Exodus: Sci-Fi Thriller (The Belt Book 5)

by Gerald M. Kilby

  “That’s crazy,” Scott said. “How’s that even possible?”

  “We should go out there and take a look. We’ve still got another ninety minutes on the clock.” Miranda looked directly at Scott, tuning in to his reaction.

  He stared back at her blankly.

  “It would take us fifteen minutes to get to our shuttle from here, another twenty to be over in that area,” she continued.

  “If they can hide a ship from Aria, they can hide from any of the shuttle’s sensors.” Scott shook his head, dismissing the idea.

  “Except for eyeballs.” Miranda gestured at the 3D map and zoomed in on the area. “If I were trying to hide a ship out there, then it would be in a high-sided valley or crater with a flat floor. And close, but not too close, to the main highway.” She leaned in and extended an index finger. “Right about there.”

  “Okay, say we do find it,” Scott conceded. “Then what?” He stood upright and folded his arms.

  “Then we take them out. This is a small luxury ship. There’s probably less than fifteen people on it, most of whom are probably not fighters.” She glared at Scott. “I’ve taken on ships with worse odds than this one, single-handed. It’s all about stealth.”

  Scott remained silent for a moment as he contemplated the insanity of Miranda’s proposal. “Arriving in a shuttle is hardly stealthy. They’ll spot us a mile away.”

  “We don’t have to land right on top of them, just somewhere close—assuming we find them. And they won’t be expecting us, they’ll just think we’re a standard shuttle flight passing over.”

  “I might be able to keep you hidden,” Luca said, “but it’s tricky. The neural lace I’m using is crap—like threading a needle wearing EVA suit gloves. And the bandwidth out of here is low. But it may be possible.”

  Miranda gave an expansive gesture with both hands. “Well then, are we doing this?”

  21

  A Foolhardy Errand

  Luca paced around her accommodation module in the science institute and considered the intricacies of the mission they were about to embark on—mostly, all the things that could go wrong. It was typical of her mother just to dive headlong into direct action—why employ a subtle solution when hand-to-hand combat was on offer? But even if they were to be successful in rescuing Steph and Cyrus, it wouldn’t end there—more attempts would be made, some other time, some other place. The VanHeilding Corporation were nothing if not relentless in their desire to have Luca all sliced up into petri dishes in one of their genetics labs.

  But she had to put all this pessimistic speculation out of her head now. She had a job to do—keep Miranda’s shuttle from being tracked, keep it off the grid.

  Luca jacked-in.

  It had taken Scott and Miranda longer than anticipated to get to the shuttle port and get the craft airborne. This suited Luca, since it gave her time to focus her mind on the task of concealing it from the network. It now flew low over the western edge of Jezero Crater, hugging the surface contours, making its way toward an area known as the Nili Fossae trench. Luca had locked on to its data signature and was working hard to keep it from leaking location packets into the city’s flight control network. With the shuttle’s identification beacon already deactivated, it was now hidden from all but the most forensic of data analysis.

  As Luca bent her mind to the task, she realized that she was utilizing exactly the same methodology as the node-runners were using for the VanHeilding ship. They’re out there now, she thought, embedded in the data-stream, manipulating the transmissions—and for a brief moment, Luca lost her concentration and scanned for their signatures.

  She soon sensed them. Not as distinct minds within the grid, but as fleeting glimpses, like ephemeral ghosts lurking in the digital undergrowth. She felt an urge to seek them out, confront them mind-to-mind. But that would be dangerous, not just because she would be revealing herself, but because she was not mentally strong enough anymore to take them on.

  “Luca.” Miranda’s voice broke into her mind through a comms link with the shuttle. “We’re nearing the area where the rover vanished. You seeing anything?”

  Luca resumed her focus. “Eh, I’ve been getting hints of node-runner activity, but I’m not risking trying to zone in on it.”

  “Okay, we’re going to do a sweep of the area, heading north up along this valley. Just keep us hidden as much as you can.”

