Trace advanced now fourth-in-line, one of the kid’s two canisters hooked to her back armour, the other on Rolonde’s, and thinking it would be a harsh irony if the canisters were damaged once the hard job of retrieving them had been accomplished. But the sard seemed to have vanished, whether psychologically discouraged in that way sard could become after large setbacks, or unwilling to fire upon items recovered from the vault, or with some other plan up their armoured sleeves — Trace had no idea, and did not particularly care.
“I’m getting a transmission from Tif!” Chenkov’s voice crackled in her ear as she ducked up familiar corridors and over sard bodies, the shimmering heat haze now reduced to a balmy eighty degrees celsius and falling steadily. “Putting it through!”
“…down in two ninute,” Tif came through, and Trace might have grinned to hear her were she not so busy moving and covering. “We got State Departnent intercept, cuning real soon in orbit, got noove fast!”
“I copy you Tif,” said Trace. “We’re going as fast as we can, our current ETA is shortly after you touch down.”
“Najor… randing sensor says docking probe danaged! How you get on ny ship?”
“What?” Chenkov interrupted. “I don’t see any… oh shit.” A horrified pause. “Major, she’s right… I’m getting a malfunction reading on the walkway, it says it won’t extend. I didn’t notice because I was busy doing the…”
“I don’t care Chenk,” Trace cut him off. “Either you or Aristan get out there and see if you can fix it, or find us another way.”
“I’ve borrowed a local environment suit,” came Aristan’s translated voice. “I’ll go.”
“Was never going to be that easy,” Kono muttered. “Can we walk it?”
“It’s too far,” Trace replied, having discussed this matter at length with Phoenix’s best armour techs. “The marine suits won’t survive that much time in full exposure, and Chenkov and Aristan’s environment suits certainly won’t. Chenkov, what about that vehicle in the hangar?”
“The prospector? Major it could get us out to the ship, but we’ve no docking seal! We’d have to go into full exposure for…”
“How long?” Trace demanded as she swivelled around another corner, rifle searching a shimmering hallway off a storage room. “We can take full exposure for a minute, maybe two.”
“From the dorsal hatch of the prospector to the cargo airlock on Tif’s model of descender… it’s a four meter difference at least…”
“We can give each other a boost, that’s no problem.”
“But Major, that airlock hatch takes minutes to cycle on a heavy descender! It’s rated to hold eight regular suits, but there’s ten of us and marine armour takes up a lot more space than…”
“We can throw out guns and launchers, and we’ll set a new record for marines squeezed into an airlock if we have to.” Ahead, Rael’s squad broke into the bay beyond the entry hangar, littered with sard bodies and melted lockers. “We’re nearly there… Tif, how much time do we have?”
“Doesn’t natter!” Tif retorted. “You go top fast, tine not natter!” Trace didn’t particularly like being told her priorities by a green ex-civilian Second Lieutenant, but she had no time to get into it now.
The marines thumped into the main hangar as a silver environment suit emerged from the docking probe beside the control bunker’s narrow windows. “The probe’s secure doors are down and locked,” Aristan announced. “The controls say there is hot pressure on the far side. Our previous pilot must have hovered deliberately on takeoff and melted the docking arm.”
“Everyone in the prospector!” Trace commanded. “Chenkov, can you operate the main outer doors from inside the vehicle?”
“Should be able to,” said Chenkov.
“Get in the vehicle, you’re our driver!” As her marines ran to the underside access, between the huge, steel-tread wheels, and tried to open it. Trace took cover behind one of the wheels, watching both ways at once.
“Won’t open!” Arime announced. “Chenk, we need your magic wand thingy!”
“Yeah, coming!” As the Spacer left the big control room airlock and ran to the vehicle’s underside.
“That’s got it.”
“I want two delivery cans brought with us!” Trace ordered. “Chenk and Aristan’s suits won’t survive full exposure, but the cans will!”
