by J. N. Chaney
“We, uh, haven’t been entirely forthcoming about what’s going on here,” Dash said.
Ragsdale’s eyes flew wide. “What? Really? You haven’t?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. And we’re genuinely sorry for that. But it really is in your best interest.”
“The less you know, the better,” Viktor said.
Ragsdale pulled off his hat and wiped his forehead, then put it back on. “Look. I’m Security Chief for Port Hannah. Before I took that job, I did security on Cycle, and New Winston, and a half dozen other planets. Believe me, I get that there are just some things that have to be kept behind the door.”
Ragsdale sighed, and it was world weary. “You have to look at this from my point of view, though. There’s something pretty remarkable down in that hole. Something pretty remarkable that’s only a day’s journey overland from our homes. Something we know absolutely nothing about…hell, something we didn’t even know existed until you all showed up here.”
“I know,” Dash said, raising his hands and patting the air. “You’re right. That’s all true. So we’re going to let you in on some of it. But there’s a lot we won’t, because it really is in your best interest to not know.”
“Sometimes, ignorance is a powerful defense,” Viktor said.
Ragsdale just nodded. “I understand. So, what can you tell me about what’s down there?”
“Well, it’s a crashed ship, obviously,” Dash said. “I really can’t reveal much about where it came from, who built it, or how it got here. It has been down there since before your colony was founded. Honestly, we’re surprised that it’s as intact as it seems to be. I think we really only expected to find bits and pieces of wreckage. So now we have to get down to it, get inside it, and investigate.”
“What are you looking for?” Ragsdale asked. “Because I get the sense you want to retrieve something in particular.”
Dash avoided the term Dark Metal. “There’s a substance that was used in its construction that we need to retrieve. There might also be other tech down there for us to recover.”
Ragsdale nodded. “Okay. I have a question, though.”
“Shoot.”
“Your companion you were talking to…Sentinel, I think you called her. She’s an AI, isn’t she? An advanced one, on board that man-shaped ship of yours.”
Dash looked to the others, who just variously raised their eyebrows, nodded, or shrugged.
“Yeah, she is,” Dash replied, then tapped his comm. “Sentinel, say hello to our new friend, Ragsdale.”
“It is my pleasure to make the acquaintance of another sentient being,” Sentinel said.
“She really means it,” Dash said. “She doesn’t get out much.”
Ragsdale narrowed his eyes but just gave a bemused nod. “Okay. So for you to be in possession of an advanced AI—”
“To be clear,” Sentinel said, “I am not in the possession of any one entity, but am in a willing partnership with Dash and his team.”
In his peripheral vision, Dash saw Leira raise her eyebrows when Sentinel used his name rather than referring to him as “the Messenger.” It showed she had—or had learned—some degree of discretion about what they were up to.
Ragsdale shook his head, at least partly in wonder. “Okay. So you’re partners with an AI that is aboard a ship—sorry, she’s aboard something that is clearly much more than just a ship.” He crossed his arms. “All that, along with this wreck, tells me that there’s something much, much bigger happening here than you’re letting on.”
Dash scrubbed a hand on the back of his head. “I really can’t say much more.”
“I know. I get it. Like I said, when it comes to secretive stuff with security implications, I’m not exactly fresh off the shuttle.” He took a step toward Dash. “So let me put this out there, so it’s clear. I really don’t give a shit about any of whatever it is you’re doing here, right up to the instant it starts becoming a problem for Port Hannah. When that happens, I will be all over it, expecting to know all of the details and have all of my questions answered. My priority is the safety and welfare of the people back there. I’ve already lost two of them—and, yes, I’ve lost them because they were trying to help you. So this colony has already paid too high a price for”—he looked for a word— “for you and your spy games.”
Dash nodded. He got it. Ragsdale was a good man, trying to do a hard job, that Dash and his friends were only making harder. So he met the Security Chief’s gaze squarely.
