Terror at Roschin Colony

by Scott Lucas

  After she turned the corner, Tem backtracked and reviewed the home plate on the door she had exited. The light silver nameplate read: MILO ARKARIAN.

  “Who is that?” Tem whispered to himself and noted to search for the name in the colony database at the next chance. There was nothing left to do except to return to the celebration.

  The group of younger technicians had stopped dancing and engrossed in a drinking competition. Other colonists chatted at the tables, and the staff had brought out more plates of food.

  Tem returned to his previous position beside the wall and observed the festivities. He perused the party, but he had a feeling he witnessed enough suspicious behavior to go on. He located DeWilda and intermittently watched her throughout the night. She walked among the colonists, congratulating them on their part in the shipment's success. She played her part well, but Tem noticed a certain strain in her eyes, and a nervousness when she walked.

  Chapter Eleven: War Plans

  Tem arrived first for the colony leaders meeting the next morning. He accessed the computers with the temporary administration code that Ahmad provided. Tem glanced toward the door, and opened the colony personnel files. He whispered the name outside the room that Orba left.

  Milo Arkarian was an android technician. His file revealed nothing remarkable about him because he was unremarkable. Like most of the colonists, he had basic training in android programming.

  Tem sat back and considered. It was possible that he had happened upon a rendezvous between lovers. Tem smirked. However, DeWilda appeared troubled when she left the room. A falling-out between lovers, perhaps?

  Tem brought up a schematic of the asteroid belt. By the time the rest of the colony executives arrived, Tem marked several of the nearest and largest asteroids with a hovering green icon.

  Wurth and Orba arrived together a second later, and Tem quickly closed Milo’s profile and returned his attention to the layout of the asteroid belt. Vosper arrived a few moments later, nursing a hangover. He grumbled in response to Tem’s greeting and slumped into a chair.

  “Can someone kill the lights?” Vosper asked.

  Five minutes later, Orba DeWilda strode into the conference room. She was out of breath, but otherwise her demeanor and expression were her normal self.

  Tem reminded himself to review her records again. He had read her file, and nothing stood out. no red flags. She was the eldest daughter of a low-ranking politician, and her mother had been an advocate for one of the many “clean universe” groups. It made sense that DeWilda would become the head of a prominent mining company. Ahmad’s record looked a lot more suspicious that Orba’s. Still, what he had seen during the celebration burned in his memory. Orba’s inscrutable mask had slipped.

  “They will want our blood for the next shipment,” said Vosper.

  He glanced at the Vice President, who had already taken her seat. She played it cool. Vosper continued.

  “This shipment succeeded mainly because of the efforts of our security consultant, who single-handedly captured a dreadnaught. They did not see that coming, but the next time and they won’t make the same error.”

  DeWilda laced her fingers together on top of the table. “What do you have in mind, Vosper?”

  Vosper looked to Tem, who motioned toward the layout of the asteroid belt. “You have something, Mister Blaev?”

  Tem twirled the hologram of the asteroid for a different view of the map. This time, the schematic zoomed in on a cluster of asteroids nearest the colony.

  “First, we place mines on the asteroids here and here where they hid before the most recent attack. If they return to hide in those places again, we detonate the mines and damage their ships.”

  Wurth countered, “There may be more deposits of ore inside those asteroids. This plan wastes a lot of a potential product.”

  Tem pointed to the schematic again. “See those asteroids? They’re caught in Roschin’s orbit. It’s possible that when the smaller asteroids come apart, the fragments will push toward us. Some Z-ore will rain down here, where your bots can pick them up instead of having to mine. Seems easier to me.”

  Vosper nodded. Wurth brought up the same schematic on his section of the table. He ran a couple of calculations in a sidebar, referring to icons that hovered above various asteroids with records of their mass and coordinates.

  “I thought you weren’t a scientist,” he said.

  Tem shrugged. “I’ve calculated my crash-landing trajectory several times when pressed for a time,” Tem said. “It uses many of the same factors into account. Gravity, velocity, mass.”

  Wurth nodded. “It checks out.” He dismissed his own schematic and sat back in his chair. “What else do you have in mind?”

  Tem tapped the holographic map again. Another series of icons appeared over various asteroids. “Second, we place beacons along this path.” Tem pointed to the places on the asteroid field with the Roschin Colony in the middle. “If we can place the beacons in these places, we can cast a net which will prevent the Ler ships from escaping.”

  “Prevent them from escaping?” Wurth asked.

  “Yes, that way they cannot retreat. This colony has enough to defend itself from another dreadnaught attack. They win because they can escape with the ore. If they can’t escape, we can end this.”

  Vosper nodded, “Go on.”

  “Third, we need to retract the orbital portal rings and send them up after we have destroyed the pirates.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I was the pirate captain, the orbital portal rings would be my first target on the return journey. The pirates ignored the portal rings in the last attack because the cargo ship had never made it that far before. The pirates will have to account for the portal rings in their next attack. If the cargo ship cannot reach the orbital portal rings, then the ship would take years to reach Tenzen. If they blow up the rings, the cargo ship will limp along without star drives.”

