“You got anything?” Erik asked, peering at the array of screens and data. A lot of it seemed static and fuzzy, not receiving much.
“State Department HQ is squarely in the middle of the Parliament Quarter,” said Hiro, sitting cross-legged on a wing of the big podium, straight-backed and comfortable. The pose reminded Erik of Trace. He flashed an image onto his own holography screen. Erik came and looked. “State Department run foreign policy, so they need to be central, so everyone can reach them.”
“And they, everyone else,” Romki added.
Hiro nodded. “But there’s only two actual entrances, and they’re both heavily guarded. All network systems are indirect or autistic, even Styx can’t reach them.”
“So you can’t get anything from the local network?” Erik asked, looking at the techs on hands and knees about the podium, or sitting with backs to the big windows, discussing technical things in low voices.
“Captain,” came Styx’s voice on coms, “these systems are extremely old, and very poorly maintained. I can access small fragments for now, and with more time, perhaps something greater. But there is no direct path from here to the State Department that I can access. There must be direct infiltration.”
“Which is going to take quite a distraction,” said Hiro, with a leading glance.
“I know,” said Erik. “It’ll have to be during the speech.” His mind was racing, considering all the things that had to align to make that happen. He flipped a coms channel back to Phoenix. “Hello, Lieutenant Shilu. Any progress with Tsubarata on the timing of the speech?”
“Captain, they’re a little vague, but it seems there’s a sitting in two rotations and they’re pushing the schedule. State Department’s obstructing them, or that’s the gist I get, reading between the lines.”
Two days, Erik thought, staring out the transparent wall, and the racing planetoid surface. They’d have to get a message to Trace, Tif and Dale, all without letting anyone know they’d sent it. Well, with Styx plugged into local coms channels, that wasn’t so hard.
“Any idea what you’re going to say?” Romki wondered. “It is a fairly historic occasion.”
“I dunno,” Erik admitted. “I was thinking something about galactic peace?” Hiro smiled.
“Yes, I’m sure that will work,” said Romki, drily.
“Would you like to write it for me, Stan?”
“Look at him,” Hiro deadpanned, not actually looking. “He’d love to.”
“I could write you a nice long list of all the things you shouldn’t say,” said Romki, unruffled by the ribbing. “It would be nice to avoid doing any more damage than our presence here makes unavoidable.”
“Good,” Erik agreed. “I’ll look forward to that list within twenty-four hours.” Romki blinked, as though surprised at the agreement. And realising that he’d just been given an order, like regular crew. “Hiro, will it be enough?”
“Styx has some crazy tricks once I’m close enough,” Hiro said confidently. “She can blind their entire security, make them think they’re looking at things they’re not. It’s not hard work for her.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is.”
“I’ll get in,” Hiro assured him. “And once I’m in, I’ll have total network control, and intercepting the ID clearance from Kamala should be a cinch. You just make sure the speech is so good it keeps them all riveted.”
“Dynamic pressure eighty-three percent,” said Tif, staring at the flight-sim on her controls, her hands making light adjustments on the sticks.
“Good, now watch that lateral wind shear,” said Po’koo in the main pilot’s seat. “It builds at thirteen thousand meters, then gets nasty at twelve. Flight sensors will not see it, you must be prepared.”
It was what made descents into greenhouse atmospheres so nasty — heavy descenders went down blind, as most externally mounted sensors would be melted or crushed within minutes. Descenders needed the flight profile pre-programmed on nav, and good GPS to figure where they were at each moment of the flight… but if they ran into something unexpected, sensors would absolutely not see it coming. In the hellish atmosphere of Kamala, atmospheric conditions were by nature unpredictable. Pilots had to be ready, and had to be capable of interpreting blind flight data, lacking most external references, fast enough to figure what was happening before things got out of control.
“Wind shear lateral is five degrees displacement,” said Tif, watching the numbers shift, and adjusting accordingly. “Heading thirty-two degrees… shifting now to forty-five, adjusting.” The numbers kept shifting, alarmingly. “Eight degrees displacement.”
