One Dark Future

by Michael Anderle

  “I don’t think anyone’s planning to explore whatever’s inside that comet without using pressure suits and breathers,” Jia replied.

  Lanara inclined her head toward a pile of crates behind her. “I’ve modified some of the signal boosters and repeaters we had in storage to Emma’s specifications. These will work better than that off-the-shelf crap the soldiers brought. It’ll take me one more day to fabricate enough for everybody.”

  Emma appeared in coveralls that looked suspiciously like Lanara’s. “The uniformed boys and girls have nice guns, but we need to make sure you don’t lose contact with your most important asset since whatever gun goblins and creepy conspirators you encounter past the tunnel won’t be the kind you can negotiate with. Unless you wish to bring me with you?”

  Erik shook his head. “Taking you off the Argo to hack that ship was pushing it as is. Cutter’s on the other ship. If this turns to shit, at least you can fly the Argo back.” He spared a worried glance Jia’s way.

  “I mentioned this to Erik already, but my brief exploration near the airlock door to the tunnel, including using a drone flyby from overhead, indicates the internal passageways are too small to accommodate exoskeletons,” Emma explained.

  Jia nodded. “Great. Just great. I’d prefer to go in with more firepower since even if we’re safe from the insanity signal, we don’t know what or who we’ll find in here. Are the soldiers still willing to go with us?”

  “Let’s call Osei down here for a briefing. If he doesn’t want his people to come, I’m not going to drag them along screaming.”

  Osei pursed his lips as Erik finished explaining Lanara’s progress and the general plan.

  “My guys are packed in pretty tight on this ship,” the captain commented.

  Erik was surprised by the statement. He understood the tension, and he and Jia had brought portable bunks from the cargo bay to their own quarters to reduce the strain, but he didn’t understand why the captain would bring it up now.

  “A lot of them would love to pack up and go back to the jumpship,” Captain Osei continued. “So, I want you to explain to me why we should risk going onto a potentially alien ship with an active mind-control field?”

  They’d thought about exploring with drones, but they didn’t have enough signal boosters to guarantee signal, whereas between the PNIUs and the boosters, they could at least keep in contact with Emma. Drones wouldn’t last in battle either.

  “We need to make sure the conspiracy team doesn’t gain control,” Erik replied. “If they’re not all dead, they might get a signal off with important information.”

  “We could just blow it to hell.” The captain leaned toward Erik, a stern look on his face. “That jumpship’s carrying a lot of weapons. I’m sure if both our ships start firing, we can penetrate the ice layer and get to whatever’s inside.”

  Jia shook her head. “We can’t ignore the possibility of retrieving useful tech from the ship. We’ve already come up with a counter to the signal.”

  “We can request orders,” Captain Osei replied. “Let the higher-ups make the call.”

  Jia frowned. “That’d take over a week round-trip. We can’t sit around here for a week when we don’t know what’s going on aboard that ship. At least ten people entered the ship, and we don’t know if they’ve been affected by the signal or not.”

  “I’m fine making the executive decision,” Erik commented, his gaze pinning Osei. “And Jia and I are going with you, so this isn’t rear-echelon motherfucker stuff where we send you off to die while we stay behind and take the glory.”

  “But is it risking lives unnecessarily because of your grudge?” the captain asked.

  Jia stomped toward him. “How dare you—”

  Erik quieted her with a simple head shake. “It’s a fair question, but it’s the same as I told you before. I’m not here to throw my life away, and we can’t be sure we can blow this thing away with the weapons we have. I’m willing to bet if we drop explosives all over the inside and detonate those at the end, we can make sure that thing gets blasted to pieces.”

  Osei nodded slowly, looking mollified.

  Jia’s alarmed expression telegraphed her words. “You might be blowing up an intact Navigator ship!”

  Erik smiled merrily. “Nice thing to add to my trophy list.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Jia took slow, even breaths as the airlock door opened, exposing the brightly lit boarding tunnel.

  They didn’t expect an ambush since Emma had explored the initial portion of the tunnel while they geared up. A last-minute change to focus on drone-based exploration had vanished in the wake of the AI’s report of a massive increase in signal interference as she approached the exit door.

  That was consistent with what they’d expected, but the team had to worry about potentially losing communication and planned to increase the number of repeaters to remain in direct contact with Emma.

  Erik was wrong. Jia was sure of that.

  He’d complained he found the undersea resort more threatening than space, but the current mission proved how many dangerous aspects they needed to take into account while off Earth.

  Gravity, air, pressure, temperature, and radiation; everything was conspiring to kill them. At least they could still shoot the conspiracy agents.

  Jia glanced at the bracelet around her wrist. According to Lanara and Emma, even if the team lost contact with the AI, the countermeasure would function. Presumably it was working since no one was acting suspicious or unstable, and they were far closer to the source than they’d been when exploring the captured human ship.

  Erik and Jia took point in the boarding party, followed by Captain Osei and Alpha, Bravo, Gamma, and Delta Squads.

  The soldiers traveled in a staggered pattern just in case. Armored tactical pressure suits with carryaids weren’t exoskeletons, and they’d need to be careful. No one wanted a powerful laser to take out half the team with one shot.

