“As we suspected, these larger holes appear to be blast points,” said JEFF. “Both the size of the holes and the metallic fusing around the edges suggest a particle weapon, but one whose power would only be theoretical to the colonial military.”
“What does that mean?” said Liam.
“This weapon is more advanced than any human technology.”
“You mean it’s alien?”
“Yes.”
“Those attackers at Saturn,” Liam muttered to himself. “It has to be them.” It could also have been the Drove, but they hadn’t attacked before, unless you counted turning the sun into a bomb. He rubbed his hands over his face, sinking into a cold well of grief once again.
But after another terrible moment of silence, JEFF said, “It is possible that this is not as bad as it appears.”
Liam looked up, brushing at his eyes. “How?”
JEFF pointed at the wreckage. “Do you see how those smaller holes are in uniform lines? In the event of an emergency, the starliner cores can eject their stasis pods, which have batteries that allow the pods to operate in space for an extended period of time. Then they can be salvaged with a magnetic tethering system.”
Liam sat up. “Do you think that’s what happened?” He scanned the cylinder, pocked with rows of holes, and then the ice beyond. “I don’t see any pods.”
“Yes, that is also a good sign.”
The radiation warning had become a steady drone. JEFF put the cruiser into a tight arcing turn and headed back toward Delphi station.
“Sensors are still picking up no life-forms or heat signatures,” he said. “There is also no sign of further starliner wreckage, nor of the ship itself in the nearby atmosphere, though the range of our scan is limited to our link.”
“So . . . what do you think?”
JEFF brought up the rear camera on the holoscreen and pointed to the upended section of the core that towered into the clouds. “In order for the core to impale itself in the ice like that, it would most likely have to have fallen from a great height, perhaps even from low orbit. Together with the lack of stasis pods and any further wreckage, I would theorize that the Scorpius was able to move itself out of the atmosphere before ejecting the passengers from Core Three. This would have been quite advantageous, as the pods could be retrieved in zero gravity, before they could fall to the surface and sustain damage. Since the Scorpius had lost an engine, they may have then ejected the damaged core to reduce weight. Both the core and the engine are so large that they would have fallen out of orbit rather quickly.”
Liam sat up. “Do you really think that’s what happened?”
JEFF’s eyes flickered for a moment. “I calculate that this is the most probable outcome without more information.”
“What kind of information?” said Liam.
“A scan of the entire planet and nearby celestial vicinity for wreckage, direct communication with the Scorpius or any other members of the fleet, and a log of what happened here.”
“And we don’t have any of that.”
“No. We could conduct a full visual sweep of the planet ourselves, but that would take many hours, and I think we would agree that we don’t have time for that.”
“No,” said Phoebe.
“So they might have escaped,” said Liam, “or they might be crashed on the far side of the planet, or wrecked out in space somewhere.”
“Correct.”
“And the ejected stasis pods could be on the Scorpius, or they could be floating out in space, too.”
“Again, we cannot know.”
“Where would they even go? Did they have time to refuel?”
“We will need more information.”
“Well, how are we going to get it?” Liam held the beacon between shaking fingers and slowly tapped a message.
we see crash are you ok please
“We need to access the station’s long-range scanner,” said JEFF. “It is not working currently, so our first task is to assess its condition. Clearly, there has been a station-wide power failure, and it is likely that control centers have been damaged. We will have to investigate.”
“We should just leave,” said Phoebe again.
“As I have stated before, departing now commits us to a statistically fatal outcome, given our fuel supply and the damage we’ve sustained. We must land to address those issues at a minimum before we depart.” JEFF rotated slowly toward Phoebe. “Unless you have some information that suggests otherwise?”
JEFF’s tone was strange. There seemed to be something more in his simple question to Phoebe. Liam didn’t think he’d ever heard JEFF sound that way before.
Phoebe glanced at Liam, her face stony, then back at JEFF. “All I know is this place was attacked and we don’t know if whoever’s responsible is still around.”
