by John Scalzi
“This will be your first actual away mission, yes?” Laure regarded Marce as she said it.
“That’s right.”
“And you’ve never done any other sort of fieldwork.”
“Not really, no. I’m a Flow physicist. It’s higher-order math. You don’t have to go out into the field for that.”
Laure nodded. “It’s your show, Lord Marce. Our orders say so. But you should know that you’ve got a team of Imperial Navy scientists. All of them have been in the field. You have your marines. Field is what they do. Are you open to advice?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then here it is. It’s your show. But if you’re wise you’ll listen to your team when they talk. And you’ll listen to Sergeant Sherrill and her people when she tells you to go somewhere or not to go somewhere. You’ll listen and you’ll play it safe. We’re all a long way from home, Lord Marce. We all want to get back to ours.”
“Thank you, Captain Laure,” Marce said. “You’ll be glad to know that was pretty much my plan anyway.”
“Good,” Laure said. “You don’t strike me as particularly stupid, but you never know.”
Marce grinned at this.
Laure motioned her head toward the viewscreen. “Our visual inspection of the structure will be done in a couple of hours, and then your team is up. Since Dalasýsla is dead you’re probably going to have to go through access ports on the surface.”
Marce nodded. “We were planning on that. We have the schematics of the structure from the imperial archives. We know where we want to go in. If that port is accessible, then it’ll be a short hike to the control room for the computer network.”
“You still think you’re going to be able to fire up their system?”
“Not really, no,” Marce said. “Eight hundred years is a long time. But it’s worth the attempt. It would save us a lot of time, anyway. And possibly answer a lot of questions.”
“I heard the recordings from the last days of this place,” Laure said. “I’ll be surprised if everything’s not just rubble.”
“Right.” Marce had read the transcripts and heard recordings of the last set of transmissions to come from Dalasýsla, a few years after the Flow stream had collapsed. The short version was death, disease, despots and destruction. The longer version had kept him up wondering what the hell was wrong with people.
The answer to that was probably simple enough: When people knew that they were doomed no matter what they did, their long-term decision-making skills often went right out the airlock. Marce couldn’t blame them, but given the fact that the whole of the Interdependency was now facing the same fate as Dalasýsla, he was hoping for other options.
Laure put her hand on Marce’s back. “Go get your people ready. And, Lord Marce.”
“Yes?”
“I hope you find something good in there. Something we can use to save us all.”
* * *
Dalasýsla was dead, which meant that all the mechanisms to open the service airlocks to the habitat’s surface were dead as well. Opening them up was going to take time and effort by someone, probably PFC Gamis, who was the mechanical specialist in the marine detachment. The Bransid had the tools for the job—they had known they would probably need them, so they brought them—but then Laure’s people discovered an open service airlock, not too far from where they wanted to be anyway. Suddenly Marce and his team had one less thing to worry about.
“Don’t get too excited,” Sergeant Sherrill said as she and Marce suited up with the rest of the mission team. “It just means a closed bulkhead further in. No matter what, we’re slogging our way to that network operations room.”
The suits on the mission were the latest design and tech, light and flexible, puncture- and tear- and vacuum-resistant, self-resealing (up to a point, and if you reached that point you were probably already screwed), and featured magnetized feet and an oxygen rebreather efficient enough to make the oxygen canister they went out with last for an average of fifteen hours. You could relieve yourself in them, also up to a point. Marce was hoping they would not be away long enough for that to be an issue. The helmets had full recording suites; everything they saw and heard would be recorded.
For this mission the team was small—Marce and Gennety Hanton, a navy computer scientist and historian who specialized in ancient computing systems like the ones on Dalasýsla, Sergeant Sherrill and PFCs Gamis and Lyton. No one was expecting to reach the network operations room on this trip. This trip was mostly about making a path to it, through as many sealed bulkheads as it took.
Except that sometime in the last eight hundred years someone had done most of the work for them.
“Take a look at this,” Gamis said. The recon team, all in their suits, crowded around the display the private sat at. From the display Gamis was navigating a drone into the service areas past the airlocks. The drone’s-eye view could see the bulkheads beyond and farther into the habitat had been pried into, pulled up or out, and sometimes entirely destroyed.
“Someone really wanted to get in there,” Hanton said.
“Or get out,” Lyton said.
“How far in can you get?” Sherrill asked Gamis.
Gamis paused, pulled up a three-dimensional map of the section of Dalasýsla the drone was in, and floated it alongside the drone’s view. “Birdie’s here.” Gamis motioned to a corridor on the map. “And where we want to go is here, about a klick and a half away.” Gamis went back to the drone and pushed it forward, zooming it through the corridor. “Honestly, Sarge, after the first few bulkheads it’s looking like a straight shot. It doesn’t look like this part of Dalasýsla had been sealed off for pressure loss.”
“Which means the habitat lost power before this particular area bled out its air,” Hanton said.
“Maybe,” Gamis said, still navigating the drone. The drone’s view was a combination of several wavelengths of light—above, below and within the normal human range—all merged down into a monochrome report. “Or there was a malfunction. Or a hundred different other things. Whoops.” Gamis maneuvered the drone around some floating debris. “Should have put on the auto collision detect.”