  The thought made Jia glance at Erik. His preparation for the mission had included bringing his laser rifle on the carryaid, along with extra energy cells.

  The entire team had decided against rocket launchers out of concern for blowing a hole into space, but they were compensating with an abundance of grenades. For now, they wielded their rifles as their primary weapons.

  There was still much they didn’t know about what had happened, and they had the unusual fortune of having Emma with them. If it’d just been a military team with standard equipment, they would have ended up like the dead crew.

  Jia wondered how much the conspiracy knew about the technology onboard. Something like the mind-control field would make a useful weapon, but if they had that detailed a knowledge of the Navigators, they would be deploying more advanced technology.

  A small smile appeared. She’d been drawn so far into Erik’s quest for vengeance that sometimes she forgot the conspiracy represented a danger to the entire UTC.

  Their survivors would not be allowed to take the ship.

  The boarding tunnel was standard with no surprises, including no new bodies or evidence of any more murders. They continued toward the other end, where Emma had already opened the door.

  A narrow passage carved through the ice and rock with barely enough space for two people was connected to the end of the boarding tunnel. Though the new passage didn’t display the perfect symmetry of the boarding tunnel, the evenness of the new passage indicated it’d been created artificially.

  Jia tapped on her suit and helmet lights, and Erik and the rest joined her. There was a faint greenish glow emanating from the far end, but they would need to walk a decent distance before encountering whatever it was and shooting it if necessary.

  “We might not be the first people ever to set foot on a comet, but we’re the first people to ever set foot on a comet in this part of the Solar System,” Jia offered. “That’s got to be worth something.”

  “Sure,” Erik replied. “They can name schools after us in
some crappy town.”

  Jia laughed. “I wouldn’t mind a school being named after me.”

  “Too bad the government’s probably going to deny any of this ever happened,” Erik offered, not looking her way. He nodded at Osei. “Let’s lay the repeater network close to each other.”

  The officer nodded at a nearby sergeant, who pulled the first repeater off his carryaid and set up the gray tripod.

  “Signals check, Emma,” Erik ordered. “You still with us?”

  “Yes, your direct signals and telemetry are all strong,” Emma replied, sounding bored. “No significant spikes in any signal or emission that I can detect, other than the baseline signal from before.”

  Jia chuckled. “You’re saying the alarm isn’t going off?”

  “They’d have to know how to turn it on first,” Erik replied. “Even if those guys survived the mind-control field or somehow ended up immune, it doesn’t mean they’ll figure out how to turn on an ancient alien ship.”

  “Keep alert, squads,” Osei shouted. “Remember, we still have ten possible hostiles unaccounted for.”

  The shouting was unnecessary given they were all on comm, but Jia had noticed that didn’t stop the man.

  “We have no idea what we might run into in there,” he continued. “If anyone starts experiencing or feeling anything unusual, you tell me immediately, and we’ll get you back to the Argo. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” the troops responded in unison.

  Jia kept imagining a thin shell of ice and rock stretching around the alleged prize, but even with their modest pace and the relatively small size of the comet, the green glow remained stubbornly in the distance. They had easily traveled hundreds of meters into the comet.

  “This shell would have taken thousands of years to form,” Jia murmured, running a hand over the ice wall. “Ten of thousands, probably.”

  Captain Osei’s mouth twitched. “They’ve been sitting around in the Solar System for a long time.”

  “That’s not that much of a surprise.” Jia shrugged. “We found Navigator artifacts on Mars, after all, and those are much older.”

  “I get that, but finding a cache of broken-down tech is different from finding an active ship. They might have been alive for far longer than anyone realizes.”

  “True.” Jia nodded. “But I doubt they survived thousands of years aboard this ship.”

  “If it’s been here that long, I’m surprised their security system is still working,” Erik commented.

  “Security system?” Jia looked around the tunnel for signs of activity, her grip tightening on her rifle.

  Captain Osei frowned Erik’s way but didn’t comment. He looked like he’d rather them not discuss things, but Erik and Jia weren’t the types to proceed on a mission in dead silence.

  “Their mind-control field,” Erik explained. “That’s probably what it is, or it could be something else. Maybe something malfunctioned. But it makes sense that it might be a security system.”

  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure before about it being a Navigator ship.” Jia sighed. “I just kept thinking it could be something else, but after what we saw and what Emma detected, there’s no other explanation.”

  “You don’t think there could be a Navigator in there, do you?” called one of the soldiers, Corporal Milton. He sounded more curious than afraid.

  Captain Osei glared his way before turning his scowling wrath on Jia. She politely didn’t laugh. Her early career had been marked by her superiors and colleagues not liking what she had to say. At this point, it was hard for anyone to intimidate her with a mere look.

  They would need a weapon of impressive size to make that happen.

  “It’s not likely, but it’s not impossible,” Jia explained. “We don’t know enough about Navigator technology to know if they could keep one of their people alive that long, but we’ve also seen zero evidence of an actual Navigator doing anything directly. The evidence is pointing somewhere else, especially based on Emma’s sensor readings.” She gestured down the tunnel. “Erik’s probably right. Someone left the security system on, and it’s doing its best with whatever reserve power it has.”