  “Have we ever thought of putting star drives on the cargo ship?” Vosper asked.

  Wurth shook his head. “We considered it early in the design process. The cargo ship itself can withstand the velocity, but it would rip apart the barge it’s towing.”

  “We do it this way,” Tem said. “Sabotage their places of cover, set up a net with the beacons, and protect the orbital portal rings at all costs.”

  Orba and Wurth looked to Vosper, who nodded.

  “Sounds good to me. Let’s try it.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Tem and a handful of technicians flew to the smaller asteroids around the colony. They debated sending androids to deliver the mines, but Wurth reminded them one android already malfunctioned.They elected not to use the androids until they learned who had tampered with the androids.

  They assigned one larger shuttle to each asteroid, and a handful of ships hovered in orbit to keep watch for approaching pirates. They laced seven asteroids with mines. Tem’s group headed to the asteroid farthest from the colony. This asteroid was so large that it had been named and was used as a navigational reference point when traversing the belt. The first miners called it Mentor.

  Tem lead his group on the surface of Mentor. They had landed at the edge of a gully on the asteroid’s face and unloaded their cargo from a rectangular hover cart that drifted at the front of the group. Although the gravity was still strong enough to anchor the group to the surface, they felt lighter as they moved toward the gully.

  About fifty feet in, they stopped and unloaded the first mine. Two technicians remained behind with the mine and began to dig a hole inside the asteroid’s brittle crust. The rest of the group headed to the next spot. They continued to leave groups to bury mines until they reached the end of the small gully. Once the setup was complete, they hailed the shuttle, which swooped in low and retrieved the squad with skyhooks. It was too dangerous to trek back to the other end of the gully when there were twenty mines buried everywhere.

  Back inside the shuttle, Tem joined the pilo
t in the cockpit for a flyby of the rest of the asteroid. They drifted a few hours to reach the opposite hemisphere from the gully where they had planted the first set of mines. Afterward, they moved closer and scanned for a spot that looked workable.

  “Hopefully, we can find another gully,” Tem said. “The closer to the asteroid’s core, the better.”

  One technician read Mentor’s topography readout. The technician told Tem, “Someone had mapped a hollow vein somewhere in this area. It descended nearly twelve meters.”

  “Keep an eye out for the entrance.”

  Someone spotted what looked like a pockmark on the landscape. The shuttle descended, jostling the occupants, who had been sitting on two benches for two hours. They held onto the safety bar, bumping into each other as the vessel completed its descent.

  The shuttle’s side hatch opened. Tem and the technicians exited onto the asteroid’s surface with an anti-grav cart loaded with twenty more mines.

  “Is there an outlet further along?” Tem asked. “It will be tedious work planting the mines and returning. We’d have to start at the deepest point and work our way backwards toward the surface.”

  The technician in charge of the topographical maps shook his head. “There’s no outlet.”

  “We can bury the mines, but prime them on the way out.”

  The cart steered toward the opening to the tunnel, and the technicians unloaded the mines, distributing one to each pair of technicians. They moved into the tunnel single-file. Tem counted steps, and every fifty feet he ordered the rearmost pair to stop and bury their mine. Because they were underground, there was no way to use a skyhook to extract them.

  They still buried the mines in pairs, but left the mines unprimed. It took an hour of walking before Tem and the last technician remained. They had not reached the tunnel’s end and had no idea the depth, but they were out of mines and this would have to suffice.

  “We’ve reached the site for the twentieth mine,” Tem said into his comm link. The technician had already pulled out a collapsible plasma shovel and dug a hole. The surface was denser than inside the gully. Other groups complained about this over the radio as Tem moved further inside the tunnel. Tem joined the technician with his own plasma shovel.

  Within a few minutes, his breathing became more audible in the confines of his helmet. It was strange sometimes to be out in space where sound did not exist outside a small bubble like that.

  After a few minutes, Tem stopped and slapped the comm switch to connect him with the rest of the technicians. “Head back to the surface. I’ll be coming up soon and we’ll prime the mines en route.”

  A chorus of voices acknowledged the order, and the rest of the group confirmed that they buried the mines and ready to go.

  Tem turned back toward the hole, just as the technician’s shovel came at him. The blow would have carved him between the shoulders if he had not moved. Instead, it crashed against the front of his helmet. Tem staggered back and slapped the comm switch. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The technician made no comment. Tem could not see the man’s features, hindered by the interior lights along the inner rim of his helmet. There was something familiar about the technician’s face, however, Tem was too busy dodging another frenzied blow to recall.

  The shovel collided with the tunnel. The attacker sidestepped into the newly dug a hole as he corrected and made for Tem again. This time Tem saw no other option. This man would keep on coming. The next time the shovel came his way, Tem dodged sideways, pivoted back toward the attacker, and grabbed him by the weapon arm.

  Tem, trained in low-grav combat, had the upper hand. He flipped the man’s legs out from under him and pinned him to the tunnel floor.

  The assassin technician struggled to grasp the shovel. Tem grabbed him by the wrist, and dealt a swift blow to the man’s elbow. He saw, but did not hear the man scream as the elbow bent upward, popping out of its sockets. The shovel dropped, and Tem released the now useless arm.