  “Will do.” Luca now began to scour beacon data for this sector. Mostly it was just rover traffic on the Jezero-to-Syrtis highway along with some commercial shuttle transports, yet she began to sense gaps in the transmission noise, dropped data-packets. As she bent her mind to this anomaly, she felt the presence of node-runners again, more strongly this time. She was getting close, perhaps too close.

  But Steph and Cyrus’s lives depended on the success of this mission, so she decided to give in to her urge and dig deeper. Yet she was beginning to run hot; her neural pathways were working hard to keep her footprint hidden from both Aria and the node-runners, as well as keep the shuttle stealthy. The neural lace was also compounding the issue with its limited bandwidth. But try she must, so she broke cover for a nanosecond to probe the packet data gaps, tracing the source, analyzing its nature. They were masking not just terrestrial beacon data, but orbital satellite data as well, meaning they were hiding a substantial object—a ship, parked way out in the valley.

  She pulled back just as the node-runners began to sense an anomaly in the data-stream. Hopefully they had not reckoned on that anomaly being Luca.

  She called the shuttle. “Miranda?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “I have coordinates for you. I’m pretty sure it’s where the ship is. Not far from where you are now.”

  “Good work. We’ve still got another thirty-seven minutes on the clock. We can still do this.” Miranda signed off.

  “There! I see it.” Scott was looking at a multispectrum feed from a camera on the right-hand side of the shuttle’s undercarriage. A ghostly, iridescent shape glowed out of the darkness as the shuttle banked.

  Miranda leveled out the craft. “Okay, I’ll land it over there, behind that ridge. We can EVA from there.”

  She took the shuttle northwest around a kilometer away and brought it down in a cloud of swirling dust, trusting that it wouldn’t be seen tucked in behind the ridge.

  “Luca, we’ve found it. Sending you some details.” Scott studied the camera feeds from their flyby. “Any help on finding a way in would be great.”

  “I can’t hack it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Luca replied. “Much too risky. But I’ll probably be able to identify it and get you an interior schematic.”

  “Okay, that would help.”

  Miranda unstrapped her harness and headed toward the airlock, grabbing an EVA suit helmet on the way. “We’ll need them to open the front door for us, and I have just the thing for that. It’s worked for me so many times that I can’t believe people still fall for it.”

  Scott check his plasma pistol, clipped on his helmet, and stepped into the airlock beside Miranda. The outer hatch opened onto a dusty nighttime Martian surface. A canopy of dim stars overhead afforded them almost no light, so they operated using the helmet visor’s night vision. Scott scanned the area looking for a route to bring them to the ship that would keep them concealed as much as possible.

  “This way, I think,” he said, and started off.

  “Wait up. We’re going to need a maintenance droid.” Miranda gestured over a console on her left wrist. A hatch opened on the underside of the shuttle, deploying a squat robot onto the surface.

  “What do we need that for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They moved off, climbing toward the top of the ridge, the maintenance droid following behind on robust tracked wheels.

  As they moved, Luca came back on comms, sending them details of the ship’s layout. “This is all I could find. It’s not the exact ship, so the interior might be a little
different.”

  “Okay, got it,” Miranda answered.

  They continued on until they reached the top of the ridge. Down below, they could see the ship nestled tightly into the crater valley, around five hundred meters away.

  “I can’t believe they could get that thing onto this planet without a leaving a trace.” Scott zoomed in on his visor to get a better look.

  “I’m impressed with their piloting. That’s a very narrow parking spot. Anyway, let’s hope we’re right about this and Steph and Cyrus are inside.” She pointed southwest, up along the crater wall. “I think we need to approach from that side. If these schematics that Luca sent are good, then that will be in their blind spot.”

  “Okay, but I still don’t get the droid.”

  “You’ll see.”

  They moved off again, leaving the maintenance robot behind, and circled around to the western side of the crater. Then, keeping low, they moved in on the ship. After a few tense moments, they ended up crouching under the cover on one of its massive landing struts.

