by Jake Elwood
He resumed climbing. The crater floor was a good ten or twelve meters down, and he was winded by the time he reached the top. He paused, panting, to get his bearings. The nearest edge of the fabric circle was about a kilometer away, with gently rolling ground in between. There was no cover of any sort, so he headed straight for the closest pole.
The ground was rougher close up, a stone surface broken by cracks and bumps with gray dust in drifts wherever the stone rose or fell. He ran in the strange slow motion of low gravity, leaping forward in great arcs, only gradually drifting back down to the surface.
His breath rasped in his ears and mist gathered on the inside of his faceplate as he ran. By the time he'd made a dozen strides the cooling system in his suit was no longer able to cope. He could feel his temperature rising. His left side was toward the sun, and his left shoulder and leg grew uncomfortably hot.
Instinct told him to slow down and approach warily, but he was in plain sight if anyone cared to look. The closest cover would be under the strange canopy, so he ignored his rising paranoia and made himself keep running.
He could make out the individual poles supporting the cloth now. The sun glinted on guy wires holding the poles upright. A cloth that size would be an engineering nightmare back on Earth, but a world with a third of a gee and no wind to speak of made many things possible.
When the pole was a hundred meters away he slowed his pace. A collection of huts loomed to his left, and he angled that way. They were prefabricated buildings not much different from structures he'd seen all over the solar system, simple single-story rectangles with flat roofs and no windows. The only thing unusual about them was their color. The huts were the same gray as the stone they rested on. They were designed to be hidden.
Chan stumbled to a halt with his hand against the back of a hut. He stood there panting, feeling his leg muscles tremble, and wondered how he could implement an exercise program on long space flights. The Raven didn't have much extra room. Still, maybe he could manage a miniature treadmill….
Straightening up, he moved to the corner of the hut and peered around. His breath still sawed in his lungs, but he was over the worst of it. Nothing moved in the gap between buildings, and he stepped into the two-meter space, sighing with relief as he moved into shade.
The huts were roughly square, about ten meters on a side. He edged toward the front of the hut, wanting to tiptoe. At first all he could see was shadow, but after a moment his eyes adjusted.
A crater yawned just ahead of him. A big crater, filling most of the area under the fabric. He frowned, trying to make sense of it. Why would someone hide a crater? What if someone doing a survey from orbit noticed that a crater had disappeared?
As he watched, an enormous truck rose from the depths of the crater. He saw the top of the truck box first, heaped with gray soil. No, not soil, but chunks of crushed rock. Higher and higher the truck rose, until he could see two vertical meters of truck box above the crater rim. Only then did he see the tops of the tires, and at last the cab. There was no driver. The machine was on autonomous control.
The tires rose higher and higher. This was one of the trucks that had left such mammoth tracks in the desert, Chan was sure. The tires were taller than he was. He thought he might have been able to walk under the truck box without needing to duck.
The truck reached the surface and went rolling off, following the rim of the crater. Another truck went by in the other direction. Chan watched as it found a different ramp farther along the crater rim and slowly sank from sight.
Motion caught his eye. He could just make out the tiny, toy-like shape of another truck working its way up a ramp on the far side of the crater, and a chill ran up his spine as he finally realized what he was seeing.
This was no crater. It was an open-pit mine.
He stared for a few more minutes. More trucks went by, but nothing much changed, and at last he edged back and sat down in the deepest shadows between buildings. He shook his head, trying to make sense of what he'd seen.
There were open-pit mines all over the solar system. They weren't generally a corporate secret.
Why was the Telemachus Corporation trying to hide a mine?
Something Rhett had said came back to him. Telemachus owned surface rights for a huge area around Dawn City. They didn't own the mineral rights. He was a little hazy on the international treaties that governed interplanetary mineral rights. In the outer planets it pretty much came down to finders, keepers. Here inside of Earth's orbit, though, where Solar Force was a power to be reckoned with, laws and treaties carried a bit more force.
