by Ralph Kern
Coming to a ladder, one of the troops spotted a stenciled sign on the wall saying OPS with an arrow pointing upward. The troops ignored the ladder and jumped up easily between their enhanced suits and the low gravity to the next deck.
“Clear,” one of them said over the com.
“Push out,” Phillips called.
We followed after the troops, finding ourselves in another corridor. A door off of it led deeper inside the dome.
“Stack up. Dynamic entry. Quick and neat.” The well-drilled troops formed a queue on either side of the door. “Breach!”
One of the troops hit the hatch console, and they flowed in far more rapidly than seemed possible given their heavily armored forms.
“Clear. No contact. This is the ops center.”
“Roger. Coming in.”
Together, we moved inside the ops center, leaving a couple of the troops outside to cover the corridor. It was just as low tech as the rest of the base. Everything was worn and old: a couple of banks of consoles, an old-style holotank, and a picture window ahead. It overlooked a large central chamber, and in the middle, the base of the pagoda rested, driven through the floor, while the apex disappeared into the roof of the dome. It looked ancient, imposing. Lights blinked up and down the flowing lines of its length. It looked like nothing a human mind could conceive.
But down at the base was something that did look like it was built by humans—something that looked a hell of a lot like a bomb.
CHAPTER 48
IWA
We elected to stay in the ops center viewing gallery overlooking the pagoda. One of the troops, who had apparently drawn a hell of a short straw in his career at some point and attended an EOD course for explosive ordnance disposal, went down to it, spooling a cable behind him. With the amount of EM that was flashing around the place, it was probably completely redundant, but Sergeant Jamal was taking no chances. All of our communications would go through that wire to prevent any chances of our coms setting off the device.
“Approaching device.” Jamal was keeping a commentary going the whole way down as we followed on our HUDs. On entering the central dome area, he walked up the metal grid pathway toward the pagoda, which towered above him, pulsing a sickly green light. Every few meters, he waved his sensor wand around, checking for any telltale signs of proximity triggers. I had seen that type of device used by EOD teams before. It could detect booby traps, proximity radars, sniffers, and that kind of thing. They had saved many a life.
“It’s definitely an IED. It’s fairly sophisticated but has clearly been put together with standard parts you’d find laying around a ship.” Sergeant Jamal edged in close to the large cylinder with a small boxy object attached to the side. “Looks to me like a plug-and-play drone communications module,” Jamal murmured, still calm. He waved his wand over the box. “Hell of a lot of current going through this thing. I would suggest it’s radio- or timer-controlled, from first glance. Moving to the main device now.”
The image swept to the main cylinder. It was completely featureless. It looked like an oxygen tank with glowing blue bands around it.
“Interesting. Lots of power pulsing through this thing as well.” The image panned around the device as Jamal circled it to where it abutted the base of the pagoda. Spotting some writing on the side, the image zoomed in on that section of the device. “I’ve got a serial number on this thing. Can one of you run it through the computers, see if it pops out with anything?”
“Go with the number,” Vance called. She’d stayed on the Gagarin and was communicating through a laser-coms array that one of the troops had set up on the surface and wired through to the base.
“Alpha, one, three, niner, Kilo, Kilo, four.”
“Checking.” After a short delay, Vance’s voice came back with something no one wanted to hear: “Oh, shit.”
We exchanged looks through our visors.
“What have you got?” Phillips said.
“It’s a magnetic containment bottle. It’s rated for antimatter, up to a gram’s worth.”
“That doesn’t sound like a lot,” one of the troops whispered.
“Yeah, well, I think you need to reconsider what you consider a lot,” Vance said irritably. “I was on a task force looking at what would happen if any antimatter fell into terrorist hands and they decided to weaponize it. One gram of antimatter annihilating one gram of normal matter would create a destructive force equal to a fifty-kiloton nuclear warhead. That’s around three times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.”
“Oh,” the troop muttered.
“Oh-in-fucking-deed,” Vance replied in her testy manner. “I doubt that what you have down there will vaporize Iwa, but it would leave nothing but a big crater on that entire hemisphere if it explodes.”
“Ma’am,” Jamal called up, “I’ve got an anti-tamper device here. It’s as simple as can be. If the drone control module is messed with, it’ll just cut power and this thing will pop. The auxiliary power feed on the antimatter bottle is wrecked, so we can’t just power it from an alternative source. I can’t see a work-around.”
“So if we try to defuse it, it’ll blow?” Phillips asked.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Solution?”
“Ordinarily I’d say a bomb box and controlled detonation, but…” Jamal’s voice trailed off. A bomb box wasn’t going to contain an antimatter explosion—not by a long shot. “We could try moving and spacing it.”
“No,” Sihota cut across the com. “That drone control module is likely to contain accelerometers. Frain would have thought of that and set it to cut power and blow if we move it from where he wants it.”
So we were stuck with the bomb.
“Frain’s got some serious balls if he’s drawn it from Erebus’s power plant,” Frampton said. “It’s not exactly the easiest stuff to work with.”
“Ladies and gents”—I was thinking the problem through as I was speaking—“the good sergeant down there has already said that this thing is wired up to a probe communications module. Would I be right in saying that you think that makes it link- or radio-controlled?”
