Erebus

by Ralph Kern

  That normally sedate experience of ascending the cable had been completely thrown out of the airlock this time. The elevator car had special exemption to get us up to Haven fast. That meant it was subject to a series of surges of acceleration and deceleration far in excess of those it normally performed. It felt as if we were on a high speed lift, constantly speeding up and slowing down. It wasn’t too harsh, just unsettling. The result was that the three days it normally took to ascend was reduced to less than a day, making it by far the quickest way to get into geostationary orbit, quicker even than going on one of the few space planes that still launched from the surface.

  Once the first, vicious acceleration had subsided into a cruising velocity, more or less, Cheng and I went our separate ways. The avatar guided me to a cabin, a compact affair with a single bed and en suite facilities. It would ordinarily provide sleeping accommodations for the duration of the three-day trip up to Haven. With the rapid ascent reducing that to a day, I doubted I would get the chance to use it for sleeping, but I felt the overwhelming need to shower the travel weariness off. I checked the timer to see how long I would have before the next speed change and grabbed a quick shower before my rumbling stomach reminded me that my lunch had been interrupted.

  Leaving my cabin, I headed down the spiral staircase to the lower lounge where I saw Cheng and a few others seated around a table. They had definitely picked the best one, right by a downward-slanting picture window. Night had fallen over the Mediterranean, and far below, the twinkling spiderweb lights of cities were the only things visible on the distant surface. It was odd to think we had already climbed far beyond the low-Earth-orbit satellites and space cities. Some of the bigger ones could even be seen as bright lights, creeping along in their orbits far below us.

  Cheng smiled and waved me over. I grabbed a coffee from the bar and headed across to them. As I got closer I could hear that their speech was subtly distorted. He must have put up another privacy field. As soon as I was within a few feet, their voices cleared up.

  “Layton, take a load off.” Cheng smiled, gesturing at me to take an empty seat.

  “Thanks,” I replied, sitting down.

  “Let me make some introductions. Folks, this is Layton Trent from The Hague.” Cheng said, before gesturing to each of the four men and two women in turn. “Joan Vance, Combined Intelligence Service, and Doctor Dexter Frampton, her technical guy.” I shook hands with the intense-looking, fortyish redhead and the young, earnest-looking Frampton. Both of them were Americans, obviously. “Group Captain Chemmel Sihota, Indian Air-Space Force, and this is Pavel Agapov, Federation Intelligence.” Sihota looked far too young to be a group captain, either a sign of extreme competence, lots of connections, or maybe just a vanity streak and lots of cosmetic work. “And last, but not least, Sonia Drayton from Red Star.” That didn’t surprise me; the corporations were more powerful than most nations these days. They had as much right as anyone to be in on the gig. “There’re a few other folks wandering around, but they’re too uptight to sit down and have a drink with the competition.”

  “We’re competing now, are we?” I asked with a smile.

  “Poor choice of words, Zao,” Vance grinned, smoothly cutting in. “We’re all heading up into the big black to figure out what the hell’s going on together.”

  Cheng winked. “My apologies. Old habits and all that.”

  “I take it you’ve all been attached to this task force?” I asked before taking a sip of my coffee.

  “We have,” Sihota said in a deep voice. “Apparently our respective commands don’t have a clue what’s been happening and believe that we can all create a greater whole than the sum of our parts.”

  “Fair enough. I’m guessing everyone onboard now has been dispatched by one of the powers that be, hence the override of the elevator’s usual climb rate,” I said with a grimace. “I must admit it’s a little different than the last time I was on one of these things. It felt like we were barely moving then.”

  “Yeah. And to add to our woes, the rest going up with us are mostly media,” Sihota said. We all gave looks of distaste at that.

