Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Either. Both. And also not really any of my business. Get Belle to keep a watch on this story. There’s something about it I don’t like.’

  ‘No, I know what you mean. I’m not sure I have “cop instincts,” but whatever I have is making me concerned. Besides, if it is aliens, we want to know sooner rather than later, right?’

  BioTek Microtechnologies Station, L4, 8th August.

  The primary control suite of the BioTek Microtechnologies station had twenty workstations devoted to any number of activities vital to the operation of the facility. There were always people manning the room, but there were rarely twenty of them because, when it came down to it, AIs were frequently more efficient at handling routine activities than humans were. Infomorphs did not need to sleep, they did not get tired or bored, and they did not complain. Well, the class 3 AIs most commonly used for routine human-replacement positions did not complain; the smattering of class 4s out in the research departments had been known to suggest a boring task was more suited to some form of ape descendant.

  Sid was a prime example of one of the class 3s employed in routine task management. He had not actually come with a name when he had first been installed on the station. His job was to watch the passive sensor systems and make use of the active ones, if required, for anything in the space around the station, especially if a detected object was a potential threat. One of the sensor technicians had named him Sid after a satellite which had done a similar sort of job in an old science-fiction TV series, from all the way back in the 1970s, which had featured invading aliens. To date, Sid had never discovered anything which could be described as a UFO, but people lived in hope…

  ‘Alert,’ Sid said over the speakers in the control room. ‘Currently unidentified vessel detected. Range sixteen thousand and ninety-three kilometres. Speed three point zero six kilometres per second. Collision course. Estimated time to impact, eighty-seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds.’

  Ian Overman, frowning, pulled forward a virtual display which just told him what Sid had told him. Overman was the operations manager for the station and he had come on-shift seven minutes earlier, at eight a.m. He liked working the day shift and, since he was the boss, that was when he worked. It was also the best time to be awake for most of the main activity of the station. Generally, when Sid announced the arrival of a ship near L4 and bound for the station, it was something they knew was coming. And Sid did not announce it as ‘collision course.’

  ‘Verify the velocity and collision condition,’ Overman said. Eighty-seven minutes was a long time to check things out before they started getting worried over it. There was plenty of time for the ship to change vectors. ‘What about the transponder? Ping it.’

  ‘The vessel’s power signature is minimal,’ Sid replied. ‘Apparent temperature of its exterior radiators suggests that the reactor is shut down. There is no evidence of an operating reaction engine. Transponder ping response indicates a Xiao-class vessel registered as a private orbital recycling ship. It is travelling at close to its maximum operating speed. I will continue to monitor.’

  ‘It’s registered at Prokhorov?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Contact flight control there and determine what that thing’s doing out here.’

  ‘Of course, Mister Overman.’

  New York Metro.

  ‘Fox,’ Kit said, appearing beside Fox’s cyberframe, ‘I have a call coming through from Ian Overman of BioTek. The call is flagged as priority.’

  ‘Put it through then.’ Fox waited for the image of Overman to appear in her sensorium before speaking. Overman was a mid-height man who wore his brown hair short, and a goatee to help lengthen a round face. He was nothing special to look at, but he did have hazel eyes that tried to be golden and held a fairly sharp intelligence. If he thought something was important, it probably was. ‘Ian, what can I do for you?’

  The lag on the connection was a little longer than what she had to put up with talking to Jason. ‘We have a problem. There’s a scavenger ship heading our way at about three klicks a second. Sid’s been watching it for about forty-five minutes. It’s not changing course, and it’s not responding to calls from us or Prokhorov. We’ve got an active sensor lock on it now and Sid thinks it’s dead. Says the hull temperature suggests that life support is offline. I spoke to the Palladium guys here and they spoke to Chicago, and then they said I should call you. We’ve got some time yet, so we’re going through procedure with Prokhorov before we try anything drastic.’

