“This,” said Giroux, his voice rising. “This is the Long Range Surface Sensor probe, or LoRanSS.” He pronounced it Lawrence. “Heard rumors about this sort of thing, but nothing ever confirmed, until now. And we’re the first to be able to use them in a real world situation!” He was actually rubbing his hands together, Gabriel saw. He clenched his jaw, hoping the ensign would get on with the mission briefing before he had a nervous breakdown.
Giroux thankfully continued. “It’s self-sufficient, carrying its own miniature Tokamak fusion reactor as a power source, lasts over three years. Multi-surface capable, it can move on six legs on the most uneven ground. It can even go underwater, just runs along the bottom like the water wasn’t even there!”
“Ensign,” McTiernan cut in with a warning look.
“Sorry sir, just getting a little excited,” he replied with a grimace. “I’ve been studying the specs all week.”
He tapped a few keys. “It carries a wide spectrum probe here.” A light appeared on the image at the bottom of the sensor array area. “For sampling atmospheric conditions, to sniff out chemical or biological agents, that sort of thing, like our standard surface probes do. Here,” he said as a light appeared on the top-mounted nub, “it carries a narrow beam weapon, strictly defensive of course. And obviously, multiple sensors up front for infrared, ultraviolet, radar, sonar, and gravitonics. And then there’s this…”
Gabriel watched as the image wavered, then faded into a blur. “This is the best part. It has the latest in cloaking capability. It’s unbelievable how many spoof cells they were able to pack into this thing. Even better than your camo armor, sir. In addition to standard stealth capabilities, it can go nearly invisible using the spoof cells. A nanocell picks up an image from one side of it and instantly projects that image on the opposite nanocell. Poof, instant invisibility!”
“So,” Gabriel began. “We’re supposed to carry this thing with us after we land?”
“Oh no, sir, sorry,” Giroux said. “The LoRanSSs are being sent ahead of you to scout the LZ and be your forward observer. They’re equipped with long range communication transmitters, and will be sending back information packets to your team through the wormhole relays right up until we emerge in-system, then real-time updates the rest of the way.”
McTiernan picked up the discussion. “The LoRanSSs will be in place by the time we hit 46 Scorpii. The plan is to have them land well away from the target area, scout an entry corridor, then go to ground outside the target in a predetermined pattern and relay data to your team.”
“This trash can flies?” Gabriel asked.
“No sir,” Giroux replied. “Eight of them are loaded into a standard-sized communications drone, the same type that pass through wormholes every day, and what we’re about to launch. Nothing out of the ordinary. Once it passes through the target system’s wormhole, the outer probe shell gets ditched, exposing a stealth reentry capsule. So while it can’t fly, it can certainly land. It enters a planet’s atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory; for all intents and purposes, a meteor. Closer to the surface it uses landing retrojets, then the reentry shell gets discarded, and the individual probes scatter and land.” He looked at the image wistfully. “Unfortunately they’re a one time use only. Can’t retrieve them from the surface unless a shuttle picks them up, which could endanger the personnel on the ground, so they’re designed to melt themselves down in place. Kind of sad really…” his voice trailed off.
Gabriel shook his head. An odd one, this Ensign. Glad he’d be staying on board once they arrived.
Vaillancourt cut in. “Captain, we’re at ten miles from station and holding, firing alley is open for probe.”
“Thank you Lieutenant,” McTiernan replied. “Mister Giroux, if you please?”
Giroux rubbed his hands together again. He tapped a few keys, and the holoimage shifted from a closeup of the LoRanSS to an exterior view of the Marcinko, apparently a feed from Halsey. “Firing probe in five, four, three, two, one…” He tapped a few keys, and a brief flash was seen on the Marcinko’s hull. “Probe away,” Giroux announced.
“Kind of anticlimactic, wouldn’t you say Mister Giroux?” McTiernan asked.
“Oh my no, Captain. In fact, that may be the highlight of my career. I’m very much looking forward to running the probe communications!” His smile went from ear to ear. “Commander, a pleasure to meet you. I hope we and the LoRanSSs can help your team.”
