Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3)

by Shepherd,Joel

  A slight pause for his translator to relay that. “I understand, Major. We are all expendable before the mission, myself included. If I must give my life so that this mission succeeds, I shall do so instantly.”

  “No,” Trace said firmly. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying obey. Whether you give your life or not is not up to you. I decide. And the other senior-ranked on this mission — Staff Sergeant Kono and Corporal Rael in particular. You will not unilaterally decide to die, you will not unilaterally decide not to die. You will not decide anything. You will obey. Do you understand?”

  Aristan’s indigo eyes showed cool respect. “I will obey. You have command, Major.”

  As they prepared, a signal from the lander cockpit showed the lower holds opening, and an inspection commencing. All holds were flushed to vacuum before landing, and the first two were now flooded with carbon-dioxide-rich Kamala air. It was not poisonous, as the nastier gasses tended to be heavier, and were very thin up this high. A person could even wander around in it with nothing more than a facemask. Air pressure at this altitude was lower than tavalai preferred, and right on the human norm. The temperature was even a balmy twenty-five degrees celsius, shirt-sleeve weather. It was just that there was no oxygen, and any oxygen-breather trying to breathe it would get a lungful of nothing.

  And now a third hold was being flooded. Trace frowned, watching that display as Terez and Zale helped with Chenkov’s bags. Third hold was not supposed to be flooded. Then she saw the camera view of the lower hold, and someone climbing the short ladder to central elevator.

  “Someone’s coming up!” she snapped. They weren’t supposed to come up. That had been quite well established. “Everyone hide!” And as they did that, she flipped channels to the lander bridge. “Hello bridge, someone is coming up. What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know,” spoke a translator in reply. If the pilot was worried, the translator could not catch it. “You should hide. We will query.”

  “Major?” asked ‘Bird’ Kumar. “How do we hide a hacksaw drone?” Because the elevator shaft terminated in the middle of the floor they were standing on, and the kid would not fit through the doors of those small bedrooms, not with those chainguns on. Taking them off took far more time than they had available, as the kid’s autonomous control was disabled.

  “I’ve got him,” said Trace. “You hide.” And to the drone, “Kid, this way. Follow me.” She strode the hall from crew central to the mess, where a kitchen of microwave cookers and refrigerated shelves were empty, her team taking their meals on Satamala. The kid had to squeeze on tiptoes to fit his wide legs down the hall, then rattled around behind the steel kitchen bench as Trace took position by the wall disposal. Trace checked her Koshaim, then racked it on her shoulder. If they had to deal with a single tavalai crewman, it would be quietly, and Koshaims were never that. And she thought, furiously, just how they could dispose of a crewman without arousing the suspicions of others.

  It was impossible, she thought, watching the platform elevator ascend on her visor display, toward the cargo-hold airlock. One missing man would alert the others, followed by the whole Fleet presence on Chara. Maybe this man could be reasoned with, if they put a gun to his head, and took him to see the pilots on the bridge, who could explain it to him. But even then…

  The kid rattled and whined, peering this way and that, his two-eyed head jerking back and forth. “Kid!” Trace told him, her visor still raised. “Silent. Quiet, you understand?” He considered her, head moving, but the legs were still. Acoustic speech was doubtless an inefficient way for him to process information that would typically be passed from unit to unit by direct digital transmission in a fraction of the time. But English seemed no difficulty for him. As always, it was not his comprehension, but his interpretation, that concerned her. “Kid, you can’t be seen. Do not be seen, by anyone not in the team. If you are seen, the mission will fail.”

  The kid looked at her blankly, then leaned to consider where the elevator would arrive down the hall. Could he access the lander’s feed to see the crewman coming up? Or maybe he was wondering how it would be possible to stay out of sight, once out on Chara. Well, she’d wondered herself. But tavalai Fleet had promised, and if they could arrange it for a bunch of armoured human marines, surely they could add a drone to the group. What concerned her more was that assuming Captain Pram and Makimakala had kept their mouths shut as they’d promised, none of tavalai Fleet knew that Styx existed, and thus the kid neither. There was an empty cargo crate in the lower holds that was kid-sized, and she’d been planning to use a loader with him inside it, however little he liked it. But if that plan was now about to go awry…

  “Stay!” she told the drone, making up her mind, and strode back down the hall to the main room. Already the floor lights were flashing, and a circle of floorplate opened to admit the rising crewman from the elevator airlock. He stared at her as he rose, but did not look especially surprised, which let her know she’d made the right choice.

