Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  Jermane’s expression cleared a little. He was familiar with the kind of survival domes maintained along shipping routes. They provided emergency supplies and welcome opportunities for Fleet and freighter crews to get off the ship for a while. Few liners called at them, because the D7 worlds classified and used for that purpose were not likely to impress liner passengers. They were almost always of the kind that spacers referred to as ‘slimeworlds’, primitive biospheres with just enough of a survivable atmosphere to make them tolerable with no more than an oxygen nose-clip. The ones Jermane had visited were either freezing cold or steaming with humidity, the stink of rotting algae everywhere. Even so, most of them had gardens of a sort, a terraforming effort spreading out from the survival dome and added to by ships which cast out seeds and planted trees provided by the Terraforming Society. The domes themselves were like small hotels, too, with leisure facilities maintained and supplied by the ships which used them. It wouldn’t be much fun being left at such a dome, but Jermane would cope.

  ‘We will be on a shipping route, then,’ he surmised, which got blank looks and some bewilderment from the Chanticleer’s crew.

  ‘Highly unlikely,’ Andi told him. ‘It will almost certainly be a cold drop way out in the middle of nowhere. Our orders are that we’re not even to call in at Sentinel for supplies, coming or going – we’re dark running all the way, off route, avoiding all contact with other ships. But we carry our own survival dome for things like this, see – we’ll set it up for you and make sure you have everything you need.’

  Jermane stared at her, and the cup of tea he held in his hand hovered between table and mouth as if he’d been put into some kind of stasis.

  ‘But…’ he managed to pull himself together after a few seconds, and set down the cup with exaggerated care, ‘you can’t mean that you’d leave me somewhere like that, in a survival dome, all by myself?’

  Andi looked sympathetic, but nodded. ‘It’s what we have to do in cold drops,’ she said. ‘It may be, of course, that we’re sent to a rendezvous where we can transfer you to the other ship directly, but to be honest I have to say that this kind of thing doesn’t usually work that way. The whole idea is to break the supply chain down into sections so nobody involved knows what is being moved, where, or why. We almost always make delivery to cold drops and never know who picked up the cargo, or what it was for.

  ‘You needn’t worry, though,’ she said, as she saw his expression. ‘There is a very well established procedure for this. We’ll make sure you’re absolutely safe and have everything you need before we go, and the other ship will pick you up quite soon, usually no more than a week or two. And you needn’t worry about being marooned; there’s always a failsafe in place where passengers are involved. Another ship will be tasked to carry out a check on the system later to ensure that you’re picked up okay. At the absolute worst, worst case scenario, you’d be there for three months before the failsafe ship picked you up, okay?’

  She spoke as if she thought that that would be reassuring, and so perhaps it might have been to a spacer or an intelligence agent used to this kind of stunt. Jermane, however, was fighting against panic. He was a naturally sociable man and the idea of being stranded, completely alone, for anything up to three months was making him feel physically sick.

  He opened his mouth to protest that he couldn’t do that, that they couldn’t possibly do that to him, and then realised what he was about to say, and closed his lips firmly. He could, of course, refuse to go. It was unlikely that Andi Berenard would force him off the ship at gunpoint. But he knew, with absolute certainty, that he wasn’t going to refuse. On the one hand, there was all his burning curiosity about what was going on here and his yearning for the adventure that had finally come his way. On the other hand, there was the sure knowledge that he would never have any self-respect again if he had to admit that, having agreed to the President’s request for him to undertake this clearly very important mission, he had bottled out because he was scared to be left on his own.

  ‘Okay,’ he managed, in a strangled voice.

  Andi Berenard smiled at him with kindly understanding.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ she promised.

  Jermane was still just as apprehensive, though, when the courier bringing their orders arrived four days later. He was hoping against hope that the orders would be for a ship rendezvous or even perhaps that the Chanticleer should take him to X-Base Sentinel. He would almost rather have hoped that the courier would bring orders saying that he wasn’t required for whatever it was after all, than face the prospect of being left alone.

  Almost, but not quite. His heart was hammering as he watched the courier flash into the system. The Chanticleer sent a shuttle over to collect their orders, sealed on high security tape that would not allow for them to be transmitted even on the most encrypted comms. Within moments of the shuttle disengaging, the courier had whirled away and hurtled off again, not even lingering for so much as a cup of coffee.

  ‘As expected,’ Andi Beremard informed him and her crew, once she’d opened the orders. ‘Cold drop, here.’

  She indicated on a star chart and as her crew immediately started laying in a course for the designated system, Jermane stared anxiously at the map.

  ‘What’s there?’ he asked the skipper.

  ‘Nothing, that’s the point,’ Andi told him, after a brief pause in which she worked out that this was a serious question. ‘There are thousands of wild systems in this sector – this one will almost certainly have been picked out at random with those coordinates given only to us and to the ship being assigned to pick up the cargo.’

  Jermane lifted his eyes from the chart and stared at her. He had a sense of being moved about like a very small piece in a very big game. Sooner or later, surely, surely, he would reach his destination and find out what they wanted him to do. The mind boggled, though, at what could be so important, so urgent and so secret, that it merited this extraordinary level of manoeuvring, just to get him to wherever they wanted him to be, along with whatever was in those containers.