Kumar and Zale ran to do that. Definitely the sard were waiting for something, Trace thought. Maybe they knew the previous descender had damaged the docking access when it took off, and thought the invaders could not leave. Perhaps the new plan was to trap them here, alive, until State Department reinforcements arrived. In that case, they’d likely make a final rush if they realised the humans had found another way.
Half of them were in the prospector when Kono snarled at her to get in, aware that she would have supervised them all aboard and been last in if she could. Trace ran, shouldered her rifle, grabbed the hatch rim and pulled herself up with a powered-armour heave. It led to a short ladder past layers of insulation and pressure ribbing, then the inner airlock door and an open cargo hold with pallets of equipment in crates she didn’t recognise.
In several rows some huge, hulking suits were racked, with shiny, reflective surfaces and narrow visor-plates. Rael and Zale were checking them over. “Full exposure suits,” said Rael. “They’re made for sard, I don’t think humans would fit, and they’re twice the size of regular suits, we’d never get them all in the descender’s airlock.”
“No good,” Trace agreed. The equipment in the hold must have been for repairing landing pads and clearing wrecked ships, using these suits. “You guys familiarise yourselves with the dorsal airlock, we’re going to need to crash-exit to get everyone out at once, and we can’t have the emergencies overriding and trying to close it again, or we’ll have people frying while we wait.”
“Got it,” Rael agreed, and went with Zale to do that. Trace headed to the front, up more tight stairs, and into the upper-level cockpit. Chenkov sat in the pilot’s seat, an awkward fit in his suit, flipping switches and resorting to his hand controller and glasses when he couldn’t figure what one did, while Aristan sat at his side and peered cautiously at alien controls.
“Chenk?”
“I got it, Major,” Chenkov agreed breathlessly. “Here we go.” Another switch, and the vehicle emitted a deep, throbbing hum.
“We’re all in,” came Kono’s voice from down back. “Lower access is secure.”
“I have a rear-view camera active,” said Aristan, peering at that screen. “I see sard, running to stop us.” The prospector was heavily engineered to protect from high pressure and temperature, but Trace doubted those protections would do much to stop bullets. And a hull punctured by bullets would perform similarly under pressure to an inflated balloon punctured by a pin, but imploding instead of exploding.
“Let ‘em fry!” said Chenkov, and activated the main airlock. For the second time in an hour, all three huge steel doors rumbled open, and a flood of hot, shimmering air rushed in after. Sand and debris blasted the prospector’s forward viewslit, and the big, bean-shaped vehicle shook and groaned beneath the surging pressure.
“It seems to be working,” Aristan observed calmly behind his faceplate. “I see several retreating. One has fallen.”
“Is the pressure door to the vault itself going to hold?” Trace asked. A suit alarm informed her that she was in danger of bending the hatch rim with her armoured grip, and she loosened her tight fist.
“It should,” Chenkov agreed. “The actual vault is all a separate system, you saw how tough it is. And there’s multiple doors down to protect the vault, and we’ll be out shortly.” Because, Trace thought, as much as State Department currently presented as ‘the enemy’, it would be a very bad thing were the vault itself to be destroyed by this exposure to super-hot, high-pressure air. There were still so many secrets in there, that might yet one day see the light of day.
The big steel doors lifte
d high enough for Trace to see outside. That was a whole new species of unnerving. The entryway was a long ramp, perforated in three lines where the triple-airlock blast doors would typically be lifted, one at a time, to admit or expel a vehicle slowly. Now the roaring winds swirled and buffeted, rushing to fill the near-vacuum that one human atmosphere represented. The red-orange light billowed in air so hot it seemed almost liquid, full of eddies and currents. Inside the entry bay, a few remaining lights imploded, a brief shower of sparks.
“Dear fucking god,” Chenkov muttered, as the fear of what he in particular was about to do set in.
“God will not help you,” said Aristan, staring wide-eyed at the inferno. “Your fate is already determined. Accept its discovery with joy and wonder.”
