Fermi's War

by Richard Tongue

  "We'll find a way when it comes to it. Hopefully it won't; I believe that if there is some sort of plot, it is far more likely to have been to discredit us rather than kill us in a battle that probably won't come. We've likely been past the worst of it."

  "And if not? Damn it, Lieutenant, this is serious."

  Standing up, Warren shook his head, "Sub-Lieutenant, you need to unwind. Immediately. Alamo has found some sort of alien base, and the whole station is celebrating the happy times that are upon us. Looks like this mission is going to work out after all. If you stay in this locked room looking at blueprints, what good are you going to be when that frigate gets here? Two and a half days, remember. Your orders – yes, orders – are to go to the party for at least six hours, have your fair share of drinks – or perhaps more – and then come back here and get at least eight hours sleep."

  "Yes, sir," she replied, sullenly.

  "That I'm having to order a junior officer to go to an all-expenses-paid party is a sad state of affairs."

  "All paid? By whom?"

  "Atomic miners' syndicate, or some such. Didn't ask too many details. Never needed an excuse for a party myself! Now I'm going, and I expect to see you there. Remember, that's an order. You can obsess again tomorrow if you want."

  At that, he walked out of the room, shaking his head as he went; Orlova felt the same way, though for rather different reasons. She reached up for her single set of civilian clothes and changed; the jumpsuit wasn't exactly flattering, but station stores were extremely limited when it came to attire that wasn't some sort of uniform. With a reluctant air, she began to turn off the holoprojector, but paused for a moment and dashed off a quick note to Alamo, enclosing her findings thus far.

  As she walked out of the room, she idly wondered where the party was; Esposito wasn't in her quarters, so she made her way to the lower ring; the only place she had managed to find that served anything even approximating liquor was the noodle bar. The corridors were deserted until she reached the concourse, and then she began to get an idea of how many people were in the station; it was packed tightly with people, wearing the uniforms of a dozen different syndicates, most of them in various stages of intoxication. One of the men she had fought with earlier caught her eye, and started to make his way over towards her; she tried to get out of the way, but the crowd was too tight to squeeze through.

  "You Orlova?" the man asked; she vaguely recognized him as Yoshiro.

  "Sub-Lieutenant Orlova, yes."

  He let out a manic laugh, waved his hands in the air, and yelled, "She's here, lads!"

  Once again she attempted to back away into the crowd, but before she realized hands were underneath her, pushing her into the air, and their owners were cheering. Cheering her name.

  "Make way for the savior of the Raifuku Maru!"

  They carried her through the crowd to the noodle bar, depositing her at a table inside where a seat had been cleared for her; one of Yoshiro's men ran over with a bottle of warm sake, placed carefully in front of her. Esposito was in a corner, and waved at her; she began to make her way over.

  "Er...", she said, without much coherence.

  "I'm head of the engine gang over on the Maru," Yoshiro explained. "We worked out that we'd have been the ones that were targeted if the missile had hit. I don't know about the idiot who fired it in the first place," having worked with Warren for a while, Orlova had some sympathy with that viewpoint, "but I know for a fact that you saved our lives. We've set you up a tab at this place – whatever you order is on the Atomic Syndicate, for as long as you are on the station. It's the least we can do."

  Esposito slid into a seat opposite Orlova, placing her own drink on the table. Looking around, Orlova smiled and shrugged.

  "If that's how it's going to work, I think my first order is a round for you and your gang!"

  They cheered at that, and Yoshiro slapped her on the back hard enough to make her gasp for a moment, before the crowd made their way over to the bar to drink away their Syndicate's profits. Esposito was still shaking her head, trying not to laugh.

  "It's as if that fight never happened," she said.

  "I hope their Syndicate has deep pockets."

  "They do, Maggie – they're paying for the whole party. By which I mean the Maru's spent the last few hours fabricating all of this stuff, by the looks of it. I've no idea if anyone is on duty, the whole station's turned out for it."

