Trace and Kono set off after the kid, Rolonde and Kumar behind. Trace’s visor display showed the temperature falling rapidly, as hot, high pressure air from the room behind fled into this cooler, as yet uncontaminated air. The composition was breathable, but she wasn’t about to trust that, and walked through each of the encircling bands of white light in the corridor, wondering where it all came from. Everything here was rock — black rock, unlike the heat-blasted red rock of the main base.
“If this is hacksaw tech,” Kono wondered at her side, “then who built it? The vault is supposed to be tavalai, but what if it’s been here much longer?”
“Maybe it was an old hacksaw base,” said Kumar.
“Hacksaws didn’t like planets much,” Trace disagreed. “And I can’t imagine them liking this one. Just as likely State Department has a lot of forbidden hacksaw tech, and they built it themselves. Would explain why the Dobruta don’t like them either.”
Ahead at a double-circle of light, the kid stopped, forelegs wavering ahead, as though sniffing the air. Trace and her marines stopped as well. The drone prodded at the left side of the circular, tube-like corridor. And then, with no fuss at all, began to walk up the wall.
“Holy shit,” Kumar murmured.
“My visor’s going crazy,” Rolonde said breathlessly. “Sensors don’t know what the fuck’s going on.”
Trace took a deep breath, as the kid continued to walk around the wall, heading for the ceiling. He had no particular grip on those steel feet to allow him to do that against the will of gravity. Gravity itself was shifting. “Well,” said Trace, “I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on.”
Any sufficiently advanced technology, she recalled the very old saying, would be indistinguishable from magic. She walked forward, and sure enough, as she reached the double-band of light, she felt the lean begin. For someone who’d lived as much of her life on variable-G ships and stations as she had, it wasn’t too hard to adjust to, and she simply followed the kid’s path up and around the left-side wall. The mind-bending thing here, however, was that there was no apparent force of motion creating the G-shift.
“Shouldn’t be fucking possible,” Kono murmured as he followed with the others.
“It’s only a problem if you think about it,” Trace told them. “That’s why I picked you guys — you barely think at all.”
“That’s sweet, Major,” said Rolonde.
Now they were all walking on the ceiling. It wasn’t any functionally different from walking on the floor, and Trace resolved not to look behind, and not to think about the fact that Kamala’s natural gravity was here being effectively overridden. Then the ‘floor’ that was now a ceiling came to an end, and the most incredible open space Trace had ever seen appeared above their heads. Given all the things she’d seen lately, that was saying something.
The chamber was an enormous, empty sphere, all in black stone, with only a little of that sourceless white light to gleam upon the curves. Within the precise centre of the empty, inverse sphere, was a reciprocal sphere — a solid black ball, taking up perhaps two thirds of the space. It simply hung there, perfect and smooth. Trace stared, head back within her helmet. The black, smooth shapes reminded her of the Doma Strana, and Aristan’s meditation room — minimalist and mesmerising. And it was impossible, because the sphere was touching no sides, and was supported by nothing.
“It’s like it’s being repelled off the walls,” Kono murmured. It was rare to hear anything more than businesslike deadpan from the Staff Sergeant, but he sounded awed and dazed like the rest of them. “I guess a powerful enough source of independent gravity will override everything else around it. And beyond a certain range it reverses, so we’re walking on the ceiling.”
“Gravity is a ripple in space-time,” Trace breathed. “Everything’s bent in here.” There were times in her profession, dealing with the technicalities of faster-than-light travel, that she wished she had more physics qualifications than she did. Here, she was quite pleased to be ignorant, least her head imploded from the scale of it. “Kid, can you spot an opening?”
She glanced, and found the kid examining a steel plate in the rock. He touched something, and the plate hummed aside. An elevator lifted an object into view — a multi-legged robot, Trace saw with amazement, clearly based on hacksaw design, but not a hacksaw. The kid scuttled around it, noting its relatively low-tech, clunky legs and poor articulation, its chunky power-source and un-streamlined sensory unit. But it looked immensely strong, like something designed to move under enormous stress. He clambered half onto it for a better look, then gave Trace a direct look that seemed so much like incredulity that Trace nearly believed it was.
