Delphi Promised (Targon Tales Book 4)

by Chris Reher

They shifted to the table-top emitters where soon a three-dimensional model of the asteroid field displayed. One side of it continued to show blurred and incomplete but the area Cyann had pointed out came into view when she rotated the projection as far as their sensors had been able to draw it. Along one side, four perfectly round domes rose above the surface. Shallow, wider than they were tall, their shape and placement left little doubt that these were not natural formations.

  “Looks like your Shantirs were right,” Nigel said. “Someone’s at home over there.”

  “Or was, at some point,” Anders amended.

  “Given the size of the main body, those things are pretty massive,” Cyann said. She used a pointer to feed a measurement back to the display program. The segment lit up in green. “You could fit a whole town in one of those.”

  “And that’s just the parts we can see. There could be sub-surface areas, too.”

  Nigel nudged Anders. “I say we take a closer look.”

  Cyann looked up at Anders, immediately taken by Nigel’s suggestion. Their mission boss, no less curious but far more restrained by procedure, seemed undecided. Her experience told her that he was only moments away from making a protocol-inspired decision.

  “It would only take a few hours to get there,” she pressed. “Nova didn’t say we had to stay by the keyhole. We’ll get better readings if we can get to the side of whatever’s messing up the pointy end.” She gripped his arm. “And we could get some real-vid.”

  Anders grinned. “True, and it’ll take just as long to get the sample probes back. I’m dying to find out who’s on that rock.” He walked to the main console and tapped into their com system. “Vanguard Twelve, come in.”

  “V12,” came the reply. “Standing by.”

  “I take it you’ve picked up the asteroid?”

  “Affirmative, Scout.”

  “We’re going to move in for a closer look.”

  “Sir?”

  “Some readings aren’t clear and we may have detected habitation.”

  “Sentient, sir?”

  Anders glanced at Cyann. “Uncertain. We’ve not picked up any sort of radio transmission or power source. We can’t return just yet, anyway. Our schedule won’t be affected.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “V5?” Anders said, addressing the other Vanguard team.

  “Sounds a whole lot more fun than hovering around here, sir.”

  “Prepare to depart. Maximum sweep configuration. Radio silence, all sensors active. Let’s not alarm anyone.”

  “Yay,” Cyann said when he had cut their connection to their Air Command escort.

  Nigel pumped a fist into the air and left the lab for his cockpit.

  “I’ll monitor the scans,” Anders said. “I’d like you to get some rest and see if you can pick up anything from Kiran. Something makes me think he’s on that asteroid.” He smiled. “Jovan isn’t around to annoy you, but I guess that’s not going to work a second time. Try your best.”

  * * *

  But there was nothing out there for her and Cyann’s attempts at attaining the correct sort of khamal simply threatened to send her off into a deep snooze. Likely, Jovan was aware of her efforts but the voice she sought remained silent.

  Frustrated and just a little bit grumpy, she left her cabin after hours of fruitless meditation to return to the lab. She was surprised to see Jovan there with Anders, perched atop a wheeled stool pulled up to the monitors. She was even more surprised when she quickly smoothed her tousled hair and found herself worrying about the state of her wrinkled shirt.

  “No luck?” Jovan said when she had taken a chair beside Anders.

  She shook her head. “Not a thing. Did you hear all the news?”

  “Yes. It was interesting to find that I’ve been kidnapped in my sleep and whisked away into the great unknown.”

  “Not so unknown. There’s nothing out here but chunks of asteroid. You don’t approve?”

  He shrugged. “Seems like an interesting idea. As long as you don’t plan to land. We’re not authorized for first contact. There is much we don’t know.”

  “Any indication yet that they’ll see us coming?”

  “Not really,” Anders said. “Still no noise from there. But you don’t build a habitat on an asteroid by growing wings to get there. If they hitched a ride they must have had some very advanced methods.”

  She looked up at the screen. “Maybe they’re all gone. Dead.”

