"I feel like I should be wearing a spacesuit."
"Relax, Ensign, this is perfectly safe. Like the tunnels in those alien mines they found; they've been proofed."
"I'd just feel a bit better with walls, skipper."
The level was a maze of twisted corridors and passages, no real logic to it. Marshall kicked off, diving down the corridor with a whoop, changing his course by gently pushing off one wall after another. Esposito followed him, peering around side passages as she went; the lighting was flickering on and off, casting strange shadows that came into and out of existence at the blink of an eye. After a couple of minutes, she smiled.
"I know what this place is, sir."
Marshall frowned, "Unfinished level, surely?"
"Why wouldn't they dig it out to a pattern? This is a zero-g training ground, probably for combat. I'll have to get the guys down here tomorrow, get in some training with the light-guns. If it comes to that, I think we might have found something that could approximate a leisure activity down here. The crew could have a bit of fun beating out their frustrations here, sir."
He chuckled, "Feel free to set up a league of some sort. I'll play. Damn, they built a real maze here, didn't they."
"Some ship's crew must have had a lot of time on their hands at some point." They drifted into a new section, the walls changing color slightly; there was graffiti on the walls, all of it unintelligible, and Marshall didn't see the point of pulling his datapad out to translate it. Then, all the lights went out.
"Crap."
"Ouch!" said Esposito. "I just crashed into a damn wall."
Pulling out his communicator, Marshall tapped for the control room, "Matsumoto, has there been a power failure?"
"I'm not reading one, sir." Esposito pulled out a searchlight from her belt, a beam of white light shining down the corridor.
"I'm down on the bottom level and all the lights just went out."
There was a pause for a second, then some rapid swearing in Japanese, "Someone's hacked the systems on that deck! I can't trace it!"
He looked at Esposito, "Harper's here." Speaking back into his communicator, "Can you turn them back on?"
"I'm sorry, sir, but not yet. We don't have full access to the systems ourselves at the moment."
"Let me know when you do," he replied, irritably. "We're going to continue the search."
"Aye, Captain. Sorry, sir."
Replacing his communicator into his belt, he pointed down the corridor, "We're getting close, I suspect. This way."
"We are. Look at that." Up ahead, a food wrapper was drifting down the corridor. Pushing off a wall, Marshall dived down the passage it had come from, and was rewarded with the sight of a green glow up ahead, obviously from a large monitor. The outline of a figure was in front of it, blocking some of the light.
"Harper!" he yelled, kicking down towards her. She turned, waving a hand.
"Hi, Captain," she replied.
Swinging himself to a stop on a rocky outcrop, he looked down at her, sitting with a pair of keyboards in front of her and a small drifting mass of rubbish surrounding her. "Where's your communicator?"
"I turned it off. Didn't want to be bothered."
"You didn't want to be bothered." His face was reddening as Esposito drifted up behind him, halting on the same outcrop. "I've got a whole squad of espatiers out looking for you."
She looked up, puzzled, "I haven't been gone long, have I?"
"Twenty-nine hours, spaceman," Esposito said.
Trying to control himself, Marshall shook his head, "This is the last straw. The last."
"I've found a way of getting past the satellites. I just tested it on the lighting and it works."
Marshall's eyes widened, and he let go of the outcrop, drifting back into the wall. He looked down at the grinning green-haired crewman, shaking his head.
"If this is some sort of joke, you'll be floating home."
She shook her head, "No, sir! I'm serious! Look, I want Orlova back as much as you do, so I figured the only way for me to work it out was to lock myself away somewhere for a bit. I don't work well when someone's looking over my shoulder every five seconds. This place was mentioned in some of the graffiti up above, some sort of hidden game room."
"Stay on topic, spaceman."
"Well, we're not going to sneak past the satellites, so we need to hack into the systems."
"I know that. We've been trying since we arrived. Those firewalls are tight."
