“That would be possible,” she said, “but the security team reported only one set of footprints on the apron.”
“I’m sure records would also show if someone had gone outside?”
She nodded. “Everyone is auto-logged when they go through an airlock.”
“We’ll need to look at those records to be sure,” he said, pulling out his thinpad and scribbling a note. “Are there any outer support facilities around the perimeter of the colony?”
“Other than the spaceport, no,” Dr. Sokat said. “Robinson is the only habitation in Athabasca.”
Tana nodded. “There’s nothing in walking distance. They intended the whole crater floor to be part of the colony, but it was never finished after the quarantine was imposed.”
“How far could he have walked in his condition,” Edison asked.
She laughed. “About three steps.”
“And how big is this apron he walked across to leave tracks?”
She laughed again. “Yah, obviously he made it farther than that, but I don’t see how he could have walked in.”
“There was no rover parked out there?”
“I don’t think they said they’d found one,” she said. “You’d have to talk to security to find out for sure.”
“You wouldn’t know if anyone tracked him back to see if they could find a rover?”
“Rovers all have transponders,” Saf said.
“Unless it ran out of juice and he abandoned it,” Tana said.
“They said his tracks headed east. There is a pass in the crater wall about fifteen klick in that direction,” Dr. Sokat said. “Prospectors used it for ground access to the upper valley. From there it’s about 320 kilometers to the Cerberus Fossae. I think there used to be old mining camps out there.”
“Could he have walked that far?” Edison asked.
“From the camps? No way in hell,” she said. “A healthy normal can walk about thirty kilometers in an EVA suit without extra power packs.”
“But he’s far from healthy,” Edison said, making a mental note of the way her tone implied that normal humans were inferior.
“A rover would have a 300 kilometer range,” Saffia said. “He could have run it dead and then walked the rest.”
“I assume he will be down for a while,” Edison said, raising a questioning eyebrow and waiting for Dr. Sokat to nod. “Then maybe we should take the Katana out there and see if we can find that rover of his. It might give us a starting point for questions once he wakes up.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cell A-106: Security Detention Center One: Galileo Station:
Derek Tomlinson stepped through the door into the detention cell. It was a small room, with bright lights and frigid air. He shivered, not so much because of the cold as from how Paulson Lassiter looked, with his legs drawn up against his chest and laying on his side facing the wall. His breathing was so shallow he had to watch for several seconds to make sure he was still alive.
A single table with two chairs sat along the wall opposite to the bunk and the guard that stood behind the Director stepped forward to jerk the prisoner out of bed and over to one of the seats. He snapped a magnetic lock around his wrist and used it to pin one of his hands to the table.
Lassiter offered no resistance to the guard’s manhandling, and showed little recognition that he’d been moved. The drugs they’d used to interrogate him held him marginally this side of comatose.
The guard stepped back and Derek waved his hand dismissively. “I will handle him,” he said. “Wait outside.”
When the door had closed, Derek leaned forward. “Paulson, you need to give us what we want.”
Lassiter sat motionless. A pasty, pink stone.
“Did you hear me? Odysseus will get what it needs from you.”
Hauling his eyes up from the table, he focused on Derek’s face. After several seconds, he shook his head.
“Paulson, I once thought of you as a friend,” he said. “Even though you betrayed me, I don’t want to see this continue. You look like you’re dying.”
“That would be easier,” he hissed.
“If you give us what we need, this will all end,” he said.
“Yes. It will end.” He blinked his eyes several times, each time a different flavor of emotion appeared on his face. “The only thing keeping me alive is that I haven’t let you win.”
“What if I give you my word that I won’t let that happen? I can keep you alive.”
“You can’t be that stupid, can you?” he said, his voice gaining strength as anger fed fuel to his words. “You’ve had me drugged. And now you’ve added torture to your crimes. You can’t let me live, after what you’ve done to me.”
“It wasn’t me,” Derek said.
“I know. You don’t have the eggs for it,” he said. “That only proves why I can’t let you have them. You aren’t ruthless enough to stand up to Odysseus. You’re a spineless waste of flesh.”
The Director bristled at the venom in Lassiter’s tone, but he bit down on it. “Odysseus is protecting us from something more dangerous than you know. It takes more strength to work with it than to stand against it.”
“That’s the lie you tell yourself, so you can stand to look in the mirror every morning,” he said. “But look at what you have done to me. This is what you have become. I am the real face you should see reflected and if you don’t know that, you’re blind.”
“You brought this on yourself.” Derek said as he pushed back from the table and turned away. Lassiter’s words gouged deep, but he couldn’t let that show.
“If you don’t stop Odysseus, nothing will,” he said. “Once it gets access to the fleet, there will be no putting an end to it.”
Derek shook his head. “There is more at stake than politics and power.”
“I wish you could give me a reason to believe that,” he said. “Anything? Even one truth other than that this fragging overlord is bent on dominating all of humanity.”
“Do not tell him anything,” Odysseus said over his implant.
If I could tell him, maybe he’d cooperate. Derek thought
“He already suspects the reality, but do not confirm it. If you do, you will have to eliminate him. The truth must not get out,” it replied.
