Merchants in Freedom

by Richard Tongue

  “Exactly. This war doesn’t make any sense, not from their point of view. Hell, as crippled as we are, we still have a battle fleet at our disposal, and with the colonial forces behind us, that gives us a far better shot at winning this thing than I assume they would have wanted.”

  “I think you’re probably right about that. Then this plan of theirs is intended at undoing a mistake? Maybe they blundered into this.”

  “That would be completely out of character for them. I don’t see them simply blundering into anything. They started this war, and they did it deliberately. That’s obvious. And I think we still need to know why.” He looked down at the surface of the planet below, and added, “We raced into this whole thing so damned quickly that we never stopped to ask any of the important questions. We never did complete our recon of local space.”

  “We’re asking them now,” Morgan replied. “It isn’t too late.”

  “Not quite, but we’re certainly getting there,” Winter said, shaking his head. “The key is here. In this system.”

  “What makes you think that? Surely, if this was the goal…”

  “They might not have had any choice. This was the only system we could reach, and that meant that if they were going to find one to use as bait, it had to be here. There wasn’t any other alternative. If it was just a few ships up in orbit, then I might have bought that they were just using them as a decoy, but that surface installation was far more important, and if it had its own independent network…”

  “Then they were expecting the orbital ships to be destroyed,” Morgan said, finishing the sentence. “I didn’t think it through that far. Hell, they might never have been truly dependent on the orbital network at all.”

  “Tell me something else, Joe. If Mendoza hadn’t launched that suicide run, would we have gone down to the surface, especially if we managed to find the information we were looking for up here, in orbit?”

  “That depends on just how paranoid the fleet commander is,” he replied with a smile. “Most wouldn’t. They’d have congratulated themselves on their good luck, rallied their ships, and pressed on. Oh, there would be plenty of high-resolution scans, but those systems can only tell us so much, and without actually putting boots on the ground…”

  “Precisely. Hell, if I hadn’t stopped to think it though, I might have felt the same way. They considered the surface installation safe from attack.”

  “We might have bombarded it from orbit,” Morgan mused.

  “A risk they’d have been willing to take.”

  “I thought…”

  “It’s the secret of what is down there that they’re worried about, not the people. They don’t care about people. They’re just another expendable resource as far as they are concerned, something to be tossed aside when no longer needed. The base itself was the same story. Replacing it would have probably hurt them a little, but they could have managed it easily enough. Except that orbital bombardment would have wiped out all trace of whatever they were looking for, and that’s precisely what we need to find.”

  Shaking his head, Morgan said, “You’re making an awful lot of logical leaps on this one. You realize that, right?”

  “I’m aware of that, but I’m equally aware that we don’t really have that many options on the table. This is the answer. I’m sure of it.” A light winked on Winter’s desk, and he tapped the control, saying, “Captain here. Go ahead.” “Bianchi here, Commander. I’ve got good news. We’ve recovered a database from the wreckage of one of the enemy ships. It looks as though it was in some sort of hardened, protected area, and it’s come through intact. Spaceman Novikova hooked it up to the shuttle’s database, and it holds navigational data. I think we’ve found what we’re looking for. The path that will take us deeper into their space. I’d like permission to run it through the ship’s astrogational database.”

  Winter looked at Morgan, his lips curled into a soft smile, and replied, “I want that database thoroughly swept before it comes anywhere near the ship, Commander. Get a team out there to conduct a full analysis. I know this seems good, but beware of Greeks bearing gifts. I don’t want a Trojan Horse tearing our systems to pieces because we were too enthusiastic.”

  “Of course not, sir, but given…”

  “That’s an order, Commander. Continue your sweep. We won’t be leaving this system for a while in any case. Winter out.”

  “She’s going to be disappointed,” Morgan said. “You could have told her about your suspicions.”

