by Ian Whates
He hesitated in reaching to unclip a fifth from the rack, looking at Drake and asking, “You ever handled one of these before?”
“Once or twice,” the banker replied.
Evidently satisfied, Pelquin handed the gun across. Everyone got a spare magazine as well, before Pelquin took a machine pistol for himself and also a longer-barrelled energy weapon. He then instructed the locker to close.
“Nothing for me?” Leesa asked.
“Nope. No need for you to be armed. You’re staying on the ship to monitor us and handle the drones. We’re counting on you to warn us if anything starts to go wrong.”
“What? But…”
“No buts.” Pelquin held up a restraining hand. “I know these people,” he indicated the rest of the crew. “I’ve worked with them many times before, and that sort of familiarity could prove vital in a tight spot. Somebody has to stay on the ship. Anna’s going to be driving the buggy so she can’t do it, and we need someone here to control the other two drones, monitor the overall situation when the rest of us might be too close to see the wood for the trees and, perhaps most importantly of all, keep an eye out to ensure that another shipful of Xters doesn’t turn up and catch us with our pants down. That someone is you.”
Leesa pursed her lips and glared. What she wanted to say was: but you’re squandering your most effective resource. Let the doc sit back here monitoring the screens. I’m the best fighter you’ve got on board and you can bet your Elder artefacts you’re going to need me out there! What she actually said was… nothing. She could understand Pelquin’s reasoning; it was wrong but she could understand it. He had no way of knowing how good she was in a scrap – the incident at La Gossa with the disberos aside, and he only had her word and the banker’s for that. He was going with what he knew. Logical, conservative, and wrong; but nothing she might say was likely to change his mind.
So instead of arguing she simply watched, feeling very much the outsider. She’d almost begun to feel a part of this crew, but had now been reminded very forcefully that she wasn’t. So she stood on the fringe of things and observed the others interact, as adrenaline took hold of her companions and jokes and banter flourished. The sense of mounting excitement seasoned with a touch of nerves was almost palpable.
The others trooped out, heading towards the loading bay and the planet’s surface. Leesa watched them go. Anna at least glanced back to smile and give her a small wave. Once they’d gone, she didn’t quite kick the cabinets but she thought about it.
Leesa wasn’t entirely sure why she felt so strongly about being excluded. Yes, it would have been great to see inside an Elder cache chamber but, as the Xter dead confirmed, it would also have been dangerous. These weren’t her people and this wasn’t her fight. It wasn’t even as if she would have been paid any more for putting her life on the line. A share was a share – or in her case a half of one – whether she went in there or merely sat out here and watched.
She made her way to the bridge. At least she got to sit in the pilot’s seat for once. High-backed, well-padded and responsive; the material of the seat reconfigured to support her as she made herself comfortable. She sat up and wriggled, settling back to enjoy the sensation as the seat adjusted around her. She looked around and tried to convince herself that being left behind wasn’t so bad after all. The bridge, which was always so cramped when the crew gathered here en masse, now seemed positively spacious. She squirmed in her seat, causing the chair to readjust again just for the hell of it.
As they arrived at the loading bay the doc handed out slap masks to everyone. Drake was impressed; these things weren’t cheap. Further evidence that Doctor Bariha didn’t squander his entire budget on drugs. Drake held the mask in the palm of his right hand and eyed it dubiously. He’d worn one of these before and didn’t much relish a rematch. It resembled a standard oxygen mask though flimsier. Once the edges were pressed firmly to the face the mask formed a vacuum-tight bond with the skin, sealing in mouth and nose. The most uncomfortable part about wearing a slap mask was that it got hot in there, particularly if you were performing any exercise. Oh, and they could be buggers to get off again; he’d had masks that came away with an appropriate tug and others that clung stubbornly to the face even after the application of solvent. He felt sure that someone’s facial skin would be sacrificed before the day was out.