“Even if I trusted you, there’s no way I can tell you,” he said, after several seconds.
“Of course you can’t,” Lassiter said. “It’s because there is no reason behind it. No reality in what Odysseus has said to you.”
“Perhaps not,” he said, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter. Your only path through this, that doesn’t end badly, is to cooperate. You can’t last forever. Eventually, we will get the command codes out of you.”
“I will resist you to my last breath,” Paulson said, his tone delivering it with the certainty of steel. “I have no choice.”
“I ordered a deep Brain Engram Scan.” The director got up and walked over to the door, rapping on it to get the guard’s attention. Turning back, he watched Paulson crumble into himself. “They tell me it will take a while to get set up for it. I think you need to take that time to consider what comes after that. If you survive the procedure with your mind intact, then it will be much harder for me to find a justification for Odysseus to keep you alive.”
FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:
Admiral Quintana stood in place on the command riser watching as the tactical display showed the progress in deploying the last of their defense net. Once completed, it meant they sat inside a spherical shell of automated laser turrets surrounding the station out to a distance of 2,000 kilometers. The grid formed a web of progressive resistance with the inner edge at the weapons range of the lasers mounted on L-2 itself. Dozens of beams could continuously target any ship approaching the station, well before they got into range.
The turrets themselves were small and hard to detect until they opened fire. Less than five meters in diameter, they were nothing more than two l
asers, a reactor, and a set of station-keeping engines. The design made them simple and fast to manufacture, which also meant they could produce replacements quickly to reinforce positions lost in a battle. Since the sneak attack to capture Tana Drake had blindsided them, they’d spent all of their energy pounding these together and had dedicated one entire repair dock to fabricating nothing but spares. Now that the shell was in place, they would focus on building up a stockpile of reserves. At least until their supplies ran out.
“Two minutes to deployment,” Erin Sage announced. She’d been the approach team controller when the attack came that had forced them to rethink their defenses. Quintana had promoted her to a newly formed position as Defense Coordinator. Now she managed the defense net and Approach Control.
“Admiral you’ve got Graison Cartwright from Tsiolkovskiy on a private channel,” the com officer said.
“Put him through to the riser,” the admiral said, anchoring into a seat in front of a console.
“What can I do for you?” he asked as the face of the Chief Administrator materialized on his screen.
“Deploying the cruisers to Galileo seems to have had an effect,” he said. “Rachelle Pallassano just contacted me.”
“As in the mayor of New Hope City?”
He nodded. “Seeing the level of our commitment to this, she’s ready to declare independence from Galileo and is asking if we can help her maintain security while she pushes Tomlinson’s people out.”
“That’s good, but I don’t know what we can do,” Quintana said, running his fingers through his beard while he weighed out their options. “She’s got almost as many cops as we have total personnel up here.”
“Yah,” Graison said. “I told her we can send her a few from here, but I think she’s more worried about bombardment. Her upper dome is the oldest major structure on the moon and it’s a crap-ton more vulnerable than she wants to admit.”
“Nojo,” he said. “When does she want to do this?”
“As soon as we can cover her,” he said. “She told me she has the full support of her town council right now, but that political will is fickle and can change in an instant. The longer it takes before she can declare, the more likely it is that her support will collapse. Sooner is better from her chair.”
The admiral called up the deployment plan of their ships to see if they had anything available. “We’ve only got nine multicruisers in Zone One now. Technically, the five working the corridor from TFC to L-2 puts one cruiser in her sky for a few minutes out of every ninety-five minutes.”
“I think she is looking for something more serious,” he said.
“We can change the orbits to give them more time above the horizon for NHC, but that will thin down the coverage in the corridor.” He glanced up at the tactical display on the main screen. The last of the defense net icons had just turned green. He drummed his fingers on the console for almost a minute while he debated how much risk he could justify to protect a potential new ally. Finally, he nodded.
“You get Carranza Pratte to commit to fabricating some ground-based laser platforms for them and I’ll swing two squadrons of interceptors with support crews to give them short-term coverage,” he said. “We’ll shove one of our L-2 picket ships into the corridor patrol and modify the orbit of the ones already there so she has closer to thirty minutes of flyover out of every turnaround. Until we get more of the fleet down here that’s the best we can do.”
“I‘ll pass the word,” Graison said, relief playing over his face as he signed off.
“I thought we’d decided that it was a bad idea to hold territory,” his first officer said. She was floating behind him and set her feet down on the deck with a click. “We will be spreading ourselves thin, if we have to deploy ships to protect New Hope City.”
“I know,” he said, swiveling to face her. “But as long as we only have to patrol, it won’t be bad.”
Ylva walked up and tapped the screen where he still had the deployment plan open. “How many ships would they need here to take out a multicruiser? Eight? Ten? If we have ships orbiting and spread out, we’d need to group our forces to keep them from picking the ships off one at a time. That would draw everything we’ve got currently protecting the corridor to the far side of the moon.”
“Maybe.”
“Then for the sake of protecting New Hope City you’d let as few as ten enemy ships pull our defenses completely off of L-2?”