Liam checked the sky in all directions. Were the Saturn attackers chasing down the Scorpius? Or were they still here? Maybe they had many ships, an entire army, enough to attack all the starliners and still wait here to mop up the stragglers at the back of the fleet. But the watch wasn’t blinking. And the beacon remained dark.
JEFF was still looking right at her. “And do you have a theory about who might have done this?”
Phoebe slid back into her seat and crossed her arms. “Liam’s right: it’s probably the Saturn attackers. Don’t you think?”
JEFF didn’t answer right away. His eyes flickered. Finally, he said, “I do,” and turned back to the controls. Liam was left wondering: What is he thinking?
And yet a surprising thought flashed in his mind: all the way back to the underground lab on Mars, their parents lying there, injured, and Liam’s mom saying, It was sabotage, Liam. They . . . You need to go, right now. In his search for an explanation, Liam had wondered for a brief moment if Phoebe’s parents were behind the turbines exploding, before he’d dismissed the thought. It was Barro—he’d admitted as much—and Phoebe had shot his ship down in the rings of Saturn.
But JEFF definitely sounded suspicious, as much as a bot could, anyway. When Liam thought about it, he realized this wasn’t the first time JEFF had acted oddly toward Phoebe, going back to their previous refueling stop. Then again, maybe his circuits were as fried as the cruiser’s. Liam remembered hearing about robots that got really old, and their perception and conduct filters would start to break down and they’d say and do inappropriate, almost human things. It wouldn’t take much: a corrupted line of code here, an out-of-sequence fact set there. That might explain the processing logs, too.
He looked at the core wreckage on the rear camera and thought about the attack at Saturn Station. “Is this a war?”
“What we’ve seen, from Mars to here, does suggest an organized, large-scale offensive,” said JEFF. “Someone seems to be trying to sabotage the human mission to Aaru.”
There’s that word again. “But why?”
“For the moment, their purpose is beyond calculation. We should know more once we access the long-range scanner, which is right— Oh.” They had reached the station again, flying to the side of the large dome at its center. JEFF banked around a tall communications tower. The array of circular dishes had been blown apart.
“That doesn’t look good,” said Liam.
“There will be a backup scanner,” said JEFF. He tapped the console, and schematics appeared on the holoscreen beside him, displaying a multilevel complex. A dot blinked on the lowest level. “I have located it: sublevel six. It will be in a blast-shielded compartment and have its own battery backup system. This is also where the backup data recorder is located, which should contain at least partial logs of what happened here.” He pointed to the schematic, then out of the cockpit. “The main command and data center has been destroyed. You will need to turn on the scanner and retrieve the logs manually.”
“You mean we have to go down there ourselves,” said Liam.
“Correct. You should also be able to reboot the station’s power system from there, or at least what�
��s left of it. In the meantime, I will work on repairing and refueling the cruiser. Once the scanner is operational, we can search for the Scorpius and hopefully contact it.”
Liam’s stomach churned as JEFF brought them over the central complex of the station. Collapsed buildings, their insides burned.
“There’s no smoke,” Liam noticed. “How long ago do you think this happened?”
“The lack of heat signatures suggests that the attack occurred soon after the Scorpius arrived. It would have been at its most vulnerable when docked.”
“So the attackers might have left by now,” said Liam, peering out across the ice. Then he sat up. “But I was getting that message from Mina barely an hour ago, and it said to hurry. So if the attack was a few days ago, that definitely means she survived it, right?”
“That is possible,” said JEFF. “Though if we assume the starliner was not destroyed, then it likely executed a burn and left the system. Her message might be time delayed by the distance they’ve traveled since the attack. It may only mean that she was alive to send you a message in the recent past.”
“But it would be less than four days ago,” said Liam.
“Yes,” said JEFF. “The scanner data will tell us more.”
“It probably means she got out of here alive,” said Phoebe, giving Liam the first hopeful look he’d seen on her face since they’d woken from stasis.