“No gravity,” Marce said.
“No, there wouldn’t be, would there?” Gamis said. “The habitat’s not spinning anymore.”
“More like tidally locked at this point.”
“Well, fine, all right, if you want to get technical about it, sir.”
“No bodies,” Sherrill said.
“What, Sergeant?” Gamis turned to look at his superior.
Sherrill pointed at the monitor. “You’ve driven a klick into the structure and I don’t see any bodies yet.”
“We’re still in the service areas, Sarge,” Gamis said. “People are down there only if they have work to do on the structure itself. I would guess most of whatever bodies there are would be in the habitat proper.”
“It’s still weird.”
“I’m fine not seeing any eight-hundred-year-old frozen mummies before I have to.” Gamis maneuvered the drone some more and then stopped at a door. “This is it,” he said. “Your network ops room for Dalasýsla. One of them, anyway. And all we have to do is walk to it slowly in our magnetized boots.”
“So we brought all that bulkhead-prying hardware for nothing,” Sherrill said.
“I wouldn’t say for nothing,” Gamis replied. “This is just one small section of the habitat. Other areas are probably sealed off. We’ll have to see. But at least for this, we got lucky.”
“Well, enjoy it,” Hanton said. “Once we get in there I’ll have to see if I can power up any part of that network center. We may have blown all our luck already.”
* * *
Marce decided he didn’t like the suits. His nose started to itch pretty much the second he put on his helmet, and he’d already subconsciously tried to scratch his nose three times, smashing his fingers against the helmet each time. After the third time, he gave out a frustrated grunt, which Ha
nton noticed over the communication circuit.
“You get used to it eventually, sir,” he said.
“I hope so,” Marce said, exasperated.
The walk to the network operations room was slow, as Gamis promised. The magnetic feet in the suits kept the team on the deck, but they were all tethered to each other regardless, just in case one of them lost their footing and started to float off. Marce found the deliberate gait of magnetized walking enervating, compounded by the walking being done in a blackness punctuated only by their helmet lamps. By the time they got to the door of the operations room, he felt like he had run a marathon.
“See, I did need this after all,” Gamis said, retrieving the door-spreading hardware from the case of equipment they had brought with them. The lack of gravity made it easy for Gamis and Lyton to carry the case between them, but hard for them to maneuver it. Its inertia wanted to take it places they didn’t want it to go.
Gamis and Lyton set the door-spreader. It did its magic, cranking open the sealed hatch. Marce was surprised he could hear the protesting of the door as it opened, then realized he was hearing it through his feet. The sound had carried through the floor and into his suit.
As he walked into the ops room Marce noticed marks on the door, and pointed them out to PFC Gamis, who nodded. “We’re not the first ones to do this,” he said.
“Can you tell how old those other marks are?” Marce asked.
“Not really,” Gamis said. “Could have been made five hundred years ago, could have been made last week. But I’m guessing probably not last week.”
Inside the operations center everyone untethered. Lyton tossed something toward the ceiling of the room, and suddenly the entire operations center was bathed in light, shadows radiating out from the single source.
“Let there be light,” she said, and looked over to Hanton. “You’ve got about six hours of that.”
“More than enough,” Hanton said. He walked over to the equipment case and retrieved a small computer module and a portable keyboard, and a tiny cube power source. He carried all of them over to a workstation.
“You got a power cord for that?” Gamis joked.
“Don’t need one,” Hanton said, turning on the power cube. A monitor light flashed on it, three times in red, then in steady blue. “I checked the archives. These workstations had induction plates. All you have to do is feed power to them and they’ll turn on.”
“If it’s just a terminal then that won’t do you any good,” Lyton said.
Hanton shook his head. “It’s mostly used as a terminal, but there’s a cache of onboard local memory. It’s pretty substantial because habitats believe in redundancy. If the primary computer system here ever went down, the primary operational systems could still have basic functionality with the information in these terminals. At least long enough to get the primary back up and running.”
“Assuming you can get in,” Gamis said.
Hanton patted the computer module he’d brought with him. “If it turns on at all, I brought some fun toys with me, folks. Eight-hundred-year-old security is about to meet modern cracking tools. It should be an instructive event.”
“And if it doesn’t work?” Marce asked.
“Then there are a dozen other workstations in here.”
Marce nodded at this and regarded the room. It was large and circular and in the lighting, which threw razor-sharp shadows, was a little creepy. Along one arc was a window and a doorway into another room, which held silent rows of black metal boxes. The actual processing heart of the habitat, or one of them—workstations aside, a habitat this large could have several rooms like this sprinkled around. Redundant systems save lives.
For a while, at least. The computers in those black boxes were probably long past their expiration date, as would be any others elsewhere on the habitat. Turning them on would require more than the power cube Hanton had brought with him.
Marce wondered what it would have been like on Dalasýsla when the power systems stopped working. The habitat had been powered by a combination of reactors and solar. Those generators and arrays were prone to the same mechanical failures as any system, as was the power transport grid. So many ways for things to go wrong. Marce imagined it was the systems that failed before the knowledge base for maintaining them died off, but it was hard to be sure. When the world is breaking down, scientists might be the scapegoats.
