by M. D. Cooper
Her Link was initializing and Angela was beginning her boot-up processes, so it took Tanis a moment to notice the alerts scrolling across the holo panels in the chamber. Some sort of shipwide systems malfunction was being reported, something about the drives being offline.
“Well that’s not a good sign.” Tanis queried her Link. It was still authing on all of the secure nets she needed, but the general shipnet was available and she checked its alerts.
What she found there shocked Tanis so badly that she stumbled backward and banged into the edge of her stasis pod. Though Angela was not yet fully initialized, Tanis sensed a feeling of alarm from her AI as well.
The shipnet reported no other crew out of stasis, and those that were supposed to be on duty were missing with no trace of their lifesigns on board. As the information flowed into her still-initializing systems, Tanis realized that this wasn’t the worst of it. Shipnet also reported that the engines were offline, all of the fuel was gone, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they were falling into a star.
Tanis sighed. “Oh give me a break…”
A PATH IN THE DARKNESS
M. D. Cooper
DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to all of us.
May we find our path in the darkness.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Those who have read their fair share of science fiction will know that this book stands on the shoulders of giants. It is to those giants, whose ideas paved the way for books like this to be written, that I give my thanks and gratitude.
MARS
STELLAR DATE: 3227279 / 11.22.4123 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Mars 1 Ring (M1R)
REGION: Mars Protectorate, Sol Space Federation
Tanis walked into the elevator’s main cabin, peering through the throngs of people for a seat near a window. She spotted one on the side that would have an eastern view and slipped through the crowd, managing to secure it before anyone else.
The captain’s message instructed her to come wearing civilian clothing. She managed to find one complete outfit that didn’t look military; a pair of tight, dark-blue jeans, a white blouse, and a burgundy jacket.
She pulled at the jacket as she sat, ensuring that the sidearm strapped to her side was out of sight.
The captain hadn’t said anything about weapons.
Conversation buzzed around her as a thousand people all found seats and stowed whatever they were carrying. The sounds of vendors preparing food came from the balcony above the cabin.
Tanis took in the thousand sights, sounds, and smells, her senses on alert for any sign of danger.
Outside the elevator, on the surface of Mars1, the final few passengers were walking over the manicured lawns leading up to the entrance. To her left, Tanis saw a pair of cargo haulers drive away over the low hills surrounding the elevator, their beds empty.
The clock on the local net showed departure time in nine minutes. Tanis settled back, anticipating the view. She believed that no planet was more beautiful to drop onto than Mars. Perhaps it was because she had grown up there.
A young girl sat to Tanis’s left, peering out the window with excitement.
“I can’t wait to get there!” she said as she bounced in her seat.
“Easy now, dear,” her father said from beside her. “We’ll be dropping soon enough.”
“I just can’t wait to see Mommy.” The girl smiled.
“I know.” The father patted his daughter’s head. “It’s only been a few days but it feels like so long.”
Tanis smiled at the girl, wondering what her life would have been like if kids had come into the picture. She hadn’t been much older when she first rode the elevator back down to Pavonis Mons.
She spent the rest of the time before the drop reviewing leads and lines of inquiry around the attacks on the Intrepid. She wasn’t certain what the captain thought was more important, but he wasn’t a man given to frivolities so it likely was worth her time.
An alert came over the local net and audible systems giving the fifteen second warning for the elevator’s departure. Tanis cleared the work from her mind and prepared for the moment.
A gentle shudder rippled through the deck and the elevator began to rise above the surface of Mars 1.
Tanis always found it somewhat incongruous that, due to centripetal force, space elevators had to climb toward the planet. Over the course of the trip, gravity from would decrease and the passengers would enter a period of 0g. At that point the cabin would rotate and the passengers would re-orient with their feet facing down to the planet.
Even after decades traveling between space and planets, Tanis still found it took as long as an hour to shift her thinking about what was up and down.
Both rings and free-orbiting habitats always oriented so that their parent planet or moon was up. Almost all time in space was spent with a world hanging overhead. On the surface of a world space was what was hanging above.
Tanis always had a period of feeling like she would fly off the surface of the planet into space.
With seventeen-thousand kilometers to travel, the trip would take over an hour. Tanis leaned back in her seat and gazed up through the angled windows as her home world grew larger above her.
The most distinctive feature of Mars was the Borealis Ocean, which covered the northern third of the planet. The southern two thirds consisted of a massive supercontinent broken up by small crater lakes and the larger Hellenic Sea.
Tanis recalled vacations she had taken with her family on the sea when she was younger. She found it odd that her father always insisted on leaving the shores of the Mariner Valley to go to another sea half way around the world.
After a few more minutes the Mariner Valley became visible and Tanis strained to make out the Melas Chasma where she had grown up.
She remembered the long, idyllic days of her youth swimming in its deep blue waters and spending time fishing and boating on the valley lakes.
Once, when humans first settled Mars, the Mariner Valleys were ideal sites for habitation. The mile-deep cracks in the Marsian surface offered protection from the sand storms and provided a safe haven for nurturing a heavier atmosphere. Today those initial habitations were curiosities that tourists could view in submarine tours.
To her left she could see Olympus Mons, the Sol system’s largest mountain, a massive volcano which rose over twenty-two kilometers above the seas which lapped at its western shore.
Tanis had climbed the cliffs at Olympus’s edge several times on training missions. At over nine kilometers high they were brutal, even in Mars’s low gravity.
Once on the mountain it was almost impossible to tell it was a mountain at all. With a base nearly the size of the province of France on Earth it seemed more like a gently sloping hill.
Tanis enjoyed watching the clouds drift across the surface above her until the local net sounded the warning that full 0g was near and the cabin would flip.
Several minutes later the passengers found themselves staring up at the glistening latticework of Mars 1 and the MCEE with all their elevators, shafts and anchors reaching out into space.
It was quite the change from staring at the idyllic garden world.
Less than ten minutes later the elevator dropped within a shaft cut deep into Pavonis Mons. The shield volcano was amongst the smallest of the massive volcanos on Mars, but at over 8 kilometers above sea level it was still huge by any measure.
With its peak and most of its one-hundred thousand kilometers of slopes eternally sheathed in ice, the debarkation area for the elevator was deep underground with maglev train service out to the nearby city of Sheffield on the high, arid Tharsis steppe.
Tanis transferred to the train within minutes of the elevator settling within its cradle on the surface. The trip to Sheffield would take only several minutes and from
there Tanis would transfer to a low orbit jump jet to the location the captain had provided on the island of Elysium.
It had been over a decade since she last set foot on Mars. She still remembered that fateful day when her family had sided with her ex-husband and all but ostracized her.
In retrospect, with a more measured eye cast toward her former spouse, she wasn’t surprised he had cut ties with her. But she never expected her father to cut her off as well.
The urge to check in on him was strong, but she closed that train of thought off, that part of her life was over. Soon she would leave Sol and they would be a part of her past, nothing more.
Tanis sighed.
Tanis nodded and turned her mind to work, sifting through reports to take her mind off thoughts of family.
Thirty minutes later the jump jet touched down in the city of Albor. Tanis hailed a groundcar and gave it the name of the restaurant the captain had provided.
When she arrived, Tanis saw that it was a small, street-side café with flowers overflowing its planters and the smells of good cooking coming from inside.
She entered and spotted the captain sitting at a table beside a window. He was wearing a plaid shirt and the image made her think of an old woodsman.
“Good morning, Jason,” she said as she slipped into the booth.
The captain smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “A good morning indeed, Tanis. I’m glad you could make it on such short notice.”
“Coffee, dear?” a slim woman wearing an apron with the café’s logo on it asked Tanis.
“Yes, cream and sugar, please.”
The woman poured a glass and, as Tanis reached out to take it, the captain put his hand on hers.
“Was the trip pleasant?” he asked.
Tanis had a moment to wonder if this was some elaborate ruse to get her alone and make a pass at her before she detected the nano he had slipped into her hand.
It contained a coded message and Tanis decrypted it as she replied, “It was nice enough, I took the scenic route down the Pavonis elevator, it was nice to see the valleys one last time.”
The captain nodded as he sipped his coffee. “I remembered that you grew up there. I’ve sailed on them a few times, amazing views.”
Tanis read the message as the captain spoke about his adventures on Mars’s high seas.
Tanis and the captain discussed pleasantries until the time drew near for them to meet their contact.
As they talked she wondered what the special cargo could be. There were dozens of things of incredible value already on the Intrepid and they had been successfully delivered by conventional means. She wondered if Terrance thought so little of her security on the ship—then again, he had sent her to pick it up.
The captain passed his token over the local net to the café and they walked out into the street toward the park. The walk was pleasant and only took several minutes. They kept up light banter about the weather and the things they saw around them—careful to not speak of anything more significant.
In the park they walked to a low wall overlooking a pond and leaned against it, admiring the view.
“Good morning,” a man said with a smile as he walked past.
Tanis nodded in return and suddenly knew why she had been called in, the captain could never have picked up the message she had just been delivered.
She reached out and touched the captain’s arm, sending him a coded message via the direct contact.
The captain merely nodded and said something about a swan in the pond.
The walk to the office tower was short and Tanis easily located the door they were to use. She placed her hand over the panel and passed the codes to unlock it.
They walked down a short flight of stairs and she unlocked another coded door.
Tanis had expected some sort of hidden laboratory or research facility teeming with scientists working on the next greatest breakthrough.
Instead, they found themselves in a small room facing a nondescript man sitting at a drab desk.
“Ah, you’re on time, good,” the man said. “If you’d please sit and give me your arm.”
Tanis looked to the captain, who shrugged, and back at the man. “Why would I do that?” she asked.
The man frowned. “So that I can give you the package, it has to be injected into you. It’s not something you can carry around.”
Tanis weighed her options and decided to sit and offer her arm. If this was an attempt to kill her it was the oddest yet. She looked up the man whose breath held the message in the park in addition to this man and found connections to various Enfield holdings.
As far as she could tell, this was a legitimate hand-off.
“It’s OK.” The captain placed a hand on Tanis’s shoulder. “It’s required for the nature of the package.”
Tanis looked into the captain’s eyes. She saw only calm sincerity. He had never given her any reason to distrust him.
“Very well.” She sat.
The man reached under the desk and placed a case on it. He opened it and withdrew a small needle.
“I won’t hurt much.”
Tanis wasn’t worried about whatever pain a needle might cause, she was concerned about what it might deliver.
The man slid the needle into her vein and pressed the plunger. Tanis and Angela immediately began to analyze the contents.
“Earnest said you’d try to open the package,” the man said. “He asked that you refrain. It would be damaging to your health if you did so.”
“Is that it?” the captain asked.
The man nodded and Tanis rose, again searching the captain’s eyes for a clue.
Andrews shook his head no and gestured for them to leave. Tanis rolled her sleeve back down, even more determined to find out what strange nanoscopic cargo she was carrying.
Back on the street, she and the captain began to make their way to a maglev stop three blocks away. From there they would catch a jump-jet back to Mount Apollinaris and the elevator there.
Tanis noticed a man with long, dark hair cast an appraising eye at her as she walked past. She wasn’t unfamiliar with receiving looks, but something about him struck her as strange.
She moved her nano cloud out, looking for any suspicious behavior. On crowded planet-side streets that was nearly an impossible task.
Stations and ships had rules about what could be done where and when. It kept things safe, predictable, and orderly. Planets were the embodiment of chaos. People lounged in entryways, groundcars sped past, and both humans and robots flitted through the air above.
A block from the maglev station something caught her eye. A man was leaning against a restaurant’s doorframe appearing to be bored and disinterested with his surroundings, but his eyes flitted to her three times in ten seconds.
She watched him through her nano
cloud and saw him glance at a woman across the street who also cast Tanis a furtive look.
The captain didn’t respond, but increased his pace. Tanis slid a hand into her pants pocket, through a cut in the fabric, and drew her lightwand out of her leg.
The man and the woman Tanis had identified before were moving toward them from the front, while another two women were approaching from behind. The street was too crowded with not enough cover.
Tanis stepped into a shop and the captain followed.
The store sold souvenirs for tourists and they pushed past people gawking over rocks from the bottom of the Borealis Ocean or meteor fragments from the Hellas Sea.
A man stood behind the counter wrapping trinkets and processing transactions. Tanis spotted a stockroom behind him and worked her way around the counter.
The man was too startled to speak as she pushed past him, finally gaining his voice and calling out as they slipped through the stockroom.
“Hey, what’re you doing?”
Tanis ignored him and moments later they were pushing through a back door into a wide alley.
“Get to the train?” Andrews asked.
Tanis shook her head. “No. They’ll be waiting for us. We’ll double back and find a groundcar.”
They broke into a run, moving away from the train station. Tanis had to resist breaking into a full sprint—there was no way the captain could match her augmented speed.
“Stop!” A call rang out behind them. It was a male, likely the man she first saw in front of the restaurant.
A shot rang out and Tanis felt a ballistic projectile whistle through the air near her right shoulder.