I can’t build up a decent head of steam, but I’m still optimistic. This mission came with a lot of unknowns. I built in a cushion for surprises. I’m definitely a bit behind the original timeline, but I’ve still got time enough to prepare.
Minus 8 Hours 50 Minutes
Two disk-shaped airships twenty meters across perched on the Martian surface, identical except for the markings that showed them to be from different teams. The airship Shiran took from Kobe was decorated with a geisha, a branch of cherry blossoms extending over her head, Olympus Mons in the background. The other airship bore the insignia of the forensics team, a caravan traversing Valles Marineris. Both were hard-shell Guardian airships—not pure airships, but rather buoyancy-assisted aircraft.
“A sandstorm that only lasts a day is a good sandstorm, for sure,” said Shiran. “Why do people keep turning up dead?” She stood next to a large surveying van wearing a hard-shell Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Several members of Samar’s team were already collecting evidence.
The news had come from another team before dawn—all communication had been lost with one of the geological survey teams. It wasn’t that they were refusing to respond; there was no locator signal at all.
Although this didn’t itself demonstrate a connection to Rahmya, Shiran decided to investigate immediately. There was something about this new development that was just as unnatural as the murder in Kobe. She chalked it up to intuition. And so they discovered four more bodies.
“Professor, do you think Rahmya did this?” said Mikal.
“Even if she didn’t, I think she brought bad luck with her.”
“Not bad luck—death. She’s an assassin.”
“I don’t care who the fuck she is!” Shiran had had enough of Mikal for the moment. Twenty-four hours had passed since Rahmya had breached the Guardians’ security, and five murders had already taken place. If the hit on the surveying team had been Rahmya’s work, the body count would likely continue to rise. Shiran was not in the best of moods.
The bodies had already been taken aboard the forensic team’s ship. Mars’s low atmospheric pressure was hard on corpses, especially if they were mishandled.
Samar came down the ramp from the ship. “I don’t know who the Kobe killer was, but Rahmya gets the credit for this one.”
“How do you know?”
“Take a look.” He turned and went back into the ship, followed by Shiran and Mikal. They passed through the air lock into the pressurized interior, where they raised their visors before proceeding into a smaller compartment. Four naked bodies were laid out on metal tables. Shiran flinched. Mikal ran from the room, his hand over his mouth.
Even for Shiran, the condition of the young female victim was shocking—cranium split from the bridge of the nose to the crown, eyes bulging grotesquely from exposure to the near-vacuum of Mars. Samar, a veteran, was nonchalant. He held out a small, mushroomed cylinder of metal. “We took these from the victims. They’re deformed from the impact, but the alloy matches the so-called parts Rahmya ordered.”
“So it was her. But why kill a surveying team?”
“Maybe she stumbled across them on her way somewhere and had to silence them.” It was Mikal. He was back, looking pale. His gaze flitted around the room, anywhere but on the bodies.
“No,” said Samar. “We recovered the girl’s web. We’re in luck. The victims were lined up and killed one by one, but this one seems to have ducked at the last moment. She was hit in the shoulder. The other three were shot through the heart, which destroyed their webs. The girl was killed by a head shot, leaving her web undamaged.”
“Then she saw the killer.”
“And the motive for the killing.”
“The motive?”
Samar didn’t answer. Instead he sent the data to Shiran’s web. Shiran now saw and heard the victim’s last moments from the victim’s point of view:
A visor enters her field of vision. The face behind the visor is unmistakably Rahmya’s.
What’s happening, Gong-ru? What’s wrong with my team?
You’ll be all right. It’s just a scratch. This will make the pain go away.
Rahmya smiles. Suddenly the victim’s helmet shatters.
The compartment returned; Samar had interrupted the playback. Now Shiran was looking at a freeze-frame of the victim’s last moment of life.
“So she’s passing herself off as the Kobe victim,” said Shiran. Footage from the clans’ security cameras had identified the woman in the atmospheric treatment facility: a freelance journalist from Earth named Gong-ru Yang.
Shiran stared at the web taken from the victim’s body. It was, of course, merely a tool, but an indispensable one for survival off-Earth. It was almost like another organ.
As a Guardian, Shiran had seen death up close many times. It wasn’t unusual for the web of a murder victim or a person killed in an accident to furnish the key to solving the case. Sometimes agent programs were even able to act as witnesses, with almost human reactions. It was as if immortality were creeping in, half unnoticed, via the hardware and software that made human survival possible.
“Is that all we have? What about the motive?”
“It’s coming,” said Samar. “Before I show you, let’s summarize what we know so far. Rahmya uses Gong-ru as her mule to collect the components for a weapon. She kills the mule and assumes her identity. Then, as Gong-ru she makes contact with the surveying team and instead of interviewing the team, she takes four precious lives. Now why in the world would she do that?”
“Cut to the chase, Samar.”
“Watch the rest of the data. Maybe our victim is trying to speak from beyond the grave. Note the corner of her field of vision, near the cruiser and the surveying van.”
The victim’s web had continued recording. Again, Shiran was struck by the blurring of the line between human and machine awareness.
