by David Smith
The Professor shot up, sweeping the wine and glass off the table. ‘BENEFIT???’ he screamed. ‘You arrest me without cause, let that bitch Shaw steal my data and destroy my ship, and now you want me to help you??’
Dave sighed. It wasn’t going to happen today. ‘I understand your frustration Professor, I was only asking . . . ‘
‘Don’t bother. I wouldn’t help you unless my life depended on it. Now get out of my face and leave me alone.’
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Dave was certain that Hubert knew something about this planet, but he had no leverage to get it out of him. He cursed the awkward old man and stomped back to the Bridge.
Crash was still picking his way through the debris field, and O’Mara was still analysing the wrecks. ASBeau was now assisting her, helping her to classify and sort the wreckage. As he entered the Bridge, the squat Canadian Tactical Officer looked up and said ‘We think we’ve got this sussed now, skip.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It looks like the majority of vessels are from two species. The ones in lower orbits are probably the home team and a few allies, shooting up hill, while the ones in higher orbits are mostly of one style. I reckon that would be Manny’s Wraiths.’
‘Anything on the planet yet?
O’Mara looked up too. ‘Not much yet: there’s still too much debris and stray radiation between us and the surface to get meaningful readings.’
ASBeau added ‘If the wrecks are anything to go by it’s not looking good: there’s a huge amount of radiation up here. It seems a lot of this damage was done with old style nuclear fission and fusion weapons.’
They waited patiently as Crash continued to edge the ship forward, ducking and diving between the wrecks. Eventually he took them into a very low orbit, below the vast majority of the debris, and the scientists were able to bring the ships sensors to bear on the surface.
O’Mara read the data in horrified fascination. ‘Wow. The surface is even more trashed than the ships in orbit!’
She put images on screen that showed large cities, all of which were scarred with huge impact craters.
ASBeau was reading the same data. ‘Reading very high levels of gamma radiation coming from those craters. Looks like they’re all the result of nuclear weapons too.’
The ship’s tactical software overlaid red circles on the telescope view of the ground passing beneath the ship. Dave sighed. Nothing biological could survive in such highly-irradiated areas, and there were hundreds, probably thousands of such dead-zones all across the surface of the planet.
‘Any signs of life?’
O’Mara shook her head but couldn’t tear her eyes away from the streams of incoming data. ‘Haven’t found anything yet, not even plant life or bacteria. Surface temperatures are quite low, but I guess that’s from nuclear dust-clouds and the amount of volcanic activity. At some stage this must have been a temperate environment. There’s dead forests down there that look deciduous and a number of river beds . . . ’
ASBeau suddenly interrupted. ‘Wow! Hold the front page! There’s a wrecked ship on the surface.’
Dave didn’t see why this was big news. ‘I assume that’s dropped from orbit?’
ASBeau shook his head ‘No sir, it’s a Federation vessel. And parts of it are intact.’
‘WHAT??’
ASBeau switched the main-view screen to a telescope image and zoomed in on one particular area on the surface. It was an open plain with only a few buildings clustered together, many kilometres from the main urban area. The buildings were ruined but had clearly once been large and ornate. Shapes scribed into the terrain suggested there had once been a large landscaped area around the buildings and a long straight road connecting this place to the main city was still visible in some places.
Central to it all was an imposing pyramid structure, still largely intact. There, a small vessel lay at the end of a long jagged furrow in the ground. It looked badly damaged, with open wounds visible in the hull and one engine detached and lying some distance from the rest of the ship.
Over this image the ship’s tactical software laid basic information about the ship. ‘Transport vessel: ‘Shinano Maru’ class. Registration: unknown. Crew: unknown.’
Dave’s mouth went dry. ‘Survivors?’
O’Mara was trying everything but couldn’t provide an answer. ‘Uncertain, sir. There’s so much radiation across so much of the spectrum it’s hard to get any readings at all.’
Dave knew they couldn’t leave the matter. ‘Is it feasible to put an away team on the surface?’
O’Mara changed some settings on her console. ‘Hmmm . . . in that location . . . with anti-radiation drugs and screened environmental suits we could probably get about . . . say . . . an hour on the surface?’
ASBeau nodded. ‘We’ll have to take a shuttle. That amount of radiation will affect the transporter beam.’
Dave called the Bo’s’un in his office on the shuttle deck. ‘Stavros, we have an emergency. Prep a shuttle and six heavy environment suits. We’re going down to the surface.’
He knew their chances of finding survivors were limited, but they had to act quickly. ‘O’Mara, you’re with me. Commander Ruiz, you have the Bridge, please get Dr Mengele to assign two medics to the away team.’
By the time they reached the shuttle deck, Dr Mengele had already arrived with Petty Officer Dieter Kessel, one of her nursing staff. They were already being dressed in the heavy environmental suits as was Lieutenant Theodopoulopolis and Petty Officer Perry Boyce.
The heavy environmental suits were huge affairs, more like a fitted-spaceship than a space suit. Every external surface was made from high-tech alloys and composite materials. They were heavy and cumbersome, but offered protection in the most extreme environments.