  “Phoenix?” he said via translator. “Phoenix mission?”

  “Phoenix mission,” Trace agreed, stopping at the platform edge. “Why are you here?”

  “Bad plan,” said the crewman, clad in a light environment suit, a tavalai-shaped facemask in one hand. “Hangar we wanted to use is occupied. New Fleet arrival, not good with the plan.”

  “Occupied by people who don’t know the plan?”

  “Yes,” the tavalai agreed. “New hiding place. No hangar, but pressure, good air. But small.”

  “We can get there without being seen?”

  “Yes. Night in one hour. Dark. We leave then, I show you.”

  “No,” said Trace. “You tell me how to get there. Show me a map, give me directions.”

  “Too difficult,” the tavalai insisted. “I show you, much easier.”

  “Listen,” said Trace, taking a step closer. In her big, powered suit, she stood only a little taller, but loomed over the man for sheer mass. “My marines have classified equipment. Very sensitive. No non-humans are allowed to see. If they see, I have orders to kill them. You understand?” The crewman blinked at her. “I do not want to follow these orders. But I will. Now you tell me how to get to this new hiding place.”

  Nearly two hours later, Trace climbed the manual ladder from the cargo airlock. The lander’s visuals showed her the holds were empty of Chara crew, but she moved carefully, in case her big suit made a loud metallic noise that brought someone to investigate. Kamala’s point-six gravity made that task simpler, and she reached the bottom of the wide holds in what seemed like an agonisingly long time after so much quick zipping around these spaces in zero-G.

  She left the elevator platform and moved cautiously to a wall, rifle racked and refusing to think very hard on what would happen if someone discovered them. Shooting her way in would have been easier — at least that was something she knew she was good at. Now, the first shot she fired would signal the mission’s failure, regardless of what she hit.

  She crept along a partition wall until she acquired a view of the main door. The loading bridge was in place, as the crewman had promised. Its cavernous mouth gaped, with runners and rails to carry big cargo pallets into place, before being grasped by the claws in these holds, and locked into place before flight. With her suit mikes strained to maximum, she could hear only some machinery noise, and a strange, eery howling that rose and fell, like the cry of some wild and lonely animal. The wind, she realised.

  “This is the Major,” she said into her helmet mike. “We look clear, everyone come down.”

  They did, the marines all moving with suit tension dialled down to minimum, trying to keep the suit servo noise as low as possible. That was never going to be entirely successful, but if you had to move a marine armour suit anywhere without being heard, it was on a lander pad on a giant, floating industrial platform.

  Most of her team were down when Trace heard someone swear. She looked, and with her partial view of the ele
vator rails and adjoining ladder, saw that the kid was not actually climbing down the ladder, but was flying down the side, dangling on some very thin steel cables. With legs spread as he came, he looked almost exactly like a spider. Trace hoped that Jess Rolonde was not standing directly under him.

  “I didn’t know he could do that,” said Corporal Rael. “Did you?”

  “Never needed it in zero-G,” Terez reasoned.

  The kid touched down, disconnected the cables at the top (which were magnetic, Trace guessed) and wound them back in with a high-pitched squeal as they fell, clattering off the elevator sides. Trace repressed a wince at the noise, and Rolonde got quickly out of the way as the drone came skittering across the hold floor.

  “Kid,” Trace said sternly as he arrived. “I said quietly. Was that quiet?” He looked about, evasively. Trace was reminded of Skah, when told something he wasn’t interested in hearing. She looked back along the group. Eight marines including herself, one spacer tech, one parren assassin, and one drysine warrior drone. It wasn’t the type of assault party she’d ever imagined leading. “Let’s go.”

