by Mark Wandrey
“Hi, Lilith,” she subvocalized. With the implant it wasn’t necessary for her to speak to be heard.
“Hello, Mother. There is a problem. I have lost contact with Pip and his expedition to Remus.”
“That was today? I’d completely forgotten.” Once Minu had verified she was pregnant, a lot of things had slipped her mind, at least temporarily.
“Yes, they departed Romulus fourteen hours ago and set down on Remus. They were exploring the thermal vents. Two hours ago, I lost all telemetry from their pressure suits.”
“No warning or communications?”
“Nothing. I have ruled out accidents. Bellatrix’s primary star is quiet. There is no sign of meteor activity, and there are no other starships in the vicinity. The Rasa shuttle pilot has not made any further contact either.”
“Have you tried intense sensor scans?”
“The planetoid’s active stealth network continues to defeat my scans. I am afraid some automated defenses may have been triggered.”
“Is that possible in an old installation?”
“If it was manufactured by The People, it is not outside the realm of possibility.”
“I’m heading for the factory.”
Less than an hour later, she and Aaron were jogging onto the factory’s small tarmac, toward a knot of feverish activity. The prototype for the Phoenix shuttle squatted there, a dozen ground crew rushing to finish prepping it for flight. “How soon can we take off?” Aaron demanded of the crew chief as soon as they were within earshot.
“We didn’t expect to fly this thing any time soon,” the man warned him. “It is in identical shape to when you flew it last year.”
“Will it hold up?” Minu asked him, closing her flight suit and shifting the equipment bag to a more comfortable position on her shoulder.
“It’s the same as the production Phoenix, with a few minor differences.” Aaron turned to the crew chief again. “I asked how long?”
“We’ve almost finished recharging the EPC.” He still looked reluctant. Aaron stopped and grabbed the man by his heavy, protective vest.
Her husband was a good twenty centimeters shorter than the crew chief, but he was built like a squat Hercules. Aaron routinely pressed two hundred kilos, and his arms were bigger than Minu’s thighs.
“Ten minutes, sir,” the man stammered.
“Get it done!” Aaron snapped and let him go. “We’re going to start the pre-flight checklist.”
Ten minutes later, the ground crew rushed away from the Phoenix, dragging power and data cables, while Aaron spun up the gravitic drive and taxied away from the hanger. Two men were nearly swept off their feet by the swirling gravity wash from the shuttle’s drives.
“Here we go,” Aaron said, engaging the internal compensator.
Minu felt the familiar tingle of an artificial gravity field surge through her body. A second later, the Phoenix jumped into the air and rocketed straight up.
“You didn’t request permission to take off.”
“They can fine me,” he said as he nosed the craft upward, breaking the speed of sound before they passed ten thousand meters.
Minu got on the radio and went through the formalities as Aaron mumbled, “My friends might be in danger; fuck the rules.”
Once she’d filed the belated flight plan, she turned to her husband and put a hand on his shoulder. “Gregg emailed, he has a platoon of Rangers standing by with a Phoenix at Ft. Jovich if we need them.”
Aaron nodded.
“He said he can have them there in under an hour,” she said.
“Let’s hope we don’t need them.” He worked the controls for a minute. “Isn’t Faye due in a couple of weeks?”
“Yeah,” Minu said, “but he’s Chosen.” They both nodded in understanding at his dedication to his duty.
The shuttle rocketed upward so fast the air turned to iridescent streamers of plasma across the windscreen. A part of Aaron’s mind noted they’d made it to orbit five minutes faster than they ever had before.
Minu knew he was pushing the prototype dangerously. Aaron had called the craft a kludge once before, a collection of ideas holding hands and temporarily agreeing to cooperate. She hoped those ideas would continue to cooperate until they were back on solid ground.
As soon as they were safely in orbit, Minu started calling out over the radio, “Pip, Kal’at, this is Minu aboard Phoenix 001, do you read us? Over.”
She continued to hail every five minutes as they broke orbit and headed for Remus. Once they were in space, the shuttle’s speed was limited only by the power of its drive and the safeguards that protected human passengers from massive G forces.
Lacking a gravitic lens drive like the Kaatan, it could only use the ion propulsion system, a distant relative of the impulse drive the Kaatan used. Minu watched the navigation data closely. She didn’t doubt her husband but, since he was flying manually, an extra set of eyes couldn’t hurt.
He pushed the mid-course braking maneuver as closely as he dared. Minu was just about to say something when he flipped them over and began thrusting backward to kill their momentum.
It was a carefully-controlled maneuver; Remus was a moving target several orders of magnitude smaller than Bellatrix and moving in a relatively quick orbit.
With no atmosphere to factor in, Aaron brought the shuttle straight down. Minu caught herself gripping the arms of the co-pilot seat as they fell toward the moon tail first, riding a column of ionized plasma.
“That is an aggressive flight path,” Lilith said into her ear like a conscience.
“He’s a good pilot.”
“He is that.” Minu smiled a little under the stress of the approach. Her daughter didn’t offer praise lightly.
