Ariane thumbed open the message, feeling uneasy. How could her slate be getting a message if the moon’s comm center was down? The message should have gone through the Beta Priamos Command Post, then shunted through a comm center located somewhere in this alien structure. Perhaps the comm center had routed it through the spotty mesh network.
She stared at a text message that said nothing but “CAW SEP 12.35.15.” She looked at the routing header. Muse 3 had bypassed both the station CP above and the comm center on the surface, passing it along the few nodes installed inside the facility. Those nodes operated on low power and used near-field mesh networking, meaning the message had taken a twisted and slow route to reach her slate.
CAW Space Emergency Procedure twelve-dot-thirty-five, number fifteen? What the hell did that mean? When she’d told Muse 3 to study that series, she didn’t expect—what situations did number fifteen cover? The thirty-five series covered interruption of command, control, or communications, but number fifteen was rather obscure. Her scalp wasn’t simply prickling; it tingled with the sense of danger.
“I’d better check the comm center,” she said, turning around and walking quickly back down the corridor toward the pillared hall. She brushed past the other contractors and Major Dokos.
“Ms. Kedros. Our meeting!”
She barely heard their protests. Suddenly the title for 12.35.15 popped into her mind: Hostile Takeover of Command and Control Centers. She turned the corner and started running. Slipping the slate into her coverall pocket, she gripped her ministunner, holding it hidden inside her vest as she ran. She turned another corner and skidded to a halt, her boots making an obscene sound on the polished surface.
Frank stood a few meters away, where the corridor met the pillared hall. He pointed a stunner at her.
Matt admitted he was squeamish when it came to blood. Raised on generational hydroponic- or vat-grown food, he didn’t even eat meat. Probing a leg that looked like hamburger made his stomach churn. Somehow, he pulled out the remaining flechettes. More importantly, David Ray got through the process and now dozed fitfully.
Matt now obsessively watched the cam-eye input of the Pilgrimage III, interspersed with checking the status of their environmental systems. He watched the Father’s Wrath disconnect and start a burn with a vector that meant it was heading toward the gas giant Laomedon, Priamos, its moon, and the Beta Priamos Station.
Did that mean they’d abandoned the Pilgrimage? They shouldn’t have enough people on the Father’s Wrath to take over the generational ship, plus the Priamos station and facility. Matt tried a comm check with the Pilgrimage, but there was no answer. In doing so, he woke David Ray.
“What’s going on?” David Ray sounded a bit groggy.
“I saw their ship leave on a heading for Priamos, so they might have deserted the Pilgrimage.They can’t have brought enough people to control this entire solar system.”
“Unless they used squirrels.”
Matt looked at him quizzically and David Ray added helpfully, “Pre-positioned agents hidden in plain sight, waiting to be activated. Like little rodents that hide underground and undermine structures.”
“I think you mean moles. A squirrel is a small, clever mammal that can be trained to appraise and steal jewelry.”
“Ah. I’m not well versed in pre-Yellowstone Terran fauna. Moles, then. If you study tactics used by CAW and the League during the war, you’ll find the only effective methods for taking a solar system involved moles.”
Matt grimaced. Who, among the people he knew who worked new space, would support Abram? Were there people he thought of as friends, who were waiting to throw off their masks and help the isolationists? He felt a creeping feeling of despair and wondered about Ari’s safety. She was probably all right, since Joyce was with her.
“What’s happening?” David Ray was looking at the display.
Matt turned around and watched the glints of departing short-range shuttles from the Pilgrimage. There were three coming out of the upper class C docks. He zoomed in as well as he could with the cam-eyes and tried to track them.
“They’re heading toward the time buoy. What do they think they’re doing?” David Ray watched with narrowed eyes. “They can’t destroy or disable it. We powered it up and it’s anchored, now and forever.”
Matt tracked the shuttles by adjusting the module’s cam-eyes, then turning the module itself with the small stabilization thrusters. They watched in silence for almost an hour. Matt was the first to answer the riddle.