“That’ll be all, Ensign,” McTiernan replied.
“Captain, I’ll make preparations to get underway,” said Vaillancourt. “Launch window closes in twenty two minutes.”
“By all means, Karlyn,” he replied. “Commander Gabriel, again welcome aboard. Now, if you will, please head back to the lounge and strap in. We’ve got an hour of hard acceleration, followed by eight hours of drifting. If I remember my younger days, I believe that’ll be a perfect time to catch some Z’s. We’ll rouse you and your team prior to wormhole transit.”
“Thank you Captain,” Gabriel said, sliding his feet from the straps. “Looking forward to some downtime before it gets hot.”
“Commander, the planet where you’re going, hot will be the furthest thing from your mind.”
Chapter 10
Two heavily-bundled figures trudged through the thigh-deep snow, winds gusting at nearly 70 miles per hour, a small cart towed between them on skids. The snowfall had ended several hours earlier, but the winds whipped fallen flakes into the air and extended the near-whiteout conditions. The figures leaned into the wind, slowly pushing towards the snow-covered structure a hundred yards away, making excruciatingly slow progress in the harsh conditions.
After nearly ten minutes, they reached a door at the end of the long building. One of them reached out and brushed snow and ice off the keypad and tapped in a code. The door slid open, allowing several inches of drifted snow to fall into the opening. The two entered the building, and the door slid closed behind them, shutting out the howling winds.
Inside, they both brushed their environment suits free of the frozen precipitation they had accumulated, stomped their boots on the ceramacrete floor, and pushed back their hoods, unsnapping their masks. Water puddled on the floor as the ice and snow melted in the climate-controlled environment.
The shorter of the two shook her head back and forth, releasing a tangled mass of blonde hair. “Damn, Witten, can it be any colder?” she said as she removed her gloves and blew on her pink hands. She checked her wrist-mounted biounit. “It’s twenty below zero out there, and my core temp is down to ninety four,” she said through chattering teeth.
Witten, a tall heavyset man with a thick mustache, continued to stamp his feet trying to circulate his blood. “You’re the one from Siberia, what could you be complaining about? Look at me, I’m from Texas!” He threw his gloves into a bin by the door; they landed with a squish on top of several others.
He leaned over to the cart and brushed off a few remaining ice crystals from the top of it. He pressed a switch near the tow rope they used to drag it in, and a handle popped from a recess. Grabbing the handle, he pulled and turned it halfway, and small wheels extended from its underside with a slight hiss, lifting it up an inch off the skids.
“I still don’t understand why we have to grow this food all the way over there,” he said as he motioned towards the door they had just come in. “And drag it back here. Every friggin’ day.”
Marta grabbed the tow handle and began pulling the cart down the corridor. “Greenhouse on top of the ridge for sun, labs in the valley for weather protection,” she called over her shoulder. “You know that.”
Witten trudged after her, muttering. “Why don’t we just move the Polis up there with the food? They’re aliens, they should be moving from there to here, not us. Bring ‘em down when the labs need them.”
“Don’t forget, we’re the aliens here,” Marta replied. “Now gimme a hand and let’s get this done. I’m dying for a hot chocolate.”
&nb
sp; She pulled the cart while Witten pushed from the rear, and they made their way further into the complex.
The colony was set in a rift valley between two pressure ridges, each over eight hundred feet in height. Solsbury Hill and Big Rock Candy Mountain were named by one of the board members, evidently a big music fan, upon the completion of the colony’s first housing units. The colony’s structure was standard mid-twenty-second century pre-fab, most of which was delivered to the planet’s surface by cargo container in collapsed form. Upon being set in place, they were then expanded (or in the case of some of the open domes, inflated) to create living quarters, laboratory facilities, water and sewer plants, among others. The colony had started as six pre-fab units, and in the eight years since initially being placed, it had only added twelve more sections, by using both additional pre-fab units dropped in from Earth and with extruded materials created from Poliahu’s natural elements.
