In theory, anything Gina would ever have to face should’ve been covered in her training, but she had to admit while standing upon an ice sheet in a blizzard on a dead world, that no one could have foreseen her need for a post hole boring machine. The regiment was a combat unit, but in line with Burgton’s self-sufficient philosophy, his men were credible engineers—if by credible one meant they could build a basic bridge, defensive redoubt, or other temporary structure when needed using local materials. So although she didn’t in fact have a post hole boring machine with her—because hey, she hadn’t imagined the need to bore holes for bridge supports today—she did have a working understanding of engineering principles. Enough to get by and improvise a workaround at least. The fact her workaround wouldn’t have been possible without Eric’s gift of the IED droid made no never mind.
Gina stood outside in the -43°c conditions, toasty warm in her environment suit, and used the remote controls to drive the droid down the APC’s ramp. She could see what the droid was seeing using a window she had open on her internal display. It currently showed her standing in front of it and the antenna mast beyond. She piloted the droid to within three metres of the mast and parked.
The droid had a number of probes, sensors, and even weapons equipped as standard. Sometimes they were used purely as a recon platform, and only the cameras might be used to check for explosive devices, other times its electro, magnetic, or infra sensors might be deployed. What interested her today was its array of weaponry. Normally the mortar and rail gun would be used to safely detonate IEDs, and that was fine on any other day. She didn’t want to blow up the mast though, or damage the station. She just needed a hole.
She deployed the laser.
Any laser could cut the ice, but generally they weren’t carried by Alliance troops. They had been once. Long before the Merkiaari War that was. They had been considered the cutting edge of weaponry back then and were used against other Humans on the battlefield many times, but that was before the Merki arrived and started kicking butt. For the first three years of the war, the Merki won battle after battle, and proved Alliance gear was inferior. Plasma weapons and weapons based upon mass drivers soon gained ascendance, relegating lasers to industrial use and space warfare where power limitations were less of a concern. More power gave naval lasers a real offensive punch, but making that sort of laser man portable was pretty much a pipe dream. No soldier would exchange her M18-AP rifle for even the most powerful man portable laser. Such a laser would only have power for one or two shots, while a hundred-round-magazines were standard for M18 rifles. Double-capacity drum-mags were available, but they were bulky and not commonly used. They were real bitches to reload in the field and she’d been desperate enough to reload her empty mags with loose rounds a time or two when her squad ran out.
The droid’s targeting reticule was clear on her display, but she didn’t fire. She wanted a nice round hole big enough for her and some gear to pass through. She quickly set up a firing pattern to burn a continuous circle through the ice two metres in diameter. That should be plenty. The first shot would mark the centre of the hole, and provide a drain for the melt water. Without it, the laser’s beam would be degraded.
She activated the program and the droid went to work.
Gina watched as the droid deployed one of its many arms and aimed down at the ice. It fired, melting the ice and quickly reaching the station’s roof. She knew the moment the laser hit the roof because a bloom of ejecta flew skyward peppering the ice all around with debris. The melt water in the hole quickly disappeared, and the droid stopped firing. A second or three later, the droid fired again and began circling its pilot hole.
Gina was well pleased. The droid was doing its thing and despite the weather conditions, the ice was melted long enough to flow away down the hole. She had been worried about that. If it had refrozen before getting clear she might have resorted to explosives and risked damaging what she came for. Thermate would have burned through the ice and the roof easily, but then it would have ruined anything beneath it too. It burned hot enough to melt steel when applied properly. This was better.
Gina let the droid work and started unloading a few things from the APC. She had a temporary generator, a computer, a winch, powerful lamps, and a bundle of ropes. She closed up the APC and carried everything to the hole that the droid was just about done with. She piled everything ready to use and peered down the hole just as the section of roof fell away. The droid beeped as if in satisfaction, indicating its program was complete and signalling its readiness for another task. It stowed its weapon arm.
Gina took up the hand controller again and manoeuvred the droid out of her way.
She ran a line from the APC to the winch and secured it, and then used it to lower the generator and other supplies into the hole. The electric winch wasn’t designed for heavy loads or for the extreme conditions, but it held up fine. Vipers were strong enough that had it failed, she could have lowered everything hand over hand if she had to. When the load hit bottom and the line went slack, she swung into the hole and used it to climb down into the darkness.
Gina reached the icy floor and paused to look around. She switched to light amplification mode but grimaced at the result. It was only a little better than total darkness. There wasn’t enough light coming in through the hole for her systems to work with. Well, she would fix that directly. She turned in place, slipping a little on the slick surface. The melt water from her cutting operation had refrozen making movement tricky despite the debris from the roof scattered about.
