Derelict: Tomb (Derelict Saga Book 2)

by Paul E. Cooley

  “Of course, Lieutenant. Shall I stream you the data feed?”

  If a human being had said it that way, he would think they were being sarcastic. “Yes. I would appreciate it,” he said.

  He and Black had worked together a long time, but she sounded different. And if he was honest, more than a little creepy. Instead of using a block connection to access the data more quickly as he normally did, he had essentially kept her to audio and block messages only. By streaming the data to his block, she was locked out of his thoughts completely. He wasn’t even sure he wanted a block message from her ever again.

  What the hell did the Trio do to you? That thought, and all that it implied, was what he wanted to keep her from knowing. At least as long as he could without being too obvious about it. When he made sure he wasn’t imagining things, he’d make a secure block connection to the captain and explain the situation. That was a conversation he definitely didn’t want her to hear.

  The left side of Nobel’s HUD filled with the commands Black executed, outputs and results flowing to the right. He could send a block command to halt the stream if there was something he didn’t recognize or thought was wrong with Black’s reasoning. After a moment, he frowned and paused the stream. “Black? Line 2112?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  The command Black wanted to run was a little odd. “You’re shunting the heat through fin 3. Fin 3 is the one we want to pull out of service.”

  Black paused. “Yes, of course,” the AI said. “My apologies, Lieutenant.”

  The line of code changed to what Nobel expected. He played the command and felt the floor vibrate through his boots. A plume of heat coursed through the venting systems and into space. With fin 3 out of the process, the other heat fins took the additional energy and dissipated it along with their own. If one were space-walking near the fins, they’d be burned to a crisp.

  The outputs returned, Nobel scanned them, and allowed the rest of the program to run. It took nearly five minutes for Black to finish running the commands. When they were done, the engineering bay’s ambient temperature was up by more than 5°C and rising. According to his calculations, the temperature would stabilize at about 15°C above normal ship ambient temperature. Yup, it was going to get warm.

  The reactor status lights flicked from green to a flashing yellow. Reactor 3 was now in standby mode. Without the reactor online, he could perform the metal structure test without getting false readings. He checked the reactor shield with the rad tool to ensure the radiation leak had disappeared. It had.

  He placed the tool back in the utility belt and pulled out a portable X-ray scanner. After initiating a block connection, he slowly waved the rectangular tool across the assembly. His HUD filled with a real-time video feed of the metal. It was going to take him a while to figure out where the crack or broken weld was, but he would. If it was there.

  “Please be a crack,” he said aloud. “I really don’t want to take a walk.” With that thought running through his head, he started to scan every centimeter.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The cargo bay, pressurized and cold, felt like a tomb. Without the three vehicles they’d brought on the mission, the long, wide bay seemed too empty. If not for the shelves of secured crates, Dunn would have thought S&R Black was back at Trident Station, rotting as it waited for a mission.

  Supply crates were a necessary evil. While the larder, medical bay, and personal supply stations were stuffed with extra provisions, emergency supplies stayed in the vacuum-packed Atmo-steel boxes. The standard 3x3 meter crate had been around much longer than Dunn had been alive. Their design hadn’t changed much in over a century. Spare ship parts and larger components often necessitated larger crates. Those were stowed below the cargo bay and raised from a grav-lift.

  Extra suits, weapons, ammunition, life-support components, and even hygiene products spent their lives in crates waiting for a reason to be opened. Each crate was opened upon return, checked for expiration, replenished, and then stacked back in Quirinus’ warehouses until they were once again loaded aboard a ship destined for space.

  Red labeled crates contained hazardous or explosive materials. Yellow labeled crates, on the other hand, were filled with operational necessities. Green crates were for personnel. Those were the three primary colors. Which is why he was confused by the ten blue labeled crates hidden at the back of the shelves.

  Using his block, he scanned the serial numbers and compared them to the loadout manifests Quirinus had provided as well as the numbers Colonel Heyes had included in his message. They matched.

  “Classified,” he said to the empty bay. He sent a block command to the supply shelves and the shelf with the blue crates slid forward from the assembly. With grav-plate assistance, the shelf raised until it was waist high.

  Dunn examined the crates as he attempted to discern any differences between them. There weren’t any. The crates were identically labeled, identical in construction, and looked as though they’d never been used.

  Between the lifters, the packing, and all the other mechanical endeavors involved in a loadout, crates suffered pockmarks, scratches, and dents in their surface. You could always tell whether a crate had seen space before. These had obviously not.

  He chose one at random, third to the left side of the shelf, and sent a block command to it. The crate responded with a security key challenge. Dunn replied with his public key. The crate immediately opened with a hiss, the lid slowly rising until it stood at a 90° angle.

  Dunn blinked. Five warheads stared back at him, the yellow hazard stickers on them glowing beneath the overheads. His block received a message from the crate.

  Captain Dunn:

  These ten crates have been loaded with experimental weapons and supplies designed for exo-solar material and possible lifeforms. Instructions and descriptions of each piece of ordinance are available via your block upon opening the crates. We suggest you use your best judgement in arming your ship and your marines.

  The Trio wishes you the best of luck.