Slap masks were made of a permeable membrane. They let air in but were said to scrub that air of harmful viruses, bacteria, or any other malicious mites that an alien ecosystem might have whipped up. Far more than mere filters, the masks employed an active agent capable of identifying, isolating and destroying invading microbes; nanotechnology in all its glory.
After only the briefest of hesitations he slapped the mask on. They all did, except for Nate Almont.
“No thanks, Doc,” he said, handing his mask back.
“In that case, you really ought to wear a suit with an isolated air supply.”
Almont snorted. “Doc, if you honestly think I’m going to totter around in an EVA suit on an Earth-normal world with an Earth-normal atmosphere, you’ve sniffed one tube of happy vapours too many.”
“The risk of you picking up…”
“I’ll take my chances. I’ve already been here once and, see,” he spread his arms, “I’m perfectly okay.”
“For now,” the doc muttered.
Drake was opening and closing his mouth, keeping his cheeks and jaw as mobile as possible while the mask settled in place, hoping to minimize the discomfort. He found himself sympathising with Almont.
They piled onto the buggy, Pelquin and Anna in the front, the rest of them sitting two to a side on the flatbed behind, legs dangling over the edge. Drake found himself sitting next to Bren, with Almont and the Doc at their backs. A small powerlifter and a few other pieces of equipment – hastily but securely loaded – separated them. Drake held his cane across his lap, its end poking away from Bren and towards the back of the buggy, where a storage tank had been fastened.
It wasn’t the most comfortable ride he’d ever experienced, as the buggy raced across the uneven ground, for all of Anna’s skill and the buggy’s supposed technology.
“Hey, take it easy, Anna,” Bren yelled, “or are you trying to shake us loose back here?”
“Be grateful,” Pelquin said. “This is the model with suspension.”
Things were a lot easier once they reached the tunnel. Apart from anything else, Anna slowed down.
They left a small comms relay at the entrance, knowing how tricky it was to get a signal through cache-chamber walls and not wanting to take any chances with Leesa’s monitoring them and her control of the probes. The tunnel leading in was straight, so the relay should provide a clear link no matter what. That was the theory, at any rate. They also collected the long handled piece of Xter kit left resting against the rock face. Bren seemed particularly pleased with this, examining the object as if it were some treasured bargain picked up cheaply at an auction.
Before starting forward into the tunnel itself they launched the two remaining drones, Leesa confirming she had control.
In no time at all they reached the first Xter body. There was no mistaking this for a human spacesuit. Everything about it was wrong; not just the configuration of limbs and the elongated body but the styling, the shape of the helmet, everything. It all screamed ‘other’ more forcefully than anything Drake had previously seen, despite his experience with Elder artefacts. Perhaps it was because this suit represented a living, thriving alien culture, whereas the cache chambers were mere echoes of a civilisation long gone, no matter how impressive those echoes might be.
They took things cautiously, with the two drones acting as scouts, bobbing around like wingless dragonflies a short distance in front of the buggy. They had to stop to move the next two Xter corpses out of the way, Nate and Bren jumping down to do the honours, though not without difficulty to judge by Bren’s, “Stars, these things weigh at ton!”
To D
rake’s relief, nobody suggested taking all or part of the Xter suits as bounty or salvage.
They passed through the first two defences without incident, thanks to the unwitting sacrifice of the Xters.
Next up was the collapsed section of tunnel, which was somehow smaller and less dramatic than it had appeared on the drone’s cam. They all got down and were forced to move another Xter corpse but the rubble itself proved no real obstacle for the buggy under Anna’s deft guidance. A short distance beyond lay the shattered wreckage of the original drone, and their first fully active defence. Drake could almost sense the guardian entity watching them and willing them to fail.
Progress slowed to a crawl as they approached the spot, the two drones pulling back to either side of the vehicle.