Instead of retrieving her weapon, Rahmya brings her land cruiser behind the van. She remains mostly outside the field of vision, so it’s not clear what exactly she’s doing, but evidently she’s working on something. After a few minutes, the land cruiser crosses the victim’s field of vision, towing something.
“What is that?”
“These surveyors use high-resolution ground-penetrating radar. It’s essential for their work, but it uses a huge amount of power. You just saw Rahmya drive off with their power generator.”
“She killed them for their generator?”
“That’s the most logical assumption. Her cruiser was configured for towing. The unit she rented is equipped for off-road operation. Now we know why.”
“If she had to steal a generator, that would explain the need for a weapon. But still—is a power generator really worth four lives?”
“Depends on how critical it is to her plan.”
Shiran used her web to project a map of the surrounding region onto her retina, then superimposed the murdered surveyors’ geological survey map on it. The map included their work schedule and marked areas where they expected to find ore deposits. “Rahmya’s MO tends toward secluded locations. Places where it’s dark. Take a look at this.” She sent her composite data to the flatscreen. “Ten klicks north of here is an air lock entrance to the Hydra Ice Caverns. It’s big enough to drive through in a vehicle.”
“Are you saying Rahmya took the cruiser into the caverns?”
“Process of elimination. She’s not on the surface. The caverns are the only place she could be. She can’t fly. And that cruiser of hers could maneuver down there. It’s built for rough environments.”
The Hydra Ice Caverns were an underground structure extending deep beneath the Martian cryosphere. The structure was fairly well mapped in the mining data because the processes that had formed the caverns were thought to be linked to the creation of Mars’s ore deposits. The caverns appeared to have been an underground river system. The formation of ore deposits on Mars was due not only to volcanism, but also to the activity of life. There
was strong evidence that microbial metabolic activity was also a factor. The thick methane clathrate layer far beneath the surface was a major piece of supporting evidence.
The caverns were known to have at least nine major branches—thus the name chosen by the surveyors who had discovered them. In addition, many passageways branched off these main caverns, most of them yet to be mapped. Over two hundred entrances had been found and more were still being discovered.
“So she’s fled into the caverns. That makes it simple,” said Mikal.
“Not so fast. How are we going to track her? It’s a maze in there. And below a certain depth you’ve got methane to deal with. We’d be fools to rush in without the right gear. And besides, we’ve got no idea how far inside she is already. She could’ve covered a hundred klicks by now. We can’t follow her on foot. Just the time we’d need to prepare puts her out of our reach, for sure.”
“You can’t know that!”
“Then let’s just say going after her isn’t very efficient. A lot of preliminary surveying has been going on down there. How are we supposed to tell the difference between surveyors’ tracks and Rahmya’s? It won’t be easy.”
“But we know she’s in there. Can’t we seal the exits?”
“All two hundred of them? How long do you think that’s going to take?”
“Then what do we do, Professor?”
Shiran closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. When she opened them, she spoke without emotion. “She’s slipped away from us. I think we should just face that. She’s beaten us. There’s no way we can go after her now.” No one spoke. It was a truth no one wanted to face, but it stood before them like an unmovable object. “Let’s change the rules. She got a head start. We’re chasing her but we started late. Now we can’t catch up. What do we do?”
“Professor?”
“We find out where she’s going so we’re ready for her when she comes. That’s the only way we can nail her.”
But everyone knew how little time was left to do that.
Minus 8 Hours 15 Minutes
I’m moving through the cavern when suddenly I notice something odd—I can see the red fan pattern of the laser range finder as it scans ahead of me. The laser light should be invisible. Before I can think this through, something smacks the cruiser, hard, shaking it violently. The four tracked feet are pretty tough for fore and aft movement, but they don’t take sudden lateral shocks too well. And there’s not much support for them on this surface.
The side of the cruiser slams against a wall of ice. It scrapes along on momentum for a few more meters before it stops. I’ve got no idea what’s happening here. The forward sensors are still active. Aft sensors are all down.
I suit up, half in a panic. I’ve got to get outside and see what’s wrong. It must have something to do with the lasers being visible. You can only see them when the atmosphere is dense enough. On the surface you don’t see them at all.
This is just what I need, more delay. I switch on the air lock pump. The pressure starts falling. What conditions are like in the cavern I can only guess. I stand there with my hand on the hatch release, watching the pressure fall.
What happens when I open the hatch comes as a total shock. A huge wall of flame shoots up in front of me and rushes outward. It’s gone in less than a second. I’m almost not sure if what I saw was real.
I shine my flashlight at the cruiser. The beam reflects off it in a kind of sparkling light, like fairy glow. The cruiser is bogged down in the ice. Behind it, the generator is buried under a mountain of milky crystals. Then it hits me. This is not ice. It’s too fluffy, like it’s full of air.
“Hydra Ice Cavern? This isn’t ice, it’s methane clathrate!”
On Earth there are layers of methane clathrate under ocean sediments—basically waste from microbes eating organic matter. The methane molecules get trapped in cages of frozen H2O molecules. I’ve never run across this in a cavern on Earth. But I’m not on Earth.
