Building Victoria: A Military Science Fiction Space Opera Epic: Aeon 14 (The Intrepid Saga Book 3)
Page 18
Tanis laughed.
Tanis walked down the Excelsior’s ramp where the ground crew was running microfracture inspections of the Excelsior’s grapple arms and frame. She shivered for a moment when the cold air hit her. Things may be coming along, but the temperature was rarely above freezing between Landfall’s low hills.
“Quite the thunder you brought there,” the crew chief said with a nod. “Your purple-haired friend is waiting for you in the hanger.”
“Back to purple is she?” Tanis asked.
The chief paused. “I think she is…I don’t know, I can’t keep track of you Sol types…you all look the same.”
Tanis knew that the chief was joking. She had traded jibes with him many times before, but there was a truth behind the words that were not jokes for many Victorians.
She navigated the catwalk through the cradle struts and entered the low maintenance hangar where Jessica stood waiting, fingers drumming on her forearm.
“Took your sweet time getting here,” she said.
“We could have gone faster, but I hear it’s bad form to bake the planet your terraforming with your ship’s fusion burners.”
“Bah, it was just a minor tremor, you could have jacked it up a notch.”
Tanis fell in beside Jessica and the two walked to the maglev station. “I’ll be sure to pass your cavalier attitude onto Bourke. She lost a coffee pot in this latest drop-off.”
“That’s it? Let me know when the plas breaks and then we’ll talk.”
Tanis gave Jessica a warm smile—the former TBI agent had become her strong right hand and a trusted friend. Nearly every downworld success was in part to Jessica’s credit.
“Things are well ahead of schedule down here; I saw moss fifteen klicks east of here.”
“That far out eh?” Jessica said with mild surprise. “We’ll get grass and little scrubby plants before you know it—at least around here in the tropics.”
“Tropics you say?” Tanis laughed. “I seem to remember my last visit to a world’s tropics involving a beach and warm sunshine.”
“We have warm sunshine here, you just have to go a few thousand klicks west and you’ll have all the sunshine you can bear.”
“Somehow I think I’ll pass on being blasted by the Kap’s x-rays.”
Jessica shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
As they spoke, the pair had walked to the small maglev station. They boarded the single maglev car and settled into a pair of seats facing one another.
“How is Trist?” Jessica asked.
“She’s doing well; she can really keep a lot of prickly personailities in line.”
“I can’t believe you roped her into being a some sort of politician. She still steals things, you know.”
Tanis nodded. “Yeah, but they’re little things, and most of the time she puts them back.”
“Calls it keeping sharp,” Jessica said with a nod.
“Never know when we might need her deft fingers,” Tanis replied.
“So now that we’re alone, I trust that your special delivery went well,” Jessica said.
“Just as planned. Earnest has his grubby little hands on his favorite toy.”
Jessica knew of the gamma site, but Tanis was using her to seed information that Earnest was at the beta site; and he often was, but usually his presence there was faked by sensor ghosts and falsified travel records.
Jessica would leak information in small bites about the existence of the secret research lab on Beta. If they were lucky Myrrdan would pick up on them and make an attempt to breach the facility.
They exchanged other pleasantries and eventually moved on to the purpose of Tanis’s visit.
“Markus is concerned with the rate of technology disbursement to the Victorians,” Jessica said.
Tanis shook her head. “We’re almost on schedule, to the day, with the updated plan from just a few months ago.”
“I know; he’s worried we’re going too fast now. A lot of their younger generation—the ones who were under ten when they arrived here—are really becoming taken with our culture. He’s worrying again about the Victorians losing their identity.”
Tanis let out a long sigh. This topic was one that consumed much of her time when meeting with Markus. He understood the opportunity that meeting the Intrepid created. Not only could his people be free of the Luminescent despotism in Sirius, but they could attain a comparable level of technology.
Markus had confided in Tanis that while they would be dead without it, sometimes he felt as though meeting the Intrepid had been a curse.
The statement had hurt to hear, and he immediately retracted it, but it was hard to forget and she wondered how much the sentiment colored his opinions.
“I can’t say I blame him,” she replied to Jessica. “His generation doesn’t even know what a normal society looks like, but they know to distrust a society that shares the same level of technology with ours.”
“And we don’t exactly make up a normal society,” Jessica chuckled.
“Thank god,” Tanis replied. “I have to work harder to get the message out, that we too left a place where we didn’t fit in—trying to find a new home.”
Jessica’s lips twisted in a slight grimace. “Well, most of you left trying to find a new home, some of us didn’t have much choice.”
Tanis gave Jessica a stern look and leveled a finger at her. “Don’t play that card with me. I know you think this is the adventure of a lifetime.”
Jessica raised her hands in mock defense. “Okay, okay. You got me there. You know I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Though I wouldn’t have minded saying goodbye to my folks. They probably think I died on Mars, you know.”
“I know,” Tanis replied. “Bob could get a message to them, you know. They should still be alive, right?”