“What choice do we have? We need allies.”
“Then we need to make sure they’re giving us something other than moral support,” she said. “Politics make for bad strategic decisions.”
Cerberus Fossae: Elysium Planitia, Mars:
From 2000 meters, the mining camp was almost invisible, tucked against a steep canyon wall and hidden in the shadows. As the Katana descended, they could see the camp. It looked like someone had bombed it. Repeatedly.
“What the hell happened?” Edison said to himself as he walked carefully toward the small habitat dome. A gaping hole and scattered debris showed that something inside had exploded and sent the outer skin scattering for a hundred meters.
The two security officers Saffia had picked for the investigation were spreading out in different directions. They were both alpha or plusser, but since he was uncertain how to ask politely, he left it up to her to know what special talents they might have. Living in a world where genetic engineering was common was going to present him all kinds of new social challenges.
Saffia and Edison were circling the habitat in opposite directions while he watched miniature screens from everyone’s body optics on the inside of his EVA suit visor. He hated the way the suit forced him to move in unnatural ways, so he had to pay extra attention to the ground as he walked. Staying upright was tough, and the dancing displays made it even more distracting.
“It looks like somebody had a bad day,” Ryktoff said. He was walking up to what was probably the power shed. It had shattered like the main dome.
“Careful, there’s a lot of radiation in there,” Saf ordered. She had her suit’s heads-up displays linked into the high resolution scanners aboard the Katana, so she was getting instantaneous sensor info as they walked around.
“Yah, it’s an old Thermopile-600,” he said. “It looks like the waste heat line blew. I’m seeing a lot of infrared in the shack so the core’s still hot.”
“Is the turbine spinning?” Luceel asked. Edison saw her turn and look across the distance to where Ryktoff stood outside the building.
“I don’t hear it, so I’d say negative on that,” he said.
“Any idea what caused it to blow?” Edison asked.
“Give me a few. My suit should protect me from the radiation for a short looksee, but there is a lot of twisted metal in there.” Several seconds later after a few loud and rattling grunts he swore. “I need more meso. The door’s wedged and I don’t want to risk climbing through the hole in the wall. It’s like shark teeth.”
“Luce, give Ryk a hand,” Saf said.
“On it,” she said, as he watched her optic feed bouncing headlong over the rough terrain.
“Eddy, if you want to join me, the main airlock is standing open,” Saf said. “It looks like someone wedged the outer door and the inner one is off the swings.”
“I’m on my way,” he said, turning and starting around the edge of the dome. The exterior wall had fractured into a spider web of cracks, and pieces of plasglass littered the ground. He knew any of them could be a razor sharp end to his suit, and his desire to keep breathing kept his attention on his feet and picking a clear path.
About half way around the perimeter, one shard caught his attention, and he stopped. It wasn’t frosted white like the others. Instead it was a brick red and covered with a crust of something that Edison recognized instantly.
Blood.
Frothy foam of a crystallized brown substance covered the ground around the plasglass.
“Looks like I just found where someo
ne bled out,” he said. “It’s hard to know for sure since I’ve never seen how blood behaves at this pressure, but it looks like there’s a lot of it.”
Saf came bounding around the edge of the dome and skidded to a stop to stare down at it. “Doesn’t look like it was enough to kill whoever it was,” she said. She pointed at a line of visible spots on the ground heading away from the dome. “Whoever it was, walked away, but he was dragging his right leg.”
“That means he was hurt, but not carried away,” he said, nodding.
Saf bounced off following the blood trail. Edison followed, but much less enthusiastically. She followed the trail between several large boulders and up to a pair of rovers parked under a dust red awning. “There’s another puddle over here,” she said stopping near the vehicles. “It looks like someone stood here bleeding while they did something. There are also blood stains on the other two rigs.”
He caught up to her and looked at the nearest rover. Smears covered the side of it showing where a bloody glove had opened an access panel. “Do you know what’s inside there?”
“Probably power distribution,” she said, reaching out to open the cover.
Edison swatted her hand away. “Could be rigged.”
“Good point,” she said. “Enough shit torn up out here to say that whoever did it was good at making things go boom.”
She pointed at her ear to tell him to switch to their private com channel. “Do you think it was Ariqat?”
“Gut level, yah,” he said. “I think it’s a good chance he sabotaged these rovers and then stood there bleeding while he tried to get inside the third one. That would explain the other puddle and then no more boot prints.”
“He was sure as hell determined to get away,” she said. “Especially for somebody leaking blood like that. His spacesuit was open.”
“That’s a good point,” he said. “His suit had to be sliced open.”
He switched back to the common channel. “Any idea how long it would take to lose your air with a twenty centimeter hole in your suit?”
“If he was wearing a work suit instead of a walking suit like we’re wearing, he probably didn’t lose his breathable oxygen at all,” Luce said between grunts as she and Ryktoff heaved against the airlock door of the power shed. “Those are designed so the only part of it that holds real air is the helmet. But if he had an open wound, it would be like having his guts hooked up to a vacuum pump.”
Redemption of Sisyphus Page 4