  "I wish I was out at Alamo. Alien ruins for us to poke around?"

  "We'll get our chance. Now that they've actually found something, my betting is that Alamo's going to be stationed out here for a while. We might get really lucky and end up as part of the permanent garrison."

  Orlova made a face, then replied, "This place is fine in small doses, but I think I'd rather be back on the ship having exciting adventures. If I wanted to sit around in a bar, I'd be back on Mariner."

  "When that frigate gets here, we'll probably wish we were back in this bar.”

  "No probably about it."

  Looking around, Esposito asked, "What are you doing here anyway? I didn't think there was any point bothering you."

  "Warren ordered me to come."

  Her friend laughed, replying, "You're joking."

  "No. He thinks I'm working too hard and that I need to loosen up a little. That and he thinks the sabotage I've found is probably some programmer's error, or something that has already worked itself out."

  "He is an experienced officer."

  "That doesn't make him right, Gabi." She sighed, then continued, "I let Alamo know what I found, anyway."

  Esposito grimaced, "Going behind his back? That might not go down too well."

  She held up her hands, "I didn't make a big deal about it. Just filed my report. If someone sees it, maybe they'll do something about it." She took a long drink of her sake, and smiled, "This is actually really good stuff. I could get used to this sort of treatment."

  "Warren and the skipper are old war buddies. That's what I heard. I know they were both at Second Vesta."

  "That still doesn't make him right." She took another drink.

  "What's on your mind?"

  Orlova frowned, "Does it show?"

  "You seem very intense at the moment. Since we got here."

  "It's something Cunningham said, after that flight test. I've been thinking about it for a while, but I'm not coming up with anything."

  Reaching over to the bottle, Esposito poured herself a glass, then asked, "What did he say?"

  "He asked my why I wanted to be in flight training. I didn't really have an answer. More than that – he wanted to know why I am in the service in the first place. I'm not sure I have an answer for that, either."

  She shrugged her shoulders, "It's a way to get somewhere. Paid my way through school, and giving me a nice adventure for a while afterward. Long-term, I'd rather move back into the sciences, take my doctorate, but for now, what more could you want?"

  "I don't know." She took another drink. "That's the problem. Everything just happened, I didn't get directed. I helped you out, and then Caine talked me into signing on as a shuttle pilot, and the Captain talked me into taking a commission. Said I'd be a good officer."

  "Well, I'd have to agree with him there. You did save quite a few lives, back on Ragnarok and right here."

  "Is that what I want to be, though? I don't know, Gabi, and it's getting at me. I've signed up to a three-year hitch, and that's fine. I don't mind serving that out, but what do I do afterward? Go back to smuggling again? Get a job with one of the merchant lines? Hell, I could even go to school."

  Esposito took a long, appreciative sip of her drink, replying, "You could stay in. I'd put good odds that the Captain would back you if you went for a permanent commission, and it isn't as if the Triplanetary Fleet is overburdened with officers at the moment. Now would be the time."

  "I just don't know. Is this what I want to do in ten, twenty years? I've been coasting for so long I've lost my directi
on. I've got to decide what I want to do. And you are right – I'd have my best chance making that application now, while the fleet is still forming. I should be thinking about training, whatever I want to do. Go for my Master's Certificate, maybe. Take a few courses. Maybe even a transfer to something I can use in whatever my next career is, if this isn't it."

  "What do you want to do, Maggie? That's what matters now."

  She looked down at the table, and smiled, "Have a drink. I'll worry about the rest of my life tomorrow."

  Esposito lurched forward, spilling her drink on the table, as a group of people surged into the bar, almost knocking her off her stool. She looked down at the wet surface.

  "Getting too damn crowded in here. Warren didn't say you had to have your party anywhere in particular, did he?"

  "Nope. You know, I think that spending a few hours hiding in that shop rummaging through the junk would probably qualify."

  "Not a bad idea."