  “Oh, we have real-vid now,” Anders said excitedly. He switched the display. She now saw a number of irregular shapes, dull brown and bronze, worn smooth over time and accompanied by hundreds of smaller rocks inside a cloud of what might be thousands. The light of the star in this sector threw harsh shadows over the uneven surfaces.

  “Looks a lot like our alien’s pod,” she said. “Same composition?”

  “In parts. Try not to hug it. Don’t want it melting on us.”

  Jovan laughed at that although Cyann furrowed her brow. “Not funny.”

  “Yes, it is,” Anders said. “We’ve taken a little detour to approach from the side where we’ve seen those domes. I don’t want to risk running into whatever is jamming our sensors at the front end. Look.” He zoomed into a small section of the asteroid until the round objects on its side because visible. “Most definitely made by something sentient.”

  “Makes me wish we’d brought along a few more of the experts,” Cyann said. “Look at that raised edge all around the domes. It’s almost like they built a roof over a crater. What are those bubbles around them?”

  “More structures, we think. There are few straight angles to be found. We have detected an atmosphere of sorts, but it’s still a good idea to build down and not up. A good meteor shower would do all sorts of damage.”

  “Have we been able to look inside?”

  “Not really. No more than we were able to look inside the rock on Sola back home. Sensors think these cores might be ice, at least the bigger pieces. So there’s your source of water, if these folks are, indeed, a Prime species. There is ice on the surface, too, under a layer of debris. Cold there.”

  “Oxygen?”

  “Not much on the surface, but it’s venting from the domes, along with waste gases. Point five gravity. Spectrometers aren’t all in agreement, but I’m afraid that this is, indeed, our Genesis Cloud. The composition is almost identical to the shell of the alien’s pod. We’d need samples to get at the endoliths, though. We won’t find the virus from here.”

  She turned to him. “You’re not thinking of visiting, are you?”

  “If this were my expedition I might give that a thought. After all, I feel sort of invited. But I think our Air Command escort would place us all under arrest for even thinking that.”

  “With good reason.” Jovan stood up and stretched his long limbs. “We should start heading back to the keyhole. I’ll be ready to jump us back. We know what we need to know about this thing.”

  “No we don’t,” Cyann said.

  “Huh?”

  “We still don’t know what Kiran expects from us. And surely you’re not saying that we should seriously think about destroying this thing until we know who’s living there.”

  “Cy, we cannot let it get into Trans-Targon. That’s not even a question. We know where it is, we know when it’ll get there. Now we have to stop it and we only have hours, not months or years, to figure that out.” He looked to Anders. “Am I the only one who’s worried about that?”

  “Maybe we can offload these people somehow,” she said. “We should try to make contact. We can’t just blast them out of the sky.”

  “Offload them? How? Where? There could be thousands of them. How else could you sustain a civilization on a rock like that? We don’t even have the means to keep them in quarantine.”

  “There must be a way to divert it. Maybe the Repha’s retro boosters—”

  “Look at the size of it!” He waved a hand at the screen. “It has its own gr
avity! Atmosphere! We don’t have anything that’ll do more than nudge it a bit.”

  “Well, that might be enough to veer it away from the keyhole.”

  “It’s not going from keyhole to keyhole by accident. It’s being drawn there. You’d have to move it a huge distance to get it off course.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. And what if Kiran is on there? There’s got to be a way to get to him.”

  “You would risk all of Trans-Targon for a ‘what if’?”

  Anders came to stand between them, perhaps fearing that their argument would turn physical at any moment. “I get nervous when I see Delphians raise their voices,” he said. “I agree that we need to head back and hand this over to our commander. She and Tychon have dealt with more hostiles than any of us.”

  “These aren’t rebels,” Cyann said. “They’re not hostile. These are people who have no idea that we’re planning to murder them.”

  “To save billions,” Jovan said.

  “So maybe it’s our time to get revisited by them. That’s how we got here in the first place, isn’t it? They’re part of our evolution.”

  “That’s a theory, nothing more. You’re being unreasonable.”

  “And you’re being Delphian!”

