by P. R. Adams
The Carolina was gone.
Rimes tried to open a channel to the Carolina. He received no response. Ji’s shuttle came into view on the display. Relieved, Rimes opened a channel to Imogen and Kleigshoen. Imogen answered first.
“We lost the Carolina,” she said matter-of-factly.
“I’m sorry.” Rimes saw that Yama’s shuttle was still intact. “Yama made it, and I think I was able to save the lifeboat’s occupants. I want to add Dana.” When Imogen didn’t protest he added Kleigshoen to the channel. “Dana, we—”
“What were you thinking, Jack?” Kleigshoen’s voice was strained. “You could’ve been killed! We all could’ve been killed!”
“If that habitat has any survivors in it, we may have a better sense of what we’re up against.” Rimes felt the tension in his body and tried to relax. The BAS monitors showed him dipping into the amber on several bio-functions. “I’m sorry we lost the Carolina, but it’s not hopeless. We’re still alive. The research ship’s still functional.”
“We’ll pick you and the habitat up, Colonel,” Imogen said. “Yama can retrieve your men from the SAR ship. Let’s hope this somehow makes up for our losses.”
18 April, 2174. The Drake.
“She’s coming around.”
Rimes looked up from the display that had become his world in the last several hours. Kleigshoen was framed in the open hatchway to the lab he’d settled into. He closed his eyes and tried to recall what she was talking about, who ‘she’ was.
Kleigshoen stepped into the lab. “Jack, did you get some sleep? You promised me you’d—”
It hit him: the young woman they’d found in the lifeboat. By all indications, she ’d been one of the two crew members aboard the Drake, the deep exploration vessel.
“Jack?”
“I got a nap, Dana, yeah. I’m just…” He pointed at the display. “There’s so much here.”
“There’s nothing there you can’t read about later.” Kleigshoen crossed her arms, and Rimes immediately thought of Molly. “It’s not like the data’s going to change.”
“Data constantly changes. Reality constantly changes.”
“What?” Kleigshoen settled onto the floor next to him. “Are you okay?”
Rimes rubbed the scar on his temple. He wasn’t sure how he was. “If you’re still upset about us checking out the lifeboat and the Vishnu—”
“Why don’t you bring your stuff into the berth I’m sharing with the rest of the team?”
“I need my space.”
As large as the Drake was, it only had two berths, and only one showed signs of use. Each berth could house up to four people, and that was cramped. Rimes had settled into one of the expansive labs, a physics facility that had seen frequent use based on what he’d been able to gather from the locked-down computer systems. A common bath down the corridor gave him access to a shower, which he’d used before turning his attention to the data Barlowe was slowly prying from the systems salvaged from the Vishnu.
Kleighshoen placed a hand on Rimes’s knee. “If you need someone to talk to about Molly and—”
“I’m fine.” Rimes returned his attention to the data display. “It was the right call. That frigate was going to attack once we were in range. It didn’t matter one bit whether we were approaching in a tight formation or dispersed as we were. If anything, the fact that we were so spread out may have saved one of the shuttles.”
Kleigshoen pulled her hand away. “Brozek and Meyers are still trying to figure out what it’s going to take to repair the damage from those missile strikes. So far, it just looks like a bunch of sensor and communications systems were affected, but they’re pretty sure it’s worse than that. Those missiles detonated meters away from the flight control systems.”
Rimes chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “How’s Brozek holding up?” Seconds from being dead. Does that reenergize you or make it worse? What’s he thinking of when someone mentions the Carolina now?
“It took him a little bit to get over how close he came.” Kleigshoen stood and turned her back on Rimes. “Not everyone’s used to living so close to death like you do, but he’ll be okay. The genies are having a harder time of it. I think they were, um, close?”
“Intimate. Like a pride of lions.”
“Yeah.” She leaned against a workstation near Rimes. In the workstation light he could see her outfit: jeans and the sleeveless, black T-shirt she favored. Even after so long in the field, she’d managed to find her way right back to the creature comforts available on the station. Everyone had. The entire unit was sporting new or at least repaired clothing. So were the genies.