  She moved first, entering the loading bridge and moving quietly — or nearly quietly — down the walkway alongside the big, rubber runners. Just prior to the bridge’s main articulating joint, an access door opened, and she peered out onto the pad. Her visor visuals adjusted to the glare of floodlights, focused upon the looming bulk of the lander. Pumps whined, and distant conversation carried on the wind, some tavalai workers on the pad yelling to be heard, and audible even past their facemasks. The edge of the pad was near, barely five meters.

  Trace turned and signalled the others to come, then stepped carefully down the stairs beyond the door, looking about to see the rest of the pad. It too was empty, the loading bridge leading back to a pressurised wall, and pad control looking down from above, with big windows to view proceedings, but with no real angle to see straight down. She walked to the edge of the pad, where more stairs led over and down, and crouched to view across the pad, and warn the others if anyone came. Then she signalled her team to come as they arrived, with a wince as the kid barely squeezed sideways through the door, then half-slid, half-walked the stairs and scuttled past her and off the edge.

  She followed, handing off the watch to Staff Sergeant Kono, then down to the next level beneath the pad, where a gantry platform was wide enough to accommodate most. In the dark, Chara could have been an enormous mining refinery. It had that look about it, a maze of gantries and supports, all ablaze with floodlights. There were more levels below them, and to the side, but they were very near the edge of Chara itself, and barely fifty meters further, the lights and steel all stopped, replaced by a black chasm.

  Further to the right, a protruding wing of the Chara platform resumed, jutting far out into the dark. Floodlights gleamed upon the vast sphere of a floatation tank, several hundred meters diameter, a giant balloon of gas enfolded in the mesh of steel gantries. There were dozens of them across Chara, filled with breathable air at regular pressures. Chara did not have enough inhabitants to breathe more than a fraction of all that air — mostly it was for buoyancy, low pressure tanks atop a thick blanket of high-pressure atmosphere, and bobbing atop the surface as surely as a balloon on the surface of an ocean. Even as Trace looked, she could see the platform about the enormous balloon flexing, rising independently of the rest, and heard again the shuddering creak of background noise she hadn’t been able to place until now. That noise was Chara’s independent platforms flexing, on giant hinges, as they rode atop shifting currents of air. A rigid structure upon an unstable foundation could stress and break, but Chara just flowed with the wind.

  “This way,” she told her wide-eyed, wary team. “The lower levels should be clear at night, move slowly and keep quiet.”

  The maze continued, and Trace followed the map on her visor. It was hard to reconcile the view at night, and the deserted steel walkways and supports holding up the habitation levels above, with the fact that they were on a giant steel city, circling a moon thirty kilometres above its surface, at somewhere in excess of three hundred kilometres an hour. Only once, descending yet another set of steel stairs, did the reality set in as the blackness came suddenly alive with the bright, leaping flashes of a lightning storm, ripping through the boiling clouds below.

  The excursion ended at a pressurised compartment amidst the supports, squeezed against some large, bundled pipes, and above a huge weather vane that descended far below Chara’s lowest point, lights blinking in the whistling dark. Trace approached along the walkway to a wider platform before the compartment’s front airlock. She was beginning to think they’d gotten away with it when a tavalai crewman in a facemask edged past the compartment’s side. His environment suit had an equipment belt filled with tools, and he froze as he stared at her. So utterly was he surprised that Trace knew he couldn’t be one of those ‘in’ on the plan.

  She was on him before he could move, grabbing his arm and removing his facemask. He fought desperately to get it back, but against her armoured power, she barely felt the struggle. “Jess,” she said calmly, “get the door.”

  As Jess Rolonde tried the door to the compartment. “It’s secured. Running a patch.”

  The tavalai crewman was panicking now, a more rare thing for tavalai than humans, but when deprived of oxygen in a carbon-dioxide atmosphere, that would happen. Trace could have told him to calm down and hold his breath, but that wasn’t going to work, and taking his mask was a better way to subdue him than a blow or other physical restraint that with power-armour might just kill him by accident.

