by Scott Rhine
“Elysium can only manufacture about 1200 liters of ice per L week,” Zeiss said. “Putting seven or eight people in stasis will probably free up more than that in drinking and agricultural water over the course of a year.”
“There’s my little food explorer,” Mercy said, arriving by elevator. She scooped Stu into her arms immediately, placing his sleepy face on her own shoulder. “Everything come out okay?”
“He’s breathing normally now,” Auckland said carefully.
“Yuki, you have a little squash or spit up on your shoulder. Why don’t you clean up?” Park said.
“Oh, dear,” Yuki said with exaggerated concern. “I’d better change.”
“Welcome to my world,” Mercy said.
Behind her, Lou asked, “What was that about long-term freezing?”
“With the water crisis, only you and Mercy need to be awake,” Zeiss said.
“I already explained this to Snowflake—no one is freezing my baby,” Mercy said grimly.
Zeiss lifted both hands in surrender. “I meant from the crew.”
As Yuki hid the memory fabric in her bedroom, the commander explained their predicament to the returning parents. When Yuki hurried back out to the patio, Mercy was explaining how she could adjust gravity to a minimum everywhere except Garden Hollow. “That will further stretch our resources. When we’re asleep, maybe I could set the Hollow controls even lower to conserve, like the thermostat in winter.”
“But you agree that we need to lengthen the period of our orbit?” Zeiss asked.
“Yes,” Mercy said. Her vote virtually guaranteed passage of the measures.
Yuki put her arms on Park’s shoulders. “I still think we should make one last run of goods and our specialist to Labyrinth before the shutdown. Since the Zeisses will be needed for the Sanctuary trajectory calculations, Park could make the drop.”
Following her lead, Park agreed.
Zeiss turned his head at an angle and narrowed his eyes. He could tell from months of sparring with her that Yuki was planning something.
Mercy said, “If Auckland goes with you, when he returns we can set his pod to do a deep cleanse to fix the hemoglobin damage.”
Yuki examined her nails. “And I could work the secondary instruments for Park.”
She watched Zeiss’ face as he figured out the escape and nodded slowly.
“There could be another surge at any time,” Red warned.
Zeiss shrugged. “From the rotation patterns, we have at least an L week. We can put Ascension back together in a day, and if a flare hits when they’re planetside, the shuttle will be safer on Labyrinth than here.” The commander seemed to understand and approve of the unspoken plan. When Red looked confused, he whispered, “Trust me.”
Chapter 38 – Who Watches the Watchers
Doctor Ahunga O Te Ika Whenau Whanganui, known by everyone but his wife as Auckland, didn’t pack for a prolonged stay in the landing bay. His intent had been to climb into a pod as soon as the shuttle was gone. At the last moment, engines ready for takeoff, Yuki appeared in the airlock of Ascension. She beckoned him closer. “What?” he asked on the radio.
She tapped her mouthpiece and shrugged. He’d have to stand helmet to helmet to hear her final words. When he stood on the threshold, his visor clunking against hers, Yuki mouthed the single word, “Freedom.” She tugged his arm gently with one hand and placed the other on the door controls to close the airlock.
He had to choose: being healed by the Magi to endure years of stasis, or being with his wife and friends on a world that would eventually kill him. His Maori ancestors would roll over in their graves if he opted for slavery over a good fight. He pressed the back of Yuki’s glove, closing the door.
Over the radio Yuki said, “Good luck, Doc.”
Park lifted off a little early, no doubt to compensate for the extra weight and any security procedures that Sanctuary might enforce. When nothing shot them out of the sky in the first minute, Auckland let himself breathe again. Opening the airlock into the main cabin, Yuki rushed to help Park navigate. He wandered to the few chairs in the cargo area where Pratibha waited.
His wife was rigid with anxiety. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come. When you did, I was still afraid.”
He sat next to her and strapped in as they accelerated toward the inhabited moon. Placing an awkward, crinkling arm around Pratibha’s shoulder, he said, “This is the adventure we signed up for. I’m not going to let you have all the fun.”