She located her supplies and dragged them off the ice before getting to work. She set up one of the lamps on its stand and ran a cable to the generator. She cancelled light amplification mode—she didn’t want to blind herself—and flipped the switch to start the generator. Light flooded the room, and she stared around at what was revealed. The first thing that caught her eye were the rows of cabinets running down the centre of the room, but it was to the dead status board on the far wall her eyes were drawn.
She advanced to take a better look.
There was no power to it, of course, but the status board still revealed much that she wanted to know. The station was an Infonet node. So much she had already guessed based upon the type of antenna on the roof. It was a relay station and was clearly labelled as Woolsery with a little “you are here” notice appended to it. The board also told her where other relays were by name, not coordinates unfortunately—it consisted of simple red and green lights with lines connecting them to indicate where in the system they were. A proper computer monitor would have been more informative, but only if she could get the computer running. All in all, she was satisfied with the more primitive display. Even unpowered as it was, it was useful. She made certain her database scanned the entire image of the board into her database. The place names especially. With those, she could find every one of those lights in the real world simply by calling up an old atlas entry and navigating to them using Woolsery as a starting point.
Gina turned away to investigate the rest of the station.
Woolsery Infonet Relay Station, Kushiel
Hours of work tracing power runs, and Gina finally had the building up and running. The lights in the ceiling, frost covered like the walls and floor, illuminated Gina and her lash up of cables crisscrossing the floor and entering cabinets. The cabinets contained the memory crystals used as the station’s buffer memory. The nature of crystal memory storage was such that supplying it with power should return it back to its previous state without damage. The synthetic crystals were as hard as diamond and pretty much indestructible. Crystal memory needed power to change states, meaning the buffer should still contain the data it had contained when the station lost power. She was counting on that particular property of the crystals to lead her to the prize.
“Okay, time to see what we have,” Gina said and switched on the computer she had brought and hooked up to the station’s net. “Hmmm.”
There was
a lot of data. Her computer was accessing the buffer memory and treating it like just another memory partition available to it. Truncated files or data that the computer considered gibberish was ignored as unreadable, but it could be read—maybe—aboard Hobbs with a lot of processing. She wasn’t interested in doing that. At this stage, she would search through the files she could actually read without aid.
She ran searches and looked for information that Liz said would point to the A.I or its backup. Her computer stripped file headers and compared them to its search parameters, and slowly she pieced together a map of where the data had flowed from and where it was flowing to. A lot of it was general system data, stuff the net itself needed to function and of no interest to her, but as the search deepened more and more flags were raised to grab her attention.
She smiled fiercely. This was looking better and better. She shunted the flagged entries to another window and started another search confined only to them. Almost immediately she began getting hits. She opened the files and devoured the contents. She was shocked to find Sebastian’s name almost immediately. Somehow she hadn’t expected that. She read the files, and was disappointed with the contents. They all seemed banal. Nothing out of the ordinary at all, but their presence was still significant. The file headers told her where they had originated, and it wasn’t Haverington. Eric was not going to be a happy bunny. He was looking in the wrong place.
Gina didn’t pack up immediately, though she was sorely tempted. She decided to work through all the data here first. She had already done all the prep here. It would be a waste not to strip every byte of useful data from the effort. She let her computer work, and stood to stretch her legs.
She wandered around the station poking into things while her computer did its job. The station wasn’t a big installation, one main computer centre with a couple of annexes containing offices and storage areas. She peered through open doors, and glanced into boxes at the detritus, wondering about the people who had used it all. She sat at a desk and jiggled drawers. One was locked, but her viper strength made short work of the flimsy lock. Inside was a binder that she pulled out and opened to a random page.
It was a maintenance log. Time sheets and names of people long dead together with signatures and initials signing off on work and inspections done on the network. Nothing startling or even remotely interesting. Gina flicked through the pages noting more of the same. She threw it back into the drawer and shoved it shut. She opened another drawer but found nothing but blank forms. The last drawer yielded a few old books—manuals and technical spec sheets. It didn’t matter how advanced people became in their use of computers, they still had to print stuff out to get the full benefit of the data. It didn’t matter whether it was printed on archaic paper like on Earth before colonisation began, or on plastic flimsies like these. She didn’t think people would ever stop printing stuff out.
She left the office and went back to check progress only to find her computer had finished crunching the data. She looked it over but found nothing to change her mind. She was packing up and moving out.
It took a lot less time to withdraw all her gear and pack it back aboard the APC than it had to unload and set it up. Maybe two hours later she was driving again, heading back to the shuttle. She hadn’t reached the halfway point when Eric contacted her.