“They’re mining the incoming channels of the buoy,” he said.
Joyce could barely breathe in this Gaia-be-damned cupboard . His shoulders pressed against the walls no matter which way he turned. If the darn thing had been built in a square, he might fit along the diagonal, but these Builders had problems using ninety-degree angles.
Luckily, there was air exchange around the upper and lower crack of the door. Joyce shifted his feet and leaned heavily to one side to stretch his back. He watched the crack of light at the bottom of the door.
Maria had jokingly said to hide in this closet if he thought it necessary. When he heard running footfalls outside her office and, poking his head out, saw men with flechette weapons turning the corner at the end of the hall, he thought the need for concealment might be necessary.
He heard someone step stealthily into Maria’s office and he tensed, wishing he had any weapon beyond his bare hands. They’d served him before, so he got ready to launch himself when the closet door opened.
“It’s me.”
The whisper was so soft, he might have imagined it. He saw the light at the bottom crack soften and fade away. Someone was turning down the lights in the office. The door in front of him opened slowly and he tightened his fists, only relaxing when he saw Maria’s shape.
She brought her lips close to his ear and breathed, “We have a problem.”
No shit.
CHAPTER 11
Physical torture will get any confession you seek, so it’s ineffective. Torture drug regimens, refined by TEBI during years of warfare, are better. Why not let the subjects determine their worst fears? When combined with the ability to convince subjects that they’re speaking with their captor or their savior, TEBI moved torture into the galactic age. If dosages aren’t tightly monitored, however, brain damage can occur.
—Difficulties of Modern-Day Torture, Zacharias Milano, 2099.363.11.00 UT, indexed by Heraclitus 23 under Conflict Imperative
“Frank.” Ariane tried to keep her voice low and calm. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry, Ms. Kedros, but you can’t be running around until they decide what to do with you.”
“Who are ‘they’? Whom are you mixed up with, Frank?” She stepped closer, her hand inside her jacket and still gripping her ministunner. The problem with stunners was estimating effective range; Frank’s stunner had more power and better range. A bigger problem was that his was already out and pointed. If fired from inside her pocket, the ministunner would more likely stun her than anyone else.
“Don’t make me do this, Ms. Kedros.” His jaw was tight and his mouth extended in stubborn lines.
She’d been stunned before: The feeling was even worse than the uncontrollable, violent seizure, coupled with the possible loss of bladder and bowel control. These effects usually kept any but the most desperate—or foolish—from going through it again. She kept moving closer, her steps slow and small.
“What are ‘they’ doing on-station, Frank? You’re not a destructive person. Or an extortionist or terrorist.” She hadn’t meant the last word seriously, but his eyes widened.
“It’ll be a better life without CAW or the League interfering with our lives. You’ll see.”
Suddenly, a Terran woman emerged from the dark hall behind Frank and stumbled to her knee right beside him. Frank turned to look and Ariane started to pull her ministunner—she froze.
Behind the Terran woman stood the angry young man from the space
elevator and he held a flechette pistol. There was no mistaking the bulbous shape of the chamber needed for the flechette cartridges. More importantly, there was now an innocent bystander between Ariane and the armed men.
“Turn around and face me. Put your hands up,” angry-young-man said. Presumably, this last order was for both women.
Ariane and the Terran woman raised their hands.
“Frank, search that one.” The flechette pistol jerked at Ariane. “Stop! Don’t step between me and them, you idiot.”
Frank stepped sideways and walked against the wall. He shuffled over to Ariane and holstered his stunner. She tried to catch his eye, making this as uncomfortable as possible for him, but he looked down at his feet until he was behind her. His hands, fumbling and inexpert, found the ministunner. Angry-young-man deemed the knife and flares dangerous, and Frank took them. On the plus side, they let her keep the light sources and emergency oxygen mask.
As Frank walked back, the young Terran woman beside Ariane whispered in accusation, “You had a stunner?”