  We spent a while getting to know each other. To say the situation was bizarre was an understatement. The major powers hadn’t had a hot war between them since that particularly nasty proxy conflict in Siberia, which had finally ended a decade ago. That didn’t mean that they got on well with each other, though. The nations and corporations pumped a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money trying to get one over on each other. These guys were all professionals, though. It wasn’t anything personal between them. They were all quite happy to have a companionable drink with one another. Undoubtedly, they were hoping to pick up some snippet of useful information, but at the moment, they were content to just get a feel for each other. After all, we were all here for the same purpose.

  Cheng, Vance, Sihota, Agapov, and Drayton were all clearly alpha types, something that I imagined would get pretty tiresome. Metaphors about too many chefs and not enough cooks sprang to mind. I quickly got the impression they were all go-getters. Definitely no connections had got them here. These folks had all earned their rank, despite Sihota’s apparent youth. I sent Giselle a request for information by HUDmail as we were chatting. It would be nice to know a little more about them.

  Frampton was different from the others. I found him the most fascinating to talk to, and I was relieved when the others, one at a time, excused themselves for one reason or another and left us to chat over my second attempt at lunch.

  He was, in his own way, as chest-beatingly patriotic as his boss Vance, but it occurred to me that out of us all, he was the only one who had some serious idea of the sheer destructive energy that Magellan would have unleashed when it struck Io.

  “Basically,” Frampton said as we were eating burgers in our seats by the picture window, stars twinkling by the millions outside, “it’s relatively simple math that describes what actually occurred. A mass damn near two hundred thousand tons struck the moon at half the speed of light. The side with all the damage of the moon is essentially the exit wound. Magellan created a relatively small hole where it entered on the other side. The ship drove through the core of Io, and the sheer bow shock of its passage blasted a massive chunk of the opposite surface of Io away.”

  “I get that. It’s not dissimilar to a regular, conventional bullet hitting a body. The entry wound is normally tiny. All the damage is on the other side.” I nodded.

  “Yeah.” Frampton spoke around his mouthful of burger. “Although the majority of the moon is actually intact, internally it’s all churned up. Again, to take our bullet and body example, it’s the same as the hydrostatic shockwave that does the majority of the damage in the body.”

  I remembered this from my firearms courses. Shooting a person normally killed someone in one or a combination of four ways: hitting something vital, which actually rarely happens; infection from the gunshot wound; blood loss from the injury; or, finally, hydrostatic shock. The bullet’s passage would create a shockwave that propagated throughout the body, pummeling the major organs. If I got what Frampton was telling me, it was the two last ways that had caused all the damage to the moon. Except instead of blood leaking out, it was the mantle material of Io, and instead of hydrostatic shock, it was moonquakes ripping through it.

  “Anyway, it’ll be pretty interesting to see what the end result is. As Io continues in its orbit, it’s going to be pumping out all of its insides, its core of iron, the mantle of iron sulfide, everything. Eventually it may completely disintegrate. Jupiter’s got a small ring at the moment, but a body the size of Io tuning into debris? I think it’s going to make a ring more impressive than Saturn’s.”

  “Yeah, very interesting,” I murmured. Clearly his idea of an intriguing curiosity was different from mine, which was that Io’s demise was a pretty major disaster. “The million-dollar question is why would someone do it?”

  He leaned back as he chewed, pondering. I looked out
of the window, letting him have a think. We were so far above Earth that I had to lean forward to see what was now a sphere with the moon rising above the curve of the Earth.

  “I suspect it’s all about power generation,” he said finally. Frampton squinted out of the window. “Hey, watch.”

  “Watch wh—” I started to say, following his line of sight. I saw a star streaking over the horizon. It bloomed suddenly into a huge shape, which I more sensed as an afterimage than actually saw. I instinctively grabbed the table, thinking whatever it was would strike us. “What the hell was that?”

  “One of the space cities,” Frampton grinned.

  “Seriously?” I manipulated my HUD, playing back the last few seconds on slow motion. I watched as the star slowly expanded, taking on the form of a vast cylinder city. It was at least five miles long and seemed to thunder silently by us.

