Invardii Series Boxset

by Warwick Gibson

  “Can’t say, Captain. Size seems to vary on the big one, and some frequencies go right through it like it’s not there. The smaller ones look like comet debris, methane and water ice over a denser core.”

  “How long until they hit?”

  “Not sure. Two, three minutes.” He stopped and looked again. “God’s Holy Daughters, that’s weird. The comet fragments have started bouncing around like rocks in a tumbler.”

  Finch let the reference to a renowned knocking shop on Mars pass. There was work to do.

  “George, what are our chances of being hit here at the control site by the big one?” he said tersely.

  “At the moment control is looking fairly good,” replied George. “It should land over the horizon, but there’s always the danger of fragmentation, and we don’t know where those pieces might go.”

  “Fine,” said Finch. “Put the incoming, whatever they are, on the long-range screen, then shut down power here to a minimum and seal all the bulkheads.”

  Matsu turned from the work station beside George. “All electronics and back-ups at the mining site are now powering down,” he said, “but the reactor won’t be below safety levels before these things hit, if they do hit.”

  Damn, thought Finch. The risks were reasonable though. If the fusion reactor took a direct hit at the mining site the resulting explosion would largely dissipate into space. The shock waves through the rocky interior would be more dangerous.

  Death from above if they got hit by a comet fragment, death from below if the reactor blew, not much of a choice. Finch smiled. Rule number one: don’t let fear slow your ability to think.

  “Captain, you’d better take a look at this!” said George.

  Finch turned to the screen. The central rock appeared oddly spherical, too perfectly round. Behind it, comet fragments grouped in a five-pointed formation, glowing with an eerie orange light. As the mining crew watched in stunned silence, orange fire bled from the smaller pieces into a central ring, and then lanced out toward the larger rock.

  “What’s happening?” whispered Matsu, as orange fire drilled a neat hole straight through the target and out the other side.

  “Get me a close up of that,” snapped Finch.

  The mining team watched the expanded picture in silence. In the short term, nothing happened. No explosions, no disintegration. But then the big rock vanished, gone from the void overhead as if it had never been.

  Bosun and Finch looked at each other in disbelief, then back at the screen. The supposed ‘comets’ seemed to be flying randomly again, and now they came in over the mining site. Two of them were destined to clip one side of the opencast mine, but at the last moment the formation changed direction to avoid the collision.

  “That” said George, “was a sign of intelligent control. If it wasn’t us, who in this whole goddamn Solar System was it?”

  “I’m with you, Saint G,” said Bosun.

  “Well it’s not Sumerian technology,” said Matsu, “and you can take that from me as a certainty!”

  Finch surveyed the environmental officer for a moment. It was part of Matsu’s training to know about the capabilities of Earth’s neighbours, the Sumerian race, so he was probably right. The trouble with that was it opened the door to much scarier possibilities, things Finch didn’t want to deal with right now.

  The United Federation of Earth Trading Associations (UfEta) had stumbled on the unusually stable super-element Orscantium, and what it did to space as it decayed, around four hundred years ago. The step from there to space flight hadn’t taken long at all, but it was another three hundred years before Humans found another civilisation with star drive capability, the Sumerians.

  The Sumerians were intelligent life, by all definitions, but they were so different to what Humanity had expected. Cooperation between Human and Sumerian continued to be difficult at the best of times. If the comets weren’t Sumerian in origin, then what were they? Right now Finch had other things to think about.

  “Bosun, Matsu, get a rover and take a look at the mining site. I want you there for a hands-on approach when we restart the reactor. We can never be too careful.

  “There’s also the possibility some debris from that large globe has landed nearby, so you better go armed. No, wait, if there is anything from the globe out there, it will be way ahead of us in technology.

  “Cancel the weapons. George will monitor you while you’re out there, and try not to annoy anything you find.”

  Bosun raised his eyebrows, and Finch raised his in return. “Anyone got a better idea?” he snapped. “I thought so. Let’s go do it then!”

  George unsealed the bulkheads and restored full power to the control centre. Finch ran diagnostics of the reactor systems and checked for damage using remote cameras.

  Bosun and Matsu walked into the spraysuit chamber.

  “Ah, shite, I get tired of this,” groaned Bosun, as he slipped on gloves and boots and grabbed a mask. When both of them had snapped the masks into place, they stood with arms raised and feet apart.

  A rough foam sprayed over them until they were covered from head to toe, and sealed into the accessories. A fine mist set the foam into a firm but flexible suit. The suits were rated close to 100 percent for insulation, but not recommended outside the rovers. Miners often ignored that.

  Once he had taken an airpak from the wall, Bosun pulled the straps over and around his shoulders until they clicked together across his chest. When they both had vidlink and air connections in place, they trudged over to the testing station. Behind them the spraysuit cubicles cleaned and reset themselves.

  Both spraysuits showed clear under vacuum at the testing station, and the two men exited the control centre straight into an SM2 armoured rover.

  When he had checked and cleared the rover’s systems, Matsu patched the vidlink feed into the control room and headed for the crater. Bosun started running through a checklist of the things they would need at the reactor.