Jessica was silent for a moment before responding. “You know…I think I’ll do that. It would feel good to let them know I’m still out here.”
The maglev train entered the tunnel and slipped through an ES shield before gliding into the Landfall settlement station.
The train eased to a stop and when she stepped off, Tanis was assaulted by light and color. The wide platform led into a grand atrium filled with vegetation and no small number of trees. Murals covered the walls and not a single corner was shrouded in shadow.
“They’ve been busy,” Tanis observed.
“The folks down here are soaking up every morsel of art and architecture they can,” Jessica replied. “They are building for explosive growth, but still making it look good.”
“Glad they’re making good use of the latest batch of nano miners we whipped up on the Intrepid, though I thought they were building a new commerce district.”
“Oh they are—and it’s nearly done—they’re using MDCs for the main passageways and the nano for the fine finishing work.”
“They’re what?” Tanis’s head whipped to look Jessica in the eyes. “Who approved that?”
Jessica held up her hands. “Our own engineering team pushed it up to Abby and Earnest. They approved the whole thing, it was in one of my reports and in an engineering report.”
“Huh… I have no memory of that,” Tanis said with a frown. “How is that safe, though? One twitch of the field and this entire complex eats vacuum… or is grey goo.”
“Turns out when a people spend generations where their next meal is dependent on how fast and how much ore they can get yeild out of a rock, they get really good at modifying MDC tech. They’ve some tricks that Earnest was even interested in.”
Tanis nodded in appreciation and took in the nuanced designs
of the atrium’s gardens, as Jessica led her through a security portal into the wide passage which passed through the center of the settlement.
Since her last visit, the central passage been expanded to include an additional lower level, where small electric groundcars moved. Above it, were two levels with wide catwalks, gleaming arches and people walking and chatting in the artificial daylight that shone down from a long sun, which ran the length of the corridor.
A wide staircase of a marble-like substance led down to the lower level, where a car waited for them. A young Victorian man, wearing the uniform of their security forces snapped a sharp salute to the two women and held open the door for them.
The car was simply appointed and showed that the new-found Victorian flare for design had not yet reached their automobiles.
The young man settled into the driver’s seat and pulled the car from the curb.
“It’ll be about a ten-minute drive to the new town hall,” the driver said. “Maybe a bit longer than that, if we get stuck in traffic around the new tunnels.”
Tanis and Jessica rode in silence, each staring out the car’s windows at the Victorians as they went about their business, creating the beginnings of a civilization.
The town hall, when they arrived, was fronted by a grand arch which led into another atrium. This one basked in a ruddy light and was filled with the modified brown plants that would one day flourish on the surface. The center of the atrium opened up into a wide amphitheater which was capable of seating over ten thousand people. Beyond were several low buildings set amongst the trees.
Jessica led Tanis around the amphitheater and they spotted two figures sitting on a bench beside a copse of trees.
“Looks like they’re waiting for us,” Jessica said.
Tanis nodded. “I would too—working under a tree is always better than inside…though I guess we’re still inside.”
As they approached Katrina and Markus stood to greet them.
“Quite the place you have here,” Tanis said with a smile as she shook Markus’s hand. “A far cry from that dingy little conference room we first met in.”
Markus chuckled. “That it is. A lot can certainly change in ten years, can’t it? If you had told me back in Sirius that I would spend my days in these surroundings, I would have had a good chuckle.”
“You always say that, but I know you were always a dreamer,” Katrina said.
“Not always,” Markus shook his head. “But enough of that, we have much better things to speak of.”
He led them to a table under the trees and the four sat. A young man approached with coffee and a cheese plate.
“From your cows?” Tanis asked with a wink.
“Finally, yes,” Katrina replied, “Though Markus is having trouble adapting to food made from ‘bovine nipple juice,’ as he puts it.”
“I’m working up to it,” Markus replied. “But coffee, that I am thankful for. I don’t know how our civilization persisted without it.”
“If nothing else, that is the true miracle,” Jessica said.
Once they had each made of their brew what they would, Markus began.
“We’ve decided to hold a hearing to determine whether or not the Luminescents get the death penalty.”
Tanis’s avatar nodded,
“After all this time?” she asked Markus aloud.
He nodded solemnly, his gray hair blowing slightly in the breeze as he did so. “I suspected it would always come to this, but I held it back until we could do it with cool heads. We’ve spent a lot of time studying different stellar legal systems and believe we can try them for attempted seizure or destruction of a sovereign ship in a foreign system. Piracy laws would then apply, and the punishment for piracy is death.” Markus paused, his expression darkening. “Yusuf has other murder charges hanging over him,”
Tanis recalled the stories she heard of the murder that started all this; the death of Markus’s young assistant, which put the Noctus leader on the path to revolution.
“Will you use the jury system we have proposed?” Jessica asked.
Tanis watched Markus and Katrina exchange glances. To her mind, there was no need for mercy with the Sirians. She had advocated putting them before a military tribunal on the Intrepid, but many had objected to that—Jessica amongst them. The argument was not to show themselves so willing to kill enemies while at the same time befriending the Victorians.