  Dunn parsed the message over and over again. “Exo-solar lifeforms?” he said aloud, the words echoing in the largely empty cargo bay. What the hell was the Trio talking about?

  “Black?” he called out.

  “Yes, Captain?” The voice was a purr.

  “What do you know about these crates?”

  “Apart from their classified status and that they are aboard, I know nothing,” Black said.

  “The Trio gave you no instructions regarding them?”

  “No, Captain,” Black said. “I am not privy to classified materials I have not been given specific access to. In the case of the crates, they were marked for your eyes only.”

  He tapped a finger on the side of the crate before peering closely at the five warheads. “Weapons? Why would they send weapons?”

  “Is that a question to me?” Black asked.

  He flicked his head up to the ceiling where he knew one of Black’s hundreds of interior cameras sat. “No,” he said. “But I’d appreciate some theories.”

  Black paused. “It is possible, although unlikely, that the Trio knows what is aboard Mira. Or they received information that led to the creation of weaponry designed for specific threats.”

  “Mira has been dead for 43 years,” Dunn said. “We stopped getting signals from her nearly half a century ago.”

  “Correct,” Black said.

  “So how could the Trio have known what happened to Mira? And if they did, why don’t we know it too?”

  The AI said nothing. Dunn returned his eyes to the crate. It sent another block message to him describing the warheads. He read it, the words replacing his fear and unease with confusion. “Carbon Oxygen Explosive,” he said to himself.

  The warheads in the crate were designed to fuse oxygen and carbon to create a cloud of stable CO2. In a vacuum, the gas would quickly lose cohesion and spread as individual molecules. What the hell good was this?

  “Black?
What would be the point of creating a cloud of CO2 in space?”

  “Unknown,” the AI said.

  Dunn stopped himself before uttering a curse. Against ships, such a weapon would be completely useless. It seemed more of a scientific lark, and an extremely useless one at that, rather than something designed for warfare. The fusing of the two elements would surely create a hell of an energy wave, but not nearly as large as nuclear fusion or fission bombs. And considering the warhead size, the cloud they created had to be relatively small.

  He opened the next crate and waited for the lid to spring up. That’s when Nobel called. He had difficulty focusing on the conversation with all the thoughts spinning in his mind. When he finally managed to concentrate, he realized what Nobel was saying about the reactor, okayed the shutdown, and then started to worry about what would happen if Nobel couldn’t bring it back online.

  Another worry. Another concern. Kalimura’s squad was still missing. Taulbee had found more of that gunk that killed Niro, Black was acting strange, and now the ship had a radiation leak that seemed more serious than they’d thought. What else was going to go wrong?

  The open crate waited for him. It had already sent him a block message of its contents. He was a little afraid to read it.

  “Hyper Neutrino Warhead,” the block message read. The description made little sense to him, but involved creating highly unstable atoms whose theoretical life was less than a nano-second in duration. Once the warhead detonated, it created a cloud of unstable matter that disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.

  The warhead’s efficacy was rated as lethal to humans in a direct blast, certain exo-solar materials, and safe for ships. In other words, this weapon was useless if you fired it at something encased in Atmo-steel. Detonating it in atmosphere or near space-walking humans would result in extreme lethality.

  Okay, he thought, you created something that can kill everyone in its area of effect, but not damage the ship or hurt anyone inside. We could have used these in the Satellite War.

  As soon as he had the thought, his mind filled with memories of dozens of SFMC personnel floating through space toward their objectives protected only by their suits. The combatants had been doing the same. If someone had launched one of these things into their midst, everyone would have died in a nanosecond. He shivered.

  The third and fourth crates contained flechette magazines. Thirty between the two of them. The two crates sent identical block messages. “Tritium Flechettes.” Each flechette round contained three thick shards of Atmo-steel designed to explode on impact and spread heavy water on the target.

  The rounds were not to be used outside of a vacuum and only by personnel wearing radiation-proof suits. The unstable tritiated water was radioactive once released from the flechette round. Dunn didn’t want to think about how much radiation the flechettes would leave in their wake. Probably contaminate a ship in a heartbeat.

  “Black?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  Dunn swallowed hard before speaking. “Do you know why the Trio waited until now to tell me about the crates?”

  Black didn’t answer immediately. That worried Dunn. When AIs paused, it meant their processing power was being utilized on some other matter, such as running exhaustive simulated outcomes based on what they said or did.

  “The Trio most likely didn’t want to cloud your mind with unnecessary complications if they weren’t necessary. Now that we have confirmed the existence of exo-solar material aboard Mira, the Trio felt it was time for you to know.”

  Dunn put his hands on his hips and glared at the ceiling. “My marines are out there without this gear.”

  “That is correct, Captain.”

  “So,” he said, “what good does it do us now?”

  “I assume when the marines are back aboard, you will arm them with the new weapons. But until then, only the warheads can be immediately loaded.”

  “Too late for Kalimura,” he muttered.

  Black didn’t comment.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Shit show. Those two words described the situation perfectly. Dickerson glanced at his suit report as he mag-walked behind Carb. Despite the pain in his ribs, and the damage to his suit, he had plenty of O2, water recyc still functioned, and, most importantly, he was still in one piece. But he didn’t know how long any of that would last.