  One technician’s voice squawked from the shuttle’s radio. “Is everything all right up there? You guys’ vitals are spiking like crazy.”

  Several tense seconds passed. Tem stood above the man lying quivering on the ground. He touched the comm switch. “Everything is fine up here. A scare. That’s all.”

  Tem wanted to question the unknown technician, but that was impossible with everyone else listening. Tem kept the failed assassination attempt a secret.

  Tem crouched and studied the man’s face. Now that he viewed him without the violent movements, he recognized the face. They had never met, but Tem had viewed his file just that day. It was Milo Arkarian, whose cabin Orba had visited during the celebration.

  A strange spasm shook Milo’s face. At first, Tem thought that it was a reaction to the pain the man’s broken arm, but then Milo’s entire body began to convulse. A milky liquid spattered the lower half of the visor.

  “No! Don’t you dare die on me!” Tem leaned over the man and pinned him down as he continued to thrash.

  The pilot transmitted from the shuttle, “Arkarian, check your life support!”

  Tem grabbed Milo’s wrist and flicked through the readouts. The balance of chemicals in the suit was askew. There was an inordinate amount of cyanide present. Tem hurried to resume normal levels, but as he waited for the oxygen level to normalize, Milo went still.

  The technician from the ship chimed again. “Mister Blaev, are you with Arkarian? He’s flatlined.”

  Tem barely saw anything within the helmet through the film of vomit on the interior, but he saw enough to witness a rolled-back eyeball within drooping lids. He touched his comm switch. “I think he’s gone.”

  “What happened?”

  “Another cave in,” Tem said. “I think the first one shook something loose.”

  Tem primed the first mine as planned. He left Milo’s body. The less evidence, the better. The detonation would obliterate everything.

  Tem assumed that Milo had started the cyanide leak himself. The man possessed information that he knew would come out if they captured him alive. It seemed he would rather die than give names. Tem remembered Orba DeWilda’s visit to Milo’s cabin the night before. No such thing as a coincidence.

  Chapter Twelve: An Internal Disruption

  The detonations proceeded as scheduled. As Tem’s calculations predicted, the gravitational pull of the Roschin asteroid attracted pieces of the incinerated asteroids. Vosper ordered the release of the bots out onto the surface of the asteroid to collect any ore that may have rained down along with the rubble of the asteroids.

  Although they had recovered no remains of Milo, the colony held a ceremony in the landing bay the next day and launched an empty, commemorative burial tube into space.

  Tem watched the reactions of the colonists, and he did not have to look closely to see who had taken Milo’s death the hardest. Orba sobbed throughout the ceremony and refused to leave when Rhonda approached and gently touched her arm.

  Vosper noticed Tem’s curious look. “There were only rumors,” he said, and glanced toward the single burial pod waiting for launch into space. “About Orba and Milo.”

  “Was their connection common knowledge in the colony?” Tem asked.

  “It’s a small colony.”

  “The outcome might have gone a lot different if I had known.”

  “The man died in a cave-in, Tem.”

  Tem’s silence was enough to arouse Vosper’s curiosity, and when the ceremony concluded, he jerked his head to indicate Tem should follow. They moved through the corridors to Vosper’s office.

  Vosper shut the door. “You were with Milo when he died. Was it a cave in?”

  “That’s what I told the technicians.”

  Chu stood in front of the door as though he expected Tem to bolt. He crossed his arms and reminded Tem again that this man was somebody’s parent. “And what really happened?”

  “He tried to kill me.”

  “And you…” />
  “I subdued him. He tampered with his suit, injected himself with cyanide when he failed to kill me.”

  Vosper shook his head in disbelief. “Suicide? What could he possibly have been trying to hide?”

  “Were he and DeWilda working together?”

  “No.”

  “You seem sure.”

  “Orba helped build this project. She poured her entire inheritance into it. She has no family, no children. This project is all she has. What I don’t understand is why the man who loved her would try to sabotage her.”

  “It’s possible his affections wore off. They had an argument the day before he died.”

  “You heard them?”

  Tem shook his head. “I saw her leaving his quarters. She looked furious.”

  “We need to talk to her.”

  Tem and Vosper stood outside of Orba’s quarters.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Vosper asked. “She’s bereaved.”

  “We don’t have time to be considerate,” Tem said, and pressed the doorbell.

  The door slid open. Orba had changed from her usual business attire into loose-fitting pants and shirt beneath a bathrobe, and not much else. She said nothing as they stood in her doorway.

  Vosper cleared her throat. “Apologies for disturbing you, Orba.”

  Tem cut to the chase. “We have some questions about you and Milo.”

  Orba rubbed her eyes. “Conference room. Ten minutes.”

  Tem half-expected Orba not to show, but she arrived promptly, once again dressed in her company uniform. She had tied her hair up again, though she had rushed it. She sat opposite from Tem and the others and opened her arms with indifferent acceptance. “Ask away.”

  Vosper made an uncertain sound and looked to Tem.

  Tem leaned forward across the table and looked Orba in the eyes. “How well did you know Milo Arkarian?”