ago seems cocksure and foolhardy now. I do not feel up to this task, but I must see it through regardless.
I can think of nothing more to write herein. Should this serve as my last entry in this journal, Father, know that your son goes now to do his duty, with naught but love for you and Mother and my darling sisters in my heart.
God save us all.
Lieut. Thomas Weatherby, HMS Daedalus
July 28, 2132
Shaila Jain looked down at the datapad in her gauntleted hand, re-reading the last words of Weatherby’s journal one more time as she stood between the two rovers that would take her and her colleagues into the unknown. The journal entry had appeared shortly before lunchtime, and the monitoring program she created picked up every word. Weatherby was on Mars.
Or was he? Yes, Greene insisted that space-time quantum mechanics allowed for the possibility—and she was the one who put him onto the theory. But seriously? Sailing ships? Alchemy? An 18th century Royal Navy officer walking around Mars?
She watched as Greene and Stephane loaded the last of the survey equipment onto the rovers, their now-heavier pressure suits making the job that much more difficult. Diaz had insisted they go outside with the suits on, just in case the newly quirky planet decided it wanted its old atmosphere back. Moments later they were off, with Shaila and Stephane in Rover Two and Yuna and Greene riding with Diaz in Rover One. They tore across the Martian landscape, making a straight line for the edge of the sensor outages—and from there, if they were lucky, right to the pyramid.
Stephane was reading the journal entry as Shaila drove. “How could they go from space to Mars without burning up?” Stephane asked. “Does that not generate a lot of heat?”
“Normally, sure, but ‘normally’ might not apply here,” Shaila said. “I mean, what’s a frigate doing in space in the first place?”
“True,” he allowed. “And we could be breathing the Mars air ourselves right now if we wanted. Do you really think they are out there, waiting for us?”
Shaila paused a moment before responding. “Caution and objectivity, Steve—I mean, Stephane,” she said. “Keep your head on straight and gather the facts as we find them.”
“You believe he is there.”
Shaila turned to him, expecting to see one of his infuriating Gallic grins. Instead, he looked dead serious. “Caution and objectivity,” she repeated. “We’re scientists out here, right?”
“Of course,” he said, sounding disappointed. “There could be anything out there. But still.” He seemed to choose his next words carefully. “There is something I want to say.”
Shaila checked to ensure their comms weren’t being broadcast to the other rover before responding. “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t do it. No professions of undying love or anything like that.”
She was surprised by his sudden burst of laughter. “Well, you are certainly feeling better about yourself today, yes? At least this is a good change.”
Shaila felt her face go red. “Right. Sorry. Anyway. What’d you want to say?”
“I was simply going to say that when we are both done here, I mean on Mars, that I would like to invite you to visit me in France. You have never been?”
Shaila blinked. ”You’re making travel plans?”
She could see him shrug inside his pressure suit. “It seems right, you know, that when you are going off to face something big like this, that you plan ahead for after. It gives you something to look forward to.”
“Ummm . . . yeah. Makes sense, I guess,” she said, trying to fumble through an already awkward conversation. “All right. When this is over, you can show me France. Right now, we’ve a job to do.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.” He folded his arms against his chest in seeming victory.
Thankfully, Shaila only had to endure another five minutes of embarassed silence before they arrived at their first checkpoint. The rovers pulled to a stop about a hundred meters from the estimated border of the affected area. The sensor packs had a range of about five hundred meters, so it seemed safer to get out and walk—slowly—just in case whatever was in there was still frying electronic devices.
“On your feet, people,” Diaz said, clambering out of the rover. “Everybody gets a sensor. And Jain, this is for you.” Diaz handed her a zapper.
“Really?” she asked.
“Just in case,” Diaz said.
“Of what?”
Shaila saw the colonel frown. “If I knew, maybe we wouldn’t need ’em, Jain.”
“Aye, ma’am.” She strapped the zapper to her suit’s utility belt.
Standing a few meters apart, the five astronauts began walking slowly toward what they believed was the affected area. It didn’t look like much at all, really—a flat rust-red plain with the Australis Montes mountain range off in the distance. The AOO sensor poles were visible all over the horizon, as usual. Shaila’s portable sensor pack wasn’t picking up anything at all.
