by Richard Fox
Gideon slowed to a stop next to the Toth’s body and glanced over at the Iron Hearts. Elias crushed the skull of a warrior as Bodel rammed his cannon arm into the chest of another and blew its back out with a single bullet.
Kallen…was looking right at Gideon. She pressed her armor’s knuckles against her helm to mimic kissing them, then tapped the same fist against her heart.
For a moment, Gideon felt peace. Then the Toth warrior at his feet grabbed him by the ankle. The last thing Gideon saw was the Toth’s fire-blackened claws slicing at his face.
****
Gideon snapped awake. The amniosis fluid of his womb sloshed around him, the abyssal darkness of the pod within his armor lit up in a grid.
The Toth-inflicted scars on his face and chest burned, just as they always did after that dream. He felt his heart pounding, his muscles bunched into knots.
Different, he thought. It was different this time. Nico…
“Armor, begin conscious cycle for Lieutenant Gideon,” came through his womb and into his auditory system. “Authorization Tagawa, LC-44.”
“I’m awake,” Gideon sent the Scipio’s captain.
“Get your lance prepped,” she said. “I think we’ve found her.”
****
Gale winds edged Roland off his descent path through the cloud layer enveloping Nimbus IV. The deep gray expanse around him darkened to the color of red wine below, and the searing light of the system’s star washed out the world over his head as he fell. He activated a small maneuver thruster and shunted over to one side, just beyond the limit of his plotted course.
Inside his armor’s womb, floating in the amniosis fluid and connected by an umbilical control cord that plugged into his brain through a plug in the base of his skull, he had no sensation of falling as he plunged down at terminal velocity.
A radio channel opened up from his Dotari lance mate, Cha’ril, who was unseen in the abyss of clouds but still close by.
“Roland, we’re almost to the break point and if you—”
Wind slapped against Roland’s armor, gently rocking him within his womb. The push left him slightly off the centerline of his course, but still within his path’s margin of error.
“Something to add, Cha’ril?” Roland asked.
“Got ten-meter swells on the ocean surface,” Aignar said, coming up on the lance’s channel. “Prep your retros for early stop. Get ready for a drop if Mother Nature proves fickle.”
“Confirm break floor adjustment up twenty meters,” Gideon said and new telemetry data flashed across the HUD fed into Roland’s vision.
Roland activated the jetpack bolted to his armor’s back and maneuver thrusters on his legs. He glanced over the power levels, then looked down at the approaching darkness.
“Break in three,” Aignar said, “two…one. Go, go, go!”
Roland swung his legs forward slightly and ignited his rockets. Inertia strong enough to snap the neck of a normal human felt like a slight push against his body inside the armored womb, enough that he felt his feet just touch the inside of his control pod. Heat warnings popped up on his HUD, and he felt like he had his back to a burning fire pit.
He fell through the bottom of the cloud layer and found an endless expanse of roiling ocean, nothing but white-capped waves the size of buildings thrashing against each other. He searched for a flat patch of ocean to land in as his airspeed shrank to zero.
“No good options,” he said. “Geronimo!”
Roland shut off his jetpack and plummeted toward the water. Hydraulic pistons punched the jetpack away and it went tumbling end over end through the driving rain.
Roland pressed his legs together and crossed his arms over his chest just as he came down on the backside of a wave. He wobbled slightly as he sank into Nimbus IV. His armor’s sensors switched spectrums and formed a composite of the undersea world through a mixture of heat and sonar, as it boosted what limited visible light made it through the cloud cover and salt water.
“Sound off,” Gideon said.
“Feet wet, fifty meters to the floor,” Roland said as an eel the length of a city bus swam below him. Bioluminescent dots shimmered along the eel’s flanks. Blood-red coral the size of trees dotted the ocean bottom and schools of fish meandered over lime-green sand.
Roland spread his feet hip-distance apart, hitting the ground with a massive thump. A hammer-headed manta ray scurried away. He sent out a sonar pulse and the location of the rest of his lance mates came up. They’d landed in a neat diamond formation.