“We’re nearly at clearance,” said Chenkov, watching the three doors rise. “Clearance.” He pushed the controls forward, and the prospector began to roll, huge, steel-clad tires grinding up the incline.
“Chenk,” said Trace. “Let’s be good guests and close the door behind us.”
“Yeah,” said the young spacer, with a near-manic laugh. “Right.”
“Command Squad,” Trace added. “Put your suit lifesupport into max chilldown. We want temperatures as low as possible for a starting point.”
Atop the incline, the bleak Kamala landscape spread before them, rust-red low hills and rugged rocks. Immediately before them and to the right, the looming, spherical bulk of a heavy descender on the primary landing pad.
“Hello Tif, we see you now,” said Trace. “Please stand by to open the lower primary airlock.”
“Stanby,” Tif’s reply crackled. “Got issue with conputer, don’t rike open airock with no seare.” With no seal, Trace translated that. “I got, you go.”
“It’s on the far side, yeah?” Chenkov wondered nervously staring up at the big descender, unfamiliar with this model. “Yeah, it’s gotta be, just around here.” The prospector trundled at barely walking speed, crawling past one big, hot landing leg. Trace stared up at the leg-joint, and saw it sealed with heavy-duty canvas of some kind… and probably it had coolant systems within as well. If those started to fail, and hot air got into the legs, failures could eat their way through a ship like acid.
“Command Squad,” said Trace, “how are we doing down back?”
“Got the dorsal airlock figured out,” Kono confirmed. “And the two cans we brought aboard. Minimal life support, but we only need it for a few minutes, right?”
“Yeah, real comforting,” Chenkov muttered.
“Yes, but they’ll have to take the stuff we recovered from the vault,” Trace told him. “This casing looks tough, but we can’t risk it in full exposure, it’ll need to go in the cans with Chenkov and Aristan.”
“Gotta guard the real important stuff, right?” said Chenkov.
“Spacer, how about you focus on driving?”
“Sorry Major. I talk when I’m nervous.”
“This is a bad habit,” Aristan observed.
The prospector rumbled around the landing pad, the descender’s big thrusters just below the level of the cockpit. Finally Trace saw it — the rectangular imprint on the descender’s lower side. It had two, one on each side, but the first one was too close to the rocky shelf of the vault’s docking arm, and this farside door was the only one accessible.
“You sure we can reach that?” Trace asked. It looked too high to reach from the back of the prospector.
“The suspension can elevate another four meters,” said Chenkov. “We’ll get there.” Trace thought furiously, considering options if Chenkov was wrong. Gravity here was only half normal, but while suits were powerful, they were hardly athletic, and with most marines’ physical augments, vertical leaps were typically higher outside of a suit than in one. If Trace went first, she was certain that if she could get into the airlock, she could use a rifle to haul people up from below, suit strength being what it was in lower Gs. And the canisters could be thrown, no matter how uncomfortable for those inside. The rest, they’d have to improvise… and hope no one’s suit broke in the process.
Chenkov brought them around in a wide arc to line them up precisely, with the big, bell thrusters filling the forward view. The rectangular outline of the airlock was just faintly visible, as all seals and seams were minimised on the descender to reduce stress-points. That door was going to be thick, Trace calculated, as was the one behind it. Very thick. It would take a long time to open and close, and for the airlock pumps and filters to cycle. If they couldn’t get everyone in on the first try, and cycled the airlock with someone still outside, that person would be dead before the door opened again.
Chenkov moved more controls, and the suspension hummed as the vehicle body slowly rose within its massive wheels. Now the airlock outline was right overhead… but still not close enough to reach first time, Trace reckoned.
“Good, let’s go,” she told both pilots, and stomped back into the main hold. She ducked beneath low overheads, through alien interiors above the central cavity, and arrived at the dorsal airlock to find the rest of her Command Squad preparing. Looking at them, she was overcome by the horrible sensation that someone was missing, only all seven were present… and then she realised that the missing member was the kid.
