by P. R. Adams
Rimes wished he didn’t have to get his uniform on. It rasped loudly as he shrugged into it. The noise was nearly enough to drown out Meyers’s voice.
Meyers sounded like he was running. “They’re picking up an emergency beacon, Sir. We’re almost to the hangar deck now.”
“On my way.” Durban closed the channel and pulled on his boots.
Rimes sealed his suit. “A new ambush tactic.”
Durban nodded. “I’ll take Meyers’s squad out. You bringing Lopresti?”
Good. Embrace your leadership role. Prove to me I was right to say you were capable of this. “I think Gilbert could use the experience. Ten-kilometer gap?”
Durban nodded. “At least. Treat it as an ambush until we see otherwise, right?”
“Makes sense.” Rimes kept the satisfaction from his voice, but he smiled inwardly. Durban’s confidence was reassuring.
Durban stopped at the hatch. “Maybe we get lucky and this is that standup fight you wanted?”
“Maybe.” Rimes jogged in Durban’s wake as the earpiece connected with Gilbert. “Sergeant Gilbert, get your squad down to the hangar deck. We’re heading out.”
“Roger, Sir!”
With Gilbert’s squad en route to the hangar deck, Rimes requested a shuttle crew. He was in the hangar bay by the time everything was lined up. He began pulling on his combat gear in the flickering shadow of a shuttle, his eyes floating up to the amber strobe lights flush-mounted on the tall, gray walls. The bay, normally so cramped and small, seemed large now, and he had the sense of being in the belly of a great beast.
A channel opened. Fripp.
“Captain Rimes, we have weak signals, two sources,” Fripp said as introduction. “One hundred kilometers out and two hundred seventy kilometers out.”
“Lifeboats, Sir?”
“It sure as hell isn’t the Erikson.”
Rimes saw Gilbert’s squad entering the hangar deck and waved them over. They assembled next to him and began pulling their combat gear on over their environment suits. “Lieutenant Durban has a squad ready to go at your command, Sir. My squad is prepping now.”
“This is perfect for an ambush.” Fripp sounded uncertain.
“We’re already assuming it is, Sir. I’m bringing Lieutenant Durban into the channel.” Rimes pulled his helmet on and opened the channel to Durban.
“This is Lieutenant Durban.”
“Captain Fripp, Lieutenant. I was just telling Captain Rimes I suspect an ambush.”
“Agreed, Sir.” Durban sounded crisp, confident. “Any chance we can communicate with the beacons?”
Fripp was silent for a moment. “The beacons check legitimate, but we’re running another check.” Someone spoke in the background. “Confirmed. They’re Erikson lifeboats. But that doesn’t change a damned thing.”
“No, it doesn’t, Sir,” Rimes said.
Fripp’s raspy voice played out over the channel—he’d started to say something, then stopped. After a moment, he said, “I’m tempted to simply light those targets up with our railguns.”
Rimes bit his lip. If there were survivors, they would lose potential intelligence on what happened. The genies’ deceitful nature had changed everything, even search and rescue operations.
“Captain Fripp? What about maintenance drones?” Durban sounded excited, as if being engaged had pulled him out of his shell.
“Maintenance drones?”
“We could haul those out with us, hook them to the shuttle hulls.” The excitement increased in Durban’s voice. “We get fifty kilometers out and launch them. The video feed should be good enough quality that we can see if they’ve just rigged these up to blow or if there’s really someone to rescue.”
Rimes smiled with pride. Durban had made a huge turnaround. He was thinking of solutions now rather than simply following the flow and trying to satisfy his superiors.
Fripp’s gravelly hum filled the lower frequencies of the channel for a moment as he considered the suggestion. “That’s a good idea, Lieutenant. All right, we’ll have a drone operator ride along with each shuttle. Maintain your distance and let them see what’s out there. We’ll make the call based off their assessment.”
“Copy that, Sir.” Rimes signaled for Gilbert to get his team aboard the shuttle, then followed. The idea of actually rescuing someone had enormous appeal, if only as a signal that the genies weren’t infallible.