Just another day on Mars, apparently—aside from the heavier gravity and breathable atmosphere, of course.
Diaz stopped them about five meters away from the imaginary borderline. “OK, that’s far enough. You have our test subject, Dr. Greene?”
“Got it right here,” Greene said. He opened a bag and pulled out the oddest piece of exploratory equipment in the history of space travel: a holocam, sandwiched between two standard-issue JSC daybed pillows and held together with duct tape. The pillows were Stephane’s addition to Shaila’s original solution.
Greene flipped the camera on. “You getting the readout, Dr. Hiyashi?”
Yuna was looking at a datapad. “The camera is transmitting perfectly. Ready to go.”
Greene weighed the camera in one hand for a moment, then reached back and threw it into the area, right past one of the blacked-out sensor towers. Even with the heavier gravity, the device was still pretty light compared to Earth. The camera traveled about fifteen meters, then rolled another five meters or so before coming to a halt in a cloud of dust. On their datapads, the McAuliffe crew saw a brief interruption in the camera’s transmission—less than a second—where it whited out, much as Greene’s holocam had done the first time he and Shaila encountered the EM lines. But other than that, the camera was functioning normally.
Diaz had Greene and Yuna repeat the process twice more, each time advancing another twenty to twenty-five meters into the area. There were no further white-outs, and the camera continued to function perfectly. It wasn’t even fully rad-hard.
“It would appear that whatever rendered our sensors blind yesterday is no longer in effect,” Yuna finally reported, “though we cannot say for sure if another incident is forthcoming.”
“Let’s hope not,” Diaz said. “For now, I think we’re good. Let’s get back to the rovers and keep going. But if anyone so much as catches a hint of static or systems interruption, speak up fast.”
A few minutes later, Rovers One and Two were off again. There was a brief glitch in the sensor packs as they crossed into the area, but the electronics held up fine otherwise, and Shaila was starting to wonder whether this was just one big screw-up, somehow. That didn’t last too long, however. As they progressed into the affected area, both the local gravity and atmospheric pressure continued to climb. Greene theorized that the other dimension, for want of a better word, was overlapping theirs.
Just as Greene was about to launch into a discourse on the many-worlds theory of parallel dimensions in quantum physics, Yuna interrupted—just in time, in Shaila’s opinion. “I’m picking up something,” Yuna said. “There seems to be both a large amount of liquid water and a great deal of inert organic material about 1.6 kilometers away, just over that little ridge to the northwest. It appears to be in the same position as that unidentified shape in the MRO image we got from Houston.”
“Roger that, divert to investigate,” Diaz said.
The two rovers swooped off course and headed toward a slight rise in the plain, covering the distance in less than a minute.
“Full stop!” Diaz shouted.
Shaila hit the brakes hard, pulling alongside Diaz’ rover just in time to avoid a collision and wondering what the hell happened.
Then she looked up.
About fifty meters away, a large, unnaturally straight ditch filled with water stretched off toward the mountains.
In it, listing to one side, was the wreckage of a three-masted sailing ship.
CHAPTER 24
July 28, 2132
The five astronauts walked cautiously toward the ship, having parked their rovers some fifty meters away. The distance was not only prudent, but it allowed them time to wrap their heads around the sight in front of them.
The ancient ship boasted three masts and at least twenty gun ports on its right side, which was facing the McAuliffe astronauts. Shaila’s limited sea training was enough for her to know that the spars and sails and rigging were a complete mess. The ship was listing about ten degrees to starboard, in water that barely covered its keel. There was wreckage strewn behind it—wooden shards and planking, mostly— resting in a shallow trench that, somehow, seemed wrought by hand rather than carved by the ship’s descent. Indeed, it seemed the ship had tried to land in one of the area’s new canals, but overestimated how much water was there.
“I am not detecting any movement,” Yuna said. “There are residual heat signatures, however.”
“Heat signatures?” Diaz asked.
“Yes, colonel. Ambient temperature is roughly 4 degrees Centigrade. There are several dozen heat signatures around and inside the . . . ship . . . that still stand out from the surrounding air.”
“What could those be?” Stephane said, intent on his own sensor. “They seem small, no more than one to two meters in length, some smaller than that.”