  GetOutGetOutGetOutGetOutGetOut!

  Cyann gasped. “Kiran!”

  “What is he saying?”

  “We have to leave here,” she said. “He’s so scared. Angry and scared. He can’t stop it.”

  “Stop what?” Anders said.

  Jovan dove for the com console. “Bug out. Back to the keyhole. Vanguard take defensive positions. Bug out. Bug out.”

  GoGoGoGo. Away. GetOutGetOutGetOut!

  “V5 under attack,” they heard over the speaker. “Taking damage but I don’t know how. Systems are going down.”

  The asteroid slid from their real-vid screen as Nigel rolled the ship. The maneuver was painfully slow. Something made the Scout shudder and the lights flickered overhead. Some of their screens went offline when Nigel rerouted power.

  “Nigel,” Anders shouted. “Get us the hell out of here.”

  “Could use a hand up here, Jovan,” Nigel replied. “Shit! V5 just completely fell apart. What the hell are they using?”

  Anders and Cyann went into the corridor and started to pull open bins and cabinets to retrieve portable air supplies and weather gear, the lightweight protective suits used in hostile environments and even short space walks. Another shudder went through the ship.

  “Get tactical,” Jovan said when they arrived with their loads in the cockpit. “See if you can show them we have a few arrows in our quiver.” He glanced at Cyann. “Guess they’re hostile, after all.”

  Anders manned the station while Cyann slipped into her coveralls and then quickly helped Nigel with his. Once Nigel had returned to his bench Jovan also dressed. “Talk to them, Cyann,” he said. “See if you can reach Kiran.”

  “He’s gone again. And you’re not likely to get me any more angry than earlier.”

  “Didn’t do that on purpose that time,” he said and pointed at the com console. “Talk to them anyway.”

  She sat down and switched their programs to include the translation matrix developed by Targon’s linguists. “Hello,” she said awkwardly. “Please stand down. Err, stop hurting us. We mean no harm. No danger. We want to visit. Want to help.”

  Anders nodded. “Yes, keep it simple.”

  “Please stop hurting,” she said again. “We are damaged.”

  Nigel cursed. “Give it up, Cy. They just took out the other Eagle.”

  “Anders,” Jovan said. His attention was focused on the helm where he and Nigel were plugged into their sensors to anticipate incoming waves of energy from the asteroid. “It’s coming uphill of the dome by those big spikes.”

  Cyann looked up at their display that was now again showing the asteroid field. Anders directed the Scout’s limited armament at the dome and released a warning volley.

  “Didn’t even scorch the thing,” Nigel said. “We’ve got four missiles on board. I suggest today is a good day to use them up.”

  Anders fired at the same moment when another shot from the surface strafed the Scout, turning it aside. His shot went wild and did little more than add a fresh crater. He cursed and loaded another. Cyann cried out when the overhead lights dimmed and a row of warning signals glared from the console.

  “That’s propulsion,” Nigel said. “And aft shields.”

  “Land on the asteroid,” Cyann said.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “What choice do we have?”

  “Do it,” Jovan said, his eyes on Cyann. “Take us down.”

  Nigel shook his head but turned the ship into a wide approach onto the asteroid. “You’re all crazy. Damn Delphians. I knew you’d be the end of me yet.”

  Anders opened a compartment and withdrew a selection of guns, com units and emergency kits which they stowed into their suits. “Should never have left the keyhole,” he mumbled.

  “Should have stayed in bed this morning,” Nigel added. “Looks like they stopped shooting. Hang on to something. Going vertical but for all I know this floating piece of pestilence is going to fall apart when we touch it.”

  “Don’t talk about my ship like that,” Anders said with a half-hearted grin.

  The Scout lurched sideways and all of them felt the grip of gravity. Jovan compensated quickly, but a second lurch followed. Anders was thrown from his seat and slid across the floor to the cockpit door. A final thump and the ship came to rest.

  “Uncle!” Cyann leaped from her chair and rushed to Anders, disoriented by the lighter gravity and the tilt of the ship on uneven ground.