He thought he remembered hearing fifty percent cited as the cut that interplanetary organizations would take for off-Earth mineral resources. The riches of the solar system belonged to all of humanity, according to the theory. Therefore a good big chunk of anything extracted should go to Solar Force and a dozen other interplanetary busybodies.
Telemachus wouldn't like that. If they'd found gold or platinum or gems out in the middle of an unexplored desert they wouldn't want to share. They could double their profits just by keeping their mouths shut.
Chan grinned. He was about to cost the Telemachus Corporation a lot of money.
He turned back toward the Raven. His shoulder brushed the hut beside him, and he paused.
What was inside?
"Don't do it," he murmured to himself. "Let Solar Force do the investigating." It was good advice, and he nearly managed to follow it. But there was certainly more going on than just an unreported mine. After all, people were disappearing from Dawn City. And the Telemachus Corporation, if they truly were behind the secret research facility on Enceladus, was gunning for the crew of the Stark Raven. Information was power, and anything Chan could learn might save his life.
That was what he told himself, at any rate. But ultimately it was curiosity that brought him slinking to the front corner of the hut.
Nothing moved around the pit but driverless trucks. He could make out a larger building on the far side of the excavation, a sprawling structure with windows and a roof that bristled with antennas, well inside the far edge of the big circle of cloth. That would be the heart of the base, he supposed. That's where the people would be. Not in a hut so close to the edge of the cloth that the sun hit the end wall. No, these huts would contain supplies, or core samples.
Or records.
The idea of nicking a box full of company data crystals was more than he could resist. Knowing he was taking a foolish risk, but unable to help himself, he darted across the front of the hut and palmed the controls on a roomy airlock.
The lock cycled and dust rose from his boots as air rushed in. His helmet light showed green and he retracted the face shield, taking a deep breath of stale, dusty air. Then he pressed the button that opened the inner hatch.
The hatch slid open. The first thing he saw was a battered table surrounded by plastic chairs. Four tired-looking people looked up from a card game and gaped at him, faces blank with surprise.
For several endless seconds Chan just stood there, frozen, his mind racing as he tried to think of something to say. A corner of his brain was taking in details. Two men, two women. He counted three visible tattoos, five earrings, one set of dreadlocks, and the remains of vivid blue hair dye, now largely grown out.
Not the usual Telemachus employees.
"Well?" said a fiftyish man with a graying goatee. "What do you want?"
Chan, still at a loss for words, looked from him to the woman beside him. She was black, her hair tied back in a severe bun. She had the most striking eyebrows he'd ever seen, dramatic arches so sharp they looked as if they'd been painted on.
In fact, he realized, he'd seen them done in paint. On a wall in the warren back in Dawn City.
Those dramatic eyebrows rose in an unspoken question, and he blurted, "You're her! Danni something or other."
"I'm Danni Mansoor." He couldn't have said where she was from, but her accent was cultured, aristocrati
c. She even sounded elegant when she said, "Who the hell are you?"
Chan stepped into the room. "James Chan," he said. "Captain of the Stark Raven."
The goateed man said, "Was there something you wanted, Captain Chan?"
"You've all been kidnapped," Chan said, the pieces falling into place. "What are you? Slave labor?"
If the four of them had looked puzzled before, they looked downright perplexed now. Several more people appeared in a doorway at the back of the room, men and women with hair standing up in clumps, rubbing at their eyes and yawning. One woman blinked at Chan and said, "What's going on?"
"That's what I'd like to know," Mansoor said. She stared at Chan. "Where did you come from?"
"I landed on Mercury yesterday. I saw a plume of dust in the desert a few hours ago, and I decided to snoop."
That set off a babble of voices. The figures in the doorway came into the room, and more sleepy-looking people took their place. Somehow Chan found himself sitting in a chair in front of a fan of forgotten cards with a dozen people clustered around him, talking over top of each other as they poured out their stories.
