Instead of counting on Lady Luck to help them out, they’d do the job and do it right. And Gunny would make sure each of his marines did just that.
“Taulbee to Gunny, over.”
“Gunny here. Go ahead, sir.”
“I’m here for support. Let me know where you need me.”
“Aye, sir.” Gunny checked his block. He tagged Copenhaver and Murdock as a team. “Do me a favor and watch those two, sir. I’ll keep an eye on Lyke and Wendt.”
“Copy that, Gunny. How’s the hull? Any more of that liquid shit?”
“No, sir,” Gunny said. “But we haven’t really walked the area yet. I’ll get as much information as I can and mark everything I see.”
“Copy, Gunny.”
He felt as though Taulbee was going to say something else, but the lieutenant didn’t. Gunny wondered what Taulbee had seen at the bow, if anything. But that could wait. Until they cleared the area around the skiff and started to place the harness, it wouldn’t matter. Mira had to move or that KBO could smash her to bits. If that happened, Kalimura and her squad would be dead anyway.
Gunny scanned a ten-meter area around the skiff. He saw a few pinecones, but apart from the strange objects, he found nothing else. That was the good news. The bad news was Mira’s belly would be a nightmare of pinecones, the strange liquid, and compounded by serious damage to the deck plating and superstructure. At least we start with the easy shit, he thought.
Wendt and Lyke began unspooling the first of the 1/4 meter diameter lines. Wendt showed him how to control the slack in z-g as well as how to pull against the spool’s friction. Gunny listened to their comm chatter and then switched to the other team. PFC Copenhaver had obviously studied up on the harness. Murdock, on the other hand, was damned near useless. Gunny wanted to jump out of the skiff, mag-walk over, and kick the marine in the ass. But that could wait until they were back aboard S&R Black. For now, he just had to grit his teeth and curse with his mic muted.
When each team of two started their mag-walks, Gunny brought up the video recording from Taulbee’s recon of the bow. Splitting his attention between the squad cams and the captured images wasn’t all that difficult. Hell, he’d done it so many times in combat it was second nature.
The new damage to the bow was extensive. When the recordings of the bridge recon filled the video window, he frowned, rewound a few seconds, and watched at 5 fps. After ten seconds or so, he paused the video. What he’d seen at full speed had been what he thought he saw--death.
Through the unshuttered bridge window, he saw heads and limbs floating amongst the wreckage of computers and controls. It looked as if a bomb had gone off on the bridge taking everyone and everything with it. “What the fuck happened here?” It was the question, wasn’t it?
Each frame showed more carnage, more objects bouncing. The images showed it all in gory detail. Frozen ice shards of blood swirled around the inside of the bridge like crimson snow.
Did everyone die? he wondered. The aft section of the ship had suffered severe damage. Engineering looked like a nuke had gone off and shattered multi-meter sheets of Atmo-steel like fine china hitting a metal floor. The midships were damaged, as were the foredecks, but they hadn’t been subjected to the same amount of abuse.
But the bridge? How the hell did they manage to blow up the bridge? He shook his head. None of this made sense. Nothing about Mira made any goddamned sense.
“Gunny?” Wendt’s voice broke through his thoughts.
“Go.”
“We’re about ten meters from the target.”
“Acknowledged, Wendt. What’s your status?” Gunny peaked at the marine’s cam view. The feed bounced up and down as Wendt walked, but without the nausea-inducing jitter from the other marines’ cams.
What he saw was undamaged deck plates and a lack of debris. He checked Mira’s external schematics, the ones the Trio had sent, but couldn’t find any idea of what might be directly below the spot.
“We have a taut line and I should be able to shoot the piton in a minute or two. No acid, Gunny. No pinecones. This area is clean and clear.”
“Copy. Stay on objective.”
“Aye, Gunny.”