  “Jesus, that was close,” I breathed.

  “Yeah, they normally time the ascents to avoid those kinds of close passes. It’s a little disconcerting. But because they sped us up…” Frampton shrugged.

  “You don’t say it’s disconcerting.” I shook my head, wondering at the apparent near miss.

  “Anyway…” Frampton was incredibly blasé about what seemed to be a near-death experience to me. Even though the rational side of me knew that we were safe, it still had been too close for comfort. “…Io lies well within the flux lines of Jupiter. It’s well known that lots of people were playing around with laying superconducting cable on the surface, trying to tap into it. If anyone could be successful, they would have access to the biggest generator in the solar system.”

  “Maybe so, but surely the powersats are far easier. I hear Io is a right hellhole. Chances are the cable would be constantly wrecked by all the earthquakes—I mean moonquakes—and volcanoes.”

  “Yeah, but a powersat would get the tiniest fraction of the sunlight out in Jupiter space as compared with the inner system. Most power in the outer system is generated by either fusion or the new antimatter reactors, which are pretty dangerous things. If they’d got the Io reactors working properly, the Jupiter Alliance would have safe, cheap, limitless energy for, well, forever.”

  “So how close were people to managing it?” I leaned forward.

  “Oh, years, decades probably. Even with nanotechnology, the engineering problems are—were—massive.” Frampton resumed chewing.

  Years or decades? If that were the case, why attack Io now? Something about that being the motive didn’t quite ring true.

  ***

  I retreated to my cabin for some privacy and opened a link to Giselle to check in with her. “Hey, how are things going?”

  “We’re getting there,” Giselle said, a sad look on her face. “Just so you know, the coroner’s finished with Dev this evening. They’re looking at releasing his body back to his family in the next couple of days.”

  “That was…quick,” I said with surprise.

  “Yeah. But at least his family can lay him to rest.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” I looked out of the window at the horizon, lost in thought for a moment. Post-mortems didn’t take long these days, especially when there was no particular mystery involved about the cause of death. Apparently in the twenty-first century, a body could stay on ice for months while test after test was performed. “And the funeral?” I finally asked.

  “That’s up to the family. Probably sooner rather than later, though.”

  “And I’m up here. Great.” I gave a bitter response.

  “Layton, everyone knows you’d be there if you could,” Giselle said quietly. “But you’re doing something positive. You’re helping to find the reason we’re burying Dev. We all know if his enhancements had been online, Kumba would never have got the drop on him.”

  “On us, Giselle. Kumba got the drop on us,” I corrected her, pinching the bridge of my nose.

  “Did I make a mistake sending you, Layton? Are you ready for this?”

  “Yes, of course I’m ready. Dev would be the first one up here if it was the other way around.”

  “Okay.” The dubious tone in Giselle’s voice was still there, but it seemed like she was working through it.

  “So,” I forced a smile onto my face, and changed the subject. “What do those office imps you have slaving away in The Hague dungeon have lined up for me?”

  Giselle seemed to accept me at my word and pushed on. “I’ve got a big to-do list that you need to sign off on. I’ve boiled it down for you and am sending it across now.”

  A HUDmail icon appeared in my vision, and I opened it.

  “Any of those bastards actually confessed yet to being at the Karen Cole Hospital?” I asked as I scanned through the headers on the file.

  “Yeah, a few of them have. Most have just refused to answer any questions when they’ve been interviewed, though. Becky is fairly happy we have enough evidence to sink them, whether they squeal or not.”

  “Good.” I dropped the file into a folder to work on later. “I’ll get this back to you in a few hours.”

  “Yeah…good luck with that,” Giselle replied with a tone that said the work might be a little more extensive than she was making out. “By the way, it took some digging, but I’ve got you dossiers on all the folks you’ve asked for. They’ve been pretty straight with you. Cheng is MSS. He’s done some time in the People’s Army, too. Don’t get into a fight with him whatever you do. Chances are he has every combat enhancement going. Vance and Agapov are career intelligence; you probably don’t want to brawl with them either. Sihota is IASF. Smart cookie. Done some test piloting and has a list of degrees as long as my arm. Drayton is Red Star on their corporate security division.”