  George finished restoring the control centre to operational, and Finch handed him the mining site to bring back on line.

  “Keep a close eye on the rover, George,” he cautioned. “If you want me I’ll be simcomming the big dish. I’d better call this one in.”

  This was going to be a *S7, alien contact, he just knew it. The last time he’d got too close to ‘breaking news’, as it was so euphemistically called by the media, it had cost him his career and a relationship with an ops officer a grade ahead of him. It still hurt to think about her.

  He was just starting to get back on his feet in the mining industry, taking big risks and earning big money at the sludge end of the Solar System, and now this. Finch was fluent in several languages, and as he left he muttered the choicest and most anatomically specific curses he knew for a full minute.

  Feeling better, he headed for the restech simcomm unit next door. This was restricted technology, restech, UfEta equipment. He was familiar with the large, elevated chair, and slid himself smoothly into it.

  The headgear adjusted to his position, and the optic shields closed over his face and came on line. Fingertip controls wrapped themselves around both arms and moulded themselves to his hands. He was identified from a dozen body imprints, and the system powered up. Finch tapped through the options showing in his visual field.

  Emergency over-ride to UfEta Earth . . . class: dash question mark *S7 . . . searching . . . no line of site possible . . . allocated reroute through research station orbiting Jupiter . . . feeding coordinates to the multidish array . . . and the system powered down. He booted it up again, and it died before ID protocols even started. He booted it for a third time and the headgear retracted while the controls unwrapped themselves from his arms.

  He was running diagnostics on the chair when George called to him from the control room.

  “Something’s interfering with our data systems. As best as I can make out, it’s reading the processor files.”

  “That figures,” said Finch. “Somethi
ng just knocked me off the simcomm routines.” A cold chill started around his heart. If something out there was hostile, and they couldn’t let anybody know they were under attack, it might get very messy.

  “Start the virus and sabotage routines,” he called.

  “Already running.”

  “Let me know as soon as you’ve got anything,” said Finch, and headed for the techdeck cubbyhole, where he would try to bypass the simcomm unit and operate the dish array manually. Less than five minutes later, George called him back to the control room to look at the vidlink link from the miners on the surface.

  “Ah, Cap’n, you definitely want to look at this,” came Bosun’s voice over the feed from the rover. The control centre had its own tiny satellites to provide contact around the curvature of the small moon, but the rover was still within line-of-sight.

  The SM2 rover had stopped halfway to its intended destination. Bosun and Matsu were traversing a fairly clear slope above the giant opencast mine. Matsu trained the forward cameras onto the floor of the pit, and an enormous white hemisphere came into view.

  CHAPTER 2

  ________________

  “That, I presume,” said Bosun, “is where Big Billy went when the comet debris started shooting at it. Not silly really, since it was the only place where it stood a chance of not being seen. Now, how did it disappear from up there, and reappear down here? That’s a pretty neat trick if you can do it.”

  “You are not going to call it ‘Big Billy’,” snorted George in the control centre.

  “Anyone got a better name?” said Bosun, taking a leaf from Finch’s early handling of a situation.

  “Call it what you like,” snapped Finch. “Where’s the other half of it?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” said Matsu, “but at the highest resolution we’ve got in the rover, the sides just continue into the floor of the pit. There are no broken edges.”

  “Then where’s the debris it displaced when it landed?”

  “I don’t know. I mean it didn’t. I just, look, I don’t know how but the sides just go into the rock, okay?”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down you two,” said Finch. “Head back to the control centre and we’ll take it from there. We’re going to need all our skills to handle this one.”

  “Understood,” said Matsu. “We won’t be long. I am not at all comfortable being out here with that thing right now.”

  By the time Finch had tried the most obvious bypass routes to the dish array, the rover had returned to the control centre. A chime from the security system identified an SM2 rover docking at the airlock.

  “I don’t think I can reroute a communication to Earth,” called Finch from the techdeck, “It looks like the transmitters are down as well as the simcomm unit, and we’ve got no control over the direction of the array.”

  “Forget that,” called George. “The virus inside our data systems is kicking up a storm!”

  Finch scrambled back into the control room. Script raced across the screens on every side, and backup protocols flickered feverishly overhead. He jumped into the nearest seat. Hundreds of pages of script flashed past in seconds, then a stream of override commands speared down the page, and the flickering parade of script resumed.

  “Shut it off!” he screamed desperately. George punched in a few more commands before ripping the laser web out of its casing in desperation. The flow of data continued unabated.

  “That’s it,” said George, “there’s nothing more I can do except take a plasma torch and turn all the panels into slag. With the laser web gone none of the systems should be able to talk to the others, but they’re doing it anyway.”

  Finch tried to think of something. He glanced at the life support system, and was reassured to see it was functioning normally. He tapped on the commslink on his upper arm. “Bosun, Matsu, don’t get cleaned up. We might be going out again soon.”

  Bosun and Matsu dropped the airpaks on the floor of the cargo bay, and sat down on the benches just inside the airlock. They wouldn’t need the micropulse room next to the spray cubicles after all.