The colony’s population had remained quite constant since the beginning. The Chairman and the Board of Directors of the small company were the first to arrive with a handful of engineers and scientists. They were followed shortly after by a few dozen personnel to handle the day-to-day operations of a self-contained city. Over the next few years people rotated in and out, but the Chairman, the Board, and the original engineers and scientists never left.
It was immediately granted Corporate World status upon founding, but to call a haphazard collection of eighteen snow-covered buildings a world would be like calling a molehill a mountain. The Board didn’t mind; they had achieved independence in a matter of hours, with a few electronic signatures and a transfer of a large sum of money, and now they were the proud owners of the newest Corporate World in the galaxy. The star was 46 Scorpii, the planet was Poliahu, but the colony, and the company that owned it, was named Diji.
Witten and Marta rolled the heavy cart down a corridor lined with plasteel ports, each completely iced over, providing no view whatsoever of the outside world. At the end of the corridor, the third they had dragged the cart down, they reached a doorway, and Marta tapped the entry panel. The door slid open and they wheeled the cart into a messy room, no bigger than a typical family’s living room, crowded with folding tables overflowing with equipment. Two wallscreens were active, one showing rows upon rows of numerical readouts, the other showing an image of one of the furry aliens being led over to an operating table. Marta paused.
“They have to get fed. You know we need them alive for this process,” said a tech who was watching the readouts on the wall, pointing towards a far door with his flexscreen.
Marta hesitated. “I know, Jace. It’s just…” her voice trailed off.
“We go through this every time, Marta,” the tech replied, looking back at the wallscreen, tapping a few keys on his flexscreen. “They’re just animals, they don’t even know what’s happening.”
She nodded resignedly. “Right. I just hope I don’t end up in their position when it all hits the fan.”
The tech laughed over his shoulder. “No worries. Doesn’t work on us anyway.” His smile faded. “Get the cart in there, we’re on a tight schedule.” Tapping some more on the flexscreen, he ended the conversation.
Witten pushed the cart from the back before Marta began moving, running into the backs of her legs. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Watch it, or I’ll knock you out, cover you with a rug and throw you in there with them,” she said, only half-jokingly, and pulled the cart to the door on the other side of the room, the wheels bumping over stray cables.
Chapter 11
Gabriel was awake several hours before they arrived at the wormhole, and spent the time during the slightly-uncomfortable deceleration phase reading through the colony’s history and Naval Intelligence’s estimates of its capabilities and defenses. With the exception of standard status transmissions back to Earth, as required by world charter regulations, no one had been in contact with anyone on Poliahu since the first year it was colonized. No actual visits were required as long as status reports were received on time, and because its climate was so inhospitable, no one wanted to volunteer for an optional ambassadorial trip.
The colony was unremarkable in both size and appearance, he saw by the photos. Low buildings, buried in snow and ice. The only lights came from the nuke generator near one of the ridges it sat between, the generator unit itself a quarter mile from the other buildings. Essentially, the colony buildings were devoid of any color, lighting, and to all outwards appearances, any life whatsoever. They had been told the colony name, Diji, was Australian aboriginal for sun. Someone had a sense of irony, he supposed.
According to the original charter information, the colony was not permitted any weapons larger than a defensive sidearm. No lasers, particle beams, missiles, or heavy kinetic weapons. They had six microsatellites in orbit providing GPS and surveying radar, although looking at the size of the colony and the impassable terrain surrounding it, Gabriel was hard-pressed to see any need for either of those capabilities. One standard Nokia NK-24 communications satellite was in geostationary orbit above the colony, providing a data link with 46 Scorpii’s wormhole station, and then beyond into other systems. No defensive perimeter systems, no force fields or magnetic shields other than weather resistant EM fields.
All in all, although he hated to say it, it certainly did look like a piece of cake. However he was well aware that what was listed in the original colony charter, and what was sent back in status reports, could be vastly different from what they’d be running into. Especially considering the people running the place - the reason behind the mission in the first place. An illegal drug production facility was likely to have something more on hand than just semi-automatic pistols.