Is that what it’s come down to? I’m more concerned about the genies being imperfect than about saving lives? I can’t let them do this to me. Rimes shivered, then he shrugged the thoughts away. Maybe there’s no time for humanity right now.
15
22 September, 2167. USS Valdez.
* * *
IT WAS ALWAYS the waiting that got to Rimes. The timer he’d kicked off at launch read ninety-five minutes. Most of that time had been waiting for the drone to cross the distance.
The drone’s video feed looked the same as it had five minutes before. The stars hadn’t shifted or brightened or dimmed, and the lifeboat hadn’t changed in size, he was sure of it. It spun in space slowly, marked by a single amber light blinking against the void.
Did we lose the connection?
Rimes concentrated, then maximized the magnification. He couldn’t tell any difference.
Suddenly, the image shifted. Rimes leaned forward—as if that might help him get a better look. The drone was closer to the lifeboat now, its floods revealing a dull, white pod about ten meters long and half as deep, with a bright red stripe along its length. Somewhere along the hull would be a receptacle the drone should be able to hook into to get a readout on the interior. After a moment, the image seemed to freeze again.
His earpiece clicked.
“Captain Rimes, this is Captain Fripp. Any updates?”
“Negative, Sir.” Rimes futilely tapped his earpiece. The video feed didn’t change. He looked over at the woman managing the drone, a warrant officer named Morelli. “Chief, I don’t mean to be a pain, but…“
“Almost there, Lieutenant.” Morelli looked up and twisted her full lips into an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. Captain.”
Rimes returned the smile. He turned his attention to the display. The image had grown closer again. He could make out lettering above the red stripes. A quick image capture and rotation, and the letters resolved into Erikson.
The timer read ninety-eight minutes.
“Captain?” Durban’s voice was weak over the communicator, his image slightly grainy.
“What do you have?” Rimes cursed inwardly at the Navy’s questionable systems decisions. Out here, in the depths of space, what could possibly be more important than quality communications? “Please tell me it’s good.”
“It’s definitely a lifeboat.” Durban sounded hopeful. “The drone just finished a complete sweep of the hull. It’s intact. We have the drone matching rotation right now. When we’ve got that, we’ll latch on and use the drone’s propulsion to stop the lifeboat’s motion. That shouldn’t take long. Once that’s done, we’ll connect and pull up the data on the interior.”
Rimes shifted anxiously. “All right. Call me the second you have anything.” More waiting.
Fifty kilometers out, the shuttles would survive any nuke that could fit onto one of the lifeboats. He listened for several seconds after Durban disconnected, hoping he would come on the line again and report something, anything.
“Okay, Captain,” Morelli said around a toothy grin, “let’s see what we’ve got here.” She shifted in her seat, her hands manipulating virtual drone controls only she could see.
The drone’s video feed filled Rimes’s helmet’s display, with Morelli as the background. She was gifted with big brown eyes, long lashes, and dark brows. She was big-boned and tomboyish, yet in many ways she was striking. In particular, he marveled at her self-confidence, the way she handled the drone and the way she simplified the descriptions of her work to him without it coming across as condescending.
&n
bsp; “We’ll start with a look at the top and the bottom. You know the difference between those, Captain?” She gave a saucy wink. “A lot of these Navy boys don’t.”
Rimes chuckled. “Please proceed, Chief.”
“Okay. There’s your top. Note the controls along the surface, Sir. They’re very sensitive, but if you know what you’re doing with them, they can get you access to damn near anything.” She licked her full lips and grinned. “And…there’s your bottom—” She stopped, the grin fading from her face. “Well, hell,” she whispered.
Rimes focused on the display again. He couldn't see what had disturbed Morelli until she drew an outline on the main display. The outline stretched three meters across the center of the lifeboat hull.
Morelli tapped the outline, and it flashed. “That’s supposed to be your batteries. With those in place and a fortunate ejection placement, you could go a couple, maybe three months recycling water, chomping on algae paste, and getting as much sleep as you ever wanted, dreaming you were naked on a South Pacific beach with a couple guys rubbing coconut oil all over you. Just like paradise. Except in space. In a little protective bubble. Half frozen. Otherwise, just like paradise.”