  The two of the made their way out of the bar, bottle and glasses carefully held out of the reach of grabbing hands, and the crowd rapidly thinned out to small clusters of people sitting around chatting, some in the corridor, others taking over vacant shops. A short stroll took them down to the reclamation shop; the door was open and they walked in, only to find that the room was empty, all the shelves stripped bare.

  "Hello-o," Esposito yelled. There was no response other than a faint echo resounding from the walls.

  Orlova looked behind the counter; empty. No sign that anyone had been there.

  "I guess business was bad," Esposito said.

  "No business is that bad. There's something damn peculiar going on here," replied Orlova, as she made her way over to a wall terminal. She started punching in for details of their current location, holding her datapad over the reader to translate the Japanese characters.

  "Maybe he moved to another storefront?"

  Shaking her head, Orlova replied, "According to this, the store has never been used. There isn't even any record of power usage I can access."

  "Records problem?"

  "I doubt it. Someone's playing games with us, Gabi, and I don't like it. We need to find out what the hell is happening on this station. Let's get something to eat, go back to your quarters – I wouldn't be surprised if Warren goes back to spot-check mine – and start rummaging through the station's data network."

  "Was one of those life choices spending time in prison for unauthorized hacking?"

  Chapter 14

  The controls of the shuttle arrayed before him, Marshall sat contentedly in the shuttle's pilot seat, watching the surface of Desdemona slowly move towards him. Caine sat next to him in the co-pilot's seat, periodically reading out figures from the navigation computer. The moon ahead was so small, landing was a lot more like docking with another spacecraft than it was coming down onto a planet. He'd used the main engine only for a brief burst to push the shuttle away from Alamo, and since then had been depending entirely on the maneuvering thrusters.

  "I'm going to get another book out of this, you know," Caine said.

  "As long as I get to read it before you publish it this time."

  "The censors didn't have any problems with it."

  "What censor? Tramiel's secretary? All you'd need to get past him would be a steamy romance and a gory murder scene."

  She smiled, ""What makes you think I didn't put those scenes in?"

  Marshall grunted for a second, making a careful course correction. He gestured ahead at the surface to a small dark mark, clearly visible against the faint gray background, and Caine peered at it avidly.

  "Ever been to an alien relic site before?"

  "Just the tourist stuff at Carpenter Station, those abandoned asteroid mines. That wasn't anything like I expect here, though. It felt pretty much like a normal mine, just with some odd arrangement to the tunnels and a lot of holograms telling you about the 'long-lost alien race'. That was just blasting out tunnels and carving into rock, and whether human or alien, mining iron is going to pretty much be the same.

  "That heat source is damn strong, getting stronger. What sort of power source could be active after being untended for so long? Centuries, millennia?"

  "Take your pick, Danny. Millions of years for all we know."

  The two of them kept looking out of the viewport as the base site began to grow closer. It appeared only as a series of four mounds on the surface, but obviously far too regular even to be a freak of geology. These had been dug into the surface, created; such was evident. With the lightest touch, Marshall swept the shuttle down as close as he dared to the mounds, a few hundred meters away. Without power, the shuttle would take more than a minute to fall the final meters to the ground; he briefly considered firing the thrusters to push it towards the surface, before deciding to wait for gravity to take its slow course.

  "That worries me," he said.

  "What?"

  "That they dug themselves in like that. Camouflaged, like some of our hidden installations during the war. If they had some sort of enemies, think what they could have at their potential by now."

  She shook her head, replying, "I think you can rest easy on that note, Danny. That looks more like some of the first bases on Luna, or back on Mars. They buried themselves in to protect against radiation and micrometeorites."

  Marshall looked less certain, frowning at the structure, "That was a requirement close into a star, with first-generation technology. How would a species using such primitive means get here in the first place?"

  "We'll have to find those answers out when we touch down. Ten meters to go."

  He tapped a button on the panel, "Everyone get suited up. Check your thruster packs are full and functioning; you'll find them a lot more use on the surface than just walking."