The delicate scent of sandalwood—her scent—filled the lab now. Rimes stole a glance at her, catching her profile in the lab’s sterile light. He cursed himself for appreciating her beauty, for betraying Molly. Kleigshoen turned and tilted her head.
“What’s going on in your mind, Jack? You’ve gone through so much. Are you numb, or are you just a bundle of pain right now?”
“Neither.” Rimes knew it was more accurate to say both, but dwelling on that wouldn’t help the situation. “Others suffered losses. I’m not special.”
“I think you are. I think you’re quite special. If you ever want to…talk, I’m there for you. Anytime.”
“Thanks.” He fought back the urge to go to her, to pull her to him. He wanted to feel her warmth, to share his own warmth, to taste her. Kwon’s thoughts became a cancer, twisting Rimes’s desires. He stood. “Let’s go see if our survivor is up.”
They didn’t speak the entire way to the infirmary, but Rimes sensed Kleigshoen took comfort in his presence as much as he did in hers. They stepped into the infirmary, and their shoulders brushed. The electricity of the contact felt to Rimes like their time together before Commando School. Her skin was soft and hot. He closed his eyes and leaned against the bed nearest the door.
Corporal Banh looked up from the bed farthest in and nodded, his thick eyebrows washed in the infirmary’s sterile white lights. In that light, his cheeks seemed sunken. He wore a gray surgical gown and gloves. A mask rested against his narrow chest. Rimes had only seen Banh in a formal operating room once before, when he’d trained with two surgeons. He moved with the confident assurance of an expert.
Lying on the table in front of him was a young woman, the lifeboat’s sole occupant. Her hair was light brown, shoulder length, stringy. She had a long, sharp, almost forgettable face. Her cheeks and chin were soft, her skin fair, almost sickly. Rimes had thought she was dead at first sight. Her chest rose shallowly beneath the gray infirmary gown. With the gown on, Rimes could only see her calves and lower arms, and they were soft, as if she didn’t care about herself. Everything about her seemed weak and vulnerable. She looked like she might be approaching thirty, which was young for being on a ship like the Drake.
Banh waved toward the woman’s face. “I was afraid you were going to miss this, Colonel.”
“A moment like this? I wouldn’t dream of missing it.”
“Miss Credence should be coming around any minute now. She’s lucky to be alive, regardless of what you did. She’ll have some frostbite on her toes and fingers, but I can treat that. A few minor wounds—scrapes, abrasions. She wasn’t treated kindly by whoever put her into that lifeboat.”
“And might we know who that was yet?” Imogen breezed through the hatchway and came to a stop at the foot of Credence’s bed. Imogen still radiated hostility, even though she claimed not to hold the Carolina’s destruction against Rimes. It was actually a relief to Rimes to see that she cared about her people. It made her more human.
“We have a pretty good idea of who that might have been,” Rimes said. “We’ll need to hear her story, though. It looks like she was one of two scientists aboard this ship. No sign of the other.”
“They were lovers,” Imogen said.
Rimes nodded. “Looks like it.”
Credence gulped air suddenly and convulsed atop her bed. Banh lean
ed in and checked her vitals. His hands ran from her wrist to her throat, then to her chest.
“Miss Credence?” Banh’s voice was calm and reassuring. “Can you hear me?”
Credence’s eyes flashed open, and she gasped. She sat up, shoving back with surprising ease. “Don’t! Don’t do it! You don’t understand!” She sat up and looked around at those gathered in the infirmary. “Who are you? Why did you let them take him? Why did you let them take it?”
31
18 April, 2174. The Drake.
* * *
They sat in the galley, Rimes opposite Imogen, Banh opposite Credence, and Kleigshoen at Credence’s side. Ji sat at a separate table, Gwambe and Trang at a third table. The space was tight and the tables close together, forming a two-by-two rectangle.