Shaila took a leap forward, looking intently amidships. The ship’s skewed angle allowed her to see the exposed main deck. “I think they were people,” she said quietly. “Look.”
Everyone looked to where Shaila was pointing, midway between the fore and main masts. There they saw a number of bodies, clothed in little more than castoff rags. Blood was everywhere. A severed arm had fallen from the deck and was floating in the water surrounding the ship.
“Oh, my God,” Diaz whispered.
Shaila pulled out the holocam, which allowed her to zoom in on the main deck. “There’s, um . . . six bodies, maybe seven. A couple of them are in . . . pieces,” she reported, trying to keep her composure. “Lots of blood. The bodies appear to have been . . . slashed, maybe. Torn apart. Yeah, I see some pretty deep gouges in the decking, too.”
“What could have caused that?” Greene asked.
Diaz looked over Shaila’s shoulder. “Looks like some kind of animal attack.”
“Impossible,” Yuna said, looking up at the deck with disbelief on her face.
“It is a ship!” Stephane said, gesturing wildly at the vessel. “How can this be impossible, now, when you see this in front of you? What if this is the Daedalus?”
“Oh, shit,” Shaila said. She handed the holocam to Yuna and quickly leapt away—only to find that the higher gravity wasn’t letting her skip-walk as far as she used to go. Nonetheless, she took off at a jog, headed for the stern of the ship.
“Where are you going?” Diaz demanded. “Stay close!”
“I gotta know,” Shaila said, undeterred. She did unholster her zapper, however, as she jogged past the stern of the ship. She kept looking over her right shoulder until she stopped about five meters away. There, she looked up to see a red flag dangling from a broken spar. Under the windows of the frigate’s great cabin, she read the hastily painted block letters beneath.
“It’s not Daedalus,” she reported, relief evident in her voice as she jogged back to the group. “It’s the Chance. The pirate ship.”
“Oh, that is good!” Stephane said. “I feared the worst.”
“Objectivity, Durand,” Shaila warned, even though she was just as relieved.
“Yes, of course. But does this not show that the book is really true?” Stephane asked. “Weatherby wrote about the Chance. This is the Chance, yes?”
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br /> “All right, yeah, I believe there’s some truth to it,” Diaz allowed, her eyes glued to the remnants of human beings bleeding out on the deck of the pirate ship. “But something happened to these poor bastards, and I’m hard pressed right now to say who the good guys are, especially if the British did this.”
“Hey!” Shaila said.
“Sorry, Jain. I know the journal feels right. But they might not be your British, you know? Even if Weatherby is this great, upstanding young guy, who’s to say he isn’t just plain wrong about it all?”
“I absolutely concur,” Yuna said firmly. “We must consider that the situation may not be what it seems. Jumping in and choosing a side could be disastrous.”
“Roger that,” Shaila said, not quite agreeing.
“All right, back to the rovers,” Diaz said. “Whomever or whatever did this could still be around. We’ll head for the pyramid and have a survey team come out here later on.”
They started trudging back to the rovers, but Stephane remained looking at the Chance. Shaila walked back to him and keyed a button on his suit so they could talk privately. “What is it?”
“This is real,” he said. “The Chance. The Daedalus. This Cagliostro person. Aliens. All of it.”
Shaila had seen this look before—shell-shocked and trying to cope. Normally, it came in the middle of combat, with people out there wanting to kill you. This was bigger.
Before she could respond, Diaz’ voice came on over the com: “Sensors showing movement, possible bogeys less than two clicks off. Smoke sighted. Mount up.”
June 19, 1779
At least it wasn’t hot.
That’s what Weatherby kept telling himself as he trudged ahead across the barren, rock-strewn plain. Having made keel-fall near the southern pole, temperatures there were milder than was the norm for Mars. Indeed, had there been a nice breeze and some fresh air about, Weatherby would have been considerably heartened by the prospect of a pleasant walk. But the wind was more gale than breeze, and suffered from a density of dust that stung the eyes and skins. Furthermore, the plain itself was absolutely interminable, with the foothills of the Sierra del Sur never seeming to come much closer, and only gentle hills—mere inclines, really—punctuating the monotony. Finally, of course, pleasant walks rarely included heavy packs of food, water and ammunition.
The Daedalus Incident Revised Page 38