Methane clathrate is pretty volatile stuff. I must be standing in a pool of methane gas. The fire I saw was the little bit of oxygen left in the air lock reacting with the methane.
What I can’t figure out is why the cavern wall came down. The clathrate isn’t all that strong structurally, but the cruiser moving past it shouldn’t have triggered a collapse. First I’ve got to check the generator.
Methane gas and steam are rising from the mound of ice crystals. Now I know why there was a cave-in. Even in idling mode the generator radiates heat. That’s what brought down the clathrate. If I’m not careful, I could end up completely buried. My luck has held so far, but I can’t rely on it. And I’m losing time.
I try to shut the generator down using my web, but I can’t access the interface. Apparently only the surveying team is able to control the generator remotely. Like it or not, I’ve got to get the console exposed so I can shut it down manually. I take a shovel from the cruiser and start scooping clathrate over my shoulder. You run into a lot offworld that you’d never see on Earth, but I never expected to find myself in an ice cavern wearing an Extravehicular Mobility Unit and shoveling away like some miner. And the stuff I’m shoveling is methane clathrate—softer than ice, but handle with care. Otherwise lots of things can happen, none of them good. I’ve got to get to the console ASAP. The clathrate is melting. This could bring the whole cavern down on me. For now, the mound around the generator is containing the heat.
I don’t have much time. Five hours? Six?
That’s probably what I’m looking at to dig everything out. Then I’ve got to hit the road and get prepped. I’m barely going to make it. I keep digging, keep moving that shovel. Every minute, every second, is precious.
It takes me an hour just to dig through to the console. I open the cover and depress two toggle switches simultaneously. The space around me takes on a greater stillness. I hadn’t noticed, but the generator was emitting low-frequency vibrations.
It takes me exactly six hours to free the generator. The inside of the cruiser is freezing. There’s so much methane floating around I don’t even think about pressurizing the cab. Vigorous intercourse between methane and oxygen molecules is something I can pass on right now.
I finally get moving again, still in my EMU. The EMU keeps me warm, but not warm enough to melt my icy mood. It’s all I can do to stay calm and collected on the way to the air lock. This ice is so damn slushy, not at all what I’d planned for. I’m all out of cushion now, timewise, but flooring it would not be a good idea. That might invite another cave-in. I practically cheer when the air lock comes into view.
And that’s where I run into another snag. All this delay has put me at the air lock just as a swarm of microsatellites hovers overhead. You can hold these things in the palm of your hand. They move in separate orbits and come together at timed intervals over specific locations, using lasers to stay in formation and function as one big system. The sum of the data they collect yields very detailed, high-resolution images. If I poke my head outside now, the Guardians will be able to read the cruiser’s tracks like a newspaper.
Most of these satellites have a period of about two hours. This lot should be out of sight in about half an hour if they keep to their schedule. I stop the engine so they don’t pick up any infrared hot spots. Just a few more klicks to the destination. Whether or not I can put up with another thirty minutes of delay will decide the success or failure of the mission. I start counting the seconds in my head. When I get to eighteen hundred, I’ll be ready to roll.
Just as I reach 1,789, the timer sounds and I hit the ignition. The methane/oxygen power plant starts up. Even with a cold start, a femtosecond-burst laser keeps the environment inside the cylinder ready for combustion. As soon as I hit the switch, I can hear the faint hum of the engine from the cabin.
Got to focus. There will be another swarm overhead half an hour from now, which means I have only that long to get where I need to go. I pass through the air lock. I’m on the surface again.
Minus 2 Hours 15 Minutes
“I’m sending you the specs for the generator, Professor. Take a look.”
Shiran gave a low whistle as she reviewed the data from Samar. Most Martian power generators were fuel cells running on methane and oxygen. But this surveying unit was different. It produced power through the annihilation of protons and antiprotons. It was powerful enough to provide electricity for a small arcology.
“My, oh my. All right, we know that everything up to this point was aimed at obtaining this power generator. And as far as we know, the target is Tetsu. Can’t we get anything from the satellites, Samar?”
“Unfortunately that’s a negative. We scanned in infrared, but she seems to have that covered. She timed the murder of the surveying team so the sun would rise fairly soon afterward. There were no IR traces left to scan; the sun’s heat obliterated them. As for vehicle tracks—well, if you want to wipe those as you go, it’s not too challenging.”
“She hasn’t missed a trick. But we can at least calculate the max distance she could’ve traveled based on the vehicle’s specs. Have any of the other teams in the area spotted a lone vehicle?”
“No. Even if she’s going flat out, with the generator she’s hauling she should’ve been spotted hours ago. On the surface, that is.”
“That settles it. She’s using the caverns.”
This was not good news for Shiran. The caverns were a restricted space; if she was so sure Rahmya was inside, she ought to be using that to her advantage. “All right, so our assassin was fortunate enough to get her hands on the generator. Given all the trouble she went through to steal it, that’s got to point to something. She can’t use the generator as a weapon. That itself should answer some of our questions. What’s the tie-in between her target, the caverns, and a power generator?”
The Ouroboros Wave Page 13
