by P. R. Adams
Kershaw looked at the others, embarrassed. “Captain, what if…what if the task force is…gone?”
Munoz bellowed, “No way! They’re out there! Right, sir?”
Watanabe covered her face with trembling hands; Sung started to reach for her, but he checked himself. Theroux and Andrea remained impassive; Fontana’s eyes narrowed to slits as she watched both of them.
After a short pause, Rimes recovered. “We’ll deal with whatever situation arises once we have all the details. What matters right now is getting ready for travel. We’ll check hull integrity and airlock functionality. The last status report I received, the Valdez’s hangar had suffered serious damage. That could present a problem without a trained pilot.”
“I’m a trained pilot.” Andrea eyes flashed a challenge.
“So am I.” Theroux’s eyes were closed, and he had seemed on the edge of sleep, but his voice was strong and clear. “No need for high-risk decisions, Captain.”
“No need for any decisions at all, unfortunately.” Meyers stood behind Rimes, head down, dejected, beaten.
Rimes moved close enough to Meyers to whisper. “The Valdez?”
“No. They’re holding up okay. I warned them about the Carolina.”
“But?”
“Someone removed the reactor fuel.” He tapped a rapid beat on his forehead with an index finger. “I can give it a look, but the readouts are pretty clear. It looks like the reactor was shut down clean and the fuel removed.”
“Do what you can.” Rimes felt everyone’s eyes on him. “A little complication. We’re working through it. Everyone get some rest.”
He considered his options.
They had enough food and water in the shuttle to hold out for several days, and the genies didn’t have weapons capable of penetrating the hull. That meant he could simply seal the shuttle up and wait out the battle between the task force and the genies.
Or he could send a couple runners back to 332 to recover fuel from its reactor. That meant trying to sneak past the genies hidden somewhere out in the dead zone. It was risky, probably too risky.
Or there was the ADMP yacht not five kilometers away.
Meyers pulled his helmet on and sealed his environmental suit. That would provide sufficient protection to deal with a quick reactor inspection, assuming there was any lingering radiation.
Once Meyers entered the airlock, Rimes returned to the cockpit and settled into the pilot’s seat.
Almost immediately, an overwhelming wave of fatigue settled over him. He shook off a momentary blackout and took a few deep breaths, clenching his fists and shaking his upper body. He just needed a few more minutes awake.
The fatigue faded.
He accessed the shuttle’s systems and pulled up the logs.
A quick check, then I’ll take a nap. I can’t fight off sleep forever.
The logs wouldn’t offer much more than what Meyers had already shown him, but something was eating at Rimes and he hoped they’d simply overlooked it earlier. A quick search and he had the shuttle’s flight logs up. The logs dated back six months, the date the shuttle had been brought into operational use. He filtered the data, tracking only launch origin and destination. He dragged that data into a workspace.
The launch data had several columns—DATE, TIME, DURAT, ICAO, DESIG, TYPE. The key seemed to be ICAO and DESIG.
ICAO…that’s some sort of civilian airfield tracking method.
Focusing just on ICAO and DESIG, Rimes saw that nearly half of the flights originated from an ICAO of KFSL, which paired with a DESIG value of FtSill.
Fort Sill airfield.
He couldn’t make sense of most of the codes in the flight data, but he could guess with the DESIG column, which seemed to label the target and destination more meaningfully. They presented a surprisingly small list: FtSill, USCrln, ChnaLk, and AFEdwd.
Fort Sill. USCrln…that’s the Carolina. What are the other two?
Rimes opened one of the flight records associated with AFEdwd and pulled out the details. He found coordinates he could run against his BAS.
Edwards Air Force Base. That’s pretty specialized. Looks like it’s used for very limited flight operations.
He switched to a ChnaLk record and pulled up its coordinates. China Lake. The BAS indicated it was a vast, desolate stretch of land used for weapons and advanced flight system testing.
Rimes looked through his BAS for anything of significance, anything that could connect the two sites. They were both in southern California in areas largely untouched by the Los Angeles-San Diego sprawl. They were both military properties that had survived decades of facility closures.
He looked the sites over using a map overlay, working through his memories of the regions. Not just southern California, but desert regions in southern California. Like here.
Rimes looked through the dates again. Early on, aside from the shuttle’s arrival at Fort Sill and the handful of functional check flights and operational check flights in the first weeks, the logs were empty. The shuttles were kept on the ground outside of checkouts and training, always prepped for operational use.
He stared at the data for a moment, stumped. It suddenly came to him. The TYPE column: that’s mission type!
Opening the latest flight records, he hastily searched the last entry. He found what he was looking for: OPER. The flight to the Carolina and the flight down to the planet had been operational flights.
He checked the TYPE for the functional check flights: TEST.
He flipped to China Lake and looked at the TYPE: TRNG.
Training.
Hands shaking from a mixture of fatigue and anticipation, Rimes cross-checked the flight records against the crew manifest. The test flights showed the pilot and co-pilot. The operational flight showed pilot, co-pilot, and eight passengers. He flipped to the training flights. Eight passengers. They were training for this mission. How—
“The fuel’s definitely gone.”
