by Jim Rudnick
Below, over what might be called jungle, ridges of hills lay to the east. A half-mile-wide river lay to the west as it flowed toward the sea ahead. That jungle was thick, growing right up to the very banks of that river.
And yet, two ruler-straight tracks drove across that jungle. In the tracks, every few hundred yards, large blackened holes—pits really—could be seen.
And at the head of each of those two tracks, a terraforming foundry was slowly moving ahead, their blackened hulls lit by the occasional bank of lights and spotlights that shone down onto the jungle floor. Small industrial lasers cleared the growth that lay ahead as each of the foundries moved along. Every so often, at what the AI on the Atlas could not yet determine and track on the view-screen display sidebar, there was a laser drilling moment—but one that as yet they couldn't time with any degree of regularity.
Tanner nodded. "Helm and Ansible—anything at all come up? Are we alone here?" he asked, even though the view-screen ahead had both the NO THREATS and SMALL LIFE FORMS ONLY icons lit. Over at the helm, Lieutenant Cooper widened the scans, and for a full hundred miles around the Atlas, the displays didn't change
"Sir, no, Sir. We appear to be all alone—well, just us and those terraforming foundries. No life aboard either, Sir," he finished off.
At the Ansible station, Lieutenant Irving was sitting with her eyes closed, focused on something, and no one said anything as she suddenly held up a single forefinger and asked for a bit more time.
A full minute later, she nodded and then looked down at her console, as a dotted yellow line appeared to travel due north from one of the terraformer foundries. It left the screen at the edge, and as she twice widened the range, it continued to disappear due north.
"Sir, I am a bit at a loss here, but this I know. I cannot 'hear' any Ansible chatter—yet there is something in the background. Something so faint that without me checking, I would have glossed over it. But there does appear to be a very, very faint Ansible channel that is open between the terraforming foundry below and somewhere north of us. Not the range to know where at this point, but it is there. I think. And the only reason I could probably even pick this up were those specialized implants for my auditory nerves back on the Barony Hospital Ship. At least I think. Sorry, Sir, but that’s—oh, signal gone," she interrupted herself as that yellow line suddenly disappeared from the terraforming foundry that lay below them.
Tanner nodded. Irving was an excellent Ansible officer, and he had been on the Hospital Ship when she had been there for treatment and new audio implant surgery too. More than capable, he thought.
"Noted, Lieutenant—well done. See if you can't somehow find a way to setup an alert for us so that anytime in the future, should such a signal commence, we get a notice. That'd work fine—difficult though, I'd gather?" he asked and received a nod as she turned back to her console.
"Helm, take us back up to low orbit. Away team, assemble down in the landing bay for our shuttle trip down to one of those foundries; ready to go in fifteen," he finished, and he got up to get one more of those double-double teas he so much favored. No Scotch either. He grinned as he stirred in that extra sugar and went up the stairs to his quarters.
Inside, he went right to the short table that lay up against the huge view-port on the outside bulkhead, and from a drawer there, he pulled out his Colt. He checked the clip and magazine, made sure there was a shell in the chamber, and then strapped it on. No sense going down to a new planet unarmed. He couldn't remember whether or not he'd instructed the away team to arm themselves, so he took a moment to instruct the ship's AI that they were to do so. Picking up his still very hot tea, he walked out of his quarters and turned to his left to begin the long walk down to the landing bay. Along the way, he could see crewmen who snapped to attention and saluted for which he really had no answer but to salute back, and he said, "As you were" to them all. Each looked pretty well versed in whatever they were doing. Sometimes techies had one of those orange doors open, working on the biosensors within, and other times, equipment handlers slugged dollies along the wide corridor.
At the end of the corridor, he took the stairs to the right, went down to Deck Five, and then left into the huge landing bay.
Most of the away team was already assembled, and he nodded to his XO as he went by him. "All accounted for, XO?" he asked.
"Just waiting on our Roma team, Sir," he said as Tanner mounted the landing ramp and entered the shuttlecraft to grab a seat. Captain Siegel was already there, as was the Lady St August—and that caused him some difficulty; he had to face it though right now.
"Ma’am," he said as he went over to stand above her in her seat, "might I ask that you forgo this first foray onto a new unknown planet. We will be encountering whatever lies below, Ma’am, and to be honest, we've no idea what that might entail. Protection of a Royal on such a first contact away team mission might not be in your own best interests," he said and gently smiled at her.
She stared at him. She pointed over at the four EliteGuards who sat staring back at them but then dropped her hand. A teensy glimmer of a smile took over the corner of her mouth, and she nodded and arose. "Thank you, Captain Scott, for your concern. Noted. But we will go down to Memories at a future date, once you have assessed and verified any and all threats. Understood, Captain?" she added, that steel tone quite evident now.
He nodded and took her arm to help her out the shuttle door and down the landing ramp. She marched away, her EliteGuards behind her in formation.
Returning to the shuttle to take his seat, he got a nod—perhaps of respect—from Captain Siegel. That was a good thing, Tanner thought.