  “Got it,” Rolonde said finally, and squeezed in as Trace dragged the crewman after. There was only room for those three in the airlock, and she hit close, then a hiss as the airlock replaced the air. The tavalai gasped with relief, and coughed. “Has he got uplinks?” Rolonde wondered.

  “Jammed,” said Trace. Her suit’s coms suite could do that, against low-grade, hostile networks. “Guys, tell the kid to stay outside, he doesn’t need air anyway.”

  “No but he’ll need a recharge,” Kono reminded her. “Power core is thirty hours but we’ll want him topped up. Plus he’s kind of visible out here.”

  “Well we can’t let this guy go,” said Trace, opening the inner airlock door as the pressure equalised, and pulling her prisoner inside. “And we can’t let him see the kid, so that means keeping him in here.” The pressurised compartment was an engineering shed, long and thin with rows of tool shelves and work benches. At the far end, a couple of bunks and chairs, a minor living space for several techs to live in for a few days on a job. “Jess, search the place and see if you can find some canvas, something to hide the kid.”

  “You don’t think anyone who comes down this far will reckon something’s wrong when they see human marines?” said Rolonde, even as she did what Trace asked, stomping between shelves and trying not to let her rifle catch on the low overhead.

  “I think we could probably fit eleven in here,” said Trace, helping the tavalai crewman into a workbench chair, where he gasped and heaved with relief. “The environmentals won’t like it, but we only have to last until morning.”

  The Fleet man on the lander had assured them that Chara’s Fleet HQ would not see that this engineering compartment was being occupied — the Fleet conspirators would block the signal, and stop anyone else from coming down this way. Trace flipped her visor, and considered the recovering tech. So much for that last part. He didn’t seem to have a translator, so she activated her own, and put it on speaker.

  “Hello,” she told him. ‘Gidiri ha,’ said the speaker. The tavalai stared. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The tavalai muttered something in reply. “You already hurt me,” said her earpiece. Trace nearly smiled at the predictable, stubborn bravery.

  “Fucking tavalai,” said Rolonde from further up the aisle, rummaging through storage cupboards. Evidently her translator had caught that.

  “It�
��s carbon dioxide,” Trace retorted. “Don’t be a pussy.” With no real hope the translator would catch that, but she was a marine, and the tavalai would get the idea. “We’re here on a mission. Your own Fleet sent us. It’s aimed at State Department. But we’re not going to kill any tavalai if we can help it.”

  “Comforting,” the tech retorted, rubbing his bruised arm. Probably he’d been referring to that, when he said she’d hurt him. His look was suspicious. “How did you get here? Humans, on Chara?” And his eyes widened as he realised the answer to his own question. “You’re Phoenix! Phoenix is at the Tsubarata, and now you’re here! Why is Phoenix at the Tsubarata? Why is it really?”

  “Damn,” said Kono grimly as the airlock opened once more to admit him and Chenkov. “I was hoping we’d caught a dumb one.”

  “He’s Engineering,” Chenkov said by way of explanation, dumping his heavy equipment bag on the workbench. The tavalai stared at it, unable to understand untranslated English. “Not many dummies in Engineering.”

  “Is that a fact?” the big Staff Sergeant said drily. And to Trace, “You could just toss him off the edge.”

  “I’m not going to toss him off the edge,” said Trace, closing the translator for a moment. “If I did, we’d have the same problem — a missing tech who hadn’t reported in. We need to last until morning and our best bet to keep HQ off our back is to get this guy to cooperate, which he can’t do if he’s dead.”

  “A tavalai?” Rolonde said from down the aisle. “Good luck.”

  “You’re here for the vault,” the tavalai interrupted them. “You said State Department. You’re after the vault.”

  “Yes,” said Trace, reactivating the translator. “Your own Fleet Admirals want secrets State Department has in that vault. Think about it — how else could we have gotten here, if we didn’t have tavalai help?” The tavalai made an odd expression that she didn’t recognise. “Will you help us?”

  The expression got more extreme. Trace realised that he was laughing at her. “I’m not going to help you!” he said with obvious mirth. “Stupid humans, why would I help you?”