Behind the tables, the kitchen was an open space, containing only glistening plastic storage cabinets, a sink, a recycler, a cooler, and cooking units. The floor matched the kitchen equipment, reflecting the dull lighting just enough to stave off the darkness. The hatch was closed to help them hear Credence’s weak voice.
“So I’m not following,” Rimes said. “Could you step back through it again? Slower this time. You worked for who?”
“Technically, we were probationary ADMP contractors.” Credence spoke louder and slower than when she’d started. She took a drink of water from a mug Trang had fetched for her. A series of photographs flashed across the mug’s surface. Mostly, they were star fields and technical equipment, but on occasion Credence and a chubby, balding young man flashed for several seconds. Credence wouldn’t touch the cup when those images showed and in fact would make a point of pushing the cup away and searching for eye contact with anyone else.
“Standard contract conditions,” she said. “Three years, pass an evaluation, get an entry-level position, and start your way up. Scott. Scott O’Neill. He and I—he was my boyfriend—created our own corporation for the contract.” Credence then shook her head. “No, wait. That’s not true. Scott formed the corporation before we bid on the contract. It was a failure. He was going bankrupt. Scott was…stubborn. He insisted he didn’t need a second PhD to get on at a metacorporation. While I was working through mine, he was getting published. In his own way, he was very intelligent. He was so deep in debt, though, so impatient to begin. You know how it is.” She looked at Ji for support, then Imogen. “They have their policies, their processes. They’re like a mountain: They won’t budge for anything. Scott had the intellect; he had proof of his knowledge out in the commons. Unless you’re hiring on for menial work, though, you need that second PhD. Get a third one, and your odds of getting on with one of the big ones go up exponentially. We both had eyes on SunCorps. If you’re going to dream, dream big, right?”
“You owned part of O’Neill’s corporation?” Kleigshoen sounded sympathetic.
Rimes wondered if it was sincere.
“Seventy percent. Scott was too stubborn to accept money, so I had to buy into his business. About four years ago, he finally buckled and began his studies. In the end, he caved to my pressure.” Credence smiled, embarrassed.
Imogen grunted. “Men are always the weakest.”
Rimes watched Imogen for a moment, searching for any clear signs of the arrogance that had doomed Duke and his team and nearly taken Rimes and Meyers with them. Imogen stared back at him, her eyes cold and unwavering.
Stay focused.
“ADMP contracted us a week before Scott’s dissertation. Fourteen months later, we began training for…” Credence waved at the galley, then she slapped her thighs and sobbed for just a moment. Her sob became a laugh as she spoke. “Scott always joked we got stuck with a duck. You know.”
Rimes smiled. It was the sort of joke Rick would have made. “So you were out here for how long before the Silver Light showed up?”
“Here? What’s the date again?”
“April 18, Earth reckoning,” Banh said.
“Not even three months then. But we launched last July. We spent four months at our previous location before moving on. We were supposed to work a grid over a three-year span, investigating nine sites.”
Imogen frowned. “What were you doing?”
“Like I said before, we’d launch probes, twenty at a time.” Credence looked away from Imogen, as if bothered by her alienness, then locked eyes with Gwambe. “They had miniature drive systems in them. Out a couple weeks at full acceleration, then back, then out again. Scott actually wrote the software ADMP used to plot out the grid. They showed it to us during our interviews. Scott thought it was wonderful, even though he didn’t make a penny off it.”
“Describe what it was, exactly, that you found,” Rimes said. He was struggling with his patience again, reminding himself that Credence was a scientist, not a soldier. He had no authority over her.
“Well, you know how these things go.” Credence seemed oblivious to the likelihood she was the only one in the galley with actual experience in her particular field. “They launch. They scan. They send message drones back if they find something, just to be safe. Then, they return. We were lucky. The second week here one of the drones spotted it.”
Kleigshoen leaned in, as if she could sense Rimes’s rising irritation. “So you retrieved it? Using the drone?”