  “And I will, as soon as she gets back to the ship, but I don’t want to risk conducting any business like that over a communications link, no matter how theoretically secure it might be. Maybe I’m getting a little paranoid in my old age, but I strenuously dislike anything that seems so…”

  “Convenient?” Morgan asked. “I agree with you. The odds of finding something like that just floating out there are pretty damned remote, not unless the Tyrant commander actually wanted it to be found.” He reached for a tablet, and said, “Maybe I can prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Run an analysis of the course that particular piece of debris was on when it was found. If my guess is even remotely right, then they probably ejected it just before impact. That’s the obvious way of giving it the best possible chance of survival.” He paused, then added, “That’s what I’d have done, anyway.”

  “Feel free,” Winter replied. He reached for a control, and said, “Winter to bridge. Is Lieutenant Bryant up there?”

  “I’m here, sir,” she replied.

  “Good. I need you to launch a new series of probes. I want every planet in this system comprehensively covered, and I mean comprehensively. Nothing left out, nothing missing. I want to know everything that there is to know about this system, and I need it yesterday.”

  “I’ll get on it at once, sir, but it’s going to take a little time…”

  “We’ve got that, Lieutenant. Make it happen. Out.”

  Nodding, Morgan said, “There’s something else that has occurred to me about this whole situation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Every time one of them is disconnected from the network, unless there has been some sort of advanced, forward planning, they’ve committed suicide.” Frowning, he added, “What if, somewhere deep down, that’s what they want?”

  Chapter 9

  It was cold. Mendoza shouldn’t have felt that, not through her protective suit, but whether it was the endless white expanse all around her or the featureless walls rising on all sides, she still felt cold. Reaching for the controls on her sleeve, she turned up her thermostat, shook her head, and continued her journey, trudging towards what looked like a route to the plateau, the ice pack itself.

  For four hours, she’d been walking endlessly onwards, unable to contact anyone else with the cliffs blocking line of sight, even if she’d been willing to take the risk. She knew that Ortiz was dead. There was no possible way back from the path he had taken. The others were another story. Volkov and Singh had both jumped clean, just as she had, perhaps ten miles behind her. There was no way for her to know whether they had made it, not until she could establish communications with anyone.

  She paused, took a deep breath, and reached for the straw in her helmet with her tongue, sucking in a quick gulp of water before pushing it away. Her suit, intact, would last her for days. With the ice readily available, she could use the emergency kit in her hand to top up her oxygen and water reserves without too much trouble. Food would be the deciding factor. She only had enough for three days, and only in the form of liquid concentrates. The most basic of survival rations. They’d keep her alive. For a while.

  The record, in a laboratory environment, was eleven days. And the test subject had required therapy afterwards for claustrophobia, had never travelled in space again. In the field, it was six, a legendary astronaut in the early days of space exploration who had completed a five-hundred-mile walk across Mercury to reach a rescue craft. That was a
century ago. Spacesuit designs had demonstrated depressingly little advancement since then.

  At last, she was at the glacier, a slick icy path to the top of the cliff, one that she might just be able to traverse. She was out of thruster fuel, all of it used up in her desperate landing, so if she slipped, fell, she was dead. On the other hand, if she didn’t make the attempt, she was just as dead. Xenophon and her crew had no way of even knowing that she was alive, still less her location, though they’d send rescue shuttles when they could.

  Assuming they could. Assuming they were still there, and a Tyrant fleet hadn’t arrived to wipe them out, or drive them from the system. Anything might be happening up in orbit, and she’d never know about it.

  She reached for her belt, pulling out the sample shovel, the end slightly pointed. Not the best equipment for scaling an ice sheet, but all she had to work with. She hammered it into the ground, tested her weight, and tentatively took her first step, climbing the side of the mountain one pace at a time, her feet constantly threatening to slip out from under her.

  Every step was a nerve-wracking trial, every movement threatening to send her sliding back to the floor. After five minutes, she’d barely climbed thirty meters, and the way was getting steeper, not easier. She was hardly able to keep upright as it was. She paused, looking around, trying to find a better way to the top, but she couldn’t.

  It had been the shuttle. The surface had been layered in thick snow, the work of centuries wiped away in a matter of milliseconds by the furious heat of the shuttle’s engines as they rushed past. Given time, the surface would harden, regain its grip, but that could take days. For a moment, she resigned herself to returning to the valley floor, waiting for rescue.