“In the real thing we would be shaking very bad right now,” said Po’koo. The big kaal was thankfully not eating his disgusting paste in the cockpit. He did not help on the controls, merely watched the screens and kept his four hands folded.
“Attitude lean is beyond optimum,” Tif said with alarm, speaking Gharkhan as her English had no hope of coping with this level of technicality. “If I keep correcting this steeply we’ll overbalance.”
“And what would make us overbalance?” Po’koo asked calmly.
“Turbulence bubble,” Tif realised, recalling the lessons he’d been giving her since they’d left Ruchino Eighty-Six. “It’s an updraft, correction is counter-spin spiral at six degrees opposite yaw.”
She did that, as Po’koo said nothing, watching the numbers curiously. Most wingless landers simply fell like a guided bomb, and were shaped conically to allow them to be aimed like an arrow. It kept them upright, and removed stability from the equation, regardless of most atmospheric turbulence. But to survive the crush-densities that a heavy descender was required to navigate, the vehicle had to be shaped as near to a perfect sphere as possible, then weighed down with heavy, heat-resistant armourplate and coolant systems. Any atmospheric flight engineer knew that balls were not aerodynamic, and beyond a certain velocity would build up a big area of low pressure in their wake that would destabilise flight. The thicker the atmosphere, the worse that destabilising pressure void became, at lower and lower velocities.
And so, instead of falling in a powerless but guided descent, heavy descenders had to make a controlled, powered descent, keeping velocities within a relatively low range. Beyond that range, they became intensely unstable, and once a ball began spinning, it was nearly impossible to recover. But powered descents in highly turbulent atmospheres were themselves inherently dangerous, requiring constant adjustment against forces that again, the descender had few sensors capable of detecting.
New warning lights flashed. “Third thruster is overheating,” Tif observed.
“Your new angle of attack is exposing it to extra atmospheric pressure,” Po’koo observed.
Tif rotated the ship’s attitude to compensate, and suddenly the lean became alarming. There was no time to describe to her instructor what was happening, so she gave it a big burst of thrust to slow descent and recover… and the over-stressed third thruster blew with a flash of red lights. The ship began to tumble. Tif did not bother fighting for further control, but slumped back in the far-too-large chair, and watched the shrieking fall toward her doom unfold upon the screens. In a catastrophic failure in Kamala’s atmosphere, there was no recovery, only the hope that death would be swift.
“You make it hard on purpose,” she told Po’koo, with an accusing stare. “An average descent can’t be that hard.”
“No average descents on greenhouse worlds,” said Po’koo. “All hard. That was typical, not average. But you did well, for a beginner.”
“Well?” Tif retorted. Her hands were shaking a little, which was usual for her after too much adrenaline. Phoenix crew teased her about it, thinking her highly-strung, however much she insisted it was normal for kuhsi. She tucked her hands under her thighs now, so Po’koo could not see.
“Yes, you did well,” Po’koo repeated. “But also, you died, and killed everyone on board. So you are a very talented corpse.” He gave a big guffaw, and
clapped the back of her chair with a thud. Then he unbuckled himself from the chair, and floated up. “I’m hungry, you stay. Practise, pretty corpse, practise.”
Tif did stay and practise, running sims on automatic until her eyes blurred and her arms ached from muscle tremors. She would be co-pilot for the actual flight, with Po’koo in the pilot’s seat, but Po’koo insisted that in order to be effective, a co-pilot had to first understand what the pilot was doing. The only way to do that was to practise being a pilot herself, so that she could be ready to assist when the moment came.
“Tif?” came a careful, female voice from behind after one sim. This one she’d survived, but by a very slim margin. Tif hauled off her flight helmet, and released her ears from their scarf with a gasp of relief.
“Remy,” she called back in English. “Yes.”