  ‘You mean fire on the ship.’ BioTek, the original German company, had been fairly paranoid about security on their station. It was fully equipped with laser turrets for defence and the security team were trained in manning those turrets. ‘How far off is it?’

  ‘It’s gone past eight thousand klicks. Maybe forty minutes away. Still no sign of a course change.’

  ‘I don’t think there will be. I’m going to make a call to Prokhorov. I’ll put you on hold while I do. Uh, why did head office tell you to talk to me?’

  ‘Because, if this is some sort of attack on BioTek, they thought it was going to need investigating.’

  ‘Right. In that case, task Sid with getting everything he can from the sensor data. Start sending it down as soon as you have it. I think you’re going to have to turn that thing into scrap and I don’t want to risk losing anything we might get. Talk to you shortly.’ Fox switched the call to hold and saw the indicator come up on Overman’s image. ‘Kit, see if you can get a call through to Jason.’

  ‘You are calling about the current incident at L-four, Fox?’ Jason got the words out before Fox could respond to his image appearing. His use of her name also suggested she was on an open communications channel somewhere: others could hear them speaking.

  ‘Yes. You’re monitoring? This sounds a lot like the recent crash with the ATW satellite.’ A window opened in Fox’s sensorium and data began to stream through it: telemetry from Sid concerning the scavenger ship.

  ‘Yes, we are monitoring. From here, there is nothing we can do in the time available. The ship is not responding to communication requests and, given its velocity, it seems likely it has no reaction mass to change course anyway.’

  ‘Yeah… I’m getting telemetry through from Sid on the BioTek station. No indications of damage. Communications antenna are there and should be working. But the ship’s dead in the water. The radiation profile suggests the thing’s running on minimal power. If there’s anyone alive on there, they’re in vaccsuits.’

  ‘We have some data from the ATW “accident.” This appears to be far too similar.’

  Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘And even over this connection, I could hear the air quotes around that word. You don’t think either of these is an accident.’

  ‘Why do you think the UNTPP’s antiterrorism unit is taking a direct interest? Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we will get much more information regarding this incident than we did for the others.’

  ‘You’re linking this to the LET seven zero three crash too? The whole “suicide and ghost ships” thing seemed kind of hinky to me. Uh, if you want it, Palladium is offering to assist with the investigation. Someone decided to throw something big at one of our facilities. Makes it sort of corporately personal.’

  ‘I’ll put it through channels, but I’ll be happy to receive your assistance. For now, we are giving official permission for your station to open fire on the ship. A Xiao has a maximum crew of four, set against over a thousand personnel on the BioTek station. It is not an easy choice, but it is the only logical one.’

  BioTek Microtechnologies Station.

  Pretty much everyone aboard the station had an implant computer or used a wearable, but Overman knew his people, and he knew that some would be sleeping while others would simply try to ignore an alert. That was why a very loud alarm claxon was blaring through every occupied section of the ship at the same time that personal computers notified the staff of the need to act.

  Ju
st to be on the absolutely safe side, Overman activated the stationwide emergency broadcast system. ‘All staff. We have a potential collision situation. All nonessential staff will proceed to the radiation shelter with all possible speed. Ensure that any live experiments are locked down and safe, but do not delay. Overman out.’ He turned his attention to the sensor display and saw the figures, but he asked anyway. ‘Sid, time to three thousand kilometres?’

  ‘Twenty-five minutes, sixteen seconds,’ Sid said without further comment.

  ‘Okay, everyone. I want firing solutions locked in place and ready to be executed in twenty minutes. Then anyone who does not need to be here goes down to the shelter. Firing crews to position on the same timescale. We open fire at three thousand.’

  Overman swept his gaze around the room, getting direct responses from a few people and absent nods from those with their heads in immediate activity. Then he reactivated the channel to Earth. ‘It’s going to be twenty-five minutes before we start firing. We’ve got about fifteen minutes to make sure it’s just debris, but we are going to get hit by some of it.’

  There was the usual couple of seconds of pause and then Fox spoke. ‘You’re staying in the control room?’