The logic convinced Tanis and she bowed to the Intrepid leadership’s collective wisdom. The end result was the same, but this time the Victorians would play the role of killer.
“This is why I’m here, then,” Tanis said. “Your case largely requires me to testify against them. It was my ship that they directly attacked and at the time the system was claimed by me in the Andromeda.”
“There you have it,” Markus smiled. “It is a lot to ask of you personally, to condemn others to death.”
Tanis glanced at Katrina and the two shared a knowing look that did not go unnoticed. They had shared stories of their pasts and each knew that the other had taken many lives. However, the former TBI agent’s incidents had always been reactionary, in defense. Neither Jessica nor Markus had ever plotted out cold-hearted murder and carried it out with their own hands.
“I will do it,” Tanis said with little hesitation.
Markus looked surprised, but Katrina smiled.
“It will be good to finally put this—to put him—behind me. I hate thinking of him up there, it feels like a sword over my head,” Katrina said.
With the issue settled, the conversation turned to discussion of the settlement’s status and the overall progress of the Kapteyn’s system colonization. Tanis shared her false report of the mineral deposits on Perseus. She didn’t like lying to Katrina and Markus, they trusted her so much and here she was using an entire star system as bait to catch one man.
She saw Jessica fidget and knew her friend felt the same way.
As they spoke, the breeze stilled for a moment and in that brief silence, Tanis heard a faint cracking sound. She increased the sensitivity of her hearing, curious if it was from the drilling going on a kilometer away. She heard nothing else, and then another soft crack.
She dispersed nano to search out the source of the sound, something about it didn’t fit. A moment later there was a loud groan and her nano triangulated the source of the sound. It was above them.
Tanis looked up at the stone trusses arching upwards to the vaulted ceiling—nothing looked amiss, but there was no denying that sound. The rock was doing more than just settling.
“Something’s wrong, we need to mo—. “
Her words were cut off by a deafening rending. A moment later a piece of the ceiling fell, followed by another. A pillar started to lean and Tanis drew data from her nanoprobes, assessing the damage and where breaks would occur.
“This way!” She stood and began to run into the amphitheater. From what she could tell, nearly every pillar in the room and all of the support arches were falling apart. The entire ceiling was going to come down.
The stairs down to the floor of the amphitheater were wide, and they leapt down them at break-neck speed—even Markus, who still used a cane some days, all but flew down the steps.
The central dais of the amphitheater had several low doors around it that led underneath to storage and prep rooms. There was also a tunnel out of the Atrium.
Tanis wrenched a door open and pointed into the darkness.
“In here! Hurry!”
Jessica raced past her and a moment later Markus and Katrina raced through the opening. Tanis followed, throwing more nano wide, lighting all corners of dark room for her augmented vision.
“Over here!” she ran past the others and o
pened another door. A long, dark staircase stretched out before her and she dashed down without hesitation. The sound of rock crashing into the amphitheater floor above echoed through the stone walls of the tunnel.
Through the string of nano left behind, Tanis could see that the entire ceiling was indeed coming down.
At the foot of the stairs she paused, assessing the best route through the tunnels.
“Where are we going?” Katrina asked.
“There’s a service shaft that leads out to the main maintenance tunnels under the central passageway. It may be a tight fit here and there, but we can make it.”
The floor shook and Tanis felt the air begin to whistle past them; the dim lights in the tunnel flickered and Tanis moved forward.
“Com’on, while there’s still air to breathe down here!”
“How did you know about this?” Jessica asked from behind, as they threaded utility conduit and support struts.
“I don’t go anywhere anymore without pulling down all local maps and blueprints. Not going to get caught somewhere with no net and no map again.”
She consulted the route overlaying her vision. “There’s a bulkhead in a hundred meters. If we can make it there, we can seal it and keep breathing.”
The air was tearing past them now. She could tell that each breath was giving her less oxygen and she altered her lungs to adjust, drawing more from each breath. Jessica had the same augmentation, and she suspected Katrina would as well.
Markus did not and she could hear him beginning to gasp as they ran.
“Deep breaths, don’t panic!” Katrina said and Tanis saw through her nano that she was supporting Markus as they ran. The two were falling behind and Tanis dropped back.
“I have him,” she said and scooped Markus into her arms.
In the final dash to the bulkhead Tanis found herself growing lightheaded and nearly dropped Markus as she dashed over the threshold.
Jessica slammed the portal shut and sealed the locks. A decompression warning flashed above the door and Jessica threw a glare its way.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Tanis set Markus on the floor as he gasped for air, a desperate wheeze sounding from his throat. They were safe from full decompression, but the air was very thin in the tunnel. Tanis cycled her vision and scanned the rock, it carried some oxygen and she flung a swath of nano into it. The tiny robots began to disintegrate the stone, thickening the air and adding oxygen. At the same time, she sent nano into his body which entered his lungs and drew additional oxygen out of the air and pushed it directly into his bloodstream.