All of them had been arrested by Dawn City police, except one man who'd tried to stow away on a departing ship. He'd been arrested by Orbital Guard officers. Most of them had been sentenced to deportation. They'd never left Mercury, though. They weren't sure how far they were from Dawn City. They'd arrived in ones and twos over the last six months, held without trial, forced to keep the mine running if they wanted food and water.
"The machines do the work," Mansoor told him. "We mostly service the machines. There's always something. We do twelve hour shifts, then six hours off. Then it repeats."
"No communication," a haggard-looking woman said. "No mail, no phones. No one even knows we're alive." She clutched Chan's arm. "Does anyone know?"
"They think you're missing," he said. "But they're about to learn better."
"You have to get us out of here," the man with the goatee said. "Can you do that?"
Chan nodded. "Do you have vac suits?"
"Yes, but the lock doesn't open from inside."
Chan felt his stomach lurch. "What?"
"The guards check us in at shift end. Then they come back six hours later and let us out." He shrugged. "Go try the controls if you don't believe me."
"Buddha's buttocks." He stood. "Everyone, into vac suits. We're leaving." He found the switch for his radio and turned it on. "Stark Raven. Do you copy?"
"Loud and clear," Liz said.
"I'm stuck in a building. I need you to open the door Then bring the ship up here. We have a dozen prisoners to evacuate."
"Hold on." Mansoor grabbed his upper arms. She was several centimeters taller than him, and she leaned in, her eyes fierce. "There are two other shifts. Twenty more prisoners. Once the guards know we're gone, what happens to them?"
"Well, we can't stay here."
She leaned in until her forehead touched his helmet. "We can't leave them behind. They're witnesses. They're evidence. Telemachus won't leave evidence just lying around. Understand?"
Chan had a sudden vision of the research facility on Enceladus. He remembered a room he'd found, piled with bodies. "Okay, new plan. Warm the ship up. And send Joss up here with a cutting torch. She's going to cut a hole in the back of this hut, and we're going to sneak out. Then we're going to blow the whistle and get Solar Force in here." He thought for a moment. "Also the Sons of the Dawn. They can react quicker. Call Uncle. Tell him we're getting his guns. He can pick them up just outside the base. The revolution starts today."
Chapter 7
"It's three hours and eight minutes until shift change," Mansoor said. She stood directly behind Chan's seat on the bridge of the Raven, clutching the back of the chair so that he felt compelled to lean forward slightly. Four more prisoners crowded the back of the bridge. The rest were scattered around the ship.
"That's our time limit, then," Chan said. "Tell Uncle."
Joss nodded and murmured into the console in front of her. Uncle was getting his people organized as quickly as he could. He would lead them in a wild charge across the desert as soon as he could get them together. If the Raven could find the crate, the rebels would even be armed.
It made Chan queasy every time he thought about it. He was unleashing a messy storm of violence, and the gods of space only knew what carnage was going to result. Uncle led a mob of civilians, and he was going to arm them with weapons they'd never even touched before. Chan knew enough history to know that a rabble with guns didn't usually do very well against professionals.
The rabble usually got shredded.
Still, he had no idea what the professionalism level of the guards at the mine was. According to the rescued prisoners there were six men and women who habitually wore guns. It didn't mean they were trained, or knew how to handle themselves in a crisis.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
The next trick would be to avoid a massacre that would have the crew of the Raven fleeing Mercury with a charge of accessory to mass murder hanging over their heads. The solar system wasn't big enough to hide from that kind of charge.
He looked around at the refugees. They were taking turns sitting at an unused bridge station and recording tearful messages to loved ones. Rhett would broadcast the messages as soon as the battle started and secrecy no longer mattered. A woman was openly sobbing as she stammered her way through a message about her babies, how much she loved them, how desperately she longed to hold them one more time.
Chan swallowed the lump in his throat and pushed his doubts to the back of his mind. Doing nothing was gone as an option.
He turned his attention to the front windows. An empty gray wasteland raced past under the ship. Liz was taking them in a low-altitude sweep halfway around Mercury, waiting to catch up to the weapons crate in its lonely orbit high above.