Counter to earlier landings, the shuttle didn’t stop at the Elysium colony. Instead, Park flew in low over the desert so no natives could see. A dust devil churned in their wake, but this was no different than any other day in the dunes. The landing bay of Lincoln Copper Works was a recessed area extracted as part of the mining operation, which gave them partial shade from the blistering suns.
Yuki announced, “You may now remove your helmets and other safety equipment.”
They could hear clicks in the background and the whir of an engine dying. After so many flights, Auckland looked at space travel as glorified first-class jet service. Feeling ten kilos heavier, he staggered toward the airlock.
Dressed in his Hawaiian shirt and shorts, Herk came out to greet Auckland and his wife personally, holding a ridiculous, green golf umbrella out for the former mayor. “Both of you, welcome to Lincoln.”
“It’s hotter than Bombay,” she said, ducking into the shade of the umbrella.
“But it’s a dry heat,” replied Herk. “I wear my spacesuit when I’m working just for the coolant. Hurry inside while we unload. Doc, Risa will be glad for a fourth for bridge. With all the problems we’ve been encountering, there’s a rumor we’ll be here for another six-year stint.”
Shaking his head, Park said, “Not likely.”
Yuki came out of the airlock next. “Where do you want the supplies?”
Herk stopped in his tracks. “What the hell is she doing here?”
Auckland said, “Careful. She helped me escape the Magi and convinced Park to steal the shuttle. We’re not going back to Sanctuary.”
“She can’t be trusted. Plato says the Magi have her bugged,” Herk warned.
“Yeah, I wrote that note,” Yuki asserted, certain that the Magi couldn’t eavesdrop on Labyrinth. “Have you dug up the secrets of Meteoropolis yet?”
Herk pulled back. “Um . . . we don’t talk in the open. Assume the shuttle is monitored.”
Yuki said, “If you need time, wait four hours until the ship is out of range. I’ll wait out here.”
The wide security chief took a remote off his belt, guided the cargo dune buggy up to the airlock, and handed her the controls. “I’ll get Auckland settled someplace cool. Then we’ll put things on the buggy and haul them into the storage area in the mine. Later we’ll decide what gets flown back to Elysium, depending on the space left on board.”
“What else would we be carrying?” asked Park as he emerged from the lock.
“That, you’ll have to see for yourself.” Smiling, Herk led everyone but Yuki down a ramp. “This grotto was amazing when we arrived. There were blue-tinted geodes and twenty colors of sand in these caves. We gutted it, but I took pictures.” He stopped when they reached a crude bamboo garage door set in a wall of tan, glass bricks.
Risa was waiting for them at the door. She shook everyone’s hand. “We live by two rules: no mention of this in the open, and no one who sees this can go back to Sanctuary until the test is over.”
The newcomers all nodded. They were committed. When Herk opened the door, the garage contained two slabs of Magi hull material. Together, they were the size of a Volkswagen. “We have to wait until the shutters are closed to move this stuff, but we have enough for several suits of armor or a vehicle. What do you think?”
The doctor and his wife were awed. “On this planet?” asked Auckland.
Park shrugged. “Figures. They had to crash-land when the system went into a death spiral.”
“What?” Risa a
sked. So Park explained everything they deduced about the diminishing water supply of Sanctuary and the hiding place of the Magi. He even drew a map with a charcoal stick the materials engineer loaned him. Afterward, Risa said, “Wow. If that last Magi mission had this problem, why didn’t the new ship fix the problem?”
“Maybe they never figured it out. Interstellar distances make information difficult to pass,” Park said. “Yuki thinks the Magi value their secrecy more than our lives.”
“You think Z is going to allow you to stay for the sake of the shuttle’s electronics?” Herk asked.
“I just knew I couldn’t risk Yuki’s life there a day longer,” Park said.
“We might be able to help with that,” Risa said. “We didn’t call this place Lincoln because of the pennies. We named it that because he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Herk said, “Maybe you should ask your friend Toby about details of the Pandanese culture we neglected to mention.”
“He’s here? Why?” asked Auckland.