  Carb walked a meter ahead of him and to his left. She had the angle down the hallway in case anything came at them from that direction. His responsibility? The right. If something came down the middle, they’d both have a line of fire. Standard fireteam formation.

  If they were in normal gravity, the two would be squatting and covering ground with slow methodical steps. In z-g and using mag-boots, the lack of speed wasn’t by choice. They could both detach and float down the hall using their suit thrusters, but it wasn’t worth the risk of running into another swarm of those pinecone things.

  “Did you get a good look at them?” Dickerson asked over the private comms.

  “Look at what? Be a little more specific,” Carb said.

  “The pinecones.”

  Carb took a deep breath and exhaled it in a shuddering stream. “Better than I wanted,” she said. “What the fuck lives in a vacuum? I mean, what can it eat? How does it breathe?”

  “Hell if I know,” Dickerson said. “Some of the exo-biologists believe non-carbon based lifeforms could survive a vacuum.”

  She snorted. “What exo-biologists are those? The ones working for the holo industry?”

  “Um, did we or did we not just get attacked by something that lives in a vacuum?”

  Carb was silent for a moment. When she finally replied, her voice had an annoyed edge to it. “We did,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not machines or something.”

  Machines. The pinecone things seemed as though they were made of metal, or something like metal. The outer shell certainly was similar. But when he’d flown through the cargo bay, his suit lights had caught an entire swarm off to the left. At the time, he’d been too distracted trying to keep out of their way to get a good look, but what he’d seen had shrunk his balls to pellets.

  Carb went silent, her helmet lights swinging from the wall to the area in front of her and back again. Every two meters or so, she repeated the pattern. Dickerson was doing the same, but not as methodically. He was too lost in thought about what those things were. His boot struck something and he would have tripped if not for the other foot mag-locked to the floor.

  “Dammit, Dickerson!” Carbonaro yelled at him.

  He cast his suit lights down. A small box of rations tumbled through the air a few centimeters from the floor. “Didn’t see it.”

  “That’s because you’re not watching where you’re walking, asshole,” she said.

  “Yeah. Right.” He tried to shake away the thoughts of the monstrous-looking creatures, but his mind kept coming back to them. “Did you ever visit any of the arboretums on Earth?”

  “No,” she said. “And why the hell are you bringing that up right now?”

  He checked his HUD. “Because we have another fifteen meters to clear before we reach the lift. And because I need to talk.”

  “Okay. Fine. No, I never did.”

  “What about the aquariums?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Didn’t have any of those in Minneapolis. At least none I could afford to go to.”

  “Figured,” he said. “Remember when I said those things looked like pinecones?”

  “Yeah,” she said, annoyance coloring her words.

  “The arboretum in Dallas? They had some old pine trees that stretched over a hundred feet tall within the dome. Magnificent. Green needles, large pinecones dangling off them. If you went in the spring, you came out with yellow pollen clinging to everything.”

  “So? What’s your point?”

  “Do you know what a pinecone is?”

  “It’s a seed pod,” she said. “Again. What is your point?”

/>   “Right,” he said, ignoring her snark. “I thought those things might be similar. You know, seeds for some other life form.”

  “Well, they sure as hell aren’t seeds,” she said. “Never had a seed try and rip through my suit.”

  “True,” he said. “But did you see the way they moved?”

  “Yes, dammit. I was there.”

  “We ever get back to S&R Black, I want to show you some holos of the Dallas aquarium,” he said. “Because I’m pretty sure I saw something move like that.”

  “Really?” Carb asked. “Like what?”

  “Squid,” he said. “I think that’s what they’re called. Used to live in the ocean. Shit, for all I know, they still do.”

  Carb grunted. “Can’t be many of them. Unless they went very deep.”

  “True,” he said. “But I think they lived deep. Probably escaped the worst of the radiation. Maybe they managed to thrive. Anyway, point is that those things out there? They might have an analog on old Earth.”

  Carb stopped in mid-step, and clumsily turned to face him. With both her feet mag-locked to the deck, her helmet pointed directly at him. “Dickerson? You’re boring the shit out of me.”

  He shrugged. “Just an observation,” he said.

  “We don’t need to know what they are,” Carb said, “we just need to know how to kill them and stay out of their way.”

  Dickerson didn’t have an answer to that. He wasn’t even sure why he was babbling about them, except he couldn’t get the image out of his mind of the elongated bodies pulsing in the z-g.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ten meters.”

  “Right,” she said, “ten meters. Let’s hoof it.”

  He refocused his suit lights, waited for her to get ahead of him, and followed in silence. The box he’d kicked was ahead of them, still tumbling through the z-g.

  The slip-point, a magnetic lift, had no power. That was expected. But with the grav-plates inoperable, it didn’t matter. All they had to do was walk into the entry point, deactivate their magnetic boots, and push. The momentum alone would carry them to the very top of the shaft, unless they slowed themselves using their magnetics or suit thrusters. Flying up the slip-point to the next deck would be all too easy.