by Jake Elwood
"Yes," said Rhett. "Don't descend into the sauna facility. Move just past the emergency hatch and wait there." He scanned the city below, compared it to the maps, and found the rectangular structure of a pedestrian tunnel running along the top of a long beige building.
"I'm there," Chan said. "But the cops are right behind me."
Rhett didn't answer, just tilted the ship until the rooftops were in range of the laser. Liz and Joss cried out over the radio as the Raven tilted by almost forty degrees. Rhett fired the laser, one quick pulse, and levelled the ship.
"The door just closed," Chan said, wonder in his voice. "How did you do that?" A moment later his voice hardened as he said, "You put a hole in the tunnel roof! Those men will asphyxiate!"
"It's a very small hole," Rhett assured him. "They will have plenty of time to reach the emergency lock at the other end. In the meantime, you need to find a lock that gives access to the roof."
Liz walked into the bridge. "What are you doing, you mechanical menace? I'm taking over."
"I see one," Chan said. "It's right by the top of the stairs."
"Joss," Rhett said, "you will have to go out with the captain's suit." He set the ship down on the roof, right beside a red hatch with the word "AIRLOCK" stenciled on it in bright yellow letters. Rhett turned to Liz. "You have the conn," he said.
She stared at him, nonplussed. Then her eyes widened, and she pointed past him, out the bridge window. "Oh, crap."
The Raven was engulfed in shadow as the huge Orbital Guard warship blotted out the sun. The ship outweighed the Raven by five or six times, with armor plating and laser turrets that made the Raven's laser look like something designed for food prep.
But the warship was listing as she flew, with greasy clouds of smoke billowing out from under her port side, dissipating quickly in Mercury's negligible atmosphere. As Rhett watched, the ship tilted further and further, then sank quickly toward the ground. It vanished behind a row of buildings, and one last puff of smoke came up to mark the spot where she touched down.
Liz stared. "What in space just happened?"
"They have a hole in a conduit that brings coolant to the port engine," Rhett explained. "The engine reduces power automatically when it overheats."
"What?" She shook her head. "How do you know they have a hole in some conduit?"
"I put it there," Rhett said. "I suggest we take off, because—"
"We're aboard," Joss interrupted. "Let's get out of here."
"Right." Liz pushed past Rhett and dropped into the helm seat. The Raven surged upward. When they had a couple of kilometers of altitude she turned in her seat and said, "Um, good job, Rhett. Sorry I yelled at you."
"No apologies are necessary," he assured her.
"Good." She glanced over her other shoulder as Chan hurried onto the bridge, unfastening his helmet as he went. Joss was on his heels. "What now, Captain?"
"Good question," he said, dropping into his usual seat. "Any suggestions, anyone?"
"We need to get out of here," Joss said promptly. "Let's head back to Saturn at the best possible speed."
"Definitely an option," Chan said. "I still want my money, though. Do we have time to grab that crate?"
Joss sat at a console and tapped the screen. "Orbital Guard ships coming in fast," she said. "Fifty thousand kilometers and closing."
"Get us out of here, Rhett," Chan said.
"The odds of successful evasion are poor," Rhett said, checking the scanner data. "There are four Orbital Guard ships within a hundred thousand kilometers, and several very good tracking satellites in polar orbits. I recommend a different approach."
"Well?" Chan snapped.
A quick calculation told Rhett that he didn’t have time to explain his strategy, persuade Chan, and get the ship to safety before the approaching ship was dangerously close. He took the Raven into a steep dive. "I recommend diving," he said. He leveled out less than a kilometer above the surface and raced along, heading south across the burning sands. "If we fly just above ground level we'll be much harder to detect."
"All right," said Chan weakly. "Let's do that." He took a seat. "Then what?"
"We'll look for a place to hide. Preferably on the day side, which will make our heat signature harder to detect." He adjusted course, angling the Raven away from the dawn line.
A lone plume of dust rose from the desert below, the only sign of human activity on that wide, lifeless plain. Low dunes whipped past beneath the ship. Rhett checked the scanners. So far, there was no sign that the Orbital Guard ship could see them. It was still rushing toward the point where Rhett had changed trajectory.
He saw a dark circle in the sand ahead and touched the controls, slowing the Raven. "A crater," he said. "I recommend setting down."
Chan didn't answer, just flapped a hand. Rhett decided it signaled assent. The bottom of the crater was a circle of sand a kilometer across, ringed by low, crumbling walls. The sharp angle of the sun put the entire crater floor in shadow. The ship would be very difficult to spot. He touched down in the sand and turned off the engines.
"What now?" said Joss.
"Now we wait to see if they tracked us," Chan replied.
A tense silence settled over the bridge. Rhett was getting better at reading human body language in general and the signals given off by this crew in particular. He could read their tension in Liz's stiff posture, in the tight set of Chan's jaw, in the way Joss discreetly fidgeted with the seals on her vac suit. She and Chan both stayed in their suits with their helmets close by. If it came down to a shootout with Orbital Guard ships, the vac suits might save their lives.
"Are you sure we should deliver the crate?" Joss asked. "Those Sons of the Dawn people aren't particularly nice."
Rhett shifted most of his attention to analyzing the data pouring in from the Raven's passive radar and exterior cameras. A discussion of ethics was well outside of his skill set.
"Well," said Chan, "They aren't so bad, either, believe it or not." He leaned back in his seat. "I've been doing some reading. It's hard to get a clear picture of exactly how they operate. Most of what I can find was written by Telemachus or some corporate body connected to Telemachus. It's propaganda, basically, and it paints the Sons as a lot of dangerous lunatics bent on destroying life as we know it."
Liz muttered something inaudible and rubbed the gauze on her knuckles.
"The rest is written by left-wingers who are almost as extreme as the corporate flacks. They make the Sons sound like benevolent, misunderstood Robin Hood types." That drew a disgusted snort from Liz, which he ignored. "But there's one thing both sides agree on. The Sons of the Dawn have never hurt anyone."
"What?" Liz twisted around in her seat and pointed to the dark circle of bruise decorating her left eye. "What do you call this?"
"I call it a shiner," Chan said calmly. "And it's just about the most serious injury they've ever caused. Not counting what they did to your knuckles with their nasty hard skulls, of course."
"I'll show those clowns a thing or two about doing damage if I see them again," she muttered. Chan gave her a look, and she fell silent.
"They're enemies of Telemachus," Chan said. "Maybe that makes them friends of ours." He looked at Joss. "If Joss is right, then Hammond basically told her that Telemachus was behind Enceladus." He glanced at Liz, then at Rhett. "What do we know about Telemachus?"
"They are an interplanetary corporation registered on Earth, Venus, and Mars," Rhett said. "Dawn City is their largest operation. They own every building in the city and surface rights for a radius of two thousand kilometers from the pole. Corporate headquarters is on Earth. They also maintain offices on Montgolfier, Barsoom, and Portree Station."
Chan straightened in his chair. "Portree? That puts them in the vicinity of Enceladus." Portree Station orbited Saturn.
"Two more things are consistent with the Enceladus venture," Rhett said. "The company invests extensively in research and development, especially in the biogenic f
ield. And they have a consistent history of criminal violations, rarely prosecuted because they commit their crimes outside the jurisdiction of established law enforcement agencies. I can cite specific examples if you like."
"Another time," Chan said.
"Well, I'm convinced," Liz said. "Sons of the Dawn can have their guns." She stretched. "How long do you think we should wait?"
"I wonder where the missing people are," Joss said. "Do you think they learned their lesson on Enceladus?" She rubbed her arms. "What if they're doing more experiments like that?"
The three humans exchanged glances, which Rhett struggled unsuccessfully to interpret.
"I don't see how we can find out," Chan said. "If they have a hidden facility on Mercury, we'll never find it. It could be anywhere. The only people who could scan the surface are the Orbital Guard, and they're under contract to Telemachus. If they saw anything, all they'd do is report it to the company."
"We could investigate the dust," Rhett said.
All three of them turned to stare at him. "Dust?" said Chan.
"We passed a plume of dust on the way to the crater," Rhett explained. "It was clearly a vehicle. I can calculate our exact position at that time, and the direction of the plume."
Chan looked at Liz. "Are there any private businesses that send vehicles into the desert? Prospectors, maybe?"
"People collect crystals," she said. "They send out automated rovers and sometimes they go in person."
"Such expeditions are generally conducted along the dawn line," Rhett said. "It's the most efficient way to balance solar power needs and heat management." He did his best to interpret the looks they gave him. All three of them seemed startled that he had the ability to use simple logic, which seemed odd. It was his most fundamental function, after all.
"All right, then," said Chan. "Let's go investigate this plume of dust."
Chapter 6
Chan stood in the Mercurian sand, uncomfortably hot in his vac suit, wondering what Mercury was like at high noon on the equator. The sun was directly south of him, a fiery yellow ball just touching the horizon along its bottom edge. The steep angle made the tire tracks on either side of him vivid and unmistakable, shallow depressions in the sand that showed as black stripes of shadow stretching off toward the horizon.
He measured the distance between the tracks. It was four full paces between the tires of whatever monster vehicle had passed this way. He needed two more paces to cross the actual line of tire treads. He was looking at the tracks of a truck big enough to cart the Stark Raven around.
"Well?" said Liz over the radio.
"The sand is hard-packed," he said, kneeling to examine the ground more closely. "This route gets plenty of use." He examined the sand between the vast tread marks. Smaller, lighter wheels had left other indentations. "It looks like mixed traffic. Huge trucks and light rovers." He could feel the thump of his heart, quick and urgent in his chest, telling him he'd stumbled onto something significant. "I'm coming aboard. Let's get out of sight before another vehicle comes along."
When the ship sat on the far side of a dune he said, "I bet the north end of that road points straight at Dawn City."
"Within a degree," Rhett confirmed.
"The question is, what's at the south end? And how far does it go?"
"Shall we follow the road?" said Rhett.
"No, I don't think so. Right now no one knows we've found … whatever it is that we've found. I'd like to keep it that way." He turned to Liz. "Take us parallel to the road. Keep us low, and far enough over that we're out of sight. Let's check in again, say, a hundred kilometers south of here."
Ten minutes later the Raven approached the road close enough for Chan to see the same two lines of shadow running laser-straight across the sand. "Another hundred K," he said.
This time, there was no trace of the road. They floated low above the sand, going several kilometers past the spot the road should have been, and found nothing.
"Take us north," Chan said. "Low and slow."
Liz brought the ship around. "Low and slow it is."
When another plume of dust appeared dead ahead, Chan had her land the ship. They watched the dust come closer and closer and debated the range. When the cloud dispersed Liz said it was ten to fifteen kilometers away. Rhett said forty-two point three. Joss said she was pretty sure it was less than a hundred and refused to commit herself.
"Take us north," Chan said. "Even lower. Even slower."
Liz kept the ship a scant dozen meters above the sand. Chan checked the aft cameras and saw a haze of dust blown up by the force field holding them aloft. "Take us up another ten meters."
They passed over crater-pocked plains, then a high compression ridge that forced Liz to increase their altitude once more. A hill rose off to one side, and Chan said, "Put down there. Just this side of the crest."
They landed, the ship's force fields making the deck "down" until Liz cut power. Chan grabbed the arms of his chair as most of his weight vanished and the bridge suddenly acquired a fifteen-degree tilt toward aft.
Joss insisted on coming with him when he left the ship. They took a small camera with them and climbed the hill. He put a hand on her shoulder as they neared the crest, pushing her down, and they crept onto the summit, careful not to skyline themselves. They lay flat on the crest, peering north.
At first Chan saw nothing but crater-pocked gray desert. Then Joss tapped his arm and pointed.
He shaded his eyes with his hands and squinted into the distance. Was that a faint ripple of movement? He stared, seeing nothing but rock, and the ripple came again. Chan's perspective shifted, and he inhaled sharply.
A vast circle of gray cloth was staked out across a huge section of the Mercurian desert.
He brought the camera forward and laid it in the sand beside him, digging a little furrow so the lens had an unobstructed view. He zoomed in, watched the viewfinder as the camera focused, and waited for Liz and Rhett to react.
It took Liz nearly thirty seconds. When realization hit, it unleashed a storm of profanity. Then she said, "What in the name of space is that?"
"Not sure yet," Chan said.
"Well, how big is it? How far away?"
Those were good questions, and Chan realized he didn't know. The problem with lifeless planets was the lack of uniformly-sized objects to give scale. Craters and ridges could be any size, after all. "At least five hundred meters," Chan said. "No more than two kilometers?"
"More than that, I think," Joss said, and rose onto one elbow to fiddle with the camera. She zoomed in, tracked back and forth, and zoomed in more. "I think that's a hut."
Chan looked into the viewfinder. A pale rectangular object sat under an awning of some sort. He zoomed out, trying to figure out what he was seeing.
The awning was a huge circle of fabric, the same color as the soil of Mercury. It was supported by poles, and Chan could just make out a dark line of shadow underneath the covering. If the hut was a standard design, it was about two meters high. That put the covering circle a good fifteen meters above the ground. Those poles were extremely long.
He kept zooming back. Before long he could no longer see the hut. How Joss had spotted it he had no idea. Back and back he zoomed, and still he couldn't see the entire circle.
"Freeze me in hard vacuum," Liz muttered over the radio. "How big is that thing?"
At last Chan could see the entire circle of gray fabric. He did a quick calculation. "It must be three kilometers across," he said. "Maybe four. That makes it … six or seven kilometers from here?" He shook his head. "What in the name of Buddha are we looking at?"
"A base of some sort that can't be seen from orbit," Joss said. "Let's take a closer look."
By the time they were back inside the Raven they had a plan of sorts. The base was due north. A short distance to the east, a wide, deep crater pocked the plain. The Raven would keep behind the hill for as long as possible, then dart over and drop into the crater. The ship would
be visible from the base for only a moment. They would land inside the crater and scout the base on foot.
It was hard not to whisper as the ship took off. The practically nonexistent atmosphere of Mercury wouldn't transmit any sound much smaller than a nuclear explosion, but Chan still found himself lowering his voice as the Raven darted around the base of the hill. He looked toward the base and couldn't see it. Then, seconds later, the ship cleared the edge of the crater and dropped into darkness. Liz brought them to the northwest edge of the depression and set the ship down. Chan reached for his helmet.
"I'm going with you," Liz announced.
"Me too," said Joss.
Chan glanced at Rhett.
"I function the best in near-vacuum conditions," the robot said. "Perhaps I should accompany you as well."
"Forget it," Chan told them. He looked at Liz. "I need you at the controls in case I need a fast evacuation." Joss opened her mouth to argue, and he turned his gaze to her. "I need you to do whatever Liz can't do from the bridge." He pointed a finger at Rhett. "Your job will be to coordinate communications and make sure these two don't do anything stupid."
"Captain," Joss said, "this is dangerous."
"That's why I need you on the ship. Whatever I get into, I need you to get me out of it." He cut off further argument by turning away and heading for the aft airlock, pulling his helmet on as he went. He turned off the suit radio and opened the helmet visor. "Radio silence except in emergency. They're in range of suit radios." A thought occurred to him. "Rhett, scan for suit radios, would you? See what you can pick up." Then he closed the visor and stepped into the lock.
The crater was old, the floor marred by smaller craters. The walls had long since crumbled away to form a gentle slope that rose in front of the ship. Sunlight painted the top half of the wall on one side, a strip of light so bright the stone looked almost white. Chan clambered up the slope several meters, then turned to wave at his crew on the bridge.
No one waved back.