As the moon loomed closer, Aaron flared the shuttle and fired its maneuvering rockets to kill the last bit of velocity, bringing them down less than a dozen meters from the other Phoenix shuttle.
“Rasa pilot, has there been any contact with the team?” Minu knew the most likely answer but needed to ask anyway.
“Chosen shuttle, there have been no signals.”
“Understood. Please transmit their last known location and continue to monitor while we go EVA and conduct a visual search.” In the rear of the cabin, Aaron opened the locker and laid out two pressure suits.
During the formation of the Rangers, Minu had made zero gravity and vacuum operation part of their basic training. She’d spent hundreds of hours in both standard issue pressure suits and the heavily-armored version the scouts and Rangers employed. Donning the complicated suits was second nature to her. Despite Aaron’s head start, Minu finished ahead of him and went over to help him verify his connections. “Been a long time since I wore one of these,” he commented as he fit the limp plastic helmet over his head.
“Like riding a bike,” she said as she examined the door controls.
“I never learned.”
Unlike the production model, the Phoenix prototype didn’t have an airlock. Instead, they simply depressurized the entire cabin. It would have taken almost five minutes to pump the air out, but noting there were ample reserves of oxygen, Minu spilled the atmosphere into space through relief valves. With the roar of escaping air, the cabin was in vacuum in less than ten seconds. “Let’s go find them,” she said.
* * * * *
Chapter 6
March 6th, 534 AE
Maintenance Access, Unknown Facility, Bellatrix Moon Remus
Minu walked around the pentagon-shaped outline in the rock. It was now a clearly defined, mechanically cut line in the stone, unlike the vague outline Pip had spotted. Aaron stood a meter away using his hand-held scanner to examine the area. “No sign of them within a kilometer,” he reported. “Beyond that, the planet’s stealth field is interfering with the scans.”
“They’re not up here,” Minu concluded. Just like Pip, she found the stone knob, and just like him her curiosity caused her to press it. With a rumble, the five-sided elevator began
to descend.
“Got it,” she said and stepped onto the elevator. Aaron jogged over and joined her before it had descended a meter. Not wanting to start a collection of rescue craft on the surface, Minu quickly tuned her radio to the shuttle frequency. “Rasa shuttle, we have located an entrance and are descending. We anticipate loss of signal any minute. We are not to be considered overdue for,” she consulted her suit’s air stores before replying, “two hours.”
“Acknowledged,” the pilot replied. “I will monitor this—” The last part of his sentence was cut off suddenly as the hatch closed over the top of the descending lift.
“At least we know they didn’t get blown up,” Aaron said in the darkness.
Minu and Aaron reached up and activated their suit lights. The wall of the elevator was nearly glass smooth, cut from the living rock of the mountain around them. The lights created kaleidoscope patterns as they moved steadily downward.
“At least they hadn’t been blown up when they took the elevator.” She triggered her implant and said, “Lilith, can you read me?”
There was no response. That gave credence to her daughter’s hypothesis that the installation belonged to The People. They would know how to block the type of quantum signals sent by the tiny implant. She’d communicated with her daughter instantaneously over light-years before. The Kaatan was orbiting the moon nearby, and now she couldn’t reach her. I hope Lilith doesn’t begin bombarding the moon!
“You try the implant?” Aaron asked.
“Just did. We’re cut off.”
The lift moved downward for five minutes before they found themselves in a large room, riding a pentagon-shaped hoverfield-powered platform through open space. “Oof,” she whispered and reached out to grab Aaron. Her husband was his normal, unshakable self, leaning out to glance down to try and see how far above the ground they were.
“Ground coming up,” he announced.
In less than a minute, the lift gently settled to the floor.
Minu stepped off the slight rise and played the light mounted on her chest around. The room was a five-meter-wide cylinder with tapered walls that led to the bottom of the shaft they’d just descended. Like that shaft, the room was a glass bottle carved from the volcanic basalt of the mountain’s heart. “Door over here,” Aaron called. Minu took one last look around and turned to see what he’d found.
The floor was made of the same material as the walls and ceiling, and it was spotless. Either the space was perfectly sealed, or it was kept clean by robot maintenance. Aaron stood by an arched doorway a little over two meters tall, which was short for a human. Luckily, they were both short for humans.
He was examining a Concordian locking mechanism with floating holographic icons similar to something they’d both seen before. “Same as the Fire Base,” he noted. Minu knew only too well. A vast number of secret codes usable on artifacts left behind by The People had been uploaded to her brain by the Weavers. She only understood a fraction of the codes and algorithms.
“Sure is,” she agreed. “Lilith was dead on. This is the work of The People all right.” She stepped closer and twisted a few of the icons. The codes made the back of her brain itch, much like she imagined a missing limb would feel. “This was recently unlocked.”
“Pip?”
“I didn’t think he knew any of the codes.” She started down the hall. Ten meters down there was another door, this one closed. The floating icons swirled in a repeating pattern. “If it was Pip, he screwed up.”
“What does it mean?”
“The door is under lockout. Someone tripped the security protocol.” She started manipulating the codes, allowing her hands to work without conscious thought. She had learned years ago that trying to think it through was counterproductive.
