Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  Amanda grabbed for her husband with a yelp, then, as the view settled at the bottom, she slugged his shoulder. “That was not nearly enough warning, you brute.”

  Sandy had to wait for her own stomach to join her, but her eyes were busy taking in the scene. Yes, there was a huge pile of sand off to her right. Some of it had been scooped out.

  “Where’d the sand go?” Sandy asked.

  “Someone made a beach down by the lake. Again, the sand is definitely taken from the passageways we just walked through. It does not belong to the lake. Oh, there is something I need to show you.”

  Once again, they were speeding by as if on a electrocycle. They zoomed to the lake, then across the beach of sand to the far side of it. There was a pile of sand, but not very high.

  “Absent wind and tides, we think that is just enough sand for a castle,” Jacques said. “Of course, that can only be a guess.”

  “Is the beach and the putative sand castle all you have to show for human occupancy?” Sandy asked.

  “Again, we’ve got metals, including heavy and rare earths. But it has all been worn away to the basic atoms.”

  “Isn’t plastic supposed to last forever?” Amanda asked.

  “They do, or they would unless you had plastic eatin-bacteria. One of the things we’ve come across is the residue of just such bacteria. We’ve also found its evolutionary ancestors. Bacteria that have evolved to eat other food now but still hold the memory in their DNA for eating plastics. Any plastics we leave behind here will likely be eaten up and shit out as hydrocarbons in a couple of thousand years.”

  “Why would such a bacterium have evolved on a planet with no plastic to eat?” Amanda asked, slowly.

  “Unless there had been plenty of plastic to eat earlier in its history,” Jacques said.

  “And someone wanted it to eat any plastic that got left behind here. Someone wanted to erase any sign of the technology that developed,” Sandy added.

  “The evidence seems to allow for a reasonable person to reach that conclusion,” Jacques said.

  “Jacques,” Marie said. “We have found something that I think you will find interesting.”

  “Show us, Marie.”

  “We have finished mapping all the tunnels above and natural caverns coming off of this main one. We’ve gone looking for any possible side tunnels. We found one that was blocked by a rock fall. We passed over it and only came back to it when we completed our main mapping effort. We just finished drilling a path through the fallen rocks and we seem to have found something of interest.”

  Their view hurried across the cavern, then turned into a side chamber. They quickly zoomed into a natural tunnel that was short, ending at a slide that totally blocked it. Now the view got very restricted as it wiggled through the tiniest of cracks before entering a drilled tunnel and breaking out into the opening. The tunnel continued further back. Beside a huge drop off were what looked like the lenses of a pair of glasses. Whatever had once held the glasses was gone, but the glass remained, unweathered after even a hundred thousand years or more.

  “Glass,” Amanda whispered. “You can eat the plastic, but glass can last forever.”

  “If there is nothing to weather it,” Sandy said. “Jacques, what’s the temperature in here?”

  “It’s a constant forty degrees. It never warms up. It never cools down.”

  “So, the glass never flexes,” Sandy concluded.

  “Also, the air on this side of the collapse has a high concentration of CO2. It’s at the lethal level,” Marie told them.

  “As if someone had breathed it to the point of suffocation,” Sandy said. “Marie, is there any evidence of who might have breathed it?”

  “Just beyond here,” Marie told them, “the cave plunges into a deep well, some two hundred meters deep. The water has almost no oxygen in it. There is something at the bottom. It may just be rocks, but I thought you might want to be here when we get our first view of it.”

  “Show us,” Jacques said.

  Sandy found tension rising and butterflies roaring in her stomach. She felt like a little girl, staring at a Christmas present she was now allowed to open. She had to force herself to breathe.

  The well was pitch dark. The probe plunged down, only the tiny area around it illuminated. It seemed to fall forever with nothing but crystal-clear water to see. Even the walls of the shaft were out of sight, lost to sight beyond the small spark of brightness.

  Finally, a large dark object loomed into view.

  The light expanded to brighten more area around the probe.

  “What is that,” Jacques muttered.

  Sandy studied the object. “Ask your probe to cruise around it,” she ordered.

  The view did. It showed something spherical, but an edge quickly came into view. The probe cruised along the edge. Beside the hologram they were watching, Marie began to construct a replica of what they were studying.

  “It’s a helmet,” Sandy breathed. “And old-fashioned helmet. Just a pot to protect the brain bucket. I bet it’s made of armored plastic.”

  It now became clear that the helmet had landed on a ledge.

  “Let’s see what’s farther down,” Sandy ordered, and the probe shortened the reach of its beam and began to descend rapidly again.

  They found everything they were looking for in a heap on the bottom.

  29

  The probe’s echoing sonar warned them that they were about to the end of the shaft. It was getting narrower. Even with the darkness swallowing up the tiny bit of illumination, the walls began to loom around them.

  There, at the bottom, in a jumble, was what they’d been hunting the planet over for. The information came at them almost too fast.

  “That looks like a skull,” Amanda said. “Two of them.”