“Yes.” Credence looked at everyone with a hint of pity and confusion. “Obviously.”
“What did it look like?” Rimes strained to keep his voice even. He was becoming annoyed at his own agitation, trying to understand what was really bothering him. He licked his lips. He wanted a stim.
“You’ve seen images of it.” Credence blinked, as if confused. She turned to Imogen, maybe hoping for support. When no one so much as blinked, she gave an exasperated sigh. “It was like a lifeboat almost. As far as I can recall, it was four meters long. It was exactly seventy-five percent as deep and wide as it was long. Exactly. I remember that much. The precision, the fact that it had no deformities, no sign of damage. The nearest star system was more than a hundred light years away. It wasn’t moving, not that we could measure.”
“Was it metal?” Rimes willed her to get to the point, to expand on what she’d shared. “Chiseled from stone? Some sort of synthetic material?”
“We were able to nick a very small sample,” Credence said. “That cost us our laser, though. About three millimeters by five, not even half a millimeter deep. We ran some tests on that and…if you’re forcing me to guess I’d be inclined toward something synthesized. It didn’t react to anything consistent with basic metals, but it had limited conductive properties.”
“Then what was it?” Gwambe asked. “You’ve basically described a big rectangle.”
“A convex polyhedron, yes.”
Rimes relaxed. Somehow, he’d been certain the metacorporations had been foolish enough to seek out another of the entities like the one from Sahara, throwing billions of dollars into a hopeless search of the depths of space. Even they have limits to their greed. But what were they looking for then?
“Was it what you were looking for?” Imogen asked, the words plucked from Rimes’s mind.
“What we were looking for?” Credence looked at Imogen, confused. “We were mapping space. That was the whole point of Scott’s dissertation. That was why he wrote that software ADMP was using for the drone’s grid. This was the most efficient mapping work ever done. The drones they were using? I designed the sensor array. ADMP wanted us specifically for our designs and knowledge. Even before Scott took his Jimmy mod, they were going to hire us. That’s unheard of. I mean, I had the mod early on. It’s a wonderful thing. Who wouldn’t want to be closer to our genie cousins?”
Ji snarled. Her spidery body recoiled, as if the idea of a human trying to approach the genie ideal was repulsive. She dropped to the floor, bug-like, and strode to the hatch, jogging its handle and exiting in a single motion. The hatch slammed shut behind her.
“She’s sensitive,” Imogen said once Ji was gone. “The genetic modification a Jimmy goes
through can produce a false sense of identification where there shouldn’t be any. Jimmies often mistake their change as somehow comparable without any understanding of the genie experience. We are creation, you are alteration. It can be offensive to some. You understand, I’m sure.”
Credence slowly nodded. She seemed genuinely hurt by Ji’s rejection and Imogen’s explanation. Rimes imagined Credence as the spurned sorority sister, voted out for not being…whatever sororities looked for. Credence looked down at the cup and seemed to draw comfort from the familiar images flashing on its surface.
“What is the purpose of these labs if you were merely mapping space?” Imogen waved toward the hatch Ji had gone through. “You said you had a laser capable of cutting this convex polyhedron?”
“Oh. The labs were standard for this ship’s design.” Credence waved a hand at her surroundings. “These vessels were designed to be planetary exploration ships. They didn’t have the time to get a ship built just for mapping space. They wanted to test our ideas immediately. It was convenient we had the labs, and we used them when we ran across asteroids or other objects worth researching. We are scientists, after all. We put it in Iso-2, off the main physics lab.”
Iso-2. Near my bed. So locked down, we can’t even hack it.
Rimes shivered. He tried to conceive of a metacorporation researching the galaxy for the good of humankind. It made even less sense than the idea of them blowing billions of dollars on a search for another mind-controlling entity.
“Jenny,” he said, trying to affect the same warm vibe Kleigshoen had managed and feeling like a retch for it. She just lost her boyfriend and damn near died. “Did you scan this thing, get a sense of what was inside it? Or was it a solid block of…whatever this material was?”