Senescence (Jezebel's Ladder Book 5)

by Scott Rhine

  “I don’t get it,” Eowyn said.

  “If Stu dies on this mission, Laura will have something to remember him by. She may even be able to survive the death of her bond mate.”

  “My dad survived over a decade to raise me. Maybe a genius biologist like Laura could last longer, especially with the possibility of a second child. I told Mo about the precaution so he could do the same if he and Kelly have bonded, not that it’s any of our business.”

  “So my sister will live, even if Mo dies here,” Eowyn whispered. “I owe you, Ambassador Llewellyn.”

  Kaguya struggled with how to ask Stu her question. “Your initial reaction was shock. What changed your mind?”

  “I also thought about how raising the children might heal Mira’s grief at not being able to raise her own. She might forgive you, and we could be one big family. On the other hand, if I die today, I could be at peace knowing I’m a dad. Besides, Laura’s my other half. What she wants, I want.”

  His mother-in-law tried to hug him, making crinkly sounds against his suit. Embarrassed, he turned his head and looked out the window.

  From the outside, lunar craters resembled desert mesas. He could see the landing pad at the base of the nearest one. “I’ve got to grow up now. I have a family to protect. Strap in, ma’am.” Over the cabin speakers, he said, “Helmets on. Showtime.”

  ****

  Stu parked the ship as close to the wide door on the mesa-like exterior as he could, and the tongue of the landing pad pulled them into a cavern. When the massive double doors rolled shut, they were committed.

  Fortunately, bored scientists hope for distractions. All Eowyn had to do to misdirect the technical crew was to point to the patches on the shuttle. “These spots resemble the hull material we saw on the videos of the alien ship. If we analyze all this, we may find out why they modified the shuttle or what they stole it for. I’m going to take the portable evidence to the lab.”

  Sif used her own credentials as a reserve UN trooper because she sometimes served as a rescue consultant or embedded media.

  Smokey the hacker “borrowed” IDs from Mo’s Earthside team to get the rest of them in. The Somalian’s skin was dark, and his eyes darted nervously. “As long as one of the real officers accompanies us, and we don’t encounter any biometric locks, we can pass as hired muscle for a few hours.”

  Mo had sealed the Sanctuary guns and explosives in evidence containers. Each team member carried one of these items to look busy. Every piece of inventory was tagged with a tracker and a second seal that would alert security who opened them and when. “Verifying the chain of evidence,” he said, scanning each at the airlock door.

  Inside the airlock, they faced the first security checkpoint. Eowyn closed her eyes and announced over private frequencies, “We’re all registered and clean.” This meant that she had infiltrated the security grid, enabling her to monitor alarms. “We’re in luck. Most of the people in the base have swarmed the outer landing bay. There are only a few in the control tower.”

  Leaving the airlock, they entered a spacesuit locker room similar to the one on Sanctuary. Immediately afterward, they passed what appeared to be a large break room. Stu asked, “Video games?”

  Mo shut off the large TV screen. “A ready room. These guys spend a lot of their time on alert status. Regs also require a bio break for every four hours in space, just to keep them fresh.”

  Over public frequencies, Eowyn said, “This way with the evidence.”

  The main hallway was glassy smooth, light gray, and perfectly clean. It could have been a mausoleum except for a panel Stu spotted on the opposite wall. The sign read In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. “Fire hose?”

  “That’s a variant of supergoo. It puts out any fire and hardens in contact with air. They also patch air leaks with it.” Eowyn checked her wrist computer and followed the map to a side passage sealed with biohazard warning signs. “We’re on the outer ring. Ground zero is through this tunnel.”

  Sif signaled their allies of their arrival, hopping through the long-range comm on the shuttle. Their suit radios had less than a five kilometer range.

  Smokey went to work on the next lock while the rest of the other seven fanned out to guard his back. “Defeating the quarantine codes is going to take longer than expected. This system has more layers than an ogre.” He removed his left glove in order to make direct contact with the interface pad.