  “Thanks, Giselle. Just out of curiosity, does Cheng have a kid?”

  Giselle consulted her notes. “Not that we have on file. Why?”

  “Just an honesty check.” I gave a wry smile. “He failed.”

  “These spooky types and their damn smoke and mirrors.” Giselle’s voice had a note of distaste.

  “Yeah,” I replied before giving a shrug and sitting back against the headboard of my cabin bunk. “What about the other thing?”

  “I’m sending it as we speak.”

  CHAPTER 9

  IO

  With over four hundred active volcanoes constantly spewing out iron sulphide, the whole surface of Io was covered with deep drifts of yellow, orange, and black dust. The diseased color permeated the whole moon—it looked positively ill.

  Gunter Henning was trudging through the deep dust, careful to poke with his stick ahead of him to find the firmest ground. More than one engineer had plunged into an exceptionally deep drift. Fortunately, everyone had been found safe and well, but it would be a long wait for rescue, not to mention more than a little embarrassing.

  Pausing for a moment in his thick radiation/armored space suit, he looked up. Far away he could see Mount Woodgate, a massive volcano that was nearly one and a half times the height of Everest back on Earth. It was having a quiet day, just the lightest of ethereal plumes shooting upward out of it, giving the dark sky a yellow hue. Arching his head back, he could see the vast ball of Jupiter looming in the sky, the giant spot facing him. The whole thing looked like a red and white striped eye staring at him. When he’d first arrived on Io, he had found it completely overbearing. Now, the bloated gas giant was merely disconcerting.

  “Gunter, do you see the junction box yet?”

  Henning looked around. The transponder on the junction box had died, which meant he had to rely on the good ol’ eyeball Mark I method to find it. Magnometers and metal detectors didn’t work here, partly because of the Io flux lines and partly because the moon was effectively covered in rusty iron filings. Even his implant HUD was seriously limited. Because the small population didn’t warrant the expense of compensating, Io didn’t have much of the shared computing capability needed for the Hypernet to function optimally.

  He finally spotted the box, half burie
d in a drift. Henning made his way over to it and dusted it off with his thick lead-lined gauntlet. He could immediately see what the problem was. The casing of the junction box has somehow sprung open in the last quake. The whole thing would likely be full of dust. Looking to the left and right, he could see the cable, or what bits of it weren’t sunk into the surface. He nodded in satisfaction; they looked intact. “I’m at the junction box; should be an easy job,” he called over his com to Bill Wiseman back in the habitat.

  As he pulled the casing the rest of the way open, he felt a tremor. Clutching onto the side of the box, he waited for it to subside. It was probably an aftershock from the last big quake. Mount Woodgate gave a sudden belch, an orange cloud shooting out of it before it settled down. At least the quake hadn’t set the damn volcano off again.

  He pulled a small brush off his utility belt and set to work on the box. He wouldn’t be able to see the full extent of the problem until he’d got most of the dust out, but chances were it would just be a breaker. The boxes were robust, designed to be able to cope with whatever punishment the harsh moon could give, but they still required some TLC every now and again. He began to whistle tunelessly to himself as he swept the dust out of the box.

  “Hey, Henning,” Bill called, “an A-liner just dropped in. Apparently it’s having some kind of bother. It’s called a pan-pan.”

  “Anything major?”

  “Doubt it. Something to do with their attitude control. They’re not near anything they can collide with, so no great worries.”

  “Ah, fair enough,” Henning said distractedly as he brushed the last of the dust out. He moved his helmeted head closer. The switches had tripped. He flicked them back into position—no easy task with his gauntleted hands, but he’d done it many times.