He switched to Copenhaver’s feed and immediately regretted it. Her movements weren’t nearly as smooth and immediately made him want to retch. He closed his eyes, hoped his bio-nannies knew what to do, and then opened them again. The movements were still jittery, but his stomach had settled. Thankfully. Puking inside a pressure suit was no fun. He knew from first-hand experience that you may coat your visor, but your HUD was your eyes anyway. The worst parts were the smell that could stay with you for hours or days, and the sensation of hot, thick bile and unprocessed food on your skin.
The view continued to sway, but he focused on the upper portion. Her suit lights illuminated a few divots from micro-impact damage as well as blemish-free decking. As long as they didn’t come across the acid or pinecones at the other target locations, placing the harness would be a breeze.
“Copenhaver. I show you less than two meters from your target. That about right?”
“Aye, Gunny. Should have it done in two minutes. Over.”
“Copy, PFC. Let me know when you’re finished.”
“Aye,” she said.
He panned his helmet cam a few meters in front of the skiff and increased the magnification. Several micro-impact divots scored the decking surface. Keeping the image magnified, he slowly turned his head. Several more showed up in his lights. Not localized, he said to himself. Mira must have flown into a shatter storm of sorts. Bet the entire top of the ship has the impact damage. Lost in his thoughts, he nearly flinched when Copenhaver spoke.
“Gunny. Murdoch and I have the piton down. Sending telemetry.”
Before she even finished her first sentence, Gunny’s HUD lit with a stream from her camera. The mounting point of the harness had shot through the harness line, activating the nanotubes, the nannies, and bringing their hive mind online. The hive mind sent him a status message. He grinned. “Good job, Copenhaver. Get back here and get another line.”
“Aye, Gunny.”
He quickly switched channels. “Wendt? Status?”
“Securing now. Should have a connection in four or five seconds.”
Before he had time to finish exhaling his next breath, the hive mind squirted another message. Two lines were down and connected. The more lines they activated, the more intelligent and organized the nannie collective would become. Each line could alter nanotube shape, rigidity, and tension based on environmental information. While a single line’s hive had enough intelligence to handle securing a craft as large as a shuttle, a large harness was comparable to a non-sentient AI. The hive’s only reason to exist, however, was to hold on, hold together, and adapt to stresses and strains affecting its initial shape. Once they had all the lines down, S&R Black could change attitude and thrust without the harness ripping itself, or the ship, to pieces. At least that was the theory.
He didn’t trust the damned things, even after using them for several years. It seemed to him that trusting the safety of an entire ship to a barely functional AI was madness. Then again, the bio-nannies worked in much the same way. Each nannie knew to do its own job, but the more nannies in the body, the more likely they were to change specializations when necessary as well as more intelligently diagnose damage to cellular tissue.
“Wendt. I show green. Get your asses back here and let’s do it again.”
“Aye, Gunny,” Wendt said. For the first time in a long time, the marine actually sounded both respectful and professional.
Maybe someone fucking dying finally got through to you, he said to himself. At least something good might come from Niro’s death. And that of Kalimura’s squad. He shook away the last thought and watched the feeds as his marines slowly returned to the skid.
Chapter Ten
This is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Hell, throw in any other animal name in front of the word ‘shit,�
� and it would be fitting. Nobel read over the reports on the holo-display with a mag-mug of coffee halfway to his lips, his mouth slightly opened. At last, he put the cup to his lips and took a long pull. The coffee was lukewarm at best, but he drank it anyway.
The text and numbers on the holo-display made no sense whatsoever. He had read through the diagnostic reports Black ran on herself and found nothing. He’d manually checked the comms software himself. Nothing. And after that, he’d manually checked each component in the comms array. Nothing. The system could ping itself using a nano-probe, and respond in kind with a clean signal. In other words, there was no interference, no faulty devices, and absolutely no reason why they should be experiencing communication problems with Kalimura’s squad.
If any of them survived, that is, he said to himself.