  Stu stood behind the hacker, with eyes closed, listening to multiple radios and scanning with his gravity sense. The silence and the mass of the crater walls overhead made him nervous. Every few seconds, he checked on the hacker. Instead of finding him relaxed, Stu noticed that Smokey’s fingers were tightly clenched. Electrical shock? “Getting away with it, priceless.” When the hacker failed to respond to his recall phrase, Stu knocked the man loose from the computer hardware. “Medic! We’re blown. This place has Active defenses.”

  “Sif, tell the locals it’s a false alarm,” Eowyn ordered.

  Nurse Yvette examined Smokey. “His heart is fine, but his brain is theta trapped. It may take hours to bring him out.”

  Meanwhile, Stu examined the wall panel. “He appears to have cracked the magnetic lock, but the door still won’t budge. Oleander, I need to see what’s on the other side of this door before we blow it.”

  The blonde scout appeared next to the computer tech and had a seat. In moments, she blinked awake, “This whole wall is lined with mu shield. I can’t penetrate it. Someone likes their secrets.”

  “Security just issued shoot-to-kill orders,” Eowyn said, shocked.

  Mo and Sif broke the seals on their gauss guns and powered them up. Tilting her head, Sif seemed distracted.

  “Zeiss doesn’t want any UN officials harmed,” Oleander urged. Technically, she was the ranking officer on the expedition. “Use the fire hose to seal off the landing bay.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mo said, breaking the glass.

  Eowyn placed her hand on the lock to the ready room. “I’ll jam the door while the goo hardens.”

  Mo stopped foaming when Eowyn said, “Enough. That’s going to be a bloody mess to clean.”

  Meanwhile, Kaguya sat next to the unconscious Smokey. “I’ll pop up above the lunar surface and sink down in on the other side of the shielding.”

  “I don’t want you risking your life,” Stu said.

  “I’m good at circumventing safeguards. They never stopped me when I was a spy.” Kaguya held his hand.

  The moment she slumped, traveling Out-of-body, Sif whispered to Stu in a point-to-point message. “Koku is defending herself.”

  “We haven’t threatened her.”

  “That’s just it,” Sif said, moving her helmet so the others would not see her lips move. “We were all supposed to strike simultaneously, but the Japanese team seized an opportunity hours ago. Amanda Mori was slain the moment she stepped outside her fortress apartment to negotiate with a representative from the Middle East. Iran sold her out to the Chinese in exchange for controlling interest in a Turkish construction company.”

  Stu glanced at Kaguya to make sure she wasn’t awake. “Nana? We wanted to restrict her access, not murder her.”

  “The Ministry of State Security had other plans,” Sif said with a worried glance at Kaguya. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell her about the assassination until we’re back home. She might want revenge.”

  That would be lying to my family. On one hand, I have no operational experience, and Kaguya is my most experienced asset. On the other, I’ve been warned by her own daughter that she can be ten kilos of kill-trained crazy in a five-kilo sack.

  When Kaguya’s eyes flashed open, Stu almost jumped. “The other side of the quarantine door is hard vacuum. We can’t open the door until the pressure on the two sides has equalized.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Eowyn.

  Kaguya stood and dusted herself off. “The flashing red error message on the airlock controls.”

  “Is there a
nother way around?” asked Stu.

  “Decompress this tunnel,” offered Mo.

  Stu shook his head. “The sneak suits can’t take vacuum. Plus, we have to remove Kaguya’s helmet for almost three hours to make the crown-of-thorns interface work.”

  Eowyn tapped on her map and grimaced. “There’s a junction box for solar panels on the inner crater slope. One person might fit.”

  “Bigger. Widen the search,” Stu said. “This machine is huge. All of us have to fit, even if we need to walk for a while. You said this was the outer landing pad. Where is the inner pad?”

  “Moria?” Eowyn asked. “No good. It’s a kilometer away, in the heart of the infected area.”

  “Let me guess—a deep well?”

  The UN investigator nodded. “Taken over by the nanosubstrate. A few ships stored inside would hold air, but getting there would be suicide.”

  Oleander examined the airlock and the map. “Blowing this hatch wouldn’t be wise because it could decompress this entire section. Instead, we’ll take the dogleg from the tower to the inner ring. We can seal off that branch, and I can set up shaped charges at the next lock.”