#####
The repair technician tapped the monitor a few more times, but the damn flashing icon wouldn't disappear. Low fluids level, it said in text below the alert icon, and that was going to be at least a few hours to look at and fix if need be. Judging by the look of the occupant via the display items, there was no issue with the sleeper, but this unit was certainly in need of a look.
He sighed and called for a sleeper support team and made a note on his tablet of the time and unit number too.
Reports, he thought, the ship runs on reports, and yup, I have to handle my own share too.
It took the support team nineteen minutes to show up, and he recorded that as well. They manhandled the temporary tank into place eventually, and he recorded that too. One member of the team, all dressed in white lab coats, took the readings on the sleeper and grunted.
"Sleeper is fine—why're we here?" she asked, which stopped the whole team cold.
"Because I've gotta open up the tank, you'll move the sleeper over, and I have to then run a full set of diagnostics. And if the tank can't be fixed with a one hundred percent guarantee, then you'll hold the sleeper ‘til I can get maintenance down here with a new one. Got it," he asked and then shook his head.
Someone in HR had obviously been off the day they hired this one, he thought.
He networked between his tablet and the tank, and the monitor display slowly went from full green icons, save the flashing low liquid one, to ambers and finally full reds. He nodded and paid attention to what he needed to, while the sleeper support team all laid out the new temporary tank accessories. First, the floor mats were unfolded and placed around the faulty tank. Beside them, they moved the temporary tank in a matching orientation, and as one read the settings off the faulty tank monitor, another punched in the exact same settings on the temporary one. In about four minutes, the head support tech nodded to the repair technician.
"Sir, we're ready when you are," she said, and he double-checked but she was right.
He noted that the whole thing had taken almost thirty minutes in total. Wonder how much that could be pared down if I’d hit the full red alert?
He nodded his assent and clicked the OFF switch, and the suddenness of that new setting was immediate and easy to see.
Inside the tank was the sound of the liquid being drained off; the lights i
nside turned from the normal dull red color to full and bright white light. The sleeper, of course, was still locked in cryonic sleep, but that too was going to change as the IVs and inserted needles were slowly being withdrawn back into their holding robo arms and the sleeper’s temperature slowly climbed.
The sleeper staff was there quickly. Two staff members inserted new IVs and needles into the sleeper’s veins in her elbows, while two more then manhandled the sleeper's body and carefully but very professionally moved the very cold body from within the faulty tank and laid it out in the temporary tank.
No one said a thing, but saw that this was a full human female with a body that was professionally trained to be more than fit—to be some kind of a contender for something. Nor did anyone mention the wealth of scars on the female's back and upper thighs.
The sleeper support team leader was on her tablet and a moment later nodded. "Came aboard with that scar tissue—our tank didn't do that," she said.
One of her team said, "Wonder what could have done that," but a serious look from the team leader shut him up immediately.
They quickly filled the temporary tank with cryonic fluid right up to the “add below this line” setting, and the leader clicked the button that would shut down the cover as the temporary tank took over the job of keeping the sleeper asleep.
All eyes watched the monitor on the temporary tank as it showed its new occupant. Female, human race, twenty or so years, normal range of O2, vitals all at low range but still acceptable. Interior tank atmosphere okay, and injected chemicals were fine. Cryonic liquid down to minus 280 degrees and still falling.
The repair technician reached into the bottom of the tank, pulled out the sleeper's bag, and tucked it into the storage space in the temporary tank, and they were done.
Total time, six minutes.
He made a note of that too and filed the report with his department head who was somewhere on the SN Majestic, which at its two lights a day was on its way to Juno out on the RIM. Sleeper Gia Scott, of Branton in the Earldom of Kinross, had been successfully moved from her assigned cryonic tank to a temporary one with no problems. He added in the repair request note that the sleeper had vitals that were all at the low or thin edge of their ranges. He ensured that he clicked the top priority category for the message and clicked send to his maintenance department too.
Just one more thing to do, and he nodded as the support team locked the temporary tank in place and then he sighed.
Now, to figure out what was wrong with the unit…
CHAPTER FOUR
Moments later, the Romas showed up. Captain Rossum, her chief mate, Guari, and their chief engineer, Jofranka Morin, were along for the trip.
They sat together, he noted, but then crew tended to do that, as beside him, Bram, his Adept officer, sat beside the XO and then Sheldon, the Atlas Science officer, was perched next to him, eager to get down to the surface.
Their shuttle pilot, Lieutenant Jenkins, powered up the shuttle, which then yawed hard to port, and he hit the shuttle elevators hard, the pitch rolled back, and the shuttle was airborne and flying out of the huge landing bay port. Jenkins took her hard then to starboard, as the shuttle ducked under the huge Atlas and flew down toward Memories at speed.
Ahead, the blues and greens of the planet were there, but vast cloudbanks were also there. A hot greenhouse-like climate meant that the skies on the planet were often solidly gray as much moisture was carried by those banks of clouds. Oceans were also partially cloud covered as well, and to a lesser amount, lakes and big river deltas.
The fact that the whole planet was undergoing terraforming was interesting, Tanner thought. Maybe he'd question his Science officer, but he doubted the trip down would take long enough to hear the whole answer. He didn't look at Bram, but he knew he'd have a smile on his face after that.