“Yeah kid,” Trace agreed. “Looks like an old ancestor of yours.”
“Looks much more tavalai-tech,” said Kono. “I guess that’s the only way anything can be recovered from the vault. I guess we could use it if we knew how to reprogram it to look for our stuff. But it looks old enough to take hours.”
“The other reason Styx built the kid,” Kumar wondered. “It’s like she’s seen this place before. Or something just like it.”
Trace crouched by a small tower-system by the side of the plate. “Looks like a grapple gun. Can’t see any directional controls, I guess it doesn’t need any. Any ideas, kid?”
The kid came over to peer at it. Then touched a control, and with a loud bang! of compressed air, the grapple shot upward toward the central sphere, trailing a long, steel cable out behind. It slowed, as all things should slow that went flying upward… and then, at about the midpoint, began to accelerate once more. The weighted grapple fell faster and faster, and then the grapple cable was screeching as the mechanism fought against the massive force wheeling it in. And then it struck, with a distant, metallic thud.
“One hundred Gs,” Kono murmured. “Looks like it kicks in about halfway. That’s fucked up.”
“Stop thinking and deal with it,” Trace told him, examining the steel frame about the base of the built-in grapple gun. It looked detachable, and equipped with a braking mechanism that affixed to the thick cable. “Kid, I think this is your ride.”
The controls were just a few buttons, for stop and go, and brakes. The kid looked them over with curious precision, then looked up at the cable, now forming a several hundred meter long alloy-steel bridge across the intervening space. Then he climbed aboard.
“Now you’ll have to climb onto the underside when you hit the gravity change-over at midpoint,” Trace told him with concern. “Do you understand? You can’t just fall onto the surface — it’s one hundred Gs, even a short drop will kill you. Are your legs at full power? Are you ready?”
She’d been concerned of it before — in evolutionary terms, a spider-like design wasn’t ideal for heavy Gs because the legs were mounted to the body sides rather than underneath. The kid’s legs were attached at ball-joints within independently articulated shoulders, allowing a downward angle to forty-five degrees, but still not ideal, and the legs came outward rather than straight down. As though reading her mind, the kid curled in all his legs, as though walking on his knuckles, toes pointing up at his belly. It raised him off the ground, and gave a near-vertical posture. His head cocked at her with that peculiar, intense concentration, as though seeking her comprehension.
Trace grinned. And she reached, and gave the drone a pat on the side of his sensor-laden head, where a cheek might be. The kid nearly flinched, clearly wondering what the hell she was doing. “Good luck kid. We’ll winch you out once you’ve retrieved it. You sure you know what you’re looking for?”
The kid ignored her silly question, gave a final glance about, then up at the big black sphere overhead. Without looking, one of those incredibly dexterous limbs pushed the winch button, and the platform began to climb. Styx had been adamant she knew exactly what they were looking for, and further data from their tavalai Fleet sources had confirmed it. Tavalai Fleet had their own things they wanted him to collect, unseen by ta
valai eyes outside of State Department for thousands of years.
“Hope Styx was right about the final bit,” Kono murmured, watching the kid ascend up the steel cable. Tavalai Fleet intel had proclaimed that the final lock at the vault itself was an incredibly complicated bit of tavalai coding that would seal permanently if an intruder got it wrong, and would require a complete reset to be brought in from a distant State Department location. Styx had been dismissive, saying that she’d program the means to break the lock into the kid’s foundational brain. It would take no more than three seconds, she’d insisted. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology’, Trace found herself repeating in her mind…
Her coms crackled. “Major, this is Rael, do you copy?”
“Hello Cocky, yes I can hear you.”
“I just heard from Chenkov and Aristan, Chenk says he can’t get through to you, only to me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Major, Chenk’s just heard from Second Lieutenant Tif! She’s on her way down, she says she stole a new descender from Chara, with some help.”