“You’re right. It has. I can’t even begin to say how sorry I am about the buggy driver and your Special. But believe me, this is no game. This is deadly serious—emphasis on the word deadly.” He glanced at the waiting pit. “We wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t genuinely important. And by that, I mean important, as in, for pretty much the whole galaxy and everyone living in it.”
For a moment, Ragsdale just let his gaze bore into Dash’s. Dash didn’t try to stop it. He wanted the man to see he was serious about their shared goal, even if it meant taking his word on faith—for now.
“So if I believe something is genuinely important for me to know,” Ragsdale finally said, “no matter how secret or sensitive you might think it is, you’ll tell me?”
“Yes, I will. I promise. But that’s as long as you understand that it really does have to be something important to Port Hannah and its people—and that, if I genuinely think it isn’t, you’ll accept that, and we’ll just drop it.”
“So you get the final call? That’s a terrible deal.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s the only one I can offer.”
Ragsdale stared a moment longer, then nodded. “Fine. I’m trusting you with an awful lot here, Dash.”
“I know.”
Ragsdale stuck out his hand, and Dash shook it, firmly.
As they began moving the climbing equipment to the top of the pit and getting themselves geared up for a foray inside the crashed Golden ship, it struck Dash that everything about this ultimately affected Port Hannah. If they couldn’t stop the Golden, then Port Hannah would just be another place they’d exterminate. A crater, a place of dust and bones to be forgotten as the Golden continued their bitter harvest.
But Ragsdale didn’t need to know that—again, not yet at least.
Dash paused atop a boulder about three quarters of the way down into the pit, thumbing the winch controller as he did. The monofilament cable connecting him to the sturdy A-frame back at the top went taut, holding him at about a forty-five-degree angle. His utility vest and backpack, both laden with equipment and supplies, hung against his shoulders and chest, a heavy deadweight.
“Everything okay, Dash?” Leira called from below.
He looked down. “Yup. Just want to avoid that spot that almost did Conover in.”
Dash could see it just below him and to his right. Conover’s feet had dislodged a big rock there; it, in turn, dislodged more as it fell, and then a whole chunk of the pit’s side had given out under him. He’d grimly hung on, waiting for the slope to stabilize—and then an even bigger rock, loosened by the slide, had fallen from above him, missing his head by centimeters. Dash started up the winch again, keeping himself as far as he could to the left of the rockfall. Pieces the size of his fist were still occasionally plummeting down from above, but he managed to stay clear of them. Finally, his feet touched the bottom—a layer of loose sand and gravel over the dull metallic surface of the Golden ship.
He unhooked the cable from his harness, attached the controller to it, then sent it back up. The last one to come down would be Ragsdale. Alec, the Special, would stay up top, watching over the buggy, the climbing gear, and the hole. Dash remembered the lockjaws and immediately thought, I sure don’t envy him staying up there all alone. And yet, the yawning uncertainty of the wreck was, in a way, worse than the known danger of the lockjaws. The wreck was ancient. The wreck was Golden, and that meant every inch of it was dedicated to the elimination of life itself.
But t
wo people died trying to help them, and Dash could not, would not, let himself forget that.
As they watched Ragsdale descend, Conover said, “Are you really sure it’s a good idea to bring him with us? Inside the Golden ship?”
“No, I’m not, not at all,” Dash replied. “But how could we possibly say no? If I were him, I wouldn’t have accepted it.”
Leira nodded. “We have to face the fact that we’re probably going to end up having to reveal a lot more about what’s going on than we ever intended.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dash said. “But we’ll let it happen as it happens. I mean, who knows? Maybe we’ll be lucky, find what we’re looking for right away, and not have to reveal much at all. The risk is worth the reward, given our needs at the Forge.”
“I’m assuming that if we do find a bunch of Dark Metal,” Viktor said, “we’re going to have to bring the Archetype here so it can transport it back to the Forge.”