Rimes jumped at the sound of Meyers’s voice. Meyers was leaning against the wall, blinking, dazed. Rimes understood completely. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t remember what. His mind was still coming to terms with the concept of a team of Commandos training in the California desert.
How could they know?
“Captain Rimes?” Meyers waved his right hand slowly in front of Rimes’s eyes.
“Sorry.” Rimes held up a finger and turned his attention back to the flight records. He pulled up the first flight to China Lake. The Julian date was one-seventy-seven. Sometime in June. They were training in June. Months prior.
“What is it?”
Rimes’s brow furrowed, his eyes half-closed in concentration. “Why would you train with an orbital shuttle in the middle of the desert?”
“I’m sorry? I don’t understand.”
“This shuttle conducted a dozen training flights in the southern California desert with eight Commandos onboard.”
“They were probably getting some training time in before the mission.”
“Four months ago?”
“What?” Meyers stepped forward, thumb and forefinger on his right hand rubbing together excitedly. The reactor fuel quandary no longer ate at him. “Can you—”
Rimes initiated a connection and shared the workspace. “Alpha Foxtrot Echo Delta Whiskey Delta—that’s Edwards Air Force Base, Charlie Hotel—”
Meyers waved a hand impatiently; he’d already figured the codes out. He flipped through several records, tapping the console distractedly. “Coincidence?” He didn’t even try to sound like he believed it.
“We don’t have the luxury of coincidence right now.” Rimes absently rubbed his chapped lips. They would be hours healing.
“So you’re saying they knew this SOS was coming?”
“Or they were planning to come here themselves? Something was bugging me before and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Those cargo cases were the first piece, I guess. Do we have anything like that on
the Valdez?”
“Food, water, and ammunition?”
Rimes shook his head. “For the shuttles. Or did you ever see that composition for any of the orbital shuttles you flew in with the Commandos? All that water…“
“You’re bothered they had cases kitted out for a desert? Seriously?”
“You aren’t being paranoid enough.” Rimes smiled at himself. “It’s not that they were kitted out for the desert. That’s probably inevitable. It’s that they were kitted out and launched so quickly. I’m betting that cargo composition hasn’t changed in months. The water containers showed July.”
Meyers quickly looked back at the passenger bay. “That’s flimsy.” But he continued working through the data.
Rimes yawned, absently rubbing at the scar on his temple. “Don’t take data in isolation. What was one of the first things the Navy launched into space when all these civilian spacecraft started zipping around on their own?”
“Those pathetic automated fighter drones? What does—”
Rimes shook his head. “SAR. Search and Rescue. Remember? Their big push to show how funding the Navy needed to be a top priority? All those inner system civilian yachts they bought and refitted with gravitic drives?”
“Yeah, okay, sure.”
“So where’s SAR? Even the oldest ship in the SAR fleet operating somewhere out at the edge of the closest system would get here in response to an SOS before a ship from Earth.”
Meyers thought for a moment. “How do you know a SAR ship didn’t arrive, just like the Carolina? Maybe it’s up in orbit right now?”
“And we didn’t pick up its transmissions either? Those things don’t operate in stealth mode. And it would’ve reported back to Earth before flying here. They would have warned us.”
“Like they warned us about the Carolina?”
Rimes frowned.
Meyers threw up a hand, frustrated. “So the genies captured it.”
“Okay. Maybe they did. And the command folks didn’t pass along SAR was out here already. Where’s the SAR shuttle? Wouldn’t it still be down here somewhere?”
Meyers crossed his arms in front of his chest. “So ADMP sends the yacht out here and it crashes. The yacht transmits an SOS and the military overhears it and they launch the Carolina with a team of Commandos to handle the rescue ops instead of sending a SAR ship? And ADMP is stuck with its thumb up its ass the whole time? They had nothing to send here?”
“The Erikson. It was en route to COROT-7 when the genies took it.”
Meyers tensed. “That would’ve been nice to know, don't you think?”
Rimes sighed ruefully. “Yeah. I don’t have to agree with all the operational intelligence decisions. I probably should have shared that with everyone, regardless. But now you know. Does it change your mind any?”
“About who’s feeding what information to whom, maybe.”
“It doesn’t look very good, does it?” Rimes jaw ached from grinding his teeth. “Did the Bureau leak the Erikson’s course to the genies to give the Carolina a chance to get here first? How would that sit with ADMP? ‘Yeah, sorry about your ship getting hijacked. We wanted to get our ship there first.’”
“Not good.” Meyers was rubbing his fingers together again. “So that brings up the question of what makes this planet so valuable? The Erikson is worth…too much to even think about. Did they build it just for this planet? That would be insane.”
“I don’t think it matters what it was built for, if it was even something specific. It’s the opportunity cost.”
Meyers screwed up his face. “The what?”
“When a business like ADMP allocates assets like the Erikson, they have to choose from alternatives. Right now, ADMP probably has hundreds of surveyed worlds to choose from, each one showing some sort of promise to research. The Erikson is worth so much money, and that crew they put together was top of the line, just sending it somewhere—here or one of the other planets—is a huge sunk cost. You have to choose which opportunity you pursue or you aren’t optimizing your spending. Opportunity cost, in a nutshell.”