"Coming up on the closest point," she said. He could hear the strain in her voice. Orbital Guard was up there, and the Raven was about to become very easy to see.
"Whenever you're ready," Chan said. "Don't dawdle."
She nodded, then moved her hands on the controls. The surface of Mercury vanished, replaced by black sky.
"I'm pinging the squawk box," Joss said.
Someone behind her started to ask what a squawk box was, and was impatiently hushed by Mansoor.
"There it is." Liz worked the controls and the stars tilted as the Raven changed course.
"Orbital Guard has noticed us," Joss announced. "Three ships closing. Only one is actually close. Thirty thousand K."
Chan checked his console. The ship's transponder identified her as the Nabu. He found her in a database of ships. She was twice the mass of the Raven, with a formidable laser battery and a crew of eight.
"Let's not meet up with her," he said. He stood and grabbed his helmet. "Joss, you're with me. We'll be in the aft lock." He pushed his way through the crowd on the bridge. "Make way, please."
The two of them stood in vacuum, shoulders almost touching in the narrow confines of the lock. Chan was just starting to fidget when Liz said, "We're here."
Chan opened the lock. The crate hung in the void just a few meters away. They shoved it into the lock, then waited impatiently while the lock cycled. The Raven was a helpless target as long as they were outside. Liz wouldn't be able to maneuver or flee.
The hatch slid open, Chan pulled himself into the lock, and Joss said, "Oh, God." Chan grabbed her shoulder and hauled her into the lock, then looked in the direction of her gaze. He could see the Nabu, looking like a perfect miniature of a spaceship in the distance, but growing visibly as it rushed toward the Raven.
Chan mashed a hand against the lock controls and the hatch slid shut, cutting off his view.
By the time the lock cycled and he reached the bridge the ship was once again racing along less than a kilometer above the surface of Mercury. "They're hunting us," Liz said. "They can't see us, though."
"Head for the
rendezvous point," Chan said. "We'll wait for the cavalry." When five different people stared at him with blank expressions he sighed and shook his head. "Does nobody watch cowboy movies anymore? Never mind. We'll wait for Uncle and his revolutionary army."
"Guns, anyone?" said a cheerful voice from the back of the bridge. Tim Reynolds, the man with the gray goatee, seemed to have thrown off ten years in the half hour since the ship had lifted off. He held up a featureless black rectangle the size of his forearm. "Stingers," he said. "Very nice, Captain Chan."
"Watch where you point that," Mansoor snapped. She marched over and took the weapon from his hands.
"You can have that one," Tim told her. "There's forty-seven more in that crate."
Mansoor raised her voice. "No one touches the guns until they've learned the basics. Understand?" Seeing that she had five refugees around her and two more watching through the ruined wall at the back of the bridge, she sighed and lifted gun over her head.
"This is a Stalin and Grund ST Nine, more commonly called a stinger. It's a very dangerous weapon, designed for combat. Here's the first thing you need to know." She pointed to a pale green light on the side of the gun. "This is the safety. It's currently on." Keeping the gun pointed at the ceiling, she pressed her thumb to the metal beside the green light. The light turned red. "Now the safety is off, and you can fire it." Another press and the light went green. "Safe again."
Her fierce gaze swept the faces around her. "Anybody takes the safety off before we land on Mercury, I'm going to personally beat you to death with this stinger. I don't even have to take the safety off to do it. Is that clear?"
No one spoke.
"Good. Now. See these buttons here? Before I press them I'm going to double-check the safety is on." She made a show of checking the green light. "Okay. This one releases the hand grip." A pistol grip extended from the side of the rectangle, complete with a trigger guard and trigger. "Now I can touch the trigger. Which means I'm going to check again that the safety is on." She did so. "Now I'm going to keep my big clumsy fingers right off of the trigger until I see Nugent or one of his apes." She wrapped her hand around the pistol grip and extended her index finger so it lay alongside the trigger guard. "Do you know what happens if you put your finger inside the trigger guard while we're still on the ship?"