He closed the neuretics file just as Takahashi came into the lounge, walking gingerly in the .6G of the rotating ring. “Commander, we’re approaching the T-gate. We’re all assembled in the mess, care to join us?”
Gabriel stood up, stretching his back. “As long as it’s in the ring. I’m not up for transit while in zero-G,” he replied.
“Yes sir, two sections over. I didn’t realize you hadn’t been in the mess,” Takahashi said.
“No, not yet. Crashed out for a few hours, then did some reading.” He rubbed his eyes, the gritty residue of the sandman’s visit earlier still present. “Lead on,” he said, waving to the hatchway.
“Aye aye, sir.” Takahashi turned on his heel and walked through the hatchway into the next section.
The rotating ring, which wasn’t actually a perfect circle inside, contained twelve sections, each the same size and layout of the lounge Gabriel just left. They were laid out end to end, each one connected by a short triangle of a threshold. The threshold’s floor was six feet long while the ceiling tapered to a point, indicative of a 30 degree angle change between each section. The ‘floor’ of each section was the outer part of the ring, with the rotation of the ring giving the occupants an artificial gravity in an outwards direction. Thankfully the designers of the Ventura-class had decided against installing windows on the floor. Gabriel had been fortunate enough to have once traveled in an Earth-Ganymede luxury yacht whose builders had done just that, and although it offered a spectacular view, it also made for very disorienting (and nauseating) walks.
Each section rose up from the previous section on a 30 degree incline, so when one walked from one section to another, they were going uphill. He considered trying a jog one morning around the ring, but he didn’t want to disappoint himself by running out of steam with a perpetual uphill run. Especially not in front of these kids.
Two uphills later, Takahashi led Gabriel into the mess hall, which for a black-ops military ship such as the Marcinko was very well appointed. Fourteen chairs with thick cushioning surrounded the main table, six of them occupied by the other members of the team. Lamber, Sabra, Brevik, and Sowers were playing cards (Brevik having the largest stack of chips, Gabriel noted), while St. Laurent sat reading her flexscreen, and Jimenez
plucked idly at his guitar.
One large wallscreen dominated the wall opposite the ultra-modern food dispenser, the image showing a view from the Marcinko’s forward video feed. Jupiter was visible just on the edge of the screen, with its moon Callisto closer to the center, the entire scene sprinkled with stars. In the very center of the image sat two vertical structures, parallel to each other, with several blinking lights. The Takahashi Gate.
The T-gates, as they were more commonly referred to, were first built in 2091 by the Japanese Space Administration to more easily control the unpredictable nature of the wormholes. The first wormhole was discovered four years earlier by Masahiro Takahashi of the research vessel Hakudo Maru.
The Hakudo Maru had stumbled on the first wormhole, located just inside Jupiter’s orbital path around the sun, completely by chance. The ship was en route to study the atmosphere of the gas giant for possible use as fusion fuel when a probe sent in advance of its route suddenly disappeared. Captain Takahashi ordered the ship in closer to the point where they lost the probe, and detected highly unusual gravitometric readings. Not wanting to endanger his ship or her crew, he ordered another probe sent. When it too disappeared, this time right in front of their eyes, he took it upon himself (a hunch he later explained to have come from his boyhood science fiction reading) to have another probe reconfigured to automatically return on a direct reverse course thirty seconds after it passed the point in space where the previous two had vanished.
The probe was launched, and again disappeared at the same gravity fluctuation. However, after sixty seconds, this probe returned, appearing at the same location, on an opposite return course, completely intact. Takahashi and his crew brought it back on board, and over the next three days all gas research on the ship ceased while the crew excitedly pored over the data. It was conclusive - based on star data, the probe had instantly jumped over 150 light years into a completely different star system, determined to be Nu Ophiuchi, a binary system with no planets, only a seven million mile wide asteroid belt drifting around two early-phase stars.
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