“Yes. That’s right,” Frampton answered.
“And considering there is no crew here and Erebus has gone through the gate, then there doesn’t appear to be anyone left to activate the bomb.”
“Well…yes.”
“But the question remains; why would he have put it in place if he didn’t intend to activate it? I’m getting the impression taking a gram of antimatter is no simple task.”
“So what are you saying?” Vance asked.
“What I’m saying is that his original intention may have been to blow this rock out of the sky just after he slipped through the gate. But he changed his mind. Why?”
“Captain Vasily is still working up an analysis on Erebus after the battle. Maybe we managed to take out her transmitter. Maybe it’s still on a time delay and could blow at any moment.”
“Yeah, could be.” That was an uncomfortable thought. But surely he would have set it to explode seconds after he went through rather than leaving it as a booby trap. Everything so far told me that Frain was cold and calculating. He didn’t have a problem with killing anyone, but he didn’t go out of his way to do it. In fact, I would go so far as to say a few times on Concorde, it would have been easier for him if he had just killed some of the JAS officers. No, he hadn’t set this up as a trap. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think we’ve caught a break here. His original intention to blow this device has been scuttled. Let’s stick with plan A. Let’s power up this thing and follow him.”
Silence fell across the observation gallery and coms network.
“How much of a limb are you willing to go out on?” Vance finally said.
CHAPTER 49
IWA
“You know,” Frampton mused, “it’s been bothering me since we got the Io disclosure that only half of the necessary hardware for a gateway is built into th
ese pagoda things.”
“Dexter,” I said in exasperation, “now is not the time. I just want to know what button to press and bloody well press it.”
Things had moved fast during the last day. The troops had gone EVA and knocked out the Snapdragon laser. As was standard, the laser was hidden a mile away from its “eyes”—the radar station—which explained why the Hawk hadn’t disabled the laser itself with its Viper space-to-space missile. It had turned out to be an automated defense platform, or ADP, designed to knock out any approaching ship. Fortunately for us, Snapdragons were old technology, dating back decades before our leaving Sol. It had none of the self-defense capability of a modern ADP. A newer Spartan-class would have been equipped with all kinds of antipersonnel sentry devices. The troops thoroughly searched the base, and the food and recycling equipment suggested that the facility had only recently been abandoned.
Frampton and I were in the laboratory annex to the viewing gallery. It was full of work stations and digital whiteboards. The Post-it notes attached to every surface showed that it had been built in the pre-HUD days. To say it was quaint was an understatement. The problem was, as far as we could tell, every single damned console had been purged of all data. Reclaiming any of it would take a full IT forensic team days to sift through, and the chances of recovering much? Minimal. We didn’t have the expertise, the equipment, or the time. Every moment we delayed was a moment Frain could flee farther.
Fortunately—or, more accurately, suspiciously—the operating systems all looked in order, and activating the gateway didn’t seem especially complicated. Frampton was looking at a symbol on one of the whiteboards, head cocked to one side. It was two circles, one much larger than the other and a dotted line between them drawn in marker pen. I could see some scribbled equations covering it that may as well have been hieroglyphics to me.
“Dexter,” I said sharply to cut through his daze of concentration, “just show me what to do, then clear out. We can’t afford to delay any longer.”
“Okay.” Frampton gave a little shake of his head. “The operating system looks like it’s pretty simple. I’ll set it to the point just prior to power-up, and then you can take over.”
***
Christ, I hoped that I was right that the bomb wasn’t set to go off the moment someone switched on this contraption. My instincts said not. After all, Erebus had used it when she went through, and that hadn’t blown Iwa into a cloud of rubble.
A small shuttlepod from Gagarin waited at the lock nearest me. It was preprogrammed with a fast-burn solution to get me off this rock quickly and back to Gagarin. In theory, I needed only to press a couple of buttons in the base, run—or the Iwa equivalent of running—to the pod, press a couple more buttons, and then enjoy the ride.
I had my feet hooked under some convenient hoops on the floor in front of a console looking out of the bay window of the viewing gallery. Frampton had set it to power up the pagoda. Again, the thought that this was suspiciously easy plagued the back of my mind. It was as if someone wanted us to do it. But if this were a trap, at least it would only take me out…and forever imprison Frain and Drayton on the other side of the alien gate—a small consolation, at least.
I looked at the artifact looming from floor to ceiling in the dark belly of the cavern with my hand resting on the console, waiting for Gagarin to call. If I’d felt isolated and far from home before, it was nothing to being alone in that room waiting to punch in a sequence that I hoped wouldn’t blow me up. The artifact, ancient and alien, made me feel small, insignificant. It was a cold feeling gnawing in the center of my gut. For all we knew, the artifact could have been floating around out here during the time of the dinosaurs, before mankind ever drew breath. I shook my head and took a deep breath. I needed to get a good solid grip.
As far as Frampton could tell, the artifact had two modes—some kind of personal transport, where someone could simply walk into it, and a mode for transporting ships in orbit of Iwa. That was the mode Frampton thought he had figured out.