“Water pressure’s nominal,” Cha’ril said. “At least we didn’t land in another rip current.”
“The Scipio’s magnetometer picked up a return to the south,” Gideon said. “Move out and stay alert for whales.”
A waypoint near the edge of a canyon appeared on Roland’s HUD. He turned and started walking, his feet drumming up clouds of dust with each step. Worms rose from the sand and clutched at his armor’s shins and knees as he went on.
“I’m surprised Captain Sobieski sent us down for this one,” Aignar said. “Magnetic anomaly looks like it’s in a trench wall, could just be a vein of exposed iron.”
“The size and mass are consistent with the Cairo,” Cha’ril said. “More so than the last five drops.”
“Lots of asteroid activity in this system, lots of big lumps of metal on the ocean floor,” Aignar said. “Is that why the Cairo was even in this system all by herself?”
“She’s listed as being here on a survey mission,” Roland said.
“Then why did she have an entire company of Path Finders on her crew manifest?” Aignar asked. “Nimbus is a protosystem. Won’t be properly habitable for millions of years. Drop a drone to collect data and scoot back into the Crucible gate.”
“That the Xaros built a Crucible in this system should tell you something,” Cha’ril said. “They left jump gates where there were worlds they could settle or where they found remnants of past civilizations.”
Roland’s HUD blinked with a hit on his armor’s magnetometer, he activated a flood lamp on his helm and marched toward the anomaly. A school of fish the size of basketballs fled from his light while ribbon eels squirmed out of the sand and swam toward him.
“Don’t remember anything from the Crucible survey about the Xaros liking water planets,” Aignar said. “This is the closest thing the system has as far as an Earth-like environment.”
“The outer gas giants have extensive moon ecosystems,” the Dotari said.
“Then why—if the Cairo was out here snooping for archaeotech with her Path Finders—why say she’s on a survey mission? Phoenix sending the Scipio with the rest of her corvette squadron isn’t how we’re supposed to do search and rescue.”
Roland stopped next to a coral tree and swept his light up the trunk and to the spiny branches. Tiny polyps on the surface opened and closed, grasping at passing plankton. Red mist flowed from the upper branches, their ends broken along a straight diagonal line.
“Roland, you have something?” Gideon asked.
“Looks like something cut through this coral. Angle doesn’t look natural…continuing to the mag anomaly,” he said. Roland walked on, faster now. After a solid week of scanning and searching the planet and the rest of the system for the missing Cairo, he finally had a possible lead. As much as he wanted this mission to end, finding the ship down here meant there was little hope of finding the ship’s crew alive.
A wire outline appeared on his HUD, covering a patch of ocean floor the size of a hangar door. He walked over, and his foot thumped against something metal. He sank to his knees and brushed a swath of sand up, where it caught the gentle current and flowed away like smoke in the wind.
He felt the metal through his armor’s fingertips; the surface was pockmarked like lava rock. Roland pointed the twin gauss cannons mounted to his forearm and cycled the autoloader. He carried no ammunition and the weapon sent a blast of water across the hunk of metal, billowing sand up and away.
The sweep revealed a section of starship hull plating, the remains of a pair of white numerals on the far edge.
“Got something.” Roland sent images to the rest of his lance. “Hull number…37? That’s the Breitenfeld. This can’t be right.”
“That’s an 87,” Gideon said. “The Cairo’s complete number is 387. Besides, the Breitenfeld’s been on some secret mission for months.”
“Looks like we found her.” Roland lifted up the edge of the hull plate, disturbing a small gaggle of yellow and red fish. Floodlights from the other three suits of armor converged toward him through the gloom of the deep water.
“No. We found a piece, not the ship,” Gideon said as he neared. “This has reentry scorching on it, could’ve been lost in orbit.”
Roland swung his lamp toward the direction of the larger object that brought them down in the first place. The seafloor ended abruptly a few dozen yards away, giving way to endless water and darkening depths. He dropped the hull section and hurried over to Cha’ril and Aignar, where they stood along the trench edge.