Nate and Bren were in motion before the buggy came to a halt, jumping down and hurrying to the rear, where the boxlike oblong tank had been fastened. They each grabbed one of two nozzles, holstered on either side of the tank, and walked back to the buggy’s front. Flexible hoses unravelled, linking them to the buggy like umbilical cords.
Anna was busy, staring intently at the screen in front of her while her fingers danced over unseen keys. Two pencil thin beams of bright red light stabbed out from the buggy’s front, one to either side, indicating opposing sections of the tunnel wall.
“That’s where we need to hit,” she said.
“Well, here goes nothing.” Bren planted her feet and trained the nozzle on the highlighted patch of wall.
Nate was a fraction ahead of her, but soon both were spraying a continuous stream of frothy, gungy foam. They started at ground level and worked their way upward. Anna continued to shine her indicators, raising them as required, but the light was soon lost in the foam. Not that either Bren or Nate needed much guidance once they’d started.
It looked as if they were spraying the walls with thick, bubbling scum, while the smell – which came through strongly despite the slap masks – was an unholy alliance between brick dust and detergent.
Little more than a minute after they’d started, Bren and Nate completed their work. The foam hardened in seconds, leaving the tunnel bracketed by two thick, lumpy and uneven columns.
“All right, Leesa,” Pelquin said. “Send one of the probes through and let’s see what happens.”
Everyone was quiet as the right hand drone eased forward. It reached the space between the two grotesque pillars, hovering there… and nothing happened.
Anna let out a held breath with an exaggerated “phew!”
Just to make sure, Leesa moved the drone backwards and forwards and had it bob up and down above its mangled predecessor. Still no reaction.
“Looks as if the foam has done the trick,” Bren said.
“Maybe,” Nate said. “Unless the guardian is playing clever and holding back on the trap until we all wander through it.”
“Thanks for that cheerful thought.”
“Only one way to find out,” Pelquin said.
He was out of the buggy in an instant and walking forward.
“Pel, no!” Bren cried out, but it was too late to stop him. They’d halted just short of the trap and a few long strides brought Pelquin level with where the drone continued to hover.
There he stood. Arms stretched wide. Drake could visualise the metal spears bursting free of their bonds in a shower of hardened foam shards to skewer the captain in half a dozen places; but, even when the man turned sideways to face the wall, arms still spread as if in willing sacrifice, there was no response.
“Looks good to me,” Pelquin said, dropping his arms and walking back to them. He was grinning from ear to ear. Bren looked furious, as if now that the trap had failed to kill him she just might.
The buggy shot forward with all of them back on board. Anna had backed up a little before gunning the engines. No one wanted to be between those pillars any longer than they had to be. Drake felt a degree of sympathy for Anna, their pilot and driver, who would have to pass between the columns again and again, ferrying artefacts back to the ship.
Anna slowed down as soon as they were past the pillars. The cache chamber itself now lay only a short distance ahead. The buggy’s headlights offered tantalising glimpses of its crowded interior through the shattered inner door.
“Did the Xters do that?” Pelquin wondered, looking at the door.
“No, I don’t think they made it this far,” Nate said. “That looks to be pretty much how we left it. A shaped charge, very tightly focused.”
“What happened to the bodies of the men you lost getting this far?” Bren asked.
“No idea.”
And not a question Drake cared to dwell on. “If the traps were rebuilt, why not the door?” he wondered out loud.
“Too big a job?” Anna suggested.
Nate shook his head impatiently. “If the guardian can repair and rebuild a laser trap it can fix a door.”
“Which means this is almost certainly another trap,” Pelquin said. They had come to a halt again, just short of the door. “Leesa…”
She didn’t need telling. One of the drones was already drifting forward. Anna wasn’t the only one holding her breath as the probe moved with frustrating slowness through the broken door.
It paused, hovering in the doorway as if inviting trouble; but none came. After a couple of seconds it edged forward, entering the chamber itself. Just when Drake was tempted to start breathing normally again there came a blinding flash and a quick wash of heat.