Shrugging, she replied, "They're good. Adaptive. Anything I tried wouldn't work for long, and I could only do it once. That's why I decided to test it here. It's the same basic software, after all. Was always going to be, but I double-checked."
"Why didn't we think of that?" Esposito said, shaking her head.
"The lights went out," Marshall said, "so it worked?"
"Trust me, I know how to hack a system. I can suppress the sensor controls on the whole network. Not for long, but I can keep them dead for ten minutes or so, maybe a little more."
"Ten minutes," Marshall muttered.
Esposito frowned, "Where did you get the idea? The whole security department's been working on it."
"I've seen this before. Same software as was on that station." She chuckled, "You and Orlova told me to learn from my mistakes. I wasn't going to let that security package beat me. I've got a reputation to uphold."
"Are you sure about this, Harper? Are you absolutely sure?"
She sighed, shaking her head, "You probably want someone to check all this or something, right?"
Marshall drifted up to her, grabbing her by the shoulder, "Answer the damn question. Are you sure this will work?"
"Yes. I'm sure."
He grinned, squeezing her shoulder, and replied, "Keep working here as long as you need. I'll have someone send down some more food. As soon as you're finished up here – any idea how long?"
"Day or so to get everything nailed down."
"Then I want you to set all this up on the bridge. Get Weitzman to help you rig it to the communications console." He looked at his watch, "I want this all ready to go as soon as possible. Good work. Damn good work."
Esposito was shaking her head, "Ten minutes? What can we do in that?"
"Plenty. Call off the search, get them back to the ship." He tapped in for the bridge.
"Kibaki here, Captain. Is there a problem?"
"Get the senior staff to the briefing room right now. I've got an idea."
Chapter 21
With sweaty hands, Caine worked the knot on her improvised headdress again, trying to stop the sub burning down on her next. For a dim red dwarf, GJ 2097 was giving out a lot of heat. At first she'd welcomed getting out of the jungle and its constant rain, but the desert was worse. Stopping, she took a drink of warm water out of her canteen, a few drops running down her chin, then slammed the stopper back down and dropped it back to her hip. The whole day they had been marching endlessly, collapsing every couple of hours into heaps on the ground, struggling to recover for the next long march.
She looked around the featureless expanse; barren dunes rising out of the ground, broken only by the occasional piece of struggling scrub. There were fourteen of them, forming a long line across the desert, following in her footsteps; she was taking the lead with Orlova, Clark's gang was taking up the middle, and Orlov and Elvira at the rear, the old man struggling a bit in the heat but determinedly keeping pace with the rest. The only evidence of their passing was their footprints, and even they were being slowly swallowed up by the dust. Orlova caught up to her.
"Want me to take the lead for a while?"
Panting, Caine replied, "No, I'm fine."
"You look exhausted."
Caine looked at the bedraggled sub-lieutenant, shaking her head, "You should look in a mirror. This would be a lot better if we could see where we are going."
"Elvira says we should see the Mountains of the Moon by dawn."
"You're speaking Tatar now?"
The two of them started to walk again, not wanting to let Clark get ahead of them. "About two dozen words," Orlova replied. "Papa's teaching me some. Just in case."
"How are you handling all of this?"
"What do you mean?"
Shaking her head, Caine replied, "If my father turned up after being missing for more than a decade, having remarried a local girl, I'm not sure how I'd react."
"It's a bit strange. That's true enough. Still, Mother got a legal divorce a few years back, when she had him declared dead."
"You might want to get that sorted out."
Laughing, she replied, "First on my list when I get back."
Gesturing around the desert, Caine said, "This doesn't bother you at all, does it?"
"It's warmer than Ragnarok," she shrugged.
The two of them made their way to the top of a sand-blasted ridge, hoping to see some signs of their destination up ahead. Instead, they head a loud noise, a whirling nose, coming from above. Raising her hand to cover her eyes, Caine could see a long, thin object flying over the desert, heading in their direction.