“Probably,” Dash said. “Although again, let’s travel through that particular wormhole when we come to it.”
Ragsdale reached the bottom and unhooked the cable, then he sent it back up, before unclipping a small box from his belt.
“This is a signal repeater. I’ve got four of them. I’m going to leave one here, right at the opening, to make sure we can maintain comms with Alec up there. He’s in touch with Port Hannah.” He frowned at the dark opening. “Assuming we can actually get more than just a few meters inside this thing, I’ll put out the rest of the repeaters as we go, so we keep comms up.”
Dash nodded. It was a good and sensible plan, even if ultimately pointless if the Golden tech really wanted to interfere with things.
“Hey, is Alec going to be okay up there all on his own?” Amy asked, apparently having her own moment of concern about the lone Special. “I can’t forget about those bug things, those, uh—”
“Lockjaws,” Ragsdale said.
“Yeah. Are there any of those things around here?”
“Not likely. As far as we can tell, they burrow—which is how they were able to sneak up on us—so they tend to stay out in the open desert. This close to the hills, it’s just too rocky for them.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s good,” Amy said.
“It doesn’t mean there might not be other things around, though,” Ragsdale went on, giving the black opening a few meters away a look. “I’d definitely rather have at least two people up there, but we’ve got what we’ve got. Alec is sharp though. He can take care of himself.”
Ragsdale set up the signal repeater and activated it, did a comm check with Alec, then turned to Dash and gestured at the waiting hatch. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Dash took a last look up the slope, at the fading daylight. He can take care of himself, Ragsdale had said.
Hope that’s true for all of us.
Dash turned back to the hatch, unslinging and cradling his slug carbine. Ragsdale had provided one for each of them—a good compromise between the relatively anemic slug pistols and the incandescent fury of the plasma weapons. They’d already checked inside, seeing nothing but dirt and rock sloping down into darkness, so he knelt, worked his way through the gap, and entered the Golden ship.
“On me,” Dash said, and his voice echoed into the darkness below.
No one answered. But they followed, and that was brave enough.
10
Dash had expected that they’d be able to go a few meters and then find their way blocked by debris, crushed structural components, and smashed structures. Frankly, he’d assumed this aft-most section was just that—the aft-most section, and that everything forward of here would simply have been utterly destroyed, a pulverized cone of metallic ore that punched down into the bedrock.
But he was wrong. He led the way down a long incline of sand, gravel, and rock that started at the hatch and went deeper into the wreck. It was, he thought, material that had infiltrated from outside during the ship’s long burial pouring through the gaping hatch and probably other openings. Through the night-vision filter on his helmet, he could see that the long, gritty slope extended tens of meters into the ship, mostly filling a vast and seemingly empty compartment that appeared to make up much of its stern. The point of all this space eluded him; it must have served some purpose, but he wasn’t sure what.
As they neared the bottom, he finally saw something that loomed in detail, a massive piece of machinery that extended back up to the rear of the hull, now many meters behind and above them, nearly buried by debris. It probably had something to do with the partly exposed thruster they’d seen in the pit. It might actually be of great interest, but Dash decided to ignore it for now, in favor of something even more interesting that had just come into view.
A huge set of doors loomed at the base of the dirt pile they’d been descending. They were partly buried but must have been nearly thirty meters tall. Had they been closed, that would have been the end of their expedition, at least until they discovered another way in. Even the Archetype likely would have had trouble shifting them. However, they’d been bent, twisted, and partially flung apart, probably by whatever titanic forces had slammed through the ship when it crashed. Still, as severe as the damage was, Dash was stunned the signal had survived at all.
“Sentinel, are you seeing this?”
He’d activated a helmet cam and let Sentinel access its stream of data. She’d stated that, unless there were actual countermeasures at work, she should be able to maintain comms with them pretty much anywhere inside the wreck; he hoped that included the camera’s imagery, because he really wanted her perspective on whatever they found. Sentinel had abilities beyond the Meld, being able to intuit what data was most critical—sometimes. In other cases, human instinct was the only way to solve a problem.