  ‘I certainly am. It’s not exactly a “captain going down with his ship” thing, but I guess it’s my responsibility and I’m sticking with it. All the scientists and nonessential crew are moving to the radiation shelter.’

  ‘Right. I’m going to stay on until it’s over.’

  Overman considered his answer for a second, but all he could really come up with was, ‘Thanks.’

  Both of them knew the physics. If, somehow, the station could not destroy the ship, about a hundred tons of spaceship travelling at eleven thousand kilometres per hour would plough into the station. The steel hull would buckle and rip, the structure would fold. Being in the radiation shelter was not going to help: it was deep in the core of the station and surrounded by huge tanks of water, but it was designed to protect against solar storms, not being torn apart by a massive impact. No one would survive a direct impact like that.

  If they managed to destroy the ship, especially if they got some internal explosions, they would be turning one large object into a scatter of smaller ones, but those smaller objects would not change velocity much. Newton had got that law down centuries ago: if an object was moving, it kept going as it was unless something gave it a push. Laser beams did not impart enough push to change the course of a hundred-ton spaceship. The station would still be hit, but it was like transforming a shotgun slug into birdshot: if they were lucky, the smaller projectiles would not be able to penetrate the station’s outer hull and, maybe, everyone would live.

  ~~~

  Combat in space was not like the vids. Even in more modern productions which tended to try to be a little more accurate when portraying contemporary space-based tales, the need to show something happening meant that the visual effects were not especially realistic. People still liked far more noise in their space battles than was even vaguely realistic.

  In reality, there was silence and the beams of high-energy lasers were invisible to the eye as they lanced out across three thousand kilometres of vacuum to strike the oncoming ship. The impacts were another matter. Metal glowed in the infrared and visible ranges before melting. Damage-control foam flashed to vapour as it tried to fill the holes and failed.

  The station had ten turrets placed around its midsection. The spin of the station, which provided its gravity, brought each of those turrets into firing position several times over the course of the ten minutes the gunners were firing. For ten minutes, the ship did its best to hold together as the station’s weaponry tore through the alloy hull, into the interior systems. Metal boiled, plastics erupted into gas, and if the four men aboard the ship were alive before the barrage, they were unlikely to have survived when the lasers breached the small fission reactor which provided primary power.

  ‘Target destroyed,’ Sid announced. ‘Tracking debris and calculating trajectories.’

  ‘Thanks, Sid,’ Overman said. He felt relieved, anxious, and cold, all at the same time. It was not impossible that he had just ordered the deaths of four people. It was not impossible that those four ghosts might still get some revenge, but the people down in the refuge were probably safe.

  Overman turned again to his comms channels. ‘Fox, Captain Deveraux, it’s done. Uh, analysis coming in on the atmosphere vented suggests that there was very little oxygen. They were probably dead before we started. Sid’s checking the debris trajectories, but we’ll know for sure what’s going to hit us in five minutes anyway.’

  Closer and with less lag, Jason replied first. ‘You did the right thing, Mister Overman. Good luck.’

  Overman’s eyes scanned the display Sid was giving the control room staff. Hundreds of fragments were marked and they had all been indicated with red icons, but the reds were turning green as Sid calculated a missing trajectory. Not all of them were turning green however…

  ‘Do you have the new trajectories yet?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Not– Wait… Yes, Sid’s isolated two fragments with potential to do damage.’ Overman watched the expected path lines extend out to join a schematic of the station. ‘Impact in three minutes, nine seconds. Both on the main habitation ring.’

  ‘Like Jason said, good luck, but I’ll be hearing from you in four minutes.’

  Overman muted the channels and switched over to internal comms. ‘Damage-control parties to section three. All staff, prepare for collision.’ And then it was just a matter of waiting…

  New York Metro.

  ‘There were no casualties,’ Fox said. ‘There was a small amount of damage to the hospital and the shopping mall, but the foam stopped any decompression and the actual damage was minimal. Everyone’s safe.’