  “Watch.” Miranda pointed at where they had left the droid. She gestured over her wrist console and the robot began moving down the side of the ridge and onto the crater floor, kicking up a trail of dust as it went, in full view of the ship.

  Scott watched this ghostly dance through his night-vision visor for a while and began to understand what Miranda was planning. Then, a source of bright illumination blossomed to his right, close to their location. He dialed down the night vision and could now see that a cargo ramp on the underside of the ship had lowered, and two crew were walking out to investigate the droid.

  “Told you. It works every time. Never fails to get the door open.” She unclipped her pistol and moved forward, creeping up behind the two crew, and blasted both before they knew what hit them. “Quick, let’s get inside.”

  They moved up the ramp to the airlock, and Miranda stabbed the button to open it. “According to the schematics, this should open up into a large cargo hold with a series of ancillary storage rooms on both port and starboard. That would be a good place to keep a few captives. Also, there should be an interface terminal for the ship’s network just inside the airlock door.”

  Scott nodded as he unclipped his pistol. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  The outer door closed and the airlock hissed as it went through its compression and decontamination cycle. Scott and Miranda took up positions on either side of the interior door, minimizing their profiles. The door swung open and Scott peeked out, sweeping around the cargo hold, pistol held high.

  “What the…” A startled crew member took a direct hit to the chest from Miranda before he could do anything stupid.

  Scott continued with his visual sweep. “Clear,” he said finally, and started looking for the network interface while Miranda went to check on the downed crew member. He found it just where they said it would be and took this to be a good omen. He extracted a comms unit from a cargo pocket on the side of his EVA suit and connected it to the interface port. This would facilitate a data connection from their shuttle, hopefully providing Luca with a side-door into the ship’s systems and a way to find where Cyrus and Steph were located.

  “Done,” he spoke into his comms.

  “Okay, give me a minute,” Luca replied.

  “Don’t take too long, we don’t have much time.”

  “Then stop talking and let me figure it out.”

  Scott stopped talking, looking around for Miranda instead. She had trussed up the unconscious crew member with a few zip ties and was moving back to Scott’s location. “Is she in?”

  “Working on it.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I know, I know, just let her do her thing.”

  They were silent for a moment. As they waited, Scott scanned the cargo bay and wondered what cameras might be hidden in the corners and alcoves—were they exposed? Had anyone spotted them yet?

  Miranda was getting itchy, too. She kept her pistol high and at the ready.

  Luca’s voice burst through the EVA suit comms. “Second storeroom on the port side. They’re in there, both Steph and Cyrus.”

  Miranda was instantly on her feet and heading for the storerooms.

  “I’ve got the security systems disabled…I think,” Luca said.

  “You think?”

  “It’s a strange system, multiple layers, and I’m trying not to be noticed. The node-runners have their concentration focused on exterior systems. Fortunately, they’re not monitoring the ship’s internal systems. But…”

  “But what?” By now Miranda had vaporized the door lock with a high-intensity plasma blast and kicked it open.

  “Nothing, forget it,” said Luca. “Just don’t hang around too long.”

  Inside, Steph and Cyrus were crouched behind a stack of empty packing crates.

  “Miranda? Scott? How…” Cyrus looked from one to the other, trying to figure out how this stroke of good fortune had come about.

  “No time to explain,” Scott cut him off. “Anyone injured?”

  “We both took a stun blast earlier, but we’re okay.”

  “Then quick, this way. There’s an EVA suit locker beside the airlock. Hurry, let’s get you out of here.” Miranda gestured for them to move.

  They made their way to the locker and Scott and Miranda began pulling out suits, checking their resources as they did.

  “How the heck did you find us?” Cyrus grabbed a helmet from the rack and slotted it over his head.

  “Where’s Luca? Is she okay?” Steph already had her helmet attached and running through the diagnostics routine, a self-check of the suit’s integrity.