Her conscious mind analyzed what she saw, ever so slowly making sense out of one series of codes or another, occasionally picking up on a logic string or a recurring series of elements. Each icon could be manipulated on three axes or interfaced with other icons, thus creating dozens or hundreds more icons. The possibilities were nearly limitless. Her hands worked steadily.
“Doesn’t that ever make you dizzy? It must be like having a computer in your brain.”
“More like being possessed,” she said without looking away. “The scary thing is, I’m starting to really understand some of it.” He shook his head. “How are we on time?”
“No problem. I’m more worried about Pip and the Rasa. They’ve been EVA for more than eight hours. These suits are only good for twelve in ideal circumstances.”
“Not a lot of margin for error,” Minu agreed. There might be four hours of air remaining by the books, but that didn’t include any lost to extra exertion.
“Can you get through this?”
“I think so, but it’s got several extra levels of security.”
Minu smiled. “He was tricked. It let him in and trapped him.” A second later the icons flashed, and the pattern changed. The door obediently retracted into the floor to reveal four surprised bipeds in space suits. “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” As soon as the door opened, they could receive Pip’s radio again.
“Very funny,” Pip said, exasperation obvious on his face. It was hard to read a Rasa’s expression, but judging by the way they came out and shook Minu’s and Aaron’s hands and patted them on the backs, their gratitude was clearly understood. “I sometimes regret getting you interested in old Earth literature.”
“You’ve been memorizing lock codes?”
“I can hardly deny it, can I?”
“The problem is the algorithms are not linear.”
“I know that now. Maybe you can teach me more.”
“I doubt it. My ability to use that talent is completely subjective.” Pip made a face, and she shrugged. “Shall we get you out of here?”
Pip glanced at his suit’s computer and shook his head. “I’ve still got almost two hours of air left.”
“Yeah, but we have to get up the lift. What is so important down here?”
Pip’s smile was full of the excitement she remembered from before his injury.
“This.” He stepped aside to reveal a corpse.
“Oh!”
They’d only seen a living specimen of the being in computer images. It resembled a human in many ways, but had only three dexterous fingers and an unusually long thumb.
Minu flexed her right hand, keenly aware of the three cybernetic fingers. Her glove’s extra finger was taped to her palm to keep it out of the way. The alien’s face was slightly more elongated than a human skull, and a short tail protruded from its coccyx. The corpse was desiccated, but there was no sign of decay. Light tan fur covered its body, and it wore a simple harness with several pouches. Pip held up a tablet. It was crystalline, like the ones from the Kaatan.
“A victim of the same trap?” Aaron wondered.
“Caught in its own plan,” Kal’at agreed.
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Minu said, suspicious. Pip concurred with her. “What else did it have in those pouches?”
“Data chips and some tools. I can’t read the chips, they’re encoded with your special codes.”
“We can mess with them later. The tools?”
“Energy system tools. I’ve seen or worked with most of them. It’s rather disconcerting how little Concordian technology seems to have changed in a million years.”
“Ted knows what he’s talking about,” Minu said simply. “So, you want to go through the next door?”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
“The place already tried to kill you once,” Aaron pointed out.
“We’ve got the ultimate key now,” Pip replied and patted Minu on the shoulder.
Minu rolled her eyes and checked her computer. “We have an hour and a half before we’re overdue and Gregg arrives with the Rangers. You have one hour.”
* * *
Twenty miles above the surface of the moon, Lilith orbited inside the climate-controll
ed cocoon that was her pilot’s chamber on the Kaatan-class warship. The entire array of sensors the ship had at its disposal was probing every millimeter of the moon within a kilometer of the spot she’d watched her mother and father disappear into the rock. Moments later, all communications were severed, including the link to the quantum communicator implanted in Minu’s brain. And that should not have been possible.
Since the signal loss, Lilith had spent almost every moment trying to subvert the active stealth fields on the planetoid to get some additional details on the mountain. The defenses were perfect in every way. To her sensors and the computer’s analytical programs, it was a ball of rock without so much as a stray erg of electricity.
She floated in the pilot’s chamber, surrounded by hovering icons representing the ship’s various systems. Admitting the Kaatan was not up to the task of penetrating the moon’s defenses was not something she was happy about, but it was obvious the ship couldn’t.
In the years since her ‘birth,’ Lilith had never pursued any details of her origin. It was never really a question that drove her to seek an answer. Her knowledge of the rules she operated under was absolute. The information imparted to her during the subjective years she spent in the Medical Intelligence’s maturation chamber not only formed her mind, it laid out the rules for how things worked. And one of those rules was that nothing, absolutely nothing, could stop a quantum signal. Distort or interfere, yes. Stop, no.
With the ship’s automated systems once again watching the vast area of space around them, Lilith delved into the computer’s records. Starting with the primary data banks, then moving deeper into protocol files, operational controls for the ship, and deep logic, she examined the workings of the Medical Intelligence and the enigmatic Steward program. The Steward program had been isolated in buffer memory for years. It had never been quite the same since Bjorn and Pip had corrupted its deep logic strings while attempting to improve the ship’s operation.