  "Someone's going to try and take a first step, you know," Caine said, reaching up for her helmet.

  "And spend the next five minutes spinning around before they come back to the surface. Where are my damn gloves?"

  Helmets and gloves secured, Marshall and Caine turned off the ship's primary systems, switching control over to Alamo's master computer, just a few miles away in orbit. With a thumbs up sign, Marshall opened the cockpit airlock, and the two of them slowly began to make their way down onto the ground, taking their time over each step down the ladder. A quick visual inspection of the shuttle revealed no obvious problems, so Marshall dropped down onto the ground.

  "First words, Danny?" Caine asked.

  "Not appropriate. We aren't the first ones to land here."

  He looked down at his wrist computer; all readings seemed to match everything that he would expect, though the radiation count was a little on the high side. Nothing that would get through their suits, but something that might have to be considered in any shirtsleeve environment they might later establish. The shuttle's passenger airlock opened up, and another spacesuited figure began to emerge.

  "I thought I told you all when we boarded that we would be the first ones out, and the rest of you were to wait until we had made sure the environment was safe?"

  "Sorry, Captain," Vivandi's voice echoed through his helmet, "but we're all rearing to go, and there doesn't seem to be any reason why we can't start at once. It's just another barren rock – but with a rare prize on its surface!"

  Caine replied, "A barren rock with an over-high radiation count."

  "Nothing our suits can't protect against."

  Marshall paused for a moment before replying, "I think we're about ready anyway. Everyone can disembark and we can get started. I'm not going to order anyone to remain with the shuttle; Alamo has control of it anyway now in the event anything goes wrong. Ground rules."

  "Here we go," muttered Cross.

  "We operate in pairs. If something goes wrong with a single pair, everyone immediately heads back to the shuttle no matter what; Caine and I will go and assist. If we are the ones in trouble, Douglas and Blake will come and look. The other pairs are Cross and Green, and Cl
arke and Vivandi."

  "I work better alone, Captain," Cross complained.

  "Then go work alone on the shuttle. We have no idea what's going to happen here."

  "It's a long-dead ruin. What could possibly happen here?"

  Caine muttered, "Famous last words."

  "If anyone finds any evidence of current occupation – human or alien – then return to the shuttle immediately and call the rest back. No exceptions, no arguments, no debates. Everyone set an alarm for two hours from now to return to the shuttle unless I grant an extension. Contact Alamo every half-hour; if you miss a call, the same rules apply – everyone else gets recalled to the shuttles while Caine and I go and look."

  "Can we get going? We're using up oxygen. Some of us more than others," Cross said, looking back and forth.

  Restraining himself from simply ordering Cross back inside, Marshall replied, "I suggest for the moment that each pair takes a mound." He gestured towards the furthest structure. "We'll take that one. See you all in two hours."

  Marshall turned towards the gray mound, kicking off then turning on his suit thrusters to skim across the surface, Caine hard on his heels. It took an effort to force himself to go smoothly and slowly, instead of racing across the ground. The heads-up display in his helmet showed the other six branching off; he didn't envy Private Green trying to keep the argumentative geochemist in line.

  "See anything interesting?"

  "Nothing yet, Danny. Wait a minute. Over on the far corner, it gets a lot darker."

  "Like a rocky outcrop, perhaps?"

  "Or a tunnel. Let's take a look."

  Now they really were eating up the distance, spending their thruster fuel to the point that they would likely have a long bounce back to the shuttle, but it didn't seem to matter. The dark patch quickly revealed itself as a tunnel buried in the rock, sloped down at an angle. Instead of a circular hole, it was octagonal, and the sides were as regular as if they had been carved with a knife, the sides baked to hardness long ago.

  "Wow. See those?" Caine gestured down to the ground, a series of long, thin tracks, like tendrils whipping across the ground. "Make sure the down-blast doesn't get them. I've got some pictures."