“Gagarin is in position,” Captain Vasily called over the laser link. “Layton, you are a go at your discretion.”
I looked at the large view screen in front of me, a graphic of the artifact on display. I tapped the touch screen. It flickered back on for me to input the targeting coordinates into a waiting field.
“Okay, give me your coordinates.”
Captain Vasily fed me a long string of numbers, telling me when to swap from azimuth to altitude. I entered them, prodding the touch screen with my suited index finger.
“Target locked,” I said once I had input all the numbers. “Beginning power-up.”
This was the nerve-racking bit. Was that bomb set to explode as soon as any juice went through it? Sergeant Jamal didn’t think so. He said it was likely wired to a simple remote control. I just hoped that no suicidal zealot was around in some secret chamber that the troops had missed to activate it.
I touched the screen and a bar graph appeared, showing bars creeping upward.
Fusion tokomak active. Capacitor charge time: twenty minutes. Commit? blinked onto the screen.
“Guys, one more button to press. Are we good to go?” I said, my hand trembling. If it was going to pop, this was what would do it.
“Go,” Vasily said without hesitation.
Without another thought, I pressed the screen.
Committed. I read the blinking word off the display. “Right, I’m hauling arse.”
I unhooked my feet from the loops and turned to the door. Another screen caught my eye as I did. It showed a graphic of Akarga with pulsating red light in the center that hadn’t been up a moment before, but I didn’t have time to ponder it. I moved as fast as I could, that mix of dragging and loping that seemed to be the quickest way of getting around on this rock. I was thankful I’d had a lot of practice back on Concorde.
I jumped down the ladder well, pushing myself down on the rungs to speed my slow drop, and hauled myself to the lock. Two minutes had gone by according to the chronograph in my HUD.
The inner door of the airlock had been left open for me. I slid in, slapped the close button, and it rumbled shut. I lifted the safety guard on the emergency decompress and hit the button. The door opened slowly at first to equalize the pressure inside. If it didn’t, I would shoot out with the air and find myself in close orbit around Iwa, unable to get back to the surface until I either hit a mountain or Iwa’s insignificant gravity clawed me back into a dusty heap after a few days. By then, Gagarin would be gone, and I would die of asphyxiation or, if I could manage to get back to the base, have a long wait for rescue. The pressure in the chamber reached zero, and the door slammed open.
One of the troops had laid a guide rope leading from the lock to the shuttlepod, and I pulled myself along it as fast as I could in my bulky suit. I got to the small spacecraft with fifteen minutes left on the clock. The pod was little more than a pressurized bubble and an engine. I climbed in and sealed the hatch. I strapped myself into the seat of the single-man pod and hit the button labeled execute. It was a poor choice of word, indeed.
The engine was already primed to go, and within seconds, I felt myself being crushed back into the seat as the craft climbed hard on a column of fire. Above, I could see the Gagarin, tiny but growing fast.
“Layton, we have you off the surface. Ten minutes on the clock. ETA four minutes.”
I could only grunt in reply. I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest under the horrendous acceleration the pod had been programmed to perform.
The autopilot spun nose to tail, and Iwa rolled dizzyingly into view. Squinting through the pain, I could see the dome receding. At first, so gradually that I wasn’t sure if I were imagining it, I could see a light start to grow in the center where the tip of the pagoda breached the dome.
“Ac...” I coughed, struggling to get the word out through the brutal acceleration I was being subjected to. “Activity. Dome.”
“We’ve got it, Layt
on,” Vasily said. “Don’t worry about it; just enjoy the ride.”
The pod was decelerating hard, matching speed with Gagarin for docking, and before long, the motion slowed and eased as it maneuvered into dock.
With a loud thump, the boat latched onto Gagarin. Before I was on my feet, the hatch sprang open, and Phillips hauled me bodily out of the seat.
“Come on, Layton. No time to be a layabout,” she said. She was unbelievably strong, manipulating me with ease. “I’m going to get you to the habitat ring. If there’s any nasty radiation from that thing, you’re going to be best off in there.”
I nodded in reply, and she hauled me deftly into the spinal corridor cart elevator. Gripping the rail, she set it off toward the more protected ring section.
Two minutes went by before we got to the habitat ring. I shambled after Phillips toward the mess section, still adjusting to my centrifuge-induced weight. The mess was a quarter of the way around the ring from our position, and we made it in good time despite my now feeble legs.
“Database dump has been completed. The blockade over at the gate will have all data up to this point,” I heard Frampton say as we entered the mess and I buckled my aching body into my seat. “I’ll keep piping through sensor readings as we get them.” That would at least mean that the lander and assault shuttle would have a record of everything we had found.
“Thirty seconds,” Vasily called.
“Layton, well done,” Vance said distractedly, watching the image of the Iwa dome. The tip was unmistakably bright now. It looked like it was barely containing the energy within.
“Thanks. At least it hasn’t sparked off the antimatter,” I said.
“Ten seconds.”
“Whose bright idea was it to follow Frain through an alien stargate, anyway?” Vance muttered.
The tip of the pagoda flared and everything in the room brightened. Other than that, it felt nothing like a human gate. It was far, far more painful.