About her, Kono, Kumar and Rolonde exchanged incredulous, hopeful glances. Trace’s eyes remained fixed on the kid’s moving platform. “Can she reach your platform?”
“Yes, but she says there’s a State Department-aligned cruiser on its way from Konik, fast! Which means it’s armed, and it looks like a military intercept, she says you have thirty-five minutes until she needs to launch. Once she’s up she can make rendezvous with the tavalai Fleet, but until she’s in their custody we’re fair game. We leave it too late and they’ll shoot us down en route.”
“I copy that, Cocky. Tell Chenkov to guide her if possible, and keep the entry bay secure.”
“Yes Major.”
On the platform, the kid performed a fast crawl over the ‘top’ of the ascending platform to the ‘bottom’, without taking a claw off the ‘go’ button. It was all going to be for nothing if he fell, or couldn’t take the stresses as Styx claimed. Approaching the smooth black sphere, she could see him shifting, hunching his legs beneath him as he’d demonstrated. Then another shift, and a shuffle, as enormous forces began to build.
“Come on kid,” Kumar muttered. Even Rolonde stood mute, staring up, hoping. Beside them, the cable’s steel foundation groaned and shuddered beneath the stress of extra weight on the far end of the line. Finally, the platform reached the surface. The kid did not move.
Trace counted to five, then figured something might be wrong. “Kid,” she said on coms, and boosted the signal to make sure. Could he even hear her up there? “Kid, you have to move. I know it’s hard. There should be an entry around there somewhere. It can’t be far, or nothing could reach it.” Still no movement. She had no idea if appeals to sentiment would work on a hacksaw. Surely reason would work better? “Kid, your queen is depending on you. Your entire people are depending on you. If you don’t move, they’ll be dead forever. You can bring them back.”
Her visor-scan zoomed, artificially expanding the image. She saw a leg shuffle, just a few centimetres. Then another. The strain was obvious. Trace wondered if the sensation of stress and damage felt like pain. Surely pain was counter-productive for a drone? If she could further engineer some of those more basic responses from her own genetic directives, she would. To process only the objective, under such huge stresses, would be a blessing.
The platform had deployed side ramps on the way down, to create a very slight incline. The kid inched down one, moving more steadily now. If he fell, Trace doubted he’d have the power or leverage to get back up. Perhaps that caution was the reason for his slow pace.
“At this rate Tif will get shot down before he makes it back,” Rolonde muttered.
“It can’t be far,” Trace replied. “They must have built the cable to fire right next to it.”
The kid reached the end of the ramp, and edged off. Immediately something moved, and then an entire section of black, smooth surface began retracting into the sphere, like an elevator, with the kid huddled on it. The other marines let out gasps of relief. Trace slowly exhaled, and looked about.
“Now we wait,” she said.
29
“Okay, it’s two hundred and fifty meters this way,” said Lieutenant Alomaim, indicating past the wall panels. Behind, one of the panels had been removed to reveal the blank steel at the edge of the old Krim Quarter. On the far side was the State Department Head Quarters. Upon a table that had been dragged against the wall, several small warheads were now deployed, facing the wall. Similar to the missile-warheads carried by human marine armour, these were directional charges, focusing the intensity of their detonation all in one direction. The purpose was to breach armour, or walls, giving station infantry an option in moving between rooms that did not include doorways. That the krim had stored them here in the Krim Quarter suggested that they’d once stored powered armour here as well, and were determined not to be trapped by the Quarter’s limited ingress and egress.
“The edges of the hole are going to be ragged and hot,” Alomaim continued, as he, Erik and Sergeant Brice and Private Cruze took a knee nearby, newly acquired weapons and equipment in hand or on the ground between them. “So Captain — one leg at a time, watch your head and hands.”