  Eve let out the breath she had been holding and her virtual image settled onto a seat which was invisible to Fox. ‘Thank you for letting me know, Fox.’

  ‘It’s pretty much bound to be all over the news in a few hours.’

  ‘There are several sketchy reports already appearing on a few IB channels,’ Kit supplied.

  ‘Sketchy is a good word,’ Belle added, appearing beside Kit. ‘At this time, INN is reporting that a vessel has been reported to be on a collision course with an unnamed station in the L-four region. They are, however, making a connection to the ATW incident.’

  ‘But not with LET seven zero three.’

  ‘These are all caused by the same meme?’ Eve asked, sounding incredulous.

  ‘No,’ Fox said flatly. ‘I don’t know what’s causing these events, but it’s not a meme. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s not, but I’m going to need to make that absolutely sure before I can move on. It’s a good point, Eve. Maybe we’ll make a detective out of you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I could do what you do without frequent recourse to psychiatric counselling.’

  Fox flashed the bioroid a grin. ‘Kit, I’m going to need some consults with MarTech’s memetics people… Or Palladium’s. Find me some analysts who might be able to shed light on self-destructive memes and get me in front of them. Eve… Well, your friends on the station are safe. Don’t worry when you see the news reports.’

  ‘Thank you, Fox. Oh! I have a call coming through from BioTek now. Do you think I should act surprised when they tell me?’

  ‘Up to you. I don’t think it’ll hurt their feelings too much to know I got in first.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. Several of them really don’t like coming second.’

  11th August.

  ‘Things are getting worse,’ Kit said, handing Fox a newly ‘printed’ paper as she did so.

  ‘I thought we’d done the morning news and coffee thing when I got up,’ Fox replied, though she did not complain too much, because the alternative was legal documents and plans for the metro policing resolution.

  ‘I’ll get you more virtual coffee,’ Kit said, and she left
Fox to check out the paper.

  There had been reports through most of the previous day regarding various ‘accidents’ in space. An Earth–Moon shuttle had crashed into the lunar surface first, destroying a manufacturing facility and a broad stretch of solar collectors. It had been fairly close to Luna City, but not close enough for any damage and the factory had been staffed by remotely operated cyberframes. No one had been hurt. The same could not be said for the collision of another junk-scavenger ship into a biotechnology research station. It had been a small station in a fairly low orbit, but over seventy people had died as both station and ship were reduced to scrap. Then, late in the afternoon, a shuttle coming up to Eagle Station from the Detroit spaceport had lost communication with flight control and then torn itself open as it hit the station, but only with a glancing blow. Forty-nine people had died in that one.

  ‘And now we’re getting the reactions,’ Fox said as Kit handed her a mug of coffee. ‘Shares on transport companies and space industries are down. People are cancelling trips into space. Pressure from the transport companies to have all these incidents looked into. I’d call it overreaction, but I have a bad feeling about it too. If I had guts, they’d be telling me this is more than coincidence and/or memetics.’ She flicked over the page and kept reading.

  ‘You believe that there is a specific agent behind all of these events? The “ghost ships,” perhaps?’

  ‘Ghost ships is as good a theory as any for now.’ Fox pointed a finger at one of the pages. ‘We’ve got more than one person suggesting that this is part of the apocalyptic pattern brought on by the coming of the comet. Someone’s got clued up on the ghost ship mythos that’s going around and has done a report on that.’ She paused, pursing her lips. ‘Ghost ships. Stealth ships? But for what purpose? How do they play into other ships crashing?’

  Scanning over the next page, she found more detailed accounts of the incidents. Mostly just details of times and lives lost. ‘Oh, here’s something interesting. Several witnesses to the shuttle crash at Eagle Station say they saw thrusters firing. One suggests the shuttle was trying to slow down, another suggests it was on a direct collision course but it managed to steer that into a more glancing blow. Didn’t help the shuttle much, but it probably saved the station. Assuming that information is correct, of course.’