“Yeah, if they were able to pick her up.” Liam imagined Mina alone in her pod, sending him a message as she tumbled through space. If she activated stasis, she could survive out there for years. But in stasis, she wouldn’t be able to see his messages, so how would they ever find her?
JEFF flew toward the front of a long, curved building just beside the main complex. It was half collapsed, its garage-style doors cockeyed and burned. “This is the main hangar for local transports. I will see if I can salvage the parts to aid with our repairs while you two head down to the sublevel.”
JEFF lowered the cruiser onto a landing pad outside, but it was cratered in multiple spots. “Hang on. We still have damaged landing gear from our crash on Mars.” The cruiser crunched down on the rubble-strewn pad and its back wobbled, jolting them hard in their seats.
“If we are lucky,” he added, “I will be able to tap into the water systems from here to refuel as well.”
“Our luck would have to change,” said Liam.
“We’ve been pretty lucky,” said Phoebe. “What if we’d arrived here two days ago like we’d planned? We might be part of the wreckage— What?”
JEFF was gazing at Phoebe again, his eyes flickering, his head cocked slightly.
Liam felt a nervous tremor. “What’s going on?” he finally said.
Neither of them answered.
“JEFF?” Liam spoke again.
But the bot swiveled back to the controls. “You should get into your pressure suits. Delphi’s atmosphere is slightly more suitable to your bodies than that of Mars, but the temperature is quite cold at the moment, nearly fifty below zero. Yet another reason why it is in our best interests to stay here as briefly as possible.”
“Sounds good,” said Phoebe. She unbuckled and strode out of the cockpit.
Liam looked at the back of JEFF’s head. “Am I missing something?”
JEFF swiped the holoscreen, flipping through different schematics. “I do not follow. Can you clarify?”
“Something between you and Phoebe.”
JEFF paused for the briefest moment before replying. Again, Liam had the sense that JEFF was choosing his words carefully. “I believe we are all in agreement regarding our current plan. You should get going. The sooner we have eyes and ears, as they say, the better.”
“Fine.” Liam got up. As he left the cockpit, though, he glanced back at JEFF and was surprised by his next thought: I don’t believe you. Could JEFF be lying? Was that even possible? And what exactly was he lying about? Something to do with Phoebe. Like he didn’t believe what she was saying. All she’d talked about was being worried they’d be attacked if they stayed around, and that they’d been lucky to not get here sooner. Both things seemed totally reasonable; in fact, Liam felt the same way.
But whatever it was, JEFF didn’t seem willing to say, and he was right that they needed to hurry, for so many reasons.
Liam left the cockpit, and his first step in Delphi’s low gravity sent him careening into the wall. He grabbed a nearby handle for support and took smaller steps toward the main cabin.
Phoebe was zipping up her black pressure suit. She stopped halfway and removed her atmo pack, tossing it on the couch. Liam unhooked his suit from its charger and started sliding the thick, rubbery fabric over his legs. Compared to the space-grade suit, it was much easier to move around in. “Everything okay?”
“Not really. How about you?”
“Yeah, not really. But better than when we first found that core. Hey, um, it seemed like JEFF was giving you a hard time.”
Phoebe huffed. “Who cares about JEFF? He’s a bot. Do you know what he’s not feeling right now? Scared. He’s calculating probabilities and protocols while we’re worried about everyone we know dying.”
“True,” said Liam, but the worries still needled in his mind. “Is there anything else?” His insides tied in knots as he asked it. He was barely sure why. “Things seemed weird.”
Phoebe pulled the soft helmet of her pressure suit over her head and zipped it closed. She clicked her link into the port on her sleeve and activated the suit’s controls. Then she looked back at him, through the dissipating puff of fog on the inside of her visor. “I’m with you,” she said through her suit’s tinny speaker. “We’re a team. Best in the galaxy. Okay?”
Liam nodded. “Okay.” He pulled up his suit, and as he did, he felt the impressions of the two objects in the hip pockets of his thermal wear: the orange crystal and the Phase Two data key. He and Phoebe would never have made it this far without each other.