“Cocky, how’s the suit?” she asked Rael.
“It’s fine,” Rael insisted. “There’s no breach, the damage is armour and systems, the operator space is fine.” Trace didn’t really believe him, but the others would have checked it, and there was nothing anyone could do about it now.
“Cans,” she said, pointing at the canisters for the benefit of Chenkov and Aristan, arriving behind. “Life support in here is good, it was only seventy degrees celsius when we entered, I’m only reading fifty in here, plenty of O2, breathable mix. You won’t need breathers out here or in there.” Because if the cans were breached in Kamala atmosphere, they’d be dead with or without breathers, and the whole thing would be over one way or another before air in the can could run out.
Terez helped the frightened Chenkov with his helmet, cracked the seal as Chenkov took a gasp of unfiltered air, his face screwed up at the taste. “Smells like bugs,” he said. “Hot bugs cooking on a frying pan.”
He climbed from the rest of his suit, as others helped Aristan. Trace went to Kono. “You first,” she told him. “Then me. You get under the airlock, you give me a boost, hard as you can, I think we might be a little short otherwise.” Kono nodded grim agreement. Trace knew he wouldn’t object to anything that put her in the descender first. “Once I’m in,” she continued, “you toss me the canisters.” She hated that, but it had to be done. Those canisters were containing the prizes they’d won from the vault — the entire purpose of this mission. They took priority ahead of everyone, even her… but someone had to be up there first to catch them.
“Could arrange for Aristan’s can to have a leak,” Kono said in a low voice, off coms and close enough for her to hear without assistance.
Trace barely blinked at her Staff Sergeant’s suggestion, and blanked her own coms. “Tempting, but the thing with lunatic leaders is you never know if the next one in line is better or worse. Plus at least we know Aristan values Lisbeth’s life — his successor might not.” Kono said nothing. “And we can’t risk the can’s more important contents anyhow.”
She reactivated coms so they all could hear. “First priority is the cans,” she said. “After that, all functioning suits get into the airlock. If anyone goes down, leave it for the last in line. We can’t have everyone held up in a traffic jam waiting for one broken suit — one person helps whoever’s in trouble, everyone else gets into the airlock. No queues, no delays, got it?”
They kept working, barely even bothering to acknowledge her. They knew, and she knew they did.
“Fast and smooth, people,” Kono told them as Trace checked on Rael at the airlock controls. “Fast and smooth, remember you can’t be fast if you’re rushing. Keep it smooth, don’t rush, do
n’t fuck it up.”
“Cocky,” said Trace, “we need a crash exit.”
Rael nodded. “I’ve got it, suit comp translated the digits for me. Crash exit, it won’t be pretty.”
“It never is.”
They positioned, Kono first at the base of the short stairs to the inner airlock door, then Trace. The airlock would hold two at a time, and they couldn’t let it cycle or it would take them half an hour to get everyone aboard — time Tif was telling them they didn’t have.
“Major!” called Chenkov, looking slim and vulnerable in his spacer jumpsuit as he climbed into his can. “When we crash-exit, this place will probably catch fire. There’s not enough combustion for a major explosion to breach the hull, but it could flame up real good and complicate things.”
“Got it Chenk,” said Trace, unhooking the precious container from the rear of her armour. “You get to hold the prize, take care of it. See you in a few minutes.” She handed it to him, and saw him look grateful to at least have that much to distract himself.
Aristan accepted a similar container from Rolonde, with suitable reverence, as Terez prepared to seal him in. The containers were double-layered, heavy-duty ceramic, enough to prevent temperatures rising faster than five degrees a minute. It was fifty degrees already — two minutes would make it sixty, four would be seventy. If this went wrong, Chenkov and Aristan would expire from the heat well before they ran out of air.
“Back launchers off!” Trace commanded as the lids went on the canisters. “We don’t want missiles detonating in the heat! We keep the rifles in case we need a lever, but they’ll probably melt! All good?”
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 48