“Chief.”
“You don’t like coconut oil, Captain? All right. What you see there, that is not a battery panel.”
Rimes knew the answer before he asked the question. “So what is it?”
Morelli made a ticking noise with her tongue. “I’m going to say ‘bomb’. Sir. I mean, based off everything we’ve seen these genies do so far ... we do think this is a genie thing, right?” She looked him straight in the eyes, all humor now gone.
“Yeah.” Rimes stared at the blinking outline. “Nuke?”
Morelli made the ticking noise again. “It couldn’t be a very big one, not at that size. Enough to take out the lifeboat, that’s for sure.”
And any ship foolish enough to bring it aboard. “Is there anyone inside?”
Rimes watched his team for any sign of trouble. Fifty kilometers out was safe, but most people would prefer to have five times that distance when they heard mention of nuclear weapons. He looked a question at Gilbert—You okay?.
Gilbert gave a confident nod. It was all Rimes would need in the same situation. He hoped it was all Gilbert needed.
“Matching the rotation.” Morelli spoke slowly. As she concentrated on the task, her tongue slipped between her lips, then pulled back in before slipping out again, suggestively.
In. Out. In. Out. Damn, Morelli. Even when you’re distracted?
Morelli focused on Rimes for a moment, and licked her lips as she chuckled huskily.
Rimes shook his head. “Lieutenant Durban, we’ve got a bomb on our lifeboat. Battery module. Check it.”
A hiss, then silence.
“Durban?”
“Checking.”
Rimes held his breath.
“Regular battery module,” Durban said. “Everything’s checking out so far. It looks like we have five survivors aboard, one dead.”
“Check their vitals against the manifest.”
“Already—” Durban’s voiced disappeared in a burst of static.
“Say again?” Rimes waited for a second. Letting my nerves get to me.
“They check out,” Durban said after several seconds. “Looks like the dead one was already wounded when he hooked into the lifeboat systems. Low vitals that tapered off fairly quickly.”
Rimes rubbed his forehead. It would have been easier had they discovered no survivors or found a bomb on the lifeboat. Now they had to make a decision about retrieving it. He looked at Morelli. “Chief—”
Morelli held up a finger indicating she needed another second. She wiped at her brow and blinked. “Yes, Sir?”
“Suppose you’re setting these things up for a booby trap for some ship to do a typical rescue. How do you rig it for maximum effectiveness?”
Morelli screwed up her face. “Well, you want the lifeboat to be in the rescue ship for maximum effect. That nuke needs some oxygen to produce any sort of fire blast or concussive wave. But you can’t really trigger the bomb off something like the lifeboat’s seal being popped. By the time any rescuer’s done that, the lifeboat’s right there in front of you, all up close and personal. You’d have to be blind not to see the bomb. So if I’m setting it up, I’m using a proximity sensor. Something big approaches—a few hundred tons—and the bomb’s a go. But not immediately. A ship like Valdez can’t pull you in that fast. So I’m thinking a timer. Not too long or you risk detection, but not too short or you risk shooting your wad—” she stopped, smiling awkwardly at Rimes. “Sorry. You risk…um…premature detonation. Based off what I’d expect a rescuer, especially a military ship like us, to do—you know, pull alongside, open the hangar deck, send out a shuttle—”
“A shuttle’s big enough to trigger the timer, right?”
“Sure. Figure five minutes to attach a cable, haul it back to the hangar deck, re-pressurize. Thirty minutes, tops.”
Rimes considered Morelli’s scenario. It made sense. Damn. “Valdez, this is Shuttle 332.”
A burst of static, then Fripp replied. “This is Captain Fripp. Go ahead.”
“We’ve detected a device on our lifeboat, Sir.” Rimes imagined Fripp icily staring into the distance. “We think it’s nuclear. We’re checking for survivors now. Lieutenant Durban’s team has an all clear on their lifeboat, with five survivors aboard, one fatality. Everyone checks out.”
“It sounds like we have a fairly easy decision, wouldn’t you agree?” Fripp’s voice betrayed less confidence than his words projected. “We destroy it.”