“I thought you’d like to know,” said Remy Hale, floating up to the back of Po’koo’s chair, “we received a message in general traffic, but encoded within it was another message — it’s pretty clearly from Phoenix. The Captain’s speech is scheduled for forty-one hours from now. We’ll be in Kamala orbit in thirty-one hours. Clearance at Chara takes place within half-an-hour of touchdown, so we’ll need to touch down at forty hours and forty-five minutes.”
Tif took a deep breath. “Yes. And the Major?”
“She’ll be down shortly, we think maybe fifteen hours, I’m not sure Phoenix was able to talk to her directly to get that confirmation. But she’ll be there, you can count on it.”
“Yes,” Tif agreed. “Always count on the Major.” So many things that needed to align. But this was her little portion. She could not control any of those other portions, just this one. Everyone was counting on her, just as she was counting on them.
“And Tif,” Remy added, “there was a little visual code within the message from Phoenix. When we put it together, it made this.”
She drifted a pad across, screen activated. Tif took it, and saw that some simple punctuation symbols and letters, some human and some alien, had combined to make a little face. A face with dots for eyes, a smiling mouth with a partitioned upper-lip, and big, pointed ears. Tif smiled. Clearly it was Skah — a message from him, or about him, to say he was fine. And it made her quite emotional, that the great warship Phoenix would not only look after him as one of their own while she was gone, but would take the time to reassure her about him, at a time when so many important things were going on. Skah was not only crew to them, as she was, but also clan. Nothing in her life to this point had made her prouder.
Remy saw her emotion, and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll see him again soon,” she said gently. “Just a few more days.”
And she took back the pad, and pushed off the chair to leave. Tif blinked in puzzlement. Second Lieutenant Hale, she realised, had misinterpreted her emotion. Humans always seemed to think she’d be upset to leave Skah for any period. The entire trip so far, her comrades had been reassuring her that Skah would be fine, and it wouldn’t be such a long time, really. And certainly she did miss him, and looked forward to seeing him again.
But for any well-bred kuhsi, family meant clan, as clan meant security, and prospects for the future. A mother loving her son meant wishing for him a good position with a strong clan. Skah had that now, and by her actions she bound those ties even tighter. If she died on this mission, she had no doubt at all that Phoenix would continue to raise Skah, and to look after his interests, far more capably than she could ever have done alone. She didn’t really understand this mawkish, misplaced human sentiment of mothers and sons in isolation. But human instincts toward family, and the children of one’s own family in particular, she trusted implicitly.
19
Trace lay in full armour on a civvie bunk in the lander, as reentry Gs flattened her into her armour, and her armour into the mattress. She’d likely make a mess of the mattress, but she wasn’t going to be using it once they were down. Kamala’s gravity was a little over half-a-G, but it held an awful lot of atmosphere for such a small world. Her background readings had said something about an unusually dense metallic core producing a just-as-unusually strong magnetic field, which had in turn prevented the atmosphere from being blasted away by the solar wind, as typically happened to smaller worlds this close to a lively sun. Also, Kamala had volcanic activity, which had released a build-up of gasses over millions of years — most of them dense and hot.
It made for a rough ride down, and when her reception had cleared enough, she linked in to the lander’s external view. Below stretched an endless sea of white and yellow cloud, ending in a wide, blue horizon. It looked quite beautiful from up here, with no hint of the hell that lay beneath. In a few places, the endless calm was broken by buildups of tall cumulous, where some boiling disturbance below had pushed upward, flickering with lightning. If this lander fell into that soup, they’d be crushed and incinerated, likely before they ever reached the surface. But thankfully, entering into the cloud was not on the flightplan.
A camera view found Chara, a small dot against the white cloud. As she watched, nearly floating above the mattress as the lander fell toward its target with only the mildest thrust, it grew steadily larger. Her channel gave her com snatches of conversation in Togiri, as the lander crew talked to Chara Control. Chara was a commercial entity, jointly-owned by many, with Fleet and State Department merely prominent amongst its many customers. The lander crew were Fleet, and briefed on the whole mission, as the entire crew of Satamala had been. Fleet had facilities on Chara, where non-Fleet could not go. But complicating things, she’d been told, was the fact that not all of those Fleet personnel were ‘in’ on it. She’d been promised a clear path to a holding location, an airtight hangar where Fleet equipment was stored, but her Koshaim-20 was firmly gripped in her right fist, and the missile rack on her back was loaded. If she had to expend any of those on Chara, the mission was surely lost before it began.