"Take cover!" she yelled, throwing herself to the ground. The command was futile; they'd show up easily against the desert if anyone was seriously looking for them. Rolling around in the sand, she managed to swallow a mouthful of dust, coughing and spluttering. Lying on her back, she saw the airplane flying overhead; it looked like something out of a museum, a propeller dragging an assortment of wood and canvas threw the sky, two sets of wings jutting out from the fuselage. The figure of a pilot, sticking out of the body of the plane, was just visible; he didn't seem to be looking for them, instead heading roughly on a course for Yreka. It flew towards the sun as it neared the horizon, before the tone of the engine changed, it's wings curving around. It turned towards them; the pilot had seen them after all.
"Spread out!" The group fanned out in a dozen different directions, getting away from the barrage they knew was imminent; the rattling of a machine gun sent spatters of dust flying into the air, a line of little craters running just short of her. Pulling out her pistol, she took a couple of futile shots at the aircraft as it past overhead, lost amid the noise and the cloud of dust its approach stirred up. A couple more shots rang out from the rear of the group, others taking shots.
This had to end, and quickly. He wouldn't be content with simply strafing them for long; if the pilot wasn't already on his radio calling for reinforcements, he soon would be. As the plane came around for another pass, she rolled at the last second to evade the shot, but this time it wasn't aimed at her – two of Clark's gang had made the mistake of getting too close together, and paid the price, their blood draining into the sand.
"Return fire, damn it!" She yelled. "Volley fire!" Belatedly, Clark pointed his rifle at the plane and fired three shots in quick succession, his troops following suit. Orlov was lying in the dust, pointing his pistol carefully up; as the plane drew closer on its third pass Caine ran out of cover, trying to draw it towards the shots. The pilot opted not to pass up such a tempting target, but just as he was about to pull the trigger, a bullet hit home, lancing through the fabric of the fuselage, sending him slumping forward in his seat.
The plane just flew over the dune, and Caine began to run after it, firing a couple more shots as much to stir up the rest of the troops as to have any effect on the plane. Skipping over a final dune, the pilot finally ran out of luck, and there was an explosion loud enough to send all of them falling to the ground again, smoke billowing into the air. As soon as she'd gathered her wits about her, Caine ran on towards the wreck, Orlova at her side.
By the time they reached it, nothing was left but the blackened embers of the plane, and the body of the pilot who had futilely tried to escape from the wreck, obviously already badly wounded. There was something clasped in his hand, a piece of paper; Orlova carefully moved forward, pulling it loose from his hand, then wordlessly passed it to Caine. It was a photograph; a man, presumably the pilot, a woman, and their daughter sitting between them. Cursing under her breath, Caine put the photograph back in the pilot's hand, closing his eyes with her palm.
"We got him! That was good shooting, Lieutenant!" Clark yelled as he ran over the ridge, firing off another round.
"A man just died, Clark," Orlova replied. "That's not ever cause to celebrate."
"That man is a Legionnaire," Clark said, his face snarling, "and they've killed and looted their way across this planet for years." He spat on the ground near the corpse, "I'm glad he's dead."
"The man was a husband and a father. One day I want you to tell that to them," Orlova replied.
Caine silenced her with a sympathetic, yet firm, look, then turned back, "We've got to get away from here quickly. They'll see this wreck for miles, assuming he hadn't already called someone."
Elvira looked around gingerly, then said something to Orlov. Caine frowned; she hadn't noticed the woman acting so diffidently before, but she almost looked reluctant to speak at all. Orlov turned pale, but nodded, then looked around the group.
"There is a place near here we can hide for a time. A cave at the bottom of a crater, a few miles east of here. It isn't far out of our way."
Her eyebrow raised, Caine asked, "What's wrong with it."
"It is a...bad place. It was found by a group that were collecting salt from the mountains; there were four of them, but only one returned, and him out of his mind. Only the journal entries they made reported what they found. A twisted ruin, a dark hole."