They required considerable assistance and two members of the deck crew helped each member of the away team into a suit while others loaded a couple of spare suits into the small cargo bay of one of the ship’s shuttles.
Stavros was first to finish dressing. He took his place at the helm of the shuttle and began preparing it for flight. Before long the rest of the team were ready and the deck crew vacated the space so Stavros could open the Shuttle Bay doors.
In his usual casual style, Stavros pushed the shuttle hard, accelerating rapidly away from the ship. Dave watched nervously as they careered head-long towards a terrifyingly large lump of debris, only to barrel-role around it at the last moment.
Smaller pieces of debris cart-wheeled through space all around them, but all missed the shuttle which seemed to bear some sort of charmed existence.
As Stavros piloted the vessel, Boyce kept an eye on the scanners, looking out for debris that might be on a collision course and also keeping a lookout for a safe place to land.
Before long they could see the darkness outside the shuttle begin to change and take on a different hue. O’Mara turned to a console and began tapping buttons. She was unused to working in the heavy suit and had to start again several times, but eventually she managed to interrogate the shuttle’s sensors.
‘Atmosphere is mainly nitrogen-oxygen, but very thin and with relatively high carbon dioxide and sulphur compound levels, as well as massive radio-nucleide contamination. If I had to guess I’d say there’s been a lot of volcanic activity in addition to the orbital bombardment.’
Dave wasn’t overly interested in that. ‘What about the ship? Any signs of life yet?’
‘No, not yet, but we’re picking up transponder data now. I guess we missed it before among all the background radiation. SS Hubbard, sir, from Earth.’
‘Any record of flight plans?’
‘Just checking. It appears she was chartered by a religious group to undertake a pilgrimage to this system. The application was denied, so they posted a flight plan to the Dendara system in Sector 217. It looks like they decided to come here anyway.’
‘They wanted to come here?! What the hell were they thinking?’
O’Mara shook her head, although being inside a huge suit, nobody would have known. ‘There’s nothing else listed on the application, all it says is “pilgrimage to a site of particular religious significance”. The application was made by the Society of Independent Scientologists.’
‘Scientologists? I thought they were long gone?’ mumbled Dave.
‘Apparently not, sir. The application was posted about eighteen months ago in San Francisco. Logs from flight control show they set out around a month after that.’
‘So how long have they been here?’
Stavros answered. ‘Can’t have been long. Shinano Maru class vessels are designed for short haul tasks. They’re only good for about warp six max, so if they left from earth, a trip this far would have taken them well over a year at cruising speed.’
‘So they’ve only been here three or four months tops?’ asked Dave.
‘Less than that. They’d have had to stop for supplies and to refuel at least once, more likely twice. That would have taken them a long way off their route. I doubt they’ve been here any more than a month.’
Dave felt his heart beat a little faster. If they’d managed to soft land and stayed in the heart of the vessel, they might have been able to survive the ferocious radiation.
‘Get us as close as you can. Boyce, start broadcasting, see if you can get a response.’
Dave looked through the windscreen but could see very little. The atmosphere beyond had a dirty yellow-grey hue and apart from clouds zooming past he couldn’t make out anything about the planet. They were moving fast, and still over a hundred klicks from the wreck, but could now see the ship as a red dot on their terrain map.
They seemed to take an age to get closer and all the time Dave could hear Boyce patiently trying to contact the downed vessel.
She got no response but eventually Stavros said ‘I’m reading a power source about twenty klicks ahead. It can only be from the wreck.’
Dave held his breath. Could someone really still be alive?
The shuttle broke through the lowest level of cloud and for the first time they caught sight of the terrain below.
It looked desolate.
Whatever had grown there had long since withered and died. The landscape was brown and grey, blackened by fire in places or streaked with yellow drifts where sulphur had precipitated from the atmosphere.
Even here, a hundred klicks from the nearest ruined city, radiation levels were dauntingly high, and odd impact craters and debris dotted the barren vista.
Despite that chaos it was clear that at some stage in the past there had been something of significance here.
A large oval earthwork rampart had been formed, well over a kilometre across even at its narrowest dimension. Across this narrowest point of the oval another earthwork had been raised, connecting the sides to a huge tetrahedral structure in the centre of the oval. Other smaller constructions sat on top of the raised bank, but they were dwarfed by the pyramid which rose over a hundred meters above the plain.
Among it all they saw the long livid scar of the wreck. It had carved a deep gash across the oval rampart before crashing down onto the plain, carving a deep gouge hundreds of meters long. At the head of this wound lay the remains of the small crashed freighter.
This close the damage was much more apparent. Although the main hull had survived intact, much of the hull plating had been buckled by the impact or torn away, leaving the frame of the hull exposed in places. One engine stanchion pointed up into the glowering sky, the end ragged and torn where the engine itself had been ripped away. The other stanchion and engine had scraped along the ground during the crash and were bent and buckled.
There was no obvious sign of life, but the fact that there was still an energy source gave them hope. Someone or something had kept at least part of the ship alive.