Ariane answered calmly, “But they have flechette weapons.”
“Yeah, Ms. Fancy Doctorate, she was smart. She probably saved your life.” Angry-young-man grinned with a nasty and meaningful expression.
“You’d kill us?” The Terran woman’s face paled.
Ariane looked again at Frank, who wouldn’t meet her gaze. In contrast to angry-young-man, Frank acknowledged his duplicity. He supported whoever was behind this action, but he was obviously ashamed of his deception.
The young man, who wasn’t Terran himself, ignored the woman’s question. “We’ll have to confine them,” he said.
Ariane and the young woman were marched back down the corridor. They passed the conference room that would have held her contractor meeting, but now a man with a stunner stood at the door. They went past this room and around another gentle thirty-degree turn, where they were directed through another tall door.
This opened into a strangely disconcerting triangular room. A wide ledge ran along two walls, and a dividing wall jutted from the remaining wall opposite the door. The ledge might have been a bench, although it was higher than comfortable human seating. Two women were sitting on the ledge; one was Colonel Dokos.
“Welcome to what I think is the women’s holding cell,” Dokos said after the door was closed.
“Are we being monitored?” Ariane looked about the room. She walked past the divider and raised her eyebrows at the sunken square structure hidden from the doorway. Whatever its function had been for the Builders was irrelevant and, more important, there was no one else in the room.
“Unlikely. We had to mount our operating nodes on our own structures, because this stuff is so slick and nonporous that our adhesives didn’t work. I don’t think you could mount a recording pip without it being seen.” Colonel Dokos absently stroked the wall she leaned against.
Ariane searched all the surfaces anyway, but she found nothing. Once she was satisfied, it was time to talk. The woman sitting beside Dokos was younger, but still nearing middle age. Her name was Varra Enid and she was a data analyst for an Autonomist subcontractor to Taethis Exploration. The only Terran had arrived with Ariane, and she turned out to be the vaunted Dr. Myrna Fox Lowry, the foremost astrophysicist from Mars. Regrettably, they didn’t need astrophysicists or data analysts. Ariane and Colonel Dokos exchanged a glance.
“Well,” Dokos said, “first we need to know how many hostiles we’re dealing with.”
That proved to be difficult. All their captors were workers who had come from the station above. However, Dokos had heard her captor talking to someone who mentioned an incoming ship. While Ariane was comforted that no hostiles were planted within the “cleared” R&D contractors, how many were now on Beta Priamos and the surface of Priamos? She wondered what had happened to Joyce.
The door to the room opened, ending their discussion. Two Terran women entered, the first reluctantly stepping in while their captors pushed in the second.
“Where did you take my son?” the second woman asked shrilly, tossing her burgundy hair. She started back toward her captors and stopped when she was menaced with a flechette pistol.
Ariane stood up and folded her arms as she watched. The door closed and the second Terran woman changed, instantly becoming cold efficiency. When she turned around, she didn’t acknowledge Ariane, even though they’d met, briefly, when she’d beaten Ariane and left her lying on the station deck.
“Laying mines in buoy channels is against the Phaistos Protocols,” David Ray said.
“These guys must think they’re beyond any Minoan retribution.” Matt adjusted the cam-eye focus, making the shuttles sharper. The actual mines weren’t visible, but they could watch the process of placing and arming them.
“Why are they bothering?” David Ray asked. “After all, the buoy is still locked down by Pilgrimage; entry to the system requires getting a key from us, or rather, from them. No one’s getting into this solar system after the Father’s Wrath.”
“Really?” Matt looked at David Ray with what he hoped was an innocent expression. “Perhaps they’ve heard the rumors that generational ship lines sell secret codes to governments, even the Minoans.”
“That doesn’t happen.” David Ray’s gaze shifted away from Matt.