“Alpha-Two, Alpha-One you read?” Eric said.
“Alpha-One, Two copies. How’s it going in sunny Haverington?”
Eric snorted. “I found it.”
Gina’s jaw dropped. “You found it? In Haverington?” she couldn’t believe it. Her information pointed away from the capital altogether and toward a more historic site. “You sure?”
Eric sounded puzzled when he said, “You doubted your research? The library was right where you said it would be. Intact too. The place looked untouched by time, Gina. Incredible really. I think we should empty the racks and take the crystals home with us. I know Kushiel is a monument, but all those books should be used not left here.”
Gina blinked. “Wait, what?”
“The books. They’re wasted here. I don’t think Snakeholme’s library is even half the size of this one.”
She finally caught on. “You mean you found the library, not the A.I?”
“Didn’t I just say I found the library? Maybe you need to run a diagnostic. You don’t sound like you’re tracking right. Check your O2 levels.”
Gina grinned. He would be checking his when he heard what she’d found. “Eric, I found it. The prize is mine.”
“Bull.”
“Nope, not kidding. I powered up the node and it was right there in the buffer. Stripped the header info on a bunch of files and found the originator. Sebastian was up and running when the power went out.”
“Bloody hell... that’s... where is he?”
“Place called Landing. Want to bet it’s the original landing site for the colony?”
“No bet. I know it is. The archive here is extensive and the colonisation is documented in the history section. That’s where I’ve been looking mostly. There’s no mention of his location though, just references to him as an entity in decisions made at that time.”
“Do we know if Landing was bombed?”
“It was,” Eric said grimly. “Not with kinetics though,” he said, sounding a little more hopeful.
Nukes were just as bad, worse in some ways. There were areas of the planet still hot enough that even a viper would have to limit exposure. Gina guessed they would be finding out how hot Landing was at some point.
“You want to meet there?”
“No. I want you to fly here and meet me. There’s something I need you to see.”
Gina frowned. He didn’t sound happy about something. “You want to clue me in?”
“Not until you get here. Alpha-One out.”
“Alpha-Two out.” Gina said and turned her attention to driving. “What the hell was that about?”
Haverington, Kushiel
Eric appeared on Gina’s sensors as soon as she was in range of the city, but she couldn’t land the shuttle at his location. She chose to land next to the other shuttle on the ice over what had once been a park at the centre of the city. She was taking for granted that Eric had chosen it after surveying the ice with his GPR and that it was safe.
She landed safely and deployed the APC again.
She drove carefully through the eerie streets of the capital. The looming buildings with their empty windows were oppressive and sad. The weather was fine for a sub-zero climate. Skies were clear and painfully beautifully blue, but it did little to raise the oppressive feel of the place. She drove by shattered buildings, obviously the results of a battle, and back into untouched streets heading toward Eric’s location. His icon was clear on her sensors, but he wasn’t in the library she had located for him. He was city blocks away.
She found Eric standing in a street in the commercial district of the city waiting for her. She parked a couple of metres from him, sealed her helmet, and climbed down from the cab. His APC was parked just beyond him. She ran a sensor sweep as she walked toward him, trying to discover what he found interesting. The buildings were the usual sort of thing. Commercial towers, modern for their time she was sure, but looking old before their time with windows gone and bare steel showing the depredations of a climate they weren’t designed to handle.
“So,” Gina began. “What’s up?”
For his answer, Eric beckoned her to follow him toward one of the buildings. She shrugged and followed. He stopped and looked back at her before drawing her attention to the structure.
Gina saw what had him concerned right away. The doors should have been buried by up to three metres or so of ice, but they weren’t. The other buildings had snow and ice piled against them, half covering their entrances, but this one had been cleared. It was obvious now her attention had been drawn to it that someone had cut the ice into a gentle ramp and then cut away the doors. She could see them lying on the floor inside
.
“Did you...?”
Eric shook his head and crouched. Gina joined him to study the tracks in the ice. “See here and here?”
Gina nodded.
“Droid tracks.”
“Yeah,” Gina said remembering the marks left by the use of her IED droid earlier. “Have you been inside?”
“Briefly. I wanted you to see this before going deeper in.”
Gina nodded and they entered the building.
Eric switched on a powerful hand lamp to illuminate the room. As soon as he did, Gina knew she was standing in a bank, and that someone had been here before them. Of course it was possible the mess was part of the chaos caused by the evacuation of the city. Desperate people losing their heads might have thought they would need money to survive, but she doubted that was the case here. This looked like the aftermath of a salvage operation, and she knew no salvaging had been sanctioned.
Merkiaari Wars Series: Books 1-3 Page 103