As it approached Chara, the lander rocked and roared, with more Gs as it slowed. Trace lost all sight from the lander’s cameras as thrust obscured the view, then a soft thud as they touched, and the roaring stopped.
Trace climbed carefully from the bunk, extracting her rifle and running yet another check on all suit systems. All came back green, and she opened the door to the narrow steel corridor. From adjoining doors, the rest of Command Squad were emerging, forced to ride out reentry in crew quarters because there were no chairs large enough to accommodate armour suits. She entered the central accommodation space, and in the space between unoccupied restraint-equipped chairs, found the kid, exactly where they’d left him. Turning around and around in circles, like a giant, confused spider.
Trace had to laugh. At the sound, the kid stopped turning and stared at her, questioningly. “It’s gravity, kid,” she told him. “You are programmed for it. It’s what your legs are for.”
The kid had not been restrained on the way down, because there were no restraints large enough, and being a hacksaw drone, he didn’t damage easily. He’d had to be up here on the crew level with the human crew, because the lower cargo holds would now be inspected by Chara personnel. The crew holds, she’d been assured, would be left alone, as the lander’s only announced crew were its pilots. As in human Fleet, tavalai Fleet ground personnel took Fleet pilots’ word for such things.
The kid resumed walking in circles, and his legs, unsteady at first, were already acquiring that creepy, spider-like precision, a chillingly familiar clatter of steel steps, and a rattle of intricate internal mechanisms. He looked quite different now, with twin chaingun pods on the rear thorax, muzzles pointed over each shoulder, and with reasonable articulation within the forward arc of fire. Also attached, on the lower abdomen, was an industrial-strength laser cutter, drawing power from his main core. Trace personally retained the safety triggers for both.
“Okay,” she told the gathering, “I want full equipment check and everyone ready to move out ASAP. We take no chances with this, we think we know what�
��s going to happen, but I don’t trust it even a little bit.” She turned to Spacer Chenkov. “Chenk, tell us what gear you need us to carry, and don’t be scared of bossing around people ranked more highly than you.”
“Well shit Major,” Chenkov said cheerfully, “that’s pretty much everyone. If I could just get two guys to help me with the kit…”
“Tell them,” said Trace, pointing to her marines. “Direct them — you’re key to this mission, and we’re here to help.”
“Um sure… Zale, Leo, come help please.”
“Yo,” Leo Terez agreed, and went with Zale to do that. Leo’s first name was actually Richard. He was ‘Leo’ because on planet-bound training he’d once led marines into a simulated minefield big enough to launch them all into ‘Low Earth Orbit’, as that ancient acronym still tragically referenced. And Private Lucio Zale remained Zale for now, having been newly recruited with the last batch of volunteers at Joma Station, and claiming the nickname ‘Chilli’ after his hot taste in food. But noone in Phoenix Company had served with him before, and previous nicknames didn’t count. His pure rifleman test scores were insanely good, however, and instead of annoying her officers by removing their best marines to fill a vacancy, Trace had opted to take Zale herself.
That left Aristan, clad in his light environment suit and helmet, visor raised. He’d forgone the robe, hood and veil this time, agreeing that on this occasion, even his Domesh beliefs took a back seat to the need for more practical clothes. Trace stopped before him, and levelled a gloved finger at his nose. “I don’t care what enormous importance you are back among your people,” she told him. “Out here, you’re the lowest-ranked person on the team. Lower even than him.” She pointed at the intrigued and circling hacksaw drone. “That means you do exactly what you’re told, when you’re told to do it. Do you understand?”
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 29