“I am. The doors are large and constructed for battle, but beyond that, serve no unusual purpose that I can see.”
“Agreed. That’s what I’m getting.” He looked back up the slope at the others descending behind him. “Everyone okay back there?”
Leira, bringing up the rear, called back, “So far—which isn’t very far—so good.”
Her voice echoed through the vast space, but in a flat, monotonal sort of way. Dash didn’t know if it was some property of the ship around them, or just the huge pile of dirt under their feet. He gave a thumbs up, and carried on.
He stopped at the massive doors and peered into the space beyond. More dirt and rocks, and even a few remnants of something that looked like dry lichen, were strewn across the floor. But they dwindled toward the edge of his night vision, probably marking as far into the ship as the detritus from outside had reached. The compartment was considerably smaller than the empty one they’d just traversed, although still huge. And it wasn’t as empty, with massive, complicated-looking machines rising from the deck into the ceiling high above. Skeins of cable hung from the gloom among them. Dash switched his view to thermal imaging, which gave much poorer resolution, but would let him see any heat signatures that might indicate things that were powered up—or alive. But there was nothing, so he switched back to night vision and started into the compartment.
“What the hell is that?” Conover said.
Dash turned back, thumb resting on the carbine’s safety lever. Conover had apparently seen something on the floor, so Amy and Ragsdale joined him, examining whatever it was. Leira and Viktor kept an eye out for trouble.
Dash joined the group huddled around whatever Conover had found. “What is it?”
Conover just pointed at the floor, which was covered with a few centimeters of dusty sand and gravel.
Footprints.
“So I assume none of us made those, right?” Dash said.
Conover held his foot up over one of the prints. He had big feet, probably the biggest of all of them, but these prints were bigger. “Don’t think so.”
“So someone—or something—is in here already,” Amy said.
Ragsdale crouched to look more closely. “This dir
t is mostly gravel, so it doesn’t hold detail. Can’t tell if it’s a big human foot, or something else. Can’t even really tell how old it is.”
“In here, it would have been sheltered from the weather,” Viktor offered. “So it could be hours, days, maybe even weeks or months old.”
Ragsdale stood. “All we can tell is that it’s a big footprint, roughly the shape of a human foot.”
“Can you think of anyone in your colony with feet this big?” Leira asked. “Assuming they’re proportional, they’d have to be attached to a pretty big body.”
Ragsdale shook his head. “I think I’d remember someone big enough for these feet. No one comes to mind.”
Dash hefted the carbine. “So, either someone else has been here, and you folks at Port Hannah never knew it, or it’s…” He shrugged. “Something else.”
“We’d better keep a close eye out, just in case,” Amy said.
“I think that was the plan anyway.”
They turned back to the massive doors and the compartment beyond. As they started forward again—their caution ratcheted up another couple of notches—Ragsdale spoke up. “Something you’ve never talked about, Dash, is if there might be someone else after this wreck. Do your employers have competitors we should know about?”
Dash glanced back. He’d been avoiding this angle, hoping it would never come up. Now he considered lying—but it just didn’t seem right to leave Ragsdale in the dark. So, he nodded.
“They do.”
“So, could that footprint belong to one of them? Could they have already been here?”
“They might have. But that doesn’t really change what we came here to do, or how careful we should be about doing it.”
He waited for Ragsdale to react angrily, or with frustration, but he just nodded and hefted his own carbine. He was a pro.
They picked their way into the next compartment.
The dirt and debris from outside finally dwindled away to reveal bare deck plates. Their footsteps clunked against them, soft and dull, but still causing a thunderous racket in the brooding silence. As they progressed, Conover carefully examined all of the tech they passed, but reported that none of it seemed to be active. Finally, they reached the far end of the compartment, where three corridors branched off in different directions.