  Jia halted and sucked in a breath. Erik tensed and swept the area with his rifle. Osei and the troops spread out, taking up defensive positions.

  “You see something?” Erik whispered.

  “No.” Jia shook her head. “Sorry.”

  Captain Osei muttered something under his breath before regrouping his subordinates with quick hand gestures.

  “Then what was that about?” Erik prodded, before continuing down the tunnel.

  Jia followed. “I realized something. We’re all carrying portable handholds in our carryaids because we were worried about the gravity, but it’s nearly Earth-normal, and we’re far from the ship, so we’re no longer under the influence of its grav fields.” She gestured around the narrow tunnel. “Which means this comet is far, far, far denser than we’d expected based on the size, or there’s artificial gravity extending from the ship inside.”

  Captain Osei’s expression softened and he nodded. “I get what you’re saying. Does it make a difference? I’m not going to complain about a deep-space intercept going easier than we expected.”

  “If it’s because of the comet, that means even the exterior is not what we think, which has implications, but it’s also nice to know that the Navigators apparently evolved on a world with gravity similar to ours. That’s a nice scientific discovery in and of itself. We know they were bigger than us, so some scientists speculated they might have evolved on a planet with lower gravity.”

  “Maybe you should write a xenobiology paper,” Emma offered. “On the Implied Natural Gravitational Environment of the Navigators by Lin, Blackwell, Osei, et al.”

  Jia wished Emma was accompanying them as a hologram. Whenever they weren’t using the MX 60, it was easy to forget that Emma was watching and listening. The AI was far too good at keeping her mouth shut when she wanted. It was like having the snarkiest ghost ever following her around.

  “Funny,” Jia grumbled. “But the more like us they are, the better chance we have of making use of their tech, though I’m not sure that’s always a great idea, I am sure it’s better that we have it, rather than the conspiracy or any of the other races.”

  The green glow grew brighter with each step, the source being an obvious end for the tunnel: light pouring out of a hole. No soldiers were behaving oddly, and there’d been no warnings by Emma. They were doing pretty good.

  The tunnel flared, and the glow highlighted shapes near the hole.

  “We’ve got two drill bots,” Erik called. “And I don’t think the Navigators were so close to us that their bots would look exactly like ours.”

  Jia frowned. “There’s something behind the bots.” She pointed her rifle, her eyes narrowed. “We might have a body.”

  Captain Osei signaled for his soldiers to take their positions. The individual squad members moved closer to each other while the squads staggered positions, the soldiers in front crouching while the ones in back stood for maximum firepower.

  Jia and Erik moved forward slowly toward the new find. A human man in a pressure suit lay on his back on the ground behind the bot. His helmet was cracked, probably from the bullet that had drilled a large hole in his head.

  Erik stepped past the body toward the hole. “Huh. This is weird, but I’m pretty sure it’s a ship.”

  Jia peered into the hole, letting her eyes adjust to the strange green lighting. Scorch marks marked the jagged hole separating the tunnel from the ship along with orange stains, making her wonder what else the other team had done to get inside. The wall didn’t appear to be metal, but rather a thick dark-green layer of stacked membranes with swirling curves and thin silvery veins that reminded her of a leaf’s.

  “It looks almost…biological,” she murmured, tilting her head both ways to give her a better view.

  Irregular round-topped columnar structures aro
und Jia’s height filled the sprawling ovoid chamber. They appeared to be made of the same material as the walls, which, along with the high roof, provided the glow.

  Semi-circular formations of the rounded columns spread out in the room in front of groupings of narrow bars protruding from the ground. The bars were about half the height of the columns. Stalactite-like dark-green protrusions hung from the ceiling, some stretching almost down to the columns. Webs of blue-green vine-like ropes connected the columns.

  No bodies lay in the room, and there was nothing that looked like human blood. Small portions of the columns and walls slowly expanded and retracted, inflating and deflating like twisted alien lungs. Large circular open doorways led out of the chamber in two directions.

  “I don’t know what I expected,” Erik mumbled, “but it wasn’t this. I thought Navigator tech was more, you know, tech. This crap looks like something out of a yaoguai factory.”

  Captain Osei frowned as he took in the scene. “We sure it isn’t?”

  “I doubt the conspiracy’s breeding giant yaoguai at the edge of the Solar System.” Erik shook his head. “You ever fight yaoguai?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Then you know they are messed up, but they look familiar in their own way.” Erik gestured around the room. “This crap, though.” He shrugged. “That’s aliens for you.”

  Jia pointed her gun at one of the groups of bars. “At least we know for sure this is an alien ship. Nothing about its proportions and setup is human. I’m not even sure it’s set up for humanoids.”

  Her mouth curled into a frown. Something didn’t seem right, but it wasn’t important for the moment.

  “You still with us, Emma?” Erik asked.

  “Yes, but interference is increasing,” she replied, her voice going in and out. “I would take appropriate measures if you wish to continue to have my aid. Please note there is atmosphere in the ship and it’s maintained despite the hole, but it is not breathable by humans.”

  “Wasn’t planning on taking my helmet off,” Erik noted.