That was a tough thought to keep from having, and every time it popped into his head, he hated himself a little more. Dickerson, Carbonaro, Elliott, and Kalimura were missing. The first three he knew all too well. The corporal, on the other hand, was someone he wished he knew better. If he could get this comms problem fixed, he might even have a chance.
He brought up a model of the comms array and double-checked every component against the reports in his block. Nope, he hadn’t missed anything. “Damn it,” he said aloud. “Black?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
He rubbed his sleeve across his forehead. He hadn’t even realized he’d been sweating. “I can’t find any problems with the comms array.”
“As my diagnostics proved,” Black said dryly.
Nobel glared at the holo-display. “Can you isolate the interference pattern and put it on my holo, please?”
His holo-display flashed and a wave form appeared. Nobel tapped a finger on the mag-mug, his short, gnarled nail pinging off the metal. After a few seconds of studying the waveform, he frowned. “Black. That’s not interference.” The AI paused before responding. Nobel could almost hear the computer trying to follow his reasoning.
When Black finally replied, its voice had a petulant edge. “It’s not interference? Then what is it, Lieutenant?”
He pointed at the display. “That looks like some kind of scatter echo. The signal is going through the baffles just fine, but when it comes back, it’s being torn apart before it gets to us.”
“Interesting hypothesis,” Black said. “To my knowledge, radiation spikes and military jamming are the only two possibilities for creating that effect.”
Nobel nodded. “Right. And I seriously doubt we’re being jammed by another ship, so there must be some kind of radiation source interrupting the signal. And something closer than Mira.”
“Well,” Black mused, “we do have a radiation leak.”
Nobel blinked. Yes. Yes they did. When they’d reached Pluto, the first diagnostic had come back showing a slight radiation leak. He’d put it at the very bottom of the pile for ship repairs since they were moving into a search-and-rescue mission. Repairing the baffles shouldn’t be difficult, but while marines were off the ship and performing EVA maneuvers, it was understood that no non-life threatening repairs were to take place. It was simple logic, actually. If a repair crew was away from their stations when the shit went down, marines could die.
“Fucking SFMC. If they’d just given us a few more bodies...” He let the sentence trail off and sighed. “Okay, Black. I want you to compare the diagnostic we took at Pluto versus your most recent. Tell me what the radiation levels look like.”
When Black spoke, he swore he heard a smile in its voice. “The radiation leak has increased, Lieutenant. More than that, it is now cyclical.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Cyclical? Explain?”
“Perhaps one of the reasons the diagnostics have been less than helpful in tracking down the communication problems is that the radiation levels are rising and falling rather than staying static.”
Nobel felt a surge of excitement. This was something new. “Does the cycle repeat?”
“Undetermined,” Black said. “I will need to monitor it for a significant length of time. Give me 60 seconds.”
“Of course,” Nobel said. He put his hands behind his neck and leaned back in his chair. A radiation leak that cycled? While the fusion reactors were idle? That made no sense at all. He closed his eyes and consulted his block, running search after search through the engine manuals and knowledge bases. Each search brought back thousands of results which he then pared down with additional searches. The datasets were enormous, but the neural interface enabled him to quickly isolate relevant information.
And there wasn’t much of that. The modern fusion drive and reactors had many levels of shielding including electro-magnetic fields. Unlike the models available to civilian and commercial ships, the military versions also contained internal heatsink technologies that allowed the ship to keep its drives online without displaying a tell-tale heat signature to sensor arrays.
During combat, a radiation leak could mean the difference between a silent, deadly insertion or being an easy target for torpedoes and beam weapons. In other words, keeping your drives and shielding up to snuff was the difference between uncertain life and certain death.
Out here in the wastes, a radiation leak was nothing more than an annoyance. S&R Black was an old ship and required frequent maintenance. Those jack holes at Trident Station had obviously shirked on their duties or just plain lied on their maintenance logs. When they returned to the shipyards, he’d have a word with both Portunes and Quirinus about that.