“So you think this planet is worth more than the hundreds they could’ve sent it to?”
“They think that.” Rimes looked past Meyers at the others lounging nervously in the passenger bay. “You read the reports on this planet. What did you take away from them?”
Meyers closed his eyes and recited the data. “Less than point-nine gees, thin but breathable atmosphere contaminated with pollutants and microbials, arid, moderate tectonic activity, roughly normal magnetic field. Something of a typical ‘Earth-like’ planet, but not one worth colonizing, really.”
“Other than the smell and dryness have you had any problem with the atmosphere?”
Meyers thought for a moment. “No, and we’ve probably been down here long enough for any serious threats to have gotten past our immune system. I think at least some of us should be showing elevated temperatures or other symptoms if we’d been exposed to something serious.”
“So a couple of oddities right there, don’t you think? What about the glitch?”
“Someone trying to hide something, I guess. A dump like this, they were probably counting on no one ever following up.”
“No reason for anyone to. Something changed somewhere. Before that yacht came here, someone knew or suspected. They drilled down to that crater instead of accepting the chunk of desert that false data showed. The Bureau must have a spy in ADMP, or someone somewhere caught a piece of data that made them ask questions.” Rimes pointed out the front of the cockpit at the desert beyond. “And here we are.”
Meyers sighed. “I’m not cut out for the paranoid conspiracy stuff. Cloak and dagger, spies and intrigue.”
“It’s the—” Rimes stopped as the cockpit lights cycled. “Did you see that?”
Meyers scanned the console. He hastily settled into the co-pilot’s seat and connected to the shuttle’s systems. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Remember that light we saw on our way here?” Sweat formed on Meyers’s upper lip. “It was set off by a proximity sensor.”
“Okay.”
“It just kicked off again.” Meyers stood. “The genies are coming.”
35
30 October, 2167. Fourth planet of the COROT-7 system.
* * *
Out in the open sameness of desert once again, Rimes felt an uncomfortable mix of relief and worry. They were nearly halfway to the Tesla, and they had a good lead on the pursuing genies, but he couldn’t shake the sense danger was drawing close. He told himself it was the sudden shift in pressure—the temperature abruptly dropped, and the air felt heavy and thick.
But it wasn’t the sudden shift in pressure. The danger was real. It was almost a physical thing. The sulfuric stench was a presence, a nauseating knot in his gut.
A few minutes later, the pressure changed again, this time launching another blinding sandstorm at them. It was nothing so severe as the previous one, but they were without the shuttle’s shielding, and they were blind once again in the dead zone.
Rimes advanced patiently, watching the way they’d come through the gray haze of sand.
They were sore and tired, and on the edge of collapse. Rimes had pushed them beyond their limits just to reach the shuttle. They had nothing left in them.
He pushed them anyway.
Pain and fatigue worked each of them over, threatening to drag them down. Collapse offered a promise Rimes could feel. He lost the confidence there was value in the need to go on, especially when the alternative was a sleep with unimaginable rewards.
Even Kwon’s persistent lust for Andrea and Watanabe was silenced by the fatigue.
Rimes growled and shook his head. He cursed his weakness, and he dug deeper. When he found there was nothing left, he thought of Molly and the boys. His legs ached. His mind threatened to simply shut down. But he clung to the memories of his family and found just enough strength to carry on.
The
others saw him, and they seemed to find their own strength, finally following in his tracks.
Even as drained and sore as they were and with the broken terrain they had to navigate, they should have crossed the distance in a couple hours. It took three and a half.
The storm was a dying breeze by the time they came to a stop at the Tesla’s airlock.
The images captured by the shuttle’s flyover were weeks old. A good deal had changed since. Most troubling was the open airlock, its ramp covered in sand. Rimes stopped several meters from the vessel and exchanged questioning glances with Meyers.
Why leave the airlock open?
Rimes waved for everyone to drop.
All around them, the ground was broken, low boulders and ridges rising from the gray sand. The wind was a whispering presence, filling the air with a sandy haze one moment impenetrable, the next almost clear.
Rimes sent everyone but Munoz and Theroux to cover; he waved the two of them to his position.
“We wait until the wind dies down again and we have good visibility, then we storm the ramp. I want you tight on my six, ready to support in case of close quarters engagement.”
“You got it, Captain.” Munoz rolled his head and shoulders and stretched.
Theroux grunted his agreement.
A few minutes later, they charged up the ramp, through the airlock, and into the cargo bay. There was no sign of life, just the clatter of fasteners banging off the walls as the wind blew loose cargo straps around. Rimes passed through the cargo bay, stopping at the far bulkhead. There were two hatches that opened onto a broad central passageway. Immediately beyond the open hatches, a shaft rose up to the top deck. Forward of the central passageway, there were three sealed hatches.
The only sound was the whistling wind and clattering fasteners.
After looking the shadowy interior over for a moment, Rimes radioed the rest of the team. “Cargo bay empty. Everybody assemble on me. Kershaw and Sung, there’s a central shaft to the upper deck. Check for any occupants. Munoz, secure the shaft.”