  The team about-faced, bounding for the opposite end of the ring. When the ladder to the tower was in sight, Eowyn cursed. “Torrents of encrypted traffic are pouring out of this place. Someone just called in a strike team to deal with us.”

  “Not a problem. We arranged for the Chinese to be first responders,” Oleander replied.

  Eowyn shook her head. “For some reason a US shuttle was on maneuvers a few minutes closer and will arrive before the Chinese. I’m worried. The Mori organization recently signed a major defense contract with the US government.”

  Onesemo looked away suddenly so Stu couldn’t read his reaction.

  Did Mo report to US military out of loyalty to his old country? Crap. Could Koku have called for help herself?

  “That gives us roughly thirty minutes to reach somewhere we can attach the crown,” Oleander said. “Eowyn, try diplomacy with your friends in the hangar.”

  After several minutes, Eowyn had the local head technician convinced that Stu’s team was nonviolent and posed no threat. The scientists even promised to provide medical care to Smokey.

  However, matters changed when Stu added, “We believe Koku has infiltrated your systems and is the one issuing those false orders.”

  A red light blinked on inside his helmet.

  “Someone shut off the shuttle’s long-range transmitter,” Sif announced.

  The techs no longer answered Stu’s calls. Are the radios jammed, or are they dead? Either way, the scientists weren’t calling off the US space marines.

  “We’re in this alone,” Mo said. “Maybe we should scrap the mission. I can carry Smokey.”

  Stu refused to give up. First, he asked his mother-in-law on a private link, “Why didn’t Z want you seeing the location codes?”

  Kaguya sighed. “I have trouble holding information back. Before we left on this potentially fatal mission, I tried to contact my mother on a private channel to say good-bye. I couldn’t reach her, though. Conrad worries that I’ll let something slip.”

  Stu nodded. “New plan: we send scouts to take the tower while the rest of us run for Moria the long way. One gauss gun for each team. Once we take the main transmitter, we can refuse to let the US troops land and invite our NERO friends.” After a pause, he told Yvette, “We need you to attach the crown to Kaguya. Could you help get Sif changed into the sneak suit?”

  Yvette replied, “These suits aren’t one size fits all. Sif hasn’t practiced with the equipment, and she weighs seven kilos more than I do.”

  Sif glared at the comment. “It’s muscle mass. Can either of you two speak Chinese to our allies and tell them what we need? As an ethics enforcer, can you snap a man’s neck to get to the tower if needed?”

  “No.”

  “Yvette, you need to attach the crown interface, unless you want to explain to my wife why something happened to her mother without medical help?” On a person-to-person link to Oleander, Stu added, “Sif’s asking me to withhold information about Amanda Mori’s murder from Kaguya. I don’t trust her. I want her elsewhere.”

  On the team broadcast band, Oleander said, “Emotional outbursts aside, Stu is right. My primary objective is to call that NERO ship from the tower, or none of us has a ride home.”

  Eowyn shook her head. “Splitting our forces is a bad plan. If the kill team catches us in the open—”

  “That won’t happen if we move now,” Stu insisted. “Oleander can set the charges to access the quarantined area while Sif changes. The explosion and alarms will make a great diversion for their assault.”

  Mo picked up the fallen programmer and followed. He left Smokey at the glossy door to the residential wing. Mo scavenged tools and ten liters of spare water. Whoever survived could pick Smokey up on the way out.

  Chapter 49 – Dominoes

  Kaguya crouched around a corner with the other four, waiting for the dust to clear from the explosion. She watched Out-of-Body from the vacuum side as air was sucked into the tunnel, blowing aside pink tumbleweeds to reveal over a dozen empty spacesuits. Substrate dangled like weeds growing out of cracks in the walls. The unlit tunnel sloped downward like the road to hell. Back in her body, she reported, “A lot of people died between here and the inner landing pad.”

  “The Mori technicians and security personnel were trying to evacuate.” Eowyn blanched, pointing at the closest section of substrate. “Look. The web is repairing itself. We could rip a hole through, but the passage will seal behind us. We should abort.”