“Most generational crew aren’t in the position to confirm or deny those codes, but you’re the ship’s general counsel. You’d know about such negotiations.” Then, when David Ray didn’t respond to his probing, Matt snorted and shook his head. “Look, I’m crèche-get too! I won’t be telling anyone about any secret codes, but if there’s a chance a ship could come through, we should get into a position to warn them, shouldn’t we?”
David Ray’s jaw hardened. After a few moments, he nodded slowly. “We negotiated with both CAW and TerraXL for override keys, which are restricted to emergency use.”
“At this point, I’m happy to hear that.”
“But,” David Ray said, taking a heavy breath, “those codes can’t be used when the buoy is locked down, unless the ship authorizes it. Someone on the control deck might have switched it on.”
“Abram What’s-his-face looks like he’s preparing for visitors.” Matt pointed at the screen.
“He might be extra cautious, or prepared for Minoans.”
“They have special keys?”
David Ray shrugged. “They make the time buoys, so who knows what they can do? So far, if they have special overrides, we’ve never seen them used.”
Matt turned and watched the shuttles finish their jobs. Ships coming back to real-space never superimposed upon each other, due to “magic” in the Minoan time buoy network. Pilots had to be sharp about announcing their vectors and moving out of the channel, because the buoy sensed impediments in the channels and delays could ripple through the network. How the buoys sensed obstructions drove physicists nuts; no one even had a beginning theory.
“Do you think the buoy can sense something as small as mines? Would it prevent entry from N-space?” Matt asked.
“I’m going to guess no. Otherwise, why would the Minoans put a prohibition against mines into the Phaistos Protocols?”
David Ray was probably right. Matt nodded glumly. A ship might transition from N-space safely, but when they started moving, they might be crippled. Matt didn’t know how much explosive power those mines had, but the isolationists obviously had faith in their strength.
“We have to get within real-time talking distance of the buoy channel,” Matt said. “Then we can warn someone entering from N-space.”
David Ray chewed his lip as he looked at the display that showed the distance to the channel. “That’s a one-way trip for us. It’ll take us too far out, use too much of our air reserve to push us there, and we’ll pass our point of no return. Are you willing to risk our lives on the chance that someone’s mounting a rescue mission? What if the emergency keys aren’t enabled? If they aren’t, nobody’s getting into G-145 unti
l we take back our control center.”
“What else can we do? We have no weapons. You can’t even walk. This might be our only way to help the Pilgrimage .” Matt’s throat was tight.
There was silence in module number 2098 for a couple minutes.
David Ray nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Matt did the calculations and gave the commands to the EMS, which powered the module’s rudimentary thrusters. Their thruster power was in the form of chemical propulsion and gas jets that used up part of their air reserve. This was, indeed, a one-way trip. He used as little “fuel” as possible to build up to a slow drift, keeping in mind he’d have to use fuel to slow down. It’d be twelve hours before they’d ease into real-time comm distance of the buoy’s channel. He hoped his calculations also kept them clear of the minefield, since they had no sensors that could detect the mines.
“Well, what are we going to do with ourselves in the meantime?” Matt asked as he handed David Ray another ampoule with pain medication.
David Ray winced as he tried to reposition himself. He hooked the ampoule into his implant and gave Matt a crooked grin. “You could teach me to curse.”
“Huh?”
“I was awed by your impressively long blue streak of language when you were trying to lock up the module. Where’d you learn that?”
“My pilot.” Matt laughed. “She’s military, a reservist. She can turn the air blue, when she wants to swear, that is.”
“And the part about the Minoan Great Bull—er—doing—ah—whatever?”
“Oh. That’s my addition. I have no problem profaning other people’s gods, provided they can’t hear. Since I’ve only seen two Minoans in real life, I figure it’s safe to abuse their Great Bull.”
“Hmm. You know that we’re the ones who think they worship the Great Bull, right?” David Ray asked.
“Aw, don’t take all the fun out of it.”
“Let me have a quick go at cursing; then I’ll take a nap.” David Ray said.
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