Below, a scar had been cut across the canyon wall, and resting on a shelf—barely visible to his armor’s sensors—was a Terran destroyer, her engines half-ripped from the rest of the hull, leaving decks exposed to the ocean.
His HUD returned an error as it searched for the bottom depth of the trench.
“If she’d crashed any deeper, we’d have to call in the Ruhaald,” Aignar said.
“The water pressure at the Cairo’s depth is 1100 feet,” Cha’ril said. “Eighty-five percent of our armor’s rated pressure. We’re going down there, correct?” she asked Gideon as he joined them.
“We need to learn more,” Gideon said. “Hull’s mostly intact. We should be able to recover her data banks at least. Cha’ril, Aignar, check the dorsal life pods. Roland and I will get inside. Hit your floats if you go over the edge or the pressure will crush you into paste long before you hit bottom.”
“If there is a bottom,” Aignar said.
A rising sound like a foghorn reverberated through the water.
Roland and the others snapped off their floodlights.
“Great…whales.” Roland ran along the edge of the trench, keeping pace with Gideon. He looked up at the weak light on the ocean surface. The silhouette of massive creatures passed overhead.
“It really is a mistake to call them whales,” Cha’ril said. “Earth whales are mammals. I must say that swimming mammals—which is something of an aberration, according to the most recent galactic survey—are fascinating. But we haven’t seen these Nimbus whales give birth to live young or even—”
“No one asked, Cha’ril,” Aignar said.
Gideon leapt off the edge and sank toward the ledge bearing the final resting place of the Cairo. Roland followed suit, fighting the urge to try to swim. His armor was as buoyant as an anvil and was adept at nothing but sinking in this environment.
“The xenobiological classification is important,” Cha’ril said. “It’s frustrating enough that so many humans think we Dotari are birds just because of our beaks.”
“Don’t Dotari lay eggs when they have babies?” Aignar asked.
Gideon growled through the comm channel.
“We will discuss this later,” Cha’ril said curtly.
Roland landed on the shelf jutting from the canyon side. His footfalls kicked up a spray of bioluminescent life that sparkled in the dark water. He heard the thump of Cha’ril and Aignar landing on the hull of the Cairo. The ship loomed over him, an artifact of humanity that did not belong on this world.
“Tell me what you see,” Gideon said.
“Scorch marks across the hull.” Roland zoomed in on the hull with his optics, recording images and keeping pictures up for comparison. “Worse on the dorsal. She hit atmo without her shields, then lost altitude control.”
He examined the rent where the engines had torn away from the hull.
“The break is twisted, sheared away. Must have happened when she hit the water or scraped along the canyon wall,” Roland said. He ran his optics up and down the hull, then did a double take over an open tear the length of his armor’s leg.
“Can’t be…Cha’ril, you reading any radiation from the hull? Any isotopes from a plasma-graphenium interaction?” Roland asked.
“Negative,” she said. “We’re almost to the life-pod banks.”
“Sir…” Roland was about to send the screen capture of the tear through the Cairo’s hull when Gideon sent him three images of similar damage, all ringed by silver metal that had cooled along the edges like scar tissue.
“Rail cannons,” Gideon said. “She was ambushed.”
“By who?” Roland asked. “Vishrakath use plasma weapons, same as the Naroosha. No one uses rail cannons as extensively as…we do. This can’t be right.”
“You think your eyes are lying to you?” Gideon pointed to the central passageway in the Cairo, her deck plating dangling from the exposed hull like flesh from a severed limb. “Let’s get in there and find the computer core.”
“Yes, sir.” Roland followed his lance commander to the base of the ship and began climbing up the bulkhead frames.
“At the life pods,” Aignar said. A grainy image of an open panel and an empty space in the ship’s hull came up on Roland’s HUD. “Empty. Every last pod on the dorsal port evac point is gone.”