Herk waggled his hand. “Officially it’s to see if we can grow food here. Unless we use hydroponics and retractable skylights, that’s not likely. The other choices are probably mushrooms, tequila, and ants.”
“If you knew that, why did you risk him?” Pratibha asked. “You have two other potential mine sites that are more hospitable.”
“They needed this location to scout the crash site,” Park deduced.
“We bent the rules to tap a deep-enough well to make this mine work,” Risa admitted, “but once you find out what the lake tribe is really about, there’s no way you’ll want them to have access to weapons-grade copper.”
As Herk led the group through a tunnel to a man-sized door, he announced, “This is the bunkhouse. We have one bathroom and one big bedroom. There’s a ladder up to the operations center above ground. It’s simple, but homey.”
As he opened the door, Auckland saw four sets of honest-to-God wood-frame and straw-mattress bunk beds. The sheets, however, were fine linen, clearly made on the Elysium microfabricator. On the bottom bunk nearest, them Toby lay with a disposable surgical mask over his nose and mouth. The nanobiologist was sweating and pale.
Auckland rushed to his side. “What happened?”
“While the shutters were drawn on the Magi, he played freaking Indiana Jones, that’s what happened,” Herk strode over, made a fist, and bumped knuckles with Toby. “My man took a spear to the back and still made it out with the treasure.”
Toby laughed weakly, which turned into an ugly, wheezing cough.
“The wound is infected, which shouldn’t happen easily here,” Auckland muttered after touching Toby’s forehead. “The strains are sufficiently different and our antibiotics are strong enough that nothing from Labyrinth should harm you. Did it perforate your bowel?”
“Too shallow. Just a scratch,” Toby replied. “I had to wait for the hunting parties to move on before I could ride the aqua sled back to the rendezvous spot. I could have picked up contamination during either phase. I don’t have a microscope here, and it’s too far for me to ride the buggy back to Elysium.”
Rolling his patient over, Auckland examined the crude field patch. Toby couldn’t sew his own wound closed, and neither of the Herkemers had the skill. The wound appeared a little angry but not pus-filled. “Looks like our short-term cover story will be hauling your sorry butt back to Elysium for emergency surgery. We’ll miss the window for our return.”
“Glad to be of assistance,” Toby said with labored breathing.
“Did you take samples of everything while you were running for your life?” Auckland asked.
“Of course.” Toby seemed almost offended by the question, pointing to the chest at the end of the bunk. “It’s all in there, even the armor. Wouldn’t let them open it without hazmat procedures.”
“Good man,” Auckland said. “Herk, get him and that trunk on the shuttle as soon as you can.”
Herk handed the biologist a pillow and cocooned him in linen sheets. Then, he carried the man out of the room like a carpet roll. Park accompanied him to speed their departure and make excuses to Olympus. Pratibha went as well to clear cargo out of the hold to make room.
When the others were gone, Auckland hissed, “What possessed you people to risk him like that?”
Risa raised a hand. “The lake people have formed a very aggressive empire. All the roving Green gatherers work for them. Pacino told us they completely wiped out the Black tribe a few decades ago, the ones with the obsidian spears. The remaining resistance is scattered. They call the slave lords hiding in the lake caves the Bloo—that’s a Pandanese word, not the color. We don’t have a translation.”
“We never heard anything about this,” Auckland said.
“Any time we ask him questions about Magi-infected territory, we don’t forward the recordings,” Risa explained, “or we might have an accident.”
“That’s ridiculous,” the doctor replied.
“Come on up to the control room and watch the recording from his helmet camera on Crown Island. Then you can judge,” Risa said.
Slowly, he climbed the rungs up to the high-tech center. All nonmobile evidence of high-tech was confined to one, easy-to-obliterate room. Risa sat him in the corner on an older computer. “This is disconnected from the network so the Magi can’t sneak peeks. We edited the content down to show folks back at base. Just hit play.”