Stavros landed the shuttle within twenty metres of the wreck and as the thick dust settled, O’Mara briefed them. ‘It’s too radioactive to stay outside for more than about thirty minutes but the hull of the ship will help protect us. I reckon we’ll get about an hour, but the suits monitors will give us a countdown if we soak up too much. Wind speed is about fifty kilometres an hour, but gusts are much stronger, so even though it’s a thin atmosphere you’ll need to watch your step.’
Dave mulled it over. ‘It’s not a big ship, so we’ll stick together rather than split up. It looks like we can ignore the engineering sections of the ship so we’ll enter via that gap in the plating and work our way forward to the accommodation and storage areas.’
They checked their intercoms and suit systems before four of them entered the airlock. Stavros and Boyce stayed on board in case they needed to evacuate quickly. As the outer door of the airlock opened Dave found himself being flattened against the bulkhead by the ferocity of the wind. O’Mara stumbled and nearly fell, but Kessel was behind her and caught her.
The wind whistled past them and Dave had the strangest feeling there were voices carried on it.
They edged out into murky half light. The wind had whipped up a dust storm and they could barely see the ship although it was only twenty metres away. However, beyond the ship the towering presence of the pyramid blocked out what little light there was, a dark triangle hovering in the cold, dim sky like some brooding presence.
Dave led them on, trying to be careful, but knowing that in such high levels of radiation, speed was essential.
He was halfway there when the tall figure just behind him grabbed his arm and gestured to the ground near the forward end of the ship.
There, a neat row of mounds lay. It was difficult to count but to Dave’s eye there were well over a dozen. Some were marked with crosses, others with head-stones. Oddly, most appeared to have saucepans sticking out of the ground by their handles.
The fact that these saucepans stood firm in the high winds suggested this was no mere accident, but a very careful and deliberate action. He observed them sadly and had a sudden uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched. He turned, expecting to see someone stood behind him.
There was no-one there, but the wind still whispered to him and he felt a shiver run down his spine. Gathering himself he realised there was nothing they could do to help these poor unfortunates and with a heavy heart, he turned and continued towards the ship. As they reached the ragged hole in the vessels hull he heard O’Mara’s voice crackle across the intercom.
‘The energy source is behind us, coming from somewhere in the engineering section.’
‘But it’s trashed!’
‘I know, but readings definitely come from that area.’
Hollins acknowledged her and as they clambered into the wreck they headed aft, letting O’Mara guide them via the readings on her tricorder.
The ship had come to rest at an odd angle and they seemed to be walking uphill along a slope through the passageway. The deck was slanted and also buckled in places, and there were cracks in the internal structure which suggested the impact of the crash had been very heavy.
Light fittings, cables and pipes spilled out of gaps in the deckhead, hanging at odd-looking angles in the tilted compartments.
They passed doors, most of which were either buckled themselves or which had been forced out of their frames by the crash. Looking through the ruined doors they could see the damage was universal. Furniture had torn loose from its fixings, the contents of the furniture spilled and left to lie where it had fallen.
The contents were sadly human. Items of clothing and shoes. Books and papers. Pictures of family, friends and pets. They had all meant something to someone.
As they went deeper into the ruined ship Dave noticed that the radiation count visible in his helmet display dropped away sharply. It was still enough to cook them if they weren’t in their heavy suits, but he took any reduction as a good thing. If nothing else, they would have longer in which to explore the vessel.
O’Mara was so intent in her tricorder that she very nearly walked into a hug
e and very obvious bulkhead. ‘The energy source is somewhere beyond this bulkhead’
Dave stared at the blank wall. It wasn’t actually a bulkhead. It appeared heavy plates from the hull of the ship had been hastily welded into place over the existing structure. ‘Any clue as to what the energy source is?’
O’Mara hung her tricorder on a clip on her suit and pulled out a PAD instead. After tapping away on the PAD for a few seconds she said ‘It looks like this is the forward bulkhead of the auxiliary machinery space. On the Shinano Maru class the back-up fusion reactor was installed there. I guess it must still be live: anything smaller than that probably wouldn’t show up over all the background radiation.’
‘How do we get in?’
O’Mara checked the schematic they’d found of the Shinano Maru design. ‘The main entrance to engineering would have been behind this bulkhead, but there seems to be an emergency access airlock at the bottom of the hull. I guess we try there.’
They wandered back through the deserted corridor and out through the crack in the hull. Following O’Mara they headed aft again, outside the ship now.
The winds seemed to have risen and thick dust was obscuring their view. Dave found himself feeling his way down the length of the ship as visibility grew worse and worse.
They seemed to walk much further than they had inside the ship, but eventually O’Mara stopped and crouched down and headed further under the tilted hull of the ship. Here, a large squat tube protruded from the hull, and in the end of the tube there was a very heavy manually operated circular hatch that opened inwards. It was apparently some sort of air-lock. Without waiting, O’Mara shoved the hatch open and clambered through. Uncertain what they might find, Dave decided he’d go next.
The circular hatch was nearly a metre in diameter, but the huge bulk of his environmental suit meant this was a tight squeeze. Dave was concerned that crewmen Kessel might not fit through the hatch at all, but he had no other option but to continue.