“Same with the starboard pods,” Cha’ril said. “Given the burn marks within the pod bay, I’m positive the ship was evacuated before she entered the atmosphere.”
“Pods are all loaded with mayday boxes,” Roland said as he pulled himself up another deck. “Should’ve picked them up if they crashed into the ocean…unless they’d all been destroyed before they hit atmo.”
Gideon vaulted up into the central passageway and turned his floodlight on as Roland came up behind him. Broken pieces of bulkheads floated in the water, and Roland made out half-open doors and more detritus ahead of them.
“Meet us at server room three,” Gideon said, “should be on this deck.”
The foghorn of whale song carried through the ship like a tremor. The Cairo canted to one side and Roland grabbed on to the bulkhead out of instinct.
“Why do they think we’re food?” Roland asked.
“We did see them tearing apart those jellyfish that were lit up like Christmas trees.” Gideon said, snapping off his lamp. “Come, we should be close.”
They made their way deeper into the ship, their way lit by their infrared cameras, when a shadow reached out at them from the dark.
Gideon grabbed it and gently swung the loose mass toward Roland. It was a Terran sailor—what was left of him at least. The skin beneath the cracked faceplate was gray and loose, eyes missing.
“Check for tags,” Gideon said.
Roland pinched the body’s shoulder, the flesh crumpling beneath his armored fingers. His armor’s right forefinger snapped open at the knuckle and he scanned the corpse. A small pill-sized object pulsed on his HUD in the center of the sailor’s suit.
“Got it. Spacer Apprentice Hellerman, Joseph H. Identity logged.” Roland tapped the knuckles of his fist against his helm where its mouth would be, then against his chest twice. He pressed the body to the deck and against the bulkhead. “Sir…he’s in his shipboard utilities, not his void combat suit. It takes seventy-five seconds for a graduate from basic training to switch uniforms. He at least had his emergency helm on…doubt he knew much more than the ship was under attack before he died.”
“Fits that they were ambushed,” Gideon said.
“They knew exactly where to hit her,” Cha’ril said as she and Aignar came up behind them. “From what we saw up top, every main power line was severed by rail cannon fire. I doubt the Cairo managed to fire back.”
“Roland, here.” Gideon pressed his fingertips into the seam of a door and bent the reinforced doors open just enough for Roland to stick his helm inside. Stacks of servers within metal housing were bolted
to the bulkhead of the small room. One server sat tilted, its corner denting the unit next to it.
“Core’s…not looking good. No ambient power. Let me hook up.” Roland brought his right forearm into the room. He unlocked a pair of probes from a small hatch on his armor and extended the probes out to the main computer terminal. The probes wavered up and down like cavorting eels.
“Problem?” Gideon asked.
“I’ve trained for moving the probes around in normal atmo and vacuum…not cold saltwater,” Roland said.
“Move.” Cha’ril said, nudging his foot.
“I’ve got…I’ve got it.” Roland plugged both probes into the terminal and the system powered up for a split second, then died with a snap. “Slagged.” Roland pulled his probes back into his arm. “Captain must have hit the panic button when the ship was attacked. Even if we pull the units off the wall, intelligence will never recover anything. Even the buffer was nothing but static.”
“Wait…buffers,” Aignar said. “Cairo’s a Geneva-class ship. Their point defense turrets have the same optics we do.” He tapped his helm. “Six-hour local storage. Won’t do a data transfer until a ship stands down from battle stations, keeps the load off the processors.”
“Then we find a turret,” Gideon said.
“Firing position Bravo-two-eight is at the end of this corridor,” Cha’ril said as her three lance mates turned to look at her. “I memorized the ship’s schematics. Didn’t you?”
The thrum of whale song reverberated through the ship and the deck rocked slightly beneath Roland’s feet.
“Moving.” Roland strode down the passageway, gripping the deck with the mag plates in the soles of his massive feet. The thump of the Iron Dragoons’ footfalls seemed to antagonize the whales outside the ship, and their song filled with clicks.
Aignar sent a brief video clip of a shadow moving against the severed opening behind them.