Auckland did so and watched a rare glimpse of the great lake from above, with no fog to interfere. The walls dripped from the aftermath of a storm, and the camera used ultraviolet filters near sundown. During one freeze-frame, someone highlighted the rings and streaks with a light pen. He could see the swath that the starship had cut through the landscape as it crashed. Toby said, “Nadia confirmed these regions are definitely energy signatures from an Icarus event. She’s seen the original crater at the testing facility in New Mexico, and they had the same glow to her special senses.”
An island in the center was a ring of jagged, stone teeth. Something had plowed a notch in the high point and flattened the back of the island down to sea level. When the lens shifted to normal spectrum, he saw that the center of the island was spotted with a variety of trees and grasses, some of which had a distinctive, red tinge. “Crown Island has flora different from anywhere else on the planet. If we can’t find evidence there, I’ll go diving. For anything below ten meters or so, I’ll want to come back next flare with a pressure suit.”
The scene shifted to a view of the island from the water’s surface. The view from above hadn’t done justice to the formidable barrier of rock surrounding the spit of land. The only place the aqua sled could land was a small beach covered with colorful pebbles. Toby picked up several samples and dragged the sled ashore. Grunting from the effort, he explained, “Sometimes the natives come here by raft. I don’t want to block their access.”
He tucked the sled into a small alcove behind one of the toppled stone pillars. Then Toby moved to the only gap in the defenses. Glancing up, he could see a narrow, stone staircase flanked by two artificial pillars—stacked layers of shale that resembled the corners of the bamboo plantation fences. At the very top of each corner post sat a thin, gray fragment that was more regular than the rest. Two of the angles were perfectly square. Toby said, “Those are pieces of antigravity domino. What else fell out of the forerunner ship as it broke apart?”
The next scene showed a cave with an odd skull mounted over the opening. Torrential rain had resumed, keeping the panda guard in his stone shack off to one side of the cave. There were ruts in the ground showing a patrol along the perimeter of the island. Toby snuck past the guard huddled over a fire and crept into pitch darkness. After a few steps, even UV and thermal overlay didn’t help.
Toby pulled out an LED flashlight. An altar decorated the far end of the room. The shrine had been built from a box of heavy stone and topped with the high-tech dominoes. Toby flicked off the light and crept up to the stone
box by memory. When he bumped into a step, he clicked the tiny light back on. By the pool of weak light, he removed one of the dominoes. The box was filled with bones. Toby took high-resolution stills of the interior.
“Not all those are panda bones,” Auckland said.
“Wait for it,” Risa said.
On the video, Toby came to the same conclusion, because he selected several for his sample pouch. “There are tooth marks on this bone. . . bigger than bobcats.”
Next, Toby pulled out a wooden bowl stained with blood and said, “Evidence of ritual cannibalism. In such cases, the tribe will feed on the strength of their enemy or preserve the memory of their loved ones. Which—” He grunted in pain and glanced down to see a spear sticking through his side.
Someone shouted the word “Granith” in Pandanese.
The violence startled Auckland back from the screen. “How?”
Risa paused the feed and said, “When he leaned forward over the sarcophagus, his armor shirt rode above his hip, exposing a wedge of visible fabric near the flashlight. His lecturing had pulled the guard in. The neoprene and Kevlar took the brunt of the assault. He really was just grazed.”
“Idiot.”
“Yeah. Well I would’ve spent the next minute screaming in shock. Watch this,” she said, pushing play.
The guard threw another spear, which Toby blocked with the thin gray domino. The flashlight rolled across the floor, causing a strobe effect as Toby scrambled for the deflected spear. When the fanged warrior charged, his medical coworker with minimal defense training braced the butt of the spear against the stone step. At the last moment, he raised the spear point and the massive attacker impaled himself. Auckland recalled that this was why Romans made their spearheads out of lead, so they couldn’t be reused.
While the aborigine was on his knees coping with the shock, Toby pulled out a knife and plunged it into the creature’s ear hole with surgical precision. One deft twist and the panda collapsed.
“Ooo,” Auckland said with a wince.
“Yeah. My man must have watched that part with computer enhancement a dozen times already . . . in slow motion. Toby never loses his cool for a moment. He waits till he’s outside to cut the spear out of his suit so he doesn’t leave a blood trail.”