  She couldn’t. Not while her people were out there. Not while there might be enemies around. She didn’t have any tools that could do the job, and while the shovel could dig a smoother path, carving one to take her up a mile would require far more calories than she had in her emergency rations. What she needed was her thrusters. A boost to keep her steady, keep her on her feet, push her up the slope and prevent her from falling.

  The oxygen.

  Her suit pack was designed to allow the release of some of her air as an emergency thruster, a last-resort measure intended in the event that all other contingencies failed. At this point, that was precisely the situation in which she found herself. She looked up again, picking out the smoothest possible path, the easiest way to the top, then took a deep breath, reached for her controls, and fired an experimental pulse from her makeshift boosters.

  It helped, a little, but not enough. She was going to need an ongoing effect, and she quickly fine-tuned her suit systems with a series of commands that sent her safety monitors into paroxysms of crimson rage, flooding her heads-up display with warning after warning as fast as she could override them. She looked up to the top again. If her calculations were correct, she’d reach the top with about thirty minutes of oxygen remaining. Just about enough time to top up her tanks from the surrounding ice, assuming she wasn’t immediately facing attack.

  She paused for a moment, taking another drink of water, readying herself for the attempt. She’d have one chance to make this work, only one, and if she failed, there would be no coming back. A fall from a quarter of a mile would probably wreck her suit, even in this gravity, with neither parachute nor thrusters to arrest her descent.

  There was no point, no need to wait any longer. She took a deep breath, then fired her thrusters, sending herself sliding up the side of the slope, her feet now surer of their ground, the process of climbing far easier than before. After the first few steps, she stopped using the shovel. It was only slowing her down. And she needed to move rapidly if she was going to reach her destination in the time she had.

  She could see the surface now, and kicked on her short-range scanners to watch for any motion, any sign of activity. There was nothing. Could be nothing, not out here. No life at all. She allowed herself a brief, satisfied smile as she continued her climb, her steps sure, secure, each one carefully considered but rapidly taken.

  Then she made the mistake of glancing back the way she had come, and her eyes widened as she saw the treacherous expanse below her, almost half a mile up. An amber warning flashed on her monitor, one of the few alerts she took seriously. Half of her atmospheric reserves were gone, spent in the ascent. She was half-way up. That didn’t feel hopeful. If everything continued as it was, she’d be gasping for her final breaths at about the same time as she reached the summit.

  She pushed on, harder and harder, forcing herself to take more risks, to speed her way to the summit. Her feet slipped out from underneath her on a particularly treacherous slide, and she swung the shovel still in her hand wildly at the surface, luckily digging in with the blade of the tool and using the leverage to secure her, to stop her fall. Her feet were still slipping, no way to grip on the slick, smooth ice.

  Less than two hundred meters to go. Time to take a risk. She tapped another control, her oxygen now roaring through the aft thrusters, sufficient force to get her over the worst of it and propel her to the surface, now totally dependent on the force yielded by her atmospheric reserves to find her path to safety. She hopped and kicked over the terrain, using the shovel to push off, to guide herself around the worst of the landscape, and then, at last, she was there. At the top.

  There was no time to savor the moment. In the canyon, she’d been shielded from the worst of the weather, but up here she was facing the storm in full force, snow and wind whirling around her, her view limited to only a few feet. She didn’t need to see the landscape to save her life, though, and she dropped to her knees, planting the survival kit into the snow and hastily connecting it to her suit reserves. A glance at her gauges told her that she had only twenty minutes of oxygen left. Barely enough.

  The kit kicked in, starting to extract water from the surface and breaking it down into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter gas permitted to escape into the atmosphere while the precious oxygen flooded into her tanks, the gauges slowly, reluctantly beginning to rise once more.

  It would take hours for her to top up her tanks completely. She didn’t have the time to wait. Just enough to allow her to press on towards the enemy base would suffice. It was around thirty miles from her location, and she was relatively confident that she could cover that in four hours, given the low gravity. She waited impatiently for the survival kit to work, looking into the storm, the strange eddies tricking her eyes and showing strange shadows and ghosts