  ‘And there’s nothing about me in the orders?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry.’ She showed him the orders, which consisted merely of cold-drop coordinates and a time frame in which they were to deliver their cargo and get clear of the system. The order was signed by Dix Harangay, First Lord of the Admiralty.

  ‘Those orders are dated the same day as the letter to Ambassador Jeynkins,’ Jermane was desperate for any clue as to what he was caught up in, here, and seized on that tiny scrap of information. ‘But if they were sent at the same time, from Chartsey, shouldn’t these have arrived a lot sooner?’

  ‘Well, either they were held back to be delivered after you were likely to arrive, or they were sent somewhere else first,’ Andi commented, with a distinct lack of interest, either way. ‘It doesn’t really matter, Jer,’ she pointed out, as he looked doubtfully at her. ‘Speculation in situations like this only winds things up, makes you more confused and anxious. All we can do is follow our orders and be patient, even accept that sometimes we never do find out what’s going on. And that’s okay, you know? We have to trust that there are good reasons for this level of security, and if it’s in the best interests of the League for us not to be let in on the bigger picture, we just have to accept that and do our bit to the best of our ability.’

  It was not the first time she’d said something like that to him during the last few days, and Jermane nodded acceptance. He considered it very likely that Andi Berenard was actually a Fleet Intelligence officer working under cover, and it was possible that some if not all of her crew were Fleet Intel, too. They would not admit that to him, of course, and he knew better than to ask. They were chatty enough, generally – welcoming and easy to get along with, as he’d found most spacers to be. He had a sense, too, of being in good hands, here, calm and professional, people who knew exactly what they were doing.

  Two weeks later, when they arrived at the system w
here they were to drop him, though, he had to admit to some qualms.

  ‘It’s so wild,’ he said, staring at it on scopes. It was a crowded system; fourteen planets, more than three hundred moons, two satellite belts and an unusually large number of objects on cross-system orbits. Scanners indicated more than six billion objects bigger than a metre across, moving chaotically, different directions, different speeds. Several thousand of them were lit up red on scopes, indicating that they were going to collide with other objects within the next year. Most of them would crash into one of the eight gas giants, or plunge into the sun.

  ‘Uh huh,’ Andi confirmed, with a look of mild interest at a meteor stream destined to career straight into a gas giant in a couple of months. ‘Don’t worry, though, we’ll get you in safely.’

  ‘And pick you somewhere with a pretty view,’ the first mate added.

  Jermane didn’t understand what he meant until he saw them running scans to find somewhere suitable for the survival dome. The place they picked was one of the moons around the second largest of the gas giants.

  ‘Geologically stable, moderate temperature range, easy access for shuttles – ideal,’ Andi told him.

  ‘But…’ Jermane said, staring at the information she was showing him, ‘it doesn’t have an atmosphere.’

  ‘None of them do.’ Andi pointed out. ‘Not one you could breathe, anyway. Actually, it does have some atmosphere – just a bit of methane. Nothing to worry about, though, you’ll be fine in the dome.’

  ‘And I’ve found you a great place,’ said the first mate, eagerly. ‘Incredible views. You’ll love it.’

  Four hours later, they had finished putting up the dome. It was a four-man survival dome; self-inflating, with a built-in life support system. There were air-tanks, and fifty litres of water in a recyc unit. It came with survival rations for four people for five months, but the Chanticleer also provided supplies from their own stores.

  Andi showed him round, assuring him that he didn’t need to worry about life support.

  ‘This is one of the most reliable systems on the market,’ she said. ‘It’s got triple redundancy throughout, so it’s got backup on the backup. In the unlikely event that there is any kind of problem with any of the tech in the dome, the system will diagnose and talk you through what to do about it, but you needn’t worry about that either, it’s designed for civilians to be able to use, even without previous technical skills.’ She gave him a little grin. ‘They sell a smaller version of this for people to carry on starseekers, okay? And we’ve put it on the lowest tech-skill level for you, so you’ll find it all very easy to use.’

  She was right, at least in the sense that the screen layout was familiar and the controls intuitive, very similar in style to the kind of environmental controls you might find in any modern house, with heating and air conditioning, water temperature and so on. There were lots of reassuring green lights, and a voice interface which Andi set to a calm female mode.

  And with that, having checked that he had everything he needed, Andi shook hands with him, wished him the best of luck, and left him there.

  When he tried to call the Chanticleer about ten minutes later, there was no reply. They had already gone.

  Jermane took stock of his new environment. It was open plan, but arranged in three sections. The area with the table near the food store and flash-oven he thought of as the kitchen. The area with the inflated banquette and holoscreen would be the lounge, and the bunks, lockers and shower would be the bedroom. There were only two bunks - presumably if four people really were living in here they’d have to take turns using them. Once he’d unpacked and decided which bunk he was going to use, he was pretty much settled in.

  It was at that point that the silence began to creep in on him. Even on the Chanticleer, there had been the ever-present background hum of engines and technology. Here, there was nothing. He had to go right up to the life support unit and put his ear against it to hear it making any hum at all. He tried turning the shower on and off, and discovered that the only sound with that was the running water, too. No whooshing tanks, here.

