by P. R. Adams
“I’m going through a shuttle radio.”
That explained the signal strength. “What’s your situation?”
“We’re still under attack from Azoren forces, sir, but they seem to be regrouping.”
“What about your people?”
“We’ve suffered a lot of casualties. We lost about half our people coming in. I just sent a text message to Lieutenant Stiles for an update. Audio’s a—”
The humming and squeals intensified.
McLeod checked the communicator. The signal was still closer to green than yellow. “Commander?”
Benson’s voice was a distant whisper, something transmitted from the core of Jotun. Then it was strong again. “—ome sort of attack.”
“What was that? Say again.”
“Colonel McLeod? Agent Patel?”
“Yes?” The excitement in Patel’s voice seemed almost alien. “Your signal broke up. Did you say you had been in communication with Lieutenant Stiles?”
“Yes. She just replied. They’ve retrieved the data. They found your sister.”
“Srisha is alive?”
“Alive, yes. But they’ve lost people. Some sort of attack. She didn’t have much detail. She said this is some sort of forerunner site.”
McLeod’s heart skipped a beat. “Did she say which one?”
“No. We make distinctions?”
“There are forerunners, Commander, and there are forerunners. I can’t imagine the GSA would select a dangerous forerunner site for a listening post.”
Patel snorted. “The ruins almost certainly provided the best opportunity for a spy operation.”
“That’s dangerous thinking. You know the risks involved—”
“Everything is a risk, Avis. Commander Benson, is the lieutenant returning to the crater?”
Benson’s line buzzed for a second. “They’re going to try, but this thing—they can’t seem to target it. Or damage it.”
McLeod turned to the bridge hatch. “I know the feeling. This cruiser…”
“Colonel, you’re having problems with an Azoren ship?”
“We can’t get meaningful lock-on, and when we do hit, it doesn’t do anything.”
“Some of the Azoren forces that attacked have armor that makes them almost invisible. If you’re having trouble with targeting, maybe there’s a connection. Maybe it’s all connected—the armor, the ship, and this thing attacking Stiles. Maybe it’s some sort of forerunner—”
Patel sighed. “Their technology would follow the same path as ours. Stealth is paramount to effectiveness.”
“Captain Gadreau said something along those lines, but I—”
Benson’s line cut out.
McLeod found himself making the same sort of face Chao had made while scrutinizing the weapons console, wishing the connection could be brought back by a hard stare and just wanting it. “Samir?”
Patel seemed to be muttering to himself. “The connection is lost.”
“What she was saying, the possibility of the Azoren exploiting forerunner technology, doesn’t that disturb you?”
“Of course not. They can’t be much further along than us.”
“But what if they’re taking risks we aren’t? What if they aren’t differentiating between the forerunners? How many have we found that weren’t apparently genocidal maniacs?”
“Avis, you sound like a naive ethical philosopher. We’re looking at war. You do what you have to do.”
“You don’t risk genocide.”
“Genocide is just one of many risks. You always weigh risk against reward. If you don’t, you can’t see progress.”
Something cold settled in the pit of McLeod’s stomach. “Samir, was your agency involved in selecting this site?”
“Of course we were consulted. We have the most detailed data on the Azoren.”
“And you knew the nature of these ruins?”
“Everyone knew they were forerunner. They obviously predated Azoren occupation.”
“But which forerunners?”
“You worry too much about things that don’t concern you. Focus on holding that Azoren cruiser off. When I have the data secured, I’ll contact you.”
“Samir—”
The connection was dead again. McLeod shook his head. It was typical SAID and, sadly, typical of Samir Patel. There hadn’t been even a hint of sincere concern about Srisha. All of his attention had been on the data.
But what did that data truly represent? McLeod couldn’t help wondering after hearing Benson.
Only so much could be attributed to coincidence.
Patel had spoken about his sister’s past with disdain and what amounted to embarrassment, then he had claimed a sense of obligation for her protection. To suddenly show diminished concern for her…
The GSA officer pulled out his command tablet as the Clarion entered hard maneuvers again. Before leaving Kedraal, he’d managed to get access to a little data on the people who would be involved in the mission. Records on Benson and her people were thorough, of course, as were records on Scalise and her people. But the SAID had a way of covering tracks. McLeod knew more about Samir Patel through personal and family relations than official records.
But Srisha…
McLeod examined her public records again. She’d been bright enough, with access to quality education. Yes, she’d run with a bad crowd for a little bit, just as her brother had claimed, but there had been time where she’d taken advanced courses, too.
Particulars on those courses would be scrubbed, but there were still ways to fill in data working backwards. People in the GSA should have done that already.
He tapped through the young woman’s recommendations and awards, skimming the notes made by GSA personnel.
What was the old saying? The devil is in the details?
All he had to do was pay more attention to those details to get a better—
McLeod’s fingers clasped the device tighter. How could he have missed what he was seeing now? It was so obvious, so painfully obvious.