Rimes watched Morelli. She suddenly shook her head slowly and looked down at the deck before looking up to meet his gaze. She held up two fingers.
Rimes muted his earpiece. “Two survivors? In this lifeboat? You’re sure?”
“Barely. The outer hull is covered in PV—in photovoltaic materials—so even without the batteries, the systems are running, but they’re at minimum power. And the survivors check out—names, bio-data, even the images. Their atmosphere is getting close to lethal, though. I could try to disable the bomb—”
Fripp’s voice sounded over the channel impatiently. “Captain Rimes?”
Rimes came off mute. “I’m sorry, Sir. It just got more complicated. It looks like our booby-trapped lifeboat has two survivors onboard.”
Now it was Fripp who went silent. Rimes muted again and looked at Morelli. “How would you disable the bomb? With the drone?”
Morelli scrunched her nose up uncertainly. “I could try. It’s not really designed for that, though. I was thinking a quick EVA operation. That proximity sensor I mentioned? You wouldn’t set it up for more than a few kilometers, or you risk some random piece of debris flying by and—” She balled a fist then opened it suddenly while mouthing boom. “So you shuttle me within, say, five kilometers, out the airlock I go, then fly over and disable the device. And if our genie friends were particularly clever and the timer was activated by the shuttle, I could still try to eject the bomb from the lifeboat.”
Rimes ran the numbers through his head. Five kilometers would take several minutes, assuming Morelli was competent at EVA. If the proximity sensor detected the shuttle and the timer was set to thirty minutes as Morelli guessed, that would leave her ten minutes to attempt the disarm. She would barely have enough time to get back to the shuttle and for the shuttle to get outside the bomb’s EMP range.
It was an extremely tight window, and that assumed everything they’d guessed at proved accurate. Rimes took his earpiece off mute. “Captain, Chief Morelli thinks there’s a chance we can disable or jettison the bomb.”
“Define chance, please.” Fripp was rightly being cautious.
Rimes looked at Morelli. “What are the odds, Chief?”
“Better than fifty-fifty, or I wouldn’t be proposing it. I like some things long, odds aren’t one of them.” Morelli’s wet lips curled, then when she reali
zed how serious Rimes was, she frowned. “Um, probably in the seventy-thirty range?”
Rimes’s mouth suddenly felt dry. It was another moment where the genies had the upper hand, avoiding a straight-up fight, working with unknowns. “She thinks we’re looking at about a seventy percent chance of pulling it off.”
Fripp’s heavy sigh flooded the channel. He cleared his throat, then went silent for a moment. When he spoke again, it was slower, deliberate. “Chief Morelli is my best engineer. If she says seventy percent, I’m of the opinion we give it a try.”
Rimes thought for a moment. He couldn’t shake the sense the genies were infallible, omniscient, even omnipresent. They could somehow be watching them now, ready to trigger the bomb once they were within five kilometers. Could the radiation get through our shielding?
They’re winning, just making us doubt ourselves. “Understood, Sir.”
“No unnecessary risks, Captain.” The deliberate pacing was gone, and Fripp’s voice sounded softer, full of concern.
“No unnecessary risks, Sir.” Rimes opened a channel to the cockpit. “Take us to fifty-one hundred meters, please.”
When the rockets fired, Rimes looked at Morelli. “Seventy percent, Chief?”
Morelli laughed. “What do we know about these guys, Sir? I’m hoping it’s like I said, but they don’t think like us, maybe. But if you’re setting up a trap, you have to do so with a particular intent, right?”
A trap without intent isn’t much of a trap. “Yeah.”
“Like you said, the best target here is the search and rescue ship, so you don’t want to detonate out here with no one around. Something as small as that battery panel, a space blast won’t do much more than liquefy the lifeboat and throw a bunch of radiation out there.” She shook her head. “Nah, it’s got to be a proximity trigger and timer. Not much else makes sense.”
Of course nothing else makes sense. It’s genies. We might as well be lobsters trying to make sense of the strange things beyond the glass. We won’t understand a thing until we hit the boiling water.