“Anna?” Pelquin snapped.
“Hang on, I can’t see a thing right now.”
“A discharge of energy, and a big one at that,” Leesa’s voice said. “Looks to be an energy net positioned just the other side of the door. Give me a second… Right, I’ve got it. I’m sending you through a map of the points that need to be taken out to cripple the net.”
Drake, still blinking away the afterimage of the flash, craned his neck to look over Anna’s shoulder at the dashboard display. It showed an image of the doorway and the chamber walls just beyond with a tracery of orange points overlaid – seven or eight in all.
“Anna,” Pelquin said, “can you upload this to the gun?” He held out the energy weapon from the Comet’s arsenal.
“Yes, sure, wait a sec… Done.”
Pelquin stepped down from the buggy once more and moved to stand in front of them, holding the gun in both hands. This brought him to the edge of the shattered doorway, and Drake felt Bren tense beside him, though she kept quiet.
Pelquin held the gun at waist height, shooting from the hip like some macho marine, but Drake knew that he was doing so in order to match the targeting screen with the overlaid image sent across by Anna. He fired – a brief burst of white-bright energy – then repositioned and fired again, repeating the process another half dozen times. Finally, he lowered the gun and asked, “That’s all of them. How did I do?”
“Looks spot on to me,” Leesa confirmed.
“Good, because there’s not much juice left in this thing.”
That was the problem with energy weapons: they packed a heck of a punch but they were also thirsty little beggars.
“Leesa,” Pelquin continued, “if you’d do the honours…”
Their final probe moved forward, edging past the captain’s position and into the chamber. It did so unhindered and unharmed.
Bren was moving even as Anna let loose a whoop of triumph and before anyone else could react. She stepped quickly forward to put a restraining arm across Pelquin’s chest. “You stay there,” she said. “This time, let someone else be the hero.”
“Actually, I was going to suggest that you and Nate use up the rest of the foam, just to make sure that this ‘net’ doesn’t reknit itself while we’re inside the chamber.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
So they were all forced to wait impatiently for a few moments more – the cache chamber and its glittering contents a few tantalising steps away – while Bren and Nate repeated the
ir performance with the hoses and the foam.
As soon as they’d finished, everyone climbed back aboard the buggy and the whole group of them entered the chamber together.
How’s that guardian entity doing? Drake asked.
Still here, still angry, and still up to something, Mudball replied.
But you can’t give me any idea what?
No, not yet. Watch this space.
Nate dropped off the left side of the cart, stretching up to slam a stickalamp against the uneven wall of the chamber, as high as he could reach. The sharp rap of contact brought the bulbous blister of illumination to life, while its malleable underside adapted to the rough surface of the wall and bonded. Bren was only a fraction behind him on the opposite side, jumping up with her left hand flat against the wall and stretching with her right, as if determined to get her lamp higher than Nate’s.
The wash of fresh illumination exposed the chamber and its contents; what had previously been no more than glimpsed in the buggy’s headlights now stood revealed in all its glory.
Anna gave a long ‘ooh’ of delight while Bren grinned from ear to ear, and even Pelquin glanced across at Nate and smiled. The big man looked insufferably pleased with himself.
“Well, was I right or was I right?” he asked.
“Not bad,” Pelquin allowed. “Not bad at all.”
“Gods, this is really something,” Bren murmured, as she came back to stand by the buggy. “I can’t believe I’m actually standing inside a cache chamber.”
The reverence in her voice brought home to Drake just how privileged he was. He’d been inside a dozen or more cache chambers in recent years and, while each was thrilling and wondrous in its own right, it was easy to become a little blasé about the whole thing and forget the sense of awe that stepping inside one of these places for the first time could invoke. The majority of humankind would never have the pleasure of doing so, not even once; and this was an impressive cache, perhaps the largest he’d seen in all his years with First Solar.
Bren had every right to be impressed.