  Feeling a little unnerved, Jermane went over to the window, hoping to distract himself with the promised incredible view.

  The window wasn’t glass, of course, but it was a genuine transparency in the dome, intended to combat claustrophobia. It made Jermane feel cold. The ground outside was dark grey, a bleak rocky landscape with a ridge about half a kilometre away which had a slight, odd shimmer in the light from the dome. The horizon was brightly lit – there’d be planet-rise in about an hour, the first mate had told him, with obvious expectation that Jermane would enjoy that. If he craned right round he could just see the corner of one of the cargo crates, landed next to the dome. That was reassuring, illogically, since he felt that if they came for the cargo crates they would have to find him, too.

  Chances were he’d only be here for a few days, a week or two at most.

  A week or two was beginning to look like a very long time. The possibility of being stranded here alone for three months was just terrifying. And what if nobody ever did come back to check? If this was a four-man five-month dome, presumably, he could last for twenty months here on his own, perhaps longer.

  He had a vision of himself as a haggard, bearded, long-haired castaway, starving to death. Perhaps, in another two hundred years or so, another ship would come here and find him, mummified, sitting right there on the couch.

  Realising that he was giving himself the horrors, Jermane gave himself a little shake, turned away resolutely from the window and turned the holoscreen on, just to have some noise and the illusion of company.

  He didn’t turn the holoscreen off again for the whole time he was there, keeping it on even when he went to bed. Sometimes he even put music on at the same time, the holovision playing in the lounge while he had music playing in the kitchen. It felt quite homely, that, as if there might be a family around him.

  There was, however, absolutely nothing homely about that dome. No pictures, no ornaments, it was even more impersonal than a budget hotel room.

  And it was not long, just hours, before the Thing started, with the ice.

  To begin with, he found it beautiful. Planet-rise was, indeed, spectacular, and as he stood there with a mug of coffee watching it he actually felt for a little while as if he could enjoy this. He felt suddenly bold, adventurous, seeing something that perhaps no human being had ever witnessed before. This system had been visited by a mining survey ship a couple of hundred years before, so it was already long since officially claimed as League territory. Their survey had been brief, however, and it was unlikely that any of them would have bothered to land on this unimportant moon. He might well, indeed, be the first human being ever to see this planet-rise.

  The gas giant rose rapidly over the horizon and was very soon filling the sky, a glorious pale blue cloudy orb with a glitter of delicate rings. Even more beautiful was the transformation of the lunar landscape. As the planet-light flooded the scene, it revealed that that odd shimmer on the ridge was actually a thin crisp of ice crystals. They could not be water ice, of course, he knew that, but Andi had said there was a tenuous methane atmosphere which might crystallize out and thaw in the lunar day-night cycle. It could be quite pretty, she’d said, and she was right, it was. Jermane looked out over the sugar-frosted ridge, bathed in that cool blue light, and thought that it was very pretty indeed. And then, as the warmth of the planet light raised the temperature just sufficiently for the ice to thaw, it began to evaporate.

  Jermane remembered from school science that when ice turned directly from solid to vapour it was said to ‘sublime’. Never had a word seemed more appropriate. It did not melt to liquid, but rose from the surface in delicate wisps that faded away as the planet-light increased. They didn’t curl or move as they would have on a planet with a denser atmosphere, just hung there like translucent ghosts, and vanished.

  Jermane wished, later, that he hadn’t th
ought that about ghosts. The first time he saw them he thought they were exquisite – the whole thing, the subliming ice, the dark rocks, the gas giant filling the sky, filled him with a sense of awe.

  He would, he discovered, enjoy that spectacle two or three times a day. The moon he was on rotated in six and three quarter hours. Planet-rise was a fraction later every time, with the ‘days’ growing a little shorter, but that was only a matter of minutes and did not seem important. Planet-set around four hours later was quite pretty, too, though nowhere near as glorious. As the last rays of planet-light faded from the surface, ice began to crystallise out again, shimmering across the ridge then fading back to darkness.

  When he got up the next morning, it seemed to him that there was rather more ice on the ridge than there had been the previous day. He didn’t think much of it, till the next planet-rise revealed even more of a glitter than he was expecting.

  Thinking perhaps that he was imagining it, he took a holo, put it from his mind and went to watch holovision. He had a thousand hour package on his personal comp with all his favourite films and series, and the Chanticleer had left him a movie-pack, too, so he had no shortage of choice. Setting a detective drama to run the entire series, he played a card game on his comp, too, trying to keep himself from thinking about where he was, and how terribly alone.

  He couldn’t help it, though. The next day he found himself working out how big his dome was in relation to the moon that it was on. The dome footprint was about fifty four square metres. The moon, he calculated, had a surface area of around six and a half million square kilometres. It was the smallest of the three moons orbiting the planet. The planet itself was at least three hundred and forty two million square kilometres. Beyond that, the other thirteen planets and their moons took the ground area almost beyond human comprehension. And he was alone, in that, in what was effectively a four man tent.