“Oh, hello there,” Hanton said. “Someone’s awake.” Marce turned and saw that the workstation had sprung to life, booting into a diagnostic screen.
“That’s kind of amazing,” Gamis said.
“This system is mostly solid-state,” Hanton said as he went through menus. “Made out of mostly stable materials. Industrial grade, not consumer grade. When you’re building a habitat, you build to last, not for flash.”
“Okay,” Gamis said. “But eight hundred years.”
“Oh, we’re lucky as hell,” Hanton agreed. “But some of that luck is built on design. Okay, here.” He activated a tab, and a storage structure came up. “All the local data files. I’m transferring them over to my own computer now and can open them in a virtual environment.”
“What’s there?” Sergeant Sherrill asked.
“Lots of things,” Hanton said. “What do you want?”
Sherrill looked over to Marce. “It’s your show, Lord Marce.”
Marce thought about it. “I’d like to know when Dalasýsla went dark,” he said. “That would give us some idea of what to expect for other habitats in the same situation.”
Hanton nodded. “I have an access log file here.”
“Just for the workstation?”
“There’s one of those, yes. There also another one here that looks to be for this ops center as a whole. This must have been the administrator’s workstation.”
“And it would have everything?”
“As long as there was power to it, sure,” Hanton said.
“Pull it up.”
Hanton pulled up the file. “Huh,” he said, a minute later.
“What is it?” Marce asked.
“I’m not sure you’re going to believe me if I tell you,” Hanton said.
“Try me.”
“Let me reorganize this to make it easier to understand.” Hanton did some typing for a minute, then waved Marce over to his screen. “I just dumped this data into a spreadsheet. It tallies logins by year. So, here’s the year before the Flow stream collapsed. Several thousand logins, because people are logging in and out every day, right. The year of the collapse, the same thing, and the year after that. Scroll down over the next twenty years, and the logins get fewer and fewer, because whatever shit is going down here, it’s pretty serious. Twenty-three years after, everything stops. If you were wondering when things got real bad, this is when.”
“Twenty-three years is not very long,” Sherrill said.
“No it’s not,” Hanton said. He scrolled again. “So, that’s it, right? No, it’s not, because look what happens fifty years out.” He pointed to a spate of logins.
“Somebody’s still alive,” Marce said.
“More than one, it looks like. Now, look.” Hanton kept scrolling. “Logins every few years until three hundred years ago. And then this.” For the next twenty years there were a massive number of logins. “Someone got Dalasýsla back online. Or at least part of it back online.”
“Temporarily,” Marce said.
“Twenty years is a pretty long temporary, as far as temporary goes,” Hanton said. “And then after those twenty years, the same thing happens. The logins decrease and then drop off, this time after seven years.”
Marce peered into the screen again. “But not entirely.”
“No,” Hanton agreed. “Every few years again, for almost three hundred years.” He scrolled again. “Here. Here. Here. And on and on.”
“Until when?” Gamis asked.
“Until thirty years ago,” Hanton said. “That’s the last login. The last time any
one accessed this very room.”
“All right, so how is that possible?” Lyton asked. “This place is dead as a fucking rock.”
“I have no idea how it’s possible,” Hanton said. “I’m just telling you what the file is telling me. But it explains why the computer system hasn’t entirely degraded. Every time it boots up it runs a diagnostic and fixes the little problems that crop up over time.” He pointed over to the workstation. “It’s doing it now.”
“So Dalasýsla is alive,” Marce said.
“Dalasýsla, no,” Hanton said. “Lyton is right. This place is dead. Whoever was coming here was probably using this habitat for resources, and using the computer system to help extract them. But someone is still alive in this part of space. Or was, until thirty years ago.”
A voice popped into Marce’s ear. It was Roynold, back on the Bransid. “Marce, you there?”
Marce stepped away from Hanton and his workstation, put his hand to his ear to hear Roynold better, and was annoyed again by the presence of the helmet. “I’m here. Things are very interesting on Dalasýsla, Hat.”
“Did you find evidence that someone’s still alive in the system?”
“Yeah, we did,” Marce said. “How did you know?”
“Because Captain Laure has been having her crew do a search for the other smaller habitats in the area.”
“And she found some?”
“She found lots. Three dozen.”
“And?”
“They’re all dead as Dalasýsla. Cold like Dalasýsla. Same ambient temperature as the rest of space.”
“Okay,” Marce said, confused.
“But then they found something else. Not a habitat, exactly. More like a tenner.”
“A spaceship.”
“Yes,” Roynold. “And here’s the thing about that tenner, Marce. It’s warm.”
Chapter
13
“A peace offering,” Senia Fundapellonan said as she entered Kiva Lagos’s office for her meeting. She reached over the desk to hand Kiva an object. Kiva took it; it was a bracelet of oxidized silver filigree, with golden brown topaz gems set in it.
“Don’t tell me,” Kiva said. “You went to a fair and knocked down the bottles. You had to choose between this and the stuffed elephant.”