  He groaned. “I think I broke something.”

  “Lie still,” she said. “I’ll get the kit.”

  Nigel conferred with Jovan over the Scout’s systems. “Life support is all right,” Nigel said. “The shields will reset. Maybe. Lost the exterior com array. Manual controls are fried. Something’s blown the coolant relays. We’re not going to get far without crossdrives, so forget about jumping home.”

  “Repairable?”

  “We might be able to launch by rolling off this thing with the thrusters but that’ll just have us floating in space.”

  “Which will just make us a target. Unless we can get out of their sight.”

  “True. But for all we know they have those weapons all around this rock.” He consulted with another display. “Can’t send a distress call without the long-range but I think we have the juice to send a message packet back to the keyhole. The Colonel is bound to come looking for us. She’ll find it when she gets through.”

  “Send a few of them in case they get caught up in that energy field. You might want to mention that they don’t like visitors here. And that our xenologist isn’t in the best shape for interplanetary diplomacies.” Jovan turned to Cyann and Anders. “What’s the damage?”

  She consulted her scanners. “Concussion. Two broken ribs. You’re kinda fragile, Anders.”

  “What I am is sixty-two years old. You try flying across a room into a metal wall and see how you feel afterwards.”

  “Cognitive function okay,” she reported with a grin.

  Jovan scanned the vicinity with the external cameras. “I don’t see anybody out there. We’re not too far from those domes.”

  “No one’s shooting at us now. I consider that a plus.” Nigel checked his sidearm. “Why would they just start firing without making contact?”

  “Because we were sneaking up on them?” Cyann said. She moved aside when Jovan came over to check Anders’ broken bones. “Then again, with guns like that you’d think they’d have the know-how to send a warning or something.”

  “But maybe not the interest,” Nigel said. “I still don’t even know how they did it. And the Eagles! Best pilots in the fleet and they went down like someone swatted them out of the air.”

  Jovan leaned over Anders. “A lot of pain?�
��

  “Yeah,” Anders said around shallow gasps for air.

  The Shantir touched the neural interface at Anders’ temple to reach the Human’s brain. Anders, like most operators of precision tools and all pilots, had long ago opted for the embedded device. The implant also enabled Delphians to more easily touch the minds of non-Delphians although few outsiders were granted the experience. Healers used it to help their patients use their own abilities to relieve nearly all ailments. Anders closed his eyes when Jovan guided him to gradually release the endorphins he needed to deal with the pain and to calm his breathing. “Try to keep breathing as deeply as you can,” Jovan advised.

  “You need to lie down,” Cyann said. “Nova will come for us soon, I’m sure.”

  Anders coughed. “I’ve spent twenty years in Air Command and I’ve known Nova for longer than that. It’ll be a day or so before she’ll worry because she knows Cyann and I are nosy. When she does start to worry she may send another Eagle through, but not without a lot of deliberation. It would mean sending Tychon along those half-assed coordinates you got from Kiran because he’s the only one over there that can handle them. That will leave them without a Level Three spanner on the Trans-Targon side. The only other option is to send an Eagle back to Targon to request backup. So forget about them charging to our rescue before this pile of pebbles is at the keyhole.”

  “You think she’ll wait that long?” Nigel said. “With Cyann out here? And you?”

  “Didn’t say she’d be happy about it. But she’s Air Command. And Tychon will remind her of that.”

  Jovan sighed. “Now you know why I’m a civilian. We need to find out more about these aliens. Whoever they are.”

  “We’re about to,” Nigel said. “Will you look at that.”

  The video system showing the exterior of the ship had picked up movement in the distance and automatically focused on that. Soon they distinguished a dozen or more shapes moving toward the Scout, walking upright and very cautiously. In the harsh shadows cast by the asteroid’s outcroppings, the flicker of their bioluminescence appeared like a sea of colored lights in the dark.

  Nigel tugged the tactical console from its resting position.

  “Don’t shoot at them,” Cyann said.