  In the micropulse room, finely tuned electronic pulses broke down chemical linkages in the foam of the spraysuits, as well as the clothing underneath, and peeled the resultant chaff away with a blast of ionised air.

  Everything was recycled inside the unit, and a new set of clothing for each of them was always ready when the micropulse process was finished. But for now they just had to sit and wait.

  “This interference has to be coming from the white dome hiding out in the mine,” said George, looking at the parade of script flickering across the screens.

  “We’ve still got access to the rovers, and the mining equipment. I say we try and cook ‘Big Billy’ with the plasma torches in the refinery. I could mount a handful of them on one of the mining units, and we could send it in by remote.”

  “Maybe,” said Finch, “and maybe not. The dome could just be disabled, not hostile. We saw it take a hit of that orange fire, and I don’t think that was a friendly chat. Now it’s down in the mine. It looks around, sees us, and says to itself, ‘there’s some technology I can use’.

  “Apart from which,” he added, “I don’t think we’d get anywhere near it with something that looks like a weapon.”

  George was trying to get a message out on one of the emergency frequencies when the flicker of information stopped abruptly. The two men looked at each other, then back at the screens. A small dot of light edged rather randomly around the central screen, like a child’s wavering attempts at longhand.

  The erratic scrawl had covered about half the screen when it vanished. Seconds ticked by while the two men watched in fascination.

  “HELLO COMMUNICATIONS,” appeared in giant letters, taking up most of the screen. This slowly faded, and then another message appeared, overwriting the first.

  “PLEASE TO HELP FREEDOM,” appeared in more of the giant letters.

  Then, “TO REMEMBER ONE SOURCE,” followed.

  After that there was nothing. The mixture of overwrites slowly faded from the screen.

  “What is ‘one source’?” mused George.

  “Don’t know,” said Finch, “but it does look like a request for help.”

  “Well, we’re still alive,” said George, “and it is saying please. Right now that’s better than being reduced to dust by an alien energy beam, or worse. You want to have a crack at communicating with it?”

  “No, but I don’t have much choice,” sighed Finch.

  He sat down in front of the screen. The ‘voice to screen’ command didn’t work, so he pulled out the mining diagnostics pad and reconfigured it to alphabet use.

  “HOW TO HELP?” he typed in.

  “ENERGY POWER HURRY HELP,” appeared on the screen in response.

  Finch reached over to the next screen, and called up an energy scan of the mine workings. Where the white hemisphere lay tucked up against one side, a faint blue point blinked feebly.

  “By all the gods I’ve never heard of, look at that!” he exclaimed. “The dome isn’t registering at all. There’s one small central point, and that’s running at less than a megawatt. I think maybe they do need our help.”

  George experimented, and found he could pull up a biometric scan.

  “No life signs,” he said. “No movement, no heat, no electrical activity consistent with a nervous system.”

  “The pilots, if there are any, could be shielded from scans,” said Finch, “or they could be a different sort of life.”

  Finch tapped his commslink. “Bosun, we’re going down into the pit. Stack the back of the rover with powerpaks, and throw in a portable dish for drawing power off the reactor. I’m going with you. Five minutes.”

  “Understood,” said Bosun.

  Finch turned to George. “Keep trying to send emergency messages. Hard copy a brief version of what’s happening here, something that can’t be wiped by an emf pulse, or destroyed by fire. You get the idea. If th
e worst comes to the worst, there must be some record of this.”

  George nodded.

  “And George.” George looked up from the screen. “See you on the other side, all right?”

  George laughed. “Yeah, yeah. I hope you make it too. Go catch your rover.”

  Finch headed for the spraysuit cubicles, and went through the same process Bosun and Matsu had already endured. Four minutes later the rover left the embarkation bay and roared toward the pit, huge overland wheels bouncing along the track and spinning great fountains of purple dust behind it in the low gravity.

  Bosun slowed the rover at the top of the track into the pit. The white shell of the dome was massive, an unearthly, perfect mushroom of giant proportions. As they bounced more cautiously down the long incline to the floor, the shell flickered and went dull for a moment, and then resumed its former brightness.

  “It’s losing integrity,” said Finch. “We need to be snappy about rigging up a power transfer when we get there, understood?”

  “And how are we going to do that,” said Bosun, drawing out the words with a hint of scepticism, and a little fear.

  “I don’t know,” said Finch. “At this stage I just don’t know.”

  “If they want our help, they’re going to have to give us some pointers,” drawled Bosun, coupling the powerpaks into a makeshift multibox in the back of the rover, and improvising an extendable lead from the multibox.

  “Watch the bumps, Matsu!” he said in exasperation. “I’m trying to do delicate work back here!”

  “What do you want – go fast or go careful!” snapped Matsu, his voice breaking with an aggression that was out of character.

  Finch raised his voice. “We’re all on edge. We need to think about teamwork, got it?”

  Two brisk “Yessirs” snapped back. He smiled. It was good to know he could count on his team.

  The rover circled through 180 degrees and reversed toward the dome. At half its length from the dome Finch called a stop. Matsu overrode the airlock sequence. They hadn’t pressurised the cabin, relying on the spraysuits to save time.