Erik nodded, looking over his new weapon for the hundredth time. It was long and awkward, designed to be fired from the hip, as krim had bio-engineered targeting systems built into their skulls, and other systems elsewhere. Neither krim psychology nor physiology preferred the shoulder-fired style of humans, though that difference probably made the marines more uncomfortable than their Captain. The marines’ expert checks had determined that all weapons were still in working order, but there was some debate as to the free-throw grenades. Seven hundred years was a long time even for krim-engineered weapons in perfect storage conditions. The marines’ debate had been more about whether the grenades would detonate at all rather than whether they’d detonate early, but Erik remained far from comforted. In fact, the prospect of impending firefights made him queasy in a way that starship combat had recently ceased to.
“Styx says Hiro’s one level down, and I’ve got the location fixed in my glasses, so we should be good,” Alomaim continued. “Her recon bug said there’s armed operatives inside, the consensus seems to be they’re not close to karasai standard, but given their operating requirements, they don’t need to be. If we see them, we shoot. No choice any longer.” Grim nods in the group. Given that State Department had just arranged for parren unfriendlies to shoot at them, no one was feeling reluctant.
Erik indicated his weapon. “Now might be a good time to remind you that I’ve never actually fired a weapon in combat.”
Brice looked surprised. “Not even on Homeworld?”
“Not even on Heuron,” Erik replied. “Phoenix marines have been too good at covering for me.” He could see that narrow-eyed tension in Alomaim’s eyes now, thinking over and over just how he could arrange to keep his Captain out of the fight. But State Department patrolled the halls, and would rush the Krim Quarter through this entry breach as soon as they got organised, to see how it was done, and to capture anyone still inside. That would leave Erik alone, navigating Tsubarata halls with Styx’s help, hoping a lone human in a place where no human was supposed to be could escape notice and somehow get back to Phoenix. That was impossible too, and besides, going through the State Department HQ had given them an escape route.
“Phoenix says our getaway will arrive at the docking bay in fifteen,” Alomaim continued. “So we’ve got a straight shot through to Hiro, we get him out, then straight for the docking bay. No detours, no delays, got it? And no forgetting the ultimate strategic priority.” With a meaningful stare at his marines, ignoring Erik entirely.
‘Protect the Captain’ was every marine’s ultimate strategic priority while on station, Erik knew. In this instance, that priority was conflicting with the larger mission priority of not letting Hiro’s information fall into State Department hands. Alomaim
clearly hated it, being caught between these conflicting necessities, and Erik couldn’t blame him. But Erik knew that if trouble struck, Alomaim was expecting his marines to die, if necessary, to keep him alive. Erik had always hated that too, but was well enough acquainted with strategic realities not to bitch about it. He was not just the Captain — he was the best pilot on Phoenix, and without him, everyone’s chances decreased.
“Captain,” said Brice, coming to show him his weapon. “Now remember it’s a shotgun, so you don’t have to point it much.” Erik refrained from retorting that he did know the difference between a shotgun and a rifle. If he'd had to teach a marine to fly a shuttle in five minutes flat, let alone a starship, he’d be patronising too. “It’s a rotary magazine so it shouldn’t jam no matter how old it is. You’ve got fifty rounds already loaded, they’re carbon-filament, they’ll go through light armour but nothing heavy. Just remember that area-affect weapons don’t discriminate — if you fire upon an area, everyone in that area will get hit, friend or foe.”
Erik nodded, mouth dry, and willed his hands not to shake before his marines. “I promise I won’t fire with any friendlies in front of me,” he said. “Thank you, Gunnery Sergeant.”
But Brice wasn’t finished. “Now we’re a four man unit,” she continued. “Normally I’d take point, but my rib will slow me down, and the LT’s the only one who really knows where we’re going and we won’t have time to take directions from the rear, so he’s point. I’m two, you’re three, and Cruze is four. That means that you and Cruze are a pair — follow his lead and try to cover what he’s not, understand?” Erik nodded. “Your attention will be mostly behind and flanks, that means side corridors as we pass, they can be empty when the LT and me go past, but then not be empty when you reach them, got it? Make sure, then move on, and don’t worry about what’s in front — that’s my job and the LT’s.”
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 44