  There was also a second helmet. Sandy spotted a pair of plastic and ceramic chest plates as well as two back plates. Whoever these two were, they’d been fighters and worn decent protection.

  Beneath them all were two long guns and half a dozen or more spheres that could only be hand grenades.

  “There are long bones for legs and arms,” Jacques observed. “Most are intact. I think three of them are shattered.

  “This is also being watched in several scientific labs,” Marie told them. “They have identified the pelvic bones. One is a male, the other female.”

  Sandy felt a shiver. She could almost see what choices these two lovers had faced in their final moments. Both badly wounded, they’d crawled away from whatever firefight had broken out in the tunnels above and caverns below. Had they collapsed the caves ceiling or had their attackers?

  It didn’t matter. They were trapped in a cave with air getting thick. They could die there, or, maybe, die deep in the depths, sharing one last moment of pleasure together.

  They’d chose the latter. In the end, the rifles and grenades had been there for the weight.

  Sandy’s entire body shoot and she had to blinked back the moisture that threatened to well in her eyes.

  “Get samples as quickly as you can,” Sandy ordered. “If the first samples don’t have good DNA, get the skulls up and out of there. Is the heavy metal contamination too high for people to enter that tunnel system?”

  “Not high if we wear contamination suits, maybe full space suits,” Jacques said.

  “I authorize an on site team to go down there immediately,” Sandy snapped.

  “Teams are already preparing for a drop,” Marie answered. “They can be away in three hours.”

  “Yes, love,” Amanda said. “You can go outside and play in the dirt.” She gave him a quick kiss.

  He did look like a little boy that had just been told he could go play in the mud.

  Sandy and Amanda shared a chuckle as Jacques headed for the bedroom where he, no doubt, kept a go bag packed at all times.

  He was headed out the door, whistling happily, swing a small bag in his right hand when Sandy’s computer came to life.

&nbs
p; “Admiral, we have some developments over here we think you need to see.”

  “Understood,” Sandy said, then changed her address. “Admiral’s barge, I will be there in a minute, two at the most. Be ready to cast off and take me back to the Victory, immediately.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  “What do you think it is?” Amanda asked.

  “I never guess,” Sandy said, as she followed Jacques out the door. “I’ll know soon enough.”

  As the barge sailed quickly between the Galileo and the Victory, Sandy scowled. It was just getting interesting below. She did not need for it to get interesting above.

  30

  “Admiral on the bridge,” the yeoman announced as Sandy quickly walked onto her flag bridge.

  “What have you got for me?” she demanded. Her Chief of State, Ops Chief and Intel Chief with her cat shadow stood ready to brief her.

  “The outpost at system E-13 reported a fleet of eighteen hundred large reactors of approximately the same type entering that system. The reactors’ signature is different from any we’ve met before. Close, but no cigar” the Chief of Staff said.

  “Eighteen hundred reactors. How many targets does that mean?” Sandy asked, turning to her expert on the alien menace.

  “Maybe as many as a hundred,” Penny answered, quickly. “Maybe less. Since none of them are the smaller cruiser reactors, it appears that three ‘dishes’ of alien battleships are headed our way. Say ninety battleships.”

  “Dishes?”

  “Most of the time we’ve fought the alien in pitch battle,” Penny answered, “they form themselves into a dish formation, a circular, flat array with their bow guns pointed at us. It’s not a bad tactical formation. They can expand the array to flank us in 3D. They can adjust their array to fit the situation and it seems just as flexible as our lines and squares or rectangles of battlecruisers.”

  “So, the numbers fit the definition of a whole lot of slow battleships headed our way,” Sandy concluded.

  “Battleships tend to hold to less than two gees. They’ve tried higher, but rarely can they maintain that speed.”

  “But they can keep at one gee accelerating and decelerating to get from one jump to the next in a hurry,” Sandy said.

  “Yes, ma’am, and they know they can do the normal jump at 50,000 clicks per hour or less and get a longer jump if they go faster,” Sandy explained.

  “You think they’d risk ninety ships at fast jumps?”

  “I think they’d risk anything their Enlightened One tells them to,” Penny answered flatly.

  Sandy settled herself into her command chair to study the star map. “We’ve got a major breakthrough developing dirtside,” she said. “I’m not ready to turn tail and run.”

  “What have they found down there?” Penny asked.

  “It looks like we finally have a body to examine,” Sandy answered. “I don’t know if it’s another body with the strange DNA. I’d bet my bottom dollar that if it’s a hundred and ten thousand years old that it’s got different DNA from the people wandering that planet.”

  Both Sandy and her team eyed the star map, trying to ascertain the intentions of their enemy.

  “How long do you think it will take to get a hand on these bones?” Penny asked.

  “Computer. Get me Jacques.”

  “Hi, Admiral,” came back quickly.

  “How’s your drop mission going?”

  “It’s not going anywhere,” did not sound happy.

  Around Sandy, eyes flared wide.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Sandy asked.

  “It’s dark,” Jacques growled.