Clark looked around at his gang, trying to muster up more courage, "If the Tatars are afraid of it, the Legion must be."
Almost hearing the next wave of planes coming in, Caine nodded, "Let's go. Elvira can lead if she knows the way."
With a last look at the smoldering wreck, Caine led the group away from the crash site, moving over the dunes as rapidly as possible in the heat. With her datapad she could have worked out how long it would be before they could expect company down to the minute; as it was, she ran through estimates and guesses in her head as they stumbled into the deepening gloom, the sun dipping down over the horizon, replaced with silver moonlight. This time they didn't stop, taking quick drinks from their canteens on the move.
At last, Elvira pointed towards what at first appeared to be simply another dune, but it rapidly became apparent that it was at least partly artificial, as if a thick layer of dust and sand had been draped across a buried structure of some kind. A gaping hole, octagonal in shape, lay at the bottom; Caine went white as a sheet when she recognized the shape, but she was only frozen in place for a brief moment as the familiar burr of an engine began to come over the horizon. Belatedly, she realized that everyone else was looking at the hole with equal fear.
"Come on, let's go," she said with more courage than she felt as she led the way down the dune, Elvira bringing up a shaky rear; she'd evidently spent years listening to stories of what lay inside the cave that she was now entering. Past experience did not bring Caine any comfort; quite the reverse. Months later, she still woke up in a cold sweat some nights no matter what chemical remedies Doctor Duquesne could prescribe. She loitered at the entrance, turning to the reluctant huddle.
"We'll go in single file. Everyone keep a hand on the person in front of them at all times, do not go off on your own, do not look at anything. Keep your eyes pointed ahead. No shooting unless I spec...in fact, I want all weapons unloaded. I mean it."
"If they come," Clark began.
She almost shouted back, "I don't want anyone shooting at shadows down there. Ricochets are a stupid way to die." Turning to the entrance, she took a deep breath, and walked in, trying to suppress her fears, listening to the clunk of weapons being unloaded. Orlova's hand grabbed her belt, a comforting link with reality. The only light in the corridor was the little moonlight reflecting in from outside.
Whether the lack of light prevented her from seeing things that might have cut her link with sanity, or whether it allowed her imagination
to get free rein, she couldn't say, but all too quickly she was feeling her way through the darkness. Ahead, she saw an eerie green glow from the ceiling, and her heart skipped a beat from the terror she was feeling.
Orlova whispered in her ear, "Just bioluminescence. Want me to lead?"
"No," Caine replied, jerking her head. "Keep close." The corridor began to twist to the left, side-passages leaping out from the shadows one after another; she ignored them, not wanting to think about what might be hiding. The same geometric patterns from Desdemona were repeated here, though in a rougher form, and her eye was caught to first one, then another; it took a strong conscious effort to keep herself fixed forward. Her foot stepped on something squishy, and it took every ounce of self-control in her to stop from screaming out. Just the leavings of a local animal, one not smart enough to be afraid of what might be here. She envied it.
Round and round the corridor went; she endeavored to maintain a straight line as much as she could, hoping not to get stuck in the darkness forever, a thought that rose to the surface of her mind unbidden. Her pace increased without any conscious awareness of it, Orlova was tugging back on her, slowing her down, not wanting to leave anyone behind, perhaps to be lost forever. The only noise was her pounding heartbeat; while a part of her wanted to talk, to reassure herself that the others were still there, a stronger urge to silence lay inside her.
Finally, after what seemed like days – but which afterward would appear to have only been a matter of minutes according to her watch – a pinprick of light was visible at the end of the tunnel, and her heart skipped a beat as she half-walked, half-ran towards it, striding through a large chamber without stopping for even a second to examine it. She stopped at the exit to the tunnel, looking out across the desert and the soft, inviting moonlight that seemed to bathe her in its rays, and motioned for them all to stop.
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