  Mo stared into the web-clogged maw. “Gauss-gun needles won’t do much against hungry nano.”

  Surprising everyone, Stu opened his own evidence container and pulled out the Mori family sword. “Don’t worry. Risa sprayed the blade with something to give this monster indigestion.”

  “Wait for orders. We can’t win against this,” Eowyn insisted, gazing in horror at the silicate tendrils.

  Within a minute, Oleander came over the radio. “We took the tower, but not before they disabled the satellite relay to Earth. Sif managed to contact our Chinese delivery van. They’re going to delay the US team’s landing as long as possible, engaging if necessary. They told us to hurry. Dominoes are falling. Sif says that the Seven Seals have been triggered.”

  “What exactly are the Seven Seals?” asked Mo.

  Kaguya explained, “Koku doesn’t bomb cities or attack anything directly. He sabotages key potash factories and blocks the companies capable of replacing the expensive processing machinery. Most of the remaining mechanical engineers would be needed by the war effort. As before, wheat eaters will starve. Then he drops tailored oil-eating bacteria into pipelines in the Middle East to disrupt fuel supplies—”

  Stu interrupted. “Billions dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Stu stared into the mouth of hell. “The Roman war elephant was considered unstoppable. In the Book of Maccabees, they described the way to defeat it. One man with a spear would throw himself under its body and stab the elephant through the heart. The elephant would collapse, of course, crushing the rebel.”

  “A freaking Masada suicide bomber?” asked Mo. “We should scrub the mission.”

  “The elephant of war has a weakness, the man willing to die to stop it,” Stu concluded.

  Kaguya established a private link with Stu. “Why do they believe the Seals have opened?” When he entrusted her with Sif’s story about the assassination, she replied, “Intelligence is only as good as the source, and then only when confirmed. Sif said my mother walked. That hasn’t happened since she saved my father from the poison gas. My mother has been reported dead more times than I’ve earned gold records. Take this all with a grain of salt. It’s awfully quiet for the end of the world.”

  “We can’t hear anything in space,” Stu replied. “We can’t see Earth now, not even with a telescope. Every nuke in existence co
uld be exploding or none at all. Without the satellite we’re blind. Koku would know if she’s dead. Let’s go ask.”

  She stood behind her son-in-law and broadcast to everyone. “I go where the ambassador goes. He speaks for me.”

  Stu grabbed Eowyn by the hand and pulled her along. “You dragged us all here, lady. Lead the way.” People seemed reluctant to follow him until the webbing parted before the sword of its own accord, creating a clear path.

  Either the RFID signature in the handle of my father’s sword gives him authority with the AI, Koku respects Stu as the brother of Snowflake, or she wants us to come down and visit. Kaguya’s first step snapped through a ceramic layer thinner than marzipan candy. The layer below was filled with clear liquid, veined with white and silver. “Liquid circuitry.”

  “Magi tech, like the robots on Sanctuary,” Stu said, looking over her shoulder. “We haven’t even figured it out yet. How did Earth?”

  Yvette replied, “Sensei told us that when we understand all the Pages, we could build our own starships. Whenever you combine a couple old alien technologies, new ones crop up.”

  Stu drew a deep breath. “Walk only in my footsteps, people. I’ll use my density sense to find the sturdiest path.”

  Mo asked, “Does anyone else feel like we’re in a freaking slasher movie?”

  Yvette marched up to Kaguya’s side. “Yeah. Don’t be the one left behind. They get eaten first.”

  ****

  The last obstacle to the inner landing bay’s airlock was a pool four meters across. “It’s not the width I worry about. It’s the depth,” Eowyn said. “The map says this area was a geothermal tap for emergency power.”

  Kaguya took out a large, Xenon flashlight and aimed into the puddle. There was no bottom in sight. “Those usually go down two hundred meters.”

  Stu said, “More. Koku chewed through the floor and is storing something big down there. I can’t make out details.”

  “Damn.” Mo stood back-to-back with Stu. “We can cut off the solar energy and extra memory, but Koku’s core could be safe down here even if we dropped a nuke.”