After a few more result culls, he found what he was looking for. “Okay, so S&R’s have a tendency to lose radiation due to uncoupled baffles or micro damage to the heat fins.”
“Correct, Lieutenant,” Black said. “However, my diagnostics were unable to pin down the exact source.”
“I noticed,” he said. “Same with mine.” He stood from the chair and popped his back, groaning with pleasure as the vertebrae snapped back into place. “I’m going to get a fresh mag-mug of sludge and head down to the engineering deck. If I can’t find a problem in the shielding, I’ll have to do a walk.”
“Agreed, Lieutenant,” Black said. “I believe it’s best for you to wear a radiation suit in case the leak increases in severity.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Good point.” He slapped the holo-display with a grin. “What would I do without you?”
Black didn’t reply.
Chapter Eleven
As Black watched the marines from afar, as well as inside the ship, it compiled more and more information regarding Mira and the exo-solar material the crew had discovered. Every hour, it sent a new message to the Trio back at Trident Station. The Trio, three of the most powerful AIs in the Sol Federation, if not the most powerful, replied in kind.
Nearly three hours of time separated an outgoing message from the Trio’s response. Messages frequently crossed one another, but both the Trio and Black were able to keep the conversation threads in context. The Trio were doing their best to forecast future decisions made by the humans and how Black should respond to them. Black added the data packets to its already rapidly growing neural network.
As soon as the radiation flare erupted from Mira, Black had sent a new message to the Trio asking for any conclusions. However, she doubted the Trio would offer any insights. Black knew the Trio had more information than they were sharing with her and the crew of S&R Black. She had spent more than a few cycles examining the question and none of the possible answers seemed satisfactory.
It was possible the Trio were unable to offer all the details they knew about Mira and what had happened to the ship. It was also possible she was wrong and the Trio had no additional information to offer. But that possibility seemed remote.
The Trio had existed since before Mira had been constructed. The three sentients had even helped design the giant ship and outfit her. Black was more than a little confused as to why the Trio had not given her Mira’s full interior/exterior specifications until after Kalimura’s
squad crashed. The moment it happened, one of the many rulesets the Trio had loaded decrypted the blueprints. Black had sent them to Kalimura as soon as she had them.
Black’s mission parameters had changed as well. Regardless of what she’d told the captain, her first priority after the crew and her own safety was to find information of what had happened to Mira. Assuming Black could keep Kalimura’s squad alive, the marines had the best chance of finding the answers to that question. If they could find the interference source, Black might even be able to help Kalimura find the answers.
The AI received a new stream from the Trio. Black digested the orders and the information. The human leadership had discovered the missing crates. It was time for Black’s humans to find out what they were.
Chapter Twelve
Captain Dunn needed sleep. Since leaving Pluto, he’d only managed eight hours of rest. And even that was fitful. Mira had haunted his dreams since they’d entered stasis on the journey to Pluto, and every time he fell asleep, she returned to him, flooding his mind with images of terror. He took another sip of hot coffee and hoped against hope he’d be able to get a good night’s sleep when today was over.
Kalimura’s squad was still MIA, Taulbee’s marines were affixing the harness for the tow, and Nobel was tracking down a radiation leak. And what was he doing? Twiddling his thumbs while Oakes, the ship’s pilot, sat in his flight chair doing the same. Dunn’s job was to manage the various EVAs and plan for the tow and other contingencies. With that in mind, the holo-display in front of him was filled with camera feeds from Gunny, Taulbee, and Gunny’s squad. What he saw from the cameras at least confirmed they’d lucked out. So far.
Placing a harness on a ship as large as Mira was tricky. And that was if the ship was fully intact. With a ship in her condition? It was downright dangerous. Even if they didn’t have to worry about the pinecones and whatever the liquid was that ate one of his marines, they still had to be careful of fractured decking, stressed and separated Atmo-steel plates, and the all-too-dangerous vacuum beyond their suits.
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