The shuttle dove into the upper reaches of the clouds over their chosen destination on that southern continent. Solid gray clouds with not a single thing visible—yet on the view-screen, filters had removed those clouds, and the path ahead lay easy to see. Jenkins yawed just a bit in his path, and the view-screen swung a bit to the left, and as they could now see the landmass ahead, those two long straight lines of the paths of the two terraformer foundries were plain to see.
"Most easterly one, correct, Captain?" Jenkins inquired.
"Roger that," Tanner replied.
The shuttle angled a bit more to starboard, and they dropped quickly along the straight trail of their chosen foundry. Below them, still by a thousand feet or so, the tracks had burned jungle foliage with a black hole every so often.
"Jenkins, hover over top of one of those and scan same for us?" the XO said.
"Aye, Sir, complying now, Sir," Jenkins said as their forward momentum fell away, and they were lined up on a hole just ahead. He had no difficulty in getting the shuttle to hover perfectly still, and moments later that green scanning ray dropped down to sweep the jungle first, then the burned track, and finally to drop into that hole. A full minute later, there was a beep, and up on the view-screen sidebar, data was filled in from the scans.
Tanner read, as did everybody else, that the jungle itself was live and very much a living, growing medium. The tracks, blackened by the foundry lasers, showed high—very high—traces of carbon and burned cellulose materials and were high in lignin and disaccharides as well, which was what the jungle turned into when it was lasered. But the hole itself showed some interesting oddities.
First, it was almost nine hundred yards deep. It had been burned down to that depth, the terraforming foundry looking for God knew what, but along the interior of the walls of that hole, the rock, soil, clay, mud, and everything else had been turned into a sheer glass-like surface from the ablation the laser had delivered. But what was most odd was that the bottom of the hole—right down at the nine-hundred-foot level—was not ablated. Instead of being as it should be, the same fused-glass inner core of the hole—it was plain rock.
"Interesting statistic on the pit bottom," Science Officer Sheldon said, which got some nods from the crewmen.
The shuttle sped up and slowly moved toward the foundry only a half mile away. Jenkins twisted her around the foundry, and they sat off its port flank, watching for a moment.
The terraforming foundry was moving at about a couple of feet per second, the sidebar noted—the speed not a constant as it appeared that when the lasers took a bit longer clearing a path ahead of them, the speed dropped off to allow that kind of slower movement.
"Doorway, Sir, is marked but up at thirty-six feet above the jungle floor," Jenkins said, and that made them all take a breath.
They'd have to somehow get in the foundry first before they could even hope to figure out what Memories had to offer.
#####
Tanner sat in his conference room and asked his question again—as he had no idea what Chief Warrant Officer Hartford was talking about.
"Sir, let me show you maybe? Would that be easier? Outside, I mean?" the head of the technical department on the Atlas said as he tilted his head to one side.
Tanner nodded and he signaled that Lieutenant Commander Sheldon should join him and Bram, and they all went down to Deck Five to the landing bay. There, Hartford called for his team to join them and to bring the dollies and equipment all outside.
Once there, he was quick to instruct his team to set up as per their presentation, and around him, eight other techs quickly erected a twenty-foot square that they quickly shrouded with opaque sheets of plastic. Within, Hartford started up a motorized dolly, and he climbed up to take remote control of same from outside the interior of the dolly.
Standing, he quickly helped Tanner, Bram, and Sheldon up and indicated they should stand at one end of the ten-by-ten-foot square space.
He grinned at them and opened up a trunk that was built into the leading edge of the dolly, and from within, he took a blue and copper plate.
"This will be interesting," Bram said, and he
and his captain watched.
Above the blue plate, the warrant officer placed the copper plate, and then from within that trunk and on top of it, he placed a much wider magnetic four-by-four-foot board that had only a six-inch hole in its center, which he was careful to center right over the copper plate below.
He then took a container of what looked like purple gel—Jell-O looking but not as solid, as it still flowed like syrup did. Stepping on top of the magnetic board, he placed a measured portion from within that container on the copper plate, and it rose about four feet in height.
He took that moment to grin at Tanner and then added portion after portion to the gel already on the copper plate. Each time he did, the magnetic plate, supported by the copper plate and powered by the purple gel, rose in the air another four feet or so. Ten gel portions later, Warrant Officer Hartford hung forty feet in the air. He jumped up and down, went to the very edge of the board, and walked carefully around the outside edge of the board, and it was stable.
He took that moment and said, "Well, might this work, Captain?" and that got three big nods from the Atlas officers and smiles all around too.
"Works, and works well, Warrant Officer," Tanner said as the dolly slowly moved forward a few feet per second, and Hartford was rock solid as the dolly motored along. Beside them, providing a degree of hiding from any would-be observers, the rest of the tech team walked along holding up those opaque plastic screens to give at least a semblance of hiding the anti-grav unit.
This would work. They could take down the dolly, power it up, and then use it to get up to the level where the only door into a terraformer foundry was located, about forty feet up. The dolly would keep pace with the foundry, and that would allow a small away team to get into the foundry.