  “She’s fine—she helped us find you.” But Scott was getting anxious; they were taking too long getting ready. He kept looking around the cargo bay for any sign of potential trouble.

  Then it came.

  The alert light on the airlock started flashing red. Someone had just entered, presumably the two crew who had gone out onto the surface to check out the droid decoy. Their tough EVA suits must have mitigated most of the energy from Miranda’s plasma weapon. Now they were back in action and probably very pissed off.

  “Crap, they’re coming back.” Scott gestured at the airlock.

  Miranda lifted her weapon. “So we just blast them again. Get ready.” She moved in behind some cover. Scott did likewise, his weapon trained at the airlock door. Cyrus and Steph took cover behind them.

  The airlock began executing its pressurization cycle, and Scott kept his aim fixed on the door. But before it had finished its cycle, he heard an internal door opening to the cargo hold followed by the sound of heavy feet.

  “Goddamnit.” Scott swung around to target the source and saw two well-armed crew coming his way. He fired off two blasts. One hit, sending the recipient tumbling backward. The second crew member dove for cover and returned fire. A plasma bolt sailed over Scott’s head just as the airlock door opened and more plasma fire headed in his direction.

  “We’re trapped here!” he exclaimed, firing off a few wild shots as two more crew came into the cargo bay.

  “We’ve got to get to the airlock.” Miranda’s voice sounded desperate. “Focus our fire on the two in the airlock. Get it clear.”

  Scott shifted his position, but before he could take aim, he heard a scream from Steph. She was hit and sprawled unmoving on the floor. “Steph’s down. Cyrus, you’ll need to drag her to the airlock.”

  Miranda fired a barge of blasts into the airlock, hoping to hit someone. She broke cover, moving toward the open door, firing as she went. “Let’s go, let’s go…hurry.”

  Cyrus began hauling Steph’s inert body as Scott took up a rear-guard action, firing wildly just to lay down some cover, all the time backing toward the airlock. He chanced a quick glance around at Miranda to see how far he had to move when he saw her take a direct hit to the left shoulder. She let out a scream, spun around with the impact, and collapsed on the floor.
<
br />   “Miranda? Miranda?!” he called out, but there was no response.

  “Drop your weapons,” one of the crew shouted. “There’s no way out for you.”

  Scott looked over at Cyrus, who returned his look with a shake of his head. The game was up. They had tried, but with two down and a multitude of plasma weapons trained on them, they were trapped with no way out.

  Scott raised a free hand, lowering his weapon with the other and tossing it on the floor. The crew now began to reveal themselves, moving out from cover. One came over and kicked away Scott’s fallen weapon.

  “Scott,” Luca’s voice echoed in his helmet comms. “I’m sorry, they tricked me. I don’t know how, but they knew I was in the data-stream all along. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “What’s done is done. At least we tried.”

  Out from behind the shadows of the cargo bay, a new figure emerged, expensively dressed with a definitive air of authority. The crew stepped aside to let him through. He strode to where Scott and Cyrus stood, giving them both a long, considered look. He then focused his attention down at the fallen figures of Miranda and Steph.

  “A foolhardy errand.” He looked back at Scott. “So unnecessary.” He gestured vaguely to one of his crew. “Check on these two, get them some medical assistance. I don’t want them to die—at least, not yet.”

  He returned his attention to Scott. “Your daughter is proving to be very stubborn. All this could have been avoided if she simply complied with my request. So here’s the new deal.” He took a step forward, close enough that Scott could smell his breath. “We know she’s in the data-stream, we know everything she’s doing, every system she attempts to infiltrate. There is no escaping the mind’s eye of a master node-runner—it is futile to even try. Inform her that unless she’s physically here within the hour, on board this ship, then one of you will die, and another every fifteen minutes thereafter. If she alerts the authorities, then all of you will die. She comes alone. I don’t care how—she can walk if necessary.” He stabbed a finger in Scott’s chest. “One hour.”