  “It often is,” Sandy said. “How is that a problem?”

  There was a deep sigh on net. “We boffins kind of let ourselves get all excited. We forgot to check in with your side about transportation. This cave is in very rough terrain, Admiral, and being right at the tree line, it’s way up there in thin air.”

  Jacques paused a moment to gather his thoughts before going on. “The closest landing spot for a longboat is sixty kilometers away. It’s a mountain lake with steep sides. How we could get out of the longboat and up those cliffs is anybody’s guess. They’re telling me there’s an alpine meadow a hundred klicks from our cave, but that would add time and, well, there’s a whole lot of rough terrain to drive over. Helicopters don’t carry much of a load at that altitude. Especially, they don’t hover all that well above twenty-five hundred meters and our cave is on a cliff, just above the tree line, say twenty-nine hundred, maybe three thousand meters. Just a second.”

  They waited for Jacques to come back.

  “Okay, we’ll need to get some sensors down to check out the alpine meadow to see if we can use it for a landing strip. If the ground is too soft, we may need to drop Marines to spray down stuff to harden up the landing strip and a taxi way. The joke over here is you can’t get there from here.”

  “Tell your Marine advisor that you boffins can get there from here because their admiral very much wants you to.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Jacques said. “It was more us boffins saying they’re telling us. The Marines are ready to get us there. It’s just that it’s going to take some time to do it if we don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “Right,” Sandy said. “Keep me up to date on how this is going. You are, at present, my number one priority.”

  “Understood, admiral. You tell Penny her Mimzy can check in with my Marie Curie any time she wants to.”

  “Understood.”

  Sandy waited until the commlink was clearly cut, then turned to her team. “So, do we need to tell them to risk breaking their necks?”

  “I don’t know,” Van told her.

  Sandy nodded at her Chief of Staff’s reflection on their situation then chose her course of action.

  “Van, you keep an eye on our hostiles. Mondi, you see if you can’t speed up that operation dirtside. Sandy, you and Mimzy let me know if it looks like our lovely bug-eyed monsters are likely to pull any surprises out of their hats.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am,” Mimzy said politely from Penny’s neck. “There is one surprise that the aliens might play on us. I don’t think they will, but there is a chance.”

  “What is that?” Sandy asked.

  “If they cross the system they are in, using a two-gee acceleration the entire way, they would hit the jump with enough energy to take a very long jump.”

  “How long?”

  “They will arrive at the system next out, ma’am. B-2”

  “Penny, talk to me,” Sandy demanded.

  “The alien battleships don’t normally maintain that high an acceleration, ma’am,” Penny said. “Their reactors tend to overheat and they fall off their acceleration. Mimzy, check me out. They’d have to maintain two gees for the entire trip across that system. Then they’d have to decelerate at two gees before they reached the jump into this system. If they didn’t, they’d jump right over this system and end up somewhere else. Right, Mimzy?”

  A star in the C ring of pickets on the opposite side of the one reporting now began to blink.

  “Yes, Penny. All ninety of their ships would have to maintain two gees acceleration across their present system and then decelerate at two gees between the jump into system B-2 and the jump into this system if they wanted to take the jump system at less than 50,000 kilometers per hour. The odds are, from previous observations that a third to a half, possibly more, would break down. I must point out that we have never observed an alien highspeed run for eighty hours. Since failure tend to increase as machinery heats up, it is likely the failure will exceed this guesstimate.”

  “Guesstimate?” Sandy said.

  “Something my mother suggested we use when answering questions from you humans that really can’t be answered.”

  “So you don’t know for sure,” Penny said.

  “Correct. We really don’t have any data to match this situation. However, based on what we know of
previous performance, this alien is likely to have a high failure rate.”

  “Assuming they haven’t ratcheted up their game,” Van pointed out. “We kill them, they go back and get better. We keep getting better and killing them. Sooner or later, they are going to surprise us with a ‘get better’ we didn’t expect.”

  No one had an answer for Van.

  Sandy let the silence drag for only a moment. “Let’s keep one eye on those alien battleships and another on that cave. Does anyone have any ideas about how we transport the research team to that damn hole in the ground?”

  “Are there any rules about lazing a road through the wilderness?” Van asked. “What with the aliens coming back and lazing entire towns from space, a little sky fire couldn’t be too disturbing.”

  “It could create one huge forest fire?” Penny pointed out. “It’s not much of a road if everything on both sides of it is burning.”

  Sandy had to give the point to Penny on that one.

  “Let’s not get too carried away,” Sandy said. “See how far our choppers can get the team. Then, see how much trouble it is to cut a few trees down. Let the Marine combat engineers look into blowing a road. Okay?”

  Everyone left to do what she’d ordered, leaving Sandy to rest her eyes on the star chart.

  Would the aliens try to push their battleships hard to get them here? The last batch had burned, like moths in a fire. She could do that again to this bunch.

  She yawned. No doubt her team would not get much sleep tonight, but did that mean she needed to stay up and look over their shoulder?