It was right there, at the bottom of one of the notes on Srisha’s glowing recommendations from instructors: Gerada DiMateo, instructor, Xenohistory & Necrotech Theory.
Necrotech. Xenohistory. Studying dead cultures and technology.
Srisha had been a student of forerunner archaeology and anthropology. Embarrassing in high society, perhaps, but quite obviously now something that intrigued people in SAID.
And they’d sent her to a known forerunner site. Under the cover of being a liaison with the GSA.
Now McLeod could only wonder what she’d gone looking for in those ruins. And what she’d found.
28
Stiles pushed a huge chunk of plaster aside and stuck her head through the opening Halliwell and Kohn had created. She had to squeeze back out and toss a flare through to get any sense of what she was looking at. It was an open space, just as Srisha had described. The flare painted everything a strange palette of red, which became even more eerie in the frightening silence.
She pulled back through the hole. “I can’t see any stairs from here, but there’s a lot of debris in there. It could be blocking sight to the stairs.”
Srisha nodded. “It is. I’ve been all through that area. I know the stairs are there. You just have to go in far enough.”
“All right. Let’s knock this wall down the rest of the way.”
She backed out to give Kohn some room while Halliwell caught his breath. The big Marine had been doing most of the work, but she sensed that wasn’t all that was behind him doubling over. When he jerked his head to indicate the long hallway, she muted and followed him out. Srisha stayed behind, eyes glued on the opening that had been created.
Once away from the storage room, Halliwell waved Stiles in and pressed his helmet against hers. “You muted?”
“Yes. Something wrong?”
“Maybe.” He leaned back, rolled his shoulders, then pressed against her facemask again. “Does any of th
is make sense to you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“We manage to insert a SIGINT team and an SAID agent onto a moon, they establish a post not one hundred kilometers out from an Azoren military base, and the Azoren never noticed it?”
“We do have competent operatives, Staff Sergeant Halliwell.”
“Sure. I’d imagine the Azoren do, too.”
“What’s your point?”
Halliwell stretched back to glance at the doorway, then pressed his rebreather to hers again. “All these dead. Some of them didn’t even get a shot off. None of them down here. Does this lady look like someone who could have survived something that did that?”
“Are you saying a woman couldn’t handle a threat to her life?”
“You know better than that. I wouldn’t have any other Marine covering my back than Corporal Grier.”
“Then what are you saying?”
The big man shook sweat from his forehead. “I’m not sure. I just don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand, I don’t trust.”
“You need to work on your trust issues.”
“I’ll do that. But one thing you should ask yourself: When did this SAID agent get the time to go searching around in that space? And why would she? You can’t see stairs from here, but she knows they’re in there.”
“So she explored the place.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You have any reason to doubt her?”
“I don’t know her, that’s all. People need to prove themselves to me before I trust them. Especially intelligence operatives.” He squinted his eyes.
Fine. I haven’t earned his trust, either. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“That’s all I can ask for.”
He ambled back into the storeroom, and a few seconds later, the crack of the sledgehammer filled the hallway.
His words stayed with Stiles, though. She realized that he had vocalized her own concerns about the situation from the moment Colonel McLeod had told her about the mission. It was no accident she’d been told to rendezvous at Tamos. It was no accident the Clarion had been there, waiting. It was just small enough a ship not to upset higher-ups when it was diverted for a GSA operation.
It was the same for the gunships. And for emergency recall to service of retired personnel. From a remote outpost like Tamos, cries of protest wouldn’t reach the capital for days. Everyone would be dead or returned to station by the time parliament could act.
McLeod and the GSA knew they would be going into Azoren space when Stiles returned, or maybe if she didn’t return. And Patel’s presence meant the SAID knew they would be going in as well.
The only question that had been bugging her, the root that she couldn’t get at, was whether the expectation had been a rescue or something else.
Timing. If she could figure out the chronology, she would know. But that sort of information was now in the domain of the SAID. Only Srisha had survived, and digging through the data Kohn had downloaded was going to take far more time than Stiles had.
Same as the data in the eye she’d taken from Penn’s corpse.
No one wanted her poking around, not even the colonel. And that wasn’t simply the result of chaos caused by operations against the Azoren.
She hustled back to the communications room, nodding at Grier before heading inside. “Sergeant Carruth, any luck?”
The Marine sighed. “Not a lick of luck to be had in this mess, Lieutenant.”
“Do we have options?”
“Rig something through those computers, maybe? Whatever that thing did, it fried the guts of this detonator, and the battery didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s gone, that’s how.”
“No battery means no detonation?”
“Well, reckon we just need something to send a big current at a specific point in time to pull off a detonation, but…” He nodded at all the racked equipment. “It’s like being drowned in gold. Don’t do me no good.”
“I’ll see if Petty Officer Kohn has any ideas.”
“Great. Y’know, I can’t figure how that thing would’ve even known where to look for these explosives, much less to yank out a battery.”
“Maybe the team didn’t hide the explosives like they were supposed to.”
“I guess. They went to the trouble of putting it back here, in a closet, out of sight, and they built that false panel. Just doesn’t make sense.”
Stiles paused at the doorway to study the open hatch above the ladder. “Corporal Grier, has it poked its head back down?”
“Not even once, Lieutenant. You think it knows what you’re doing back there?”
“We’ll have to assume it suspects something’s up. Stay sharp.”
“As a razor.”
Stiles got back to the room just as Halliwell’s hammer punched through the last of the bottom section of the wall. Kohn immediately went to work clearing rubble and knocking off the final bits that clung to the floor. Srisha hugged a shelving frame as if it were a life raft.
Halliwell set his hammer down and yanked away a dangling section of plaster that brushed at his helmet. “All clear. You want to point me to those stairs?”
The SAID agent squeezed between the two men. “Past that pile of what looks like red crystal. Go to the right, between mounds of rock where the walls gave and parts of the ceiling collapsed. It’s a few big turns. You’ll see the stairs beside an enclosed space, almost as big as this. Maybe two hundred meters. I-I can show you.”
Stiles tapped Halliwell on the shoulder. “I’ll go. I want you to watch this opening. And Petty Officer Kohn, you need to head back to the comms center and see if you can help Sergeant Carruth out with the demolitions pack.”
Kohn looked hurt. “I don’t really know demolitions—”
“He needs your ability to solve problems.” Stiles smiled and immediately felt guilty at the way he perked up. Manipulation wasn’t what the young man needed, not at that moment.
Halliwell brushed against her as he grabbed his weapon. “Watch your back out there, Lieutenant.” He glanced at the SAID agent’s back, then handed Stiles her carbine.
After checking the weapon’s magazine, Stiles pulled Srisha back and hunched low until through the opening. A toss sent the flare deeper into the room but also changed the color of the piles of junk. “Red crystal” was only “crystal” now.
The SAID agent shambled past, pointing the way. “Over here.”
Out of sight. Convenient.
Stiles followed, weapon at the ready, lamplight darting from one dancing shadow to another. She kept the SAID agent in sight but a few meters ahead. Just as had been described, they followed a maze of twists through rubble fields until they stood next to a shattered door and the base of a set of stairs.
Something about the doorway caught the lieutenant’s attention; there were scrape marks and cracks. It looked a lot like sledgehammer blows had broken away sections of the frame. “Was the entry like this when you came here?”
“No. We considered using that space, too.” Srisha seemed hypnotized by the opening. “It was promising, but…”
The space inside was big, and it was similar to the improvised listening post. Especially the gutted, frozen bodies and the bright red sparkle of blood that dripped from the ceiling and walls like icicles.
Stiles tightened her grip on her carbine. “Azoren, I gather.”
“Scientists, I think.” Srisha came a step nearer but stopped when Stiles let the barrel of her gun drift a little closer to the SAID agent. “I—We thought there might be something of value in there.”
“I would imagine so.” The flashlight caught something—electronic gear, piled in a corner. Gore-covered. “Was it in there when you arrived?”
“Yes. Sleeping. I think.”
“And you let it out.”
“I—We wanted the information. The Azoren abandoned this place when their researchers were wiped out, but they found some
thing.”
“I can see that.”
Srisha took another step. “We—”
“This weapon’s loaded, Srisha.”
The SAID agent stopped. “We have to keep up with them. They’re taking chances with their research, looking into things we’ve been afraid to look into.”
“Forerunner technology.”
“It can take us into the next realm. What these people knew… What they did—”
“Led to wars that wiped them out. I know.” Stiles pointed the gun to the stairs. “Up.”
They had to hunch low to get past a section of wall that had collapsed, then climb over another chunk of wall, but the stairs were intact and they did lead up to an opening and a landing. The landing was less stable than the stairs, with sections that had cracked and fallen into the subterranean area. And everything was enclosed by slabs of wall that had fallen in, creating an almost pyramid-like structure maybe four meters high.
Stiles played her light across the slabs—no openings, and everything looked solid despite the cracks.
There was no exit.
“We’d need to blow through these walls.”
Srisha nodded. “We could use the demolitions.”
“That would draw the thing after us.” Stiles rapped the weapon butt against a slab. “With those…claws, it’s cutting through armor like it’s nothing. Why isn’t it just slicing its way out whenever it gets cut off?”
“A robot. Very specific programming, probably.”
“Protect the ruins?”
“Or hunt anything down that enters what used to be the city. Something like that. It seems to be limited by what it can perceive. There might be other commands, but we haven’t triggered them.”
“If we were trying to flee, would it follow?”
“I don’t know. It’s left the ruins, but I don’t know where it goes. Maybe it perceives humans as an infection.”
“But it left you alone.”
“When I heard it had killed the people who went out to hunt it down, I sealed myself off in the bathroom. It hadn’t tried to break out of the room where I—we—found it sleeping. There wasn’t even damage to the door.”
“And no one said anything?”