He checked the beacon one last time: nothing. “Hold on,” he said to Phoebe. He ducked back into the cockpit and grabbed the link with the code key, then quickly tapped out:
back soon
Maybe all his messages were still traveling through space. Or if Mina was receiving them but was still injured, maybe someone could tell her later that the beacon had blinked. That is, if she wasn’t dead from the attack, or in her stasis pod floating in space. He shook his head, trying to clear those buzzing thoughts. Had to focus on what he could do right now.
He took off the alien watch, slid his arms into the sleeves of his suit, and put the watch on over his gloved hand. Then he zipped himself in and clicked his link into place. The heating and breathing systems hummed to life. Liam watched the readings rise to 100 percent. He ran his finger over the patch on his leg, the one covering the tear he’d sustained in the cave on Mars. Still holding.
Liam’s link flashed and JEFF spoke in his ear. “The access door to the sublevel will have a security lock, but with the power out, you will need to open it with a magnet drill.”
“Got it,” said Phoebe. She opened the closet by the airlock and hauled out a heavy metal box. She flicked open the latches and pulled out the magnet drill—a bulky, meter-long tool with a trigger, a second handle off the side, and a curved metal cup at its end. Phoebe slung it over her shoulder by its thick yellow strap.
“I have sent you the schematics of the station,” JEFF continued, “and highlighted the route down to the backup scanner. You can enter through the doors directly off the bow of the cruiser.”
“Okay.” Liam tapped his link and the map opened. Two blue dots blinked at the bottom of the screen for Liam and Phoebe, a red dot in the upper corner, which was the backup scanner, and a green line leading them to it.
Phoebe opened the map, too, and they both stepped into the airlock, Liam closing the inner door behind them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, both breathing hard in the cramped, quiet space.
“Ready?” said Phoebe.
“Yeah.” Liam pressed a button, and the outer door slid open and stairs lowered to the ground. They were greeted by howling wind and a wicked chill. Liam’s suit hummed to compensate.
“Wonder what kind of distance we can get,” said Phoebe, and she leaped out of the hatch, sailing on a long, gradual arc, much farther than they had on Mars. “Whoa!” She slammed into the side of the hangar building, dropped, and staggered on the rubble-strewn ground.
“You okay?”
Phoebe flicked on her headlamp and looked over her suit. “Yup. Very low gravity!”
Liam activated the closing cycle on the outer door and then hopped gently down from the airlock. Even this little movement sent him five meters from the craft, his boots crunching on the black rock. It was chipped and splintered, similar in composition to the volcanic glass they used to encounter in the lava tubes on Mars, only more crumbly, like walking on dry cereal, and coated with ice. He turned on his headlamp, leaned into the relentless wind, and started toward the building beyond the cruiser. Ice crystals thwicked against his suit. A slight chill seeped in, and Liam shivered, thinking please be okay, meaning Mina and Shawn, but also meaning him and Phoebe, now that they were outside the ship, exposed.
As he walked, it dawned on him that he was standing on another planet, far off in space, and that this planet had once had a solar system, was perhaps many billions of years old. It felt as solid as Mars once had, and yet he’d seen it from a distance and knew how small, how infinitesimal it was compared with the years of black around it. The thought made him feel dizzy, and with each arcing step he feared he might fall right off the side of the planet and back into endless space. He shortened his stride until he would have been barely shuffling along on Mars.
He peered through the sheeting ice, back at the damaged hangar, its doors yawning open like crooked teeth, and then out across the dark plains of ice, toward the core wreckage, and the engine burning far in the distance. No signs of movement, of attackers. Or of survivors.
They reached the shadowy entrance to the main complex, ducking out of the vicious wind into a doorway. Liam heard a distant crunching sound behind him—but it was only JEFF, rolling across the crumbly ground, a bright light on his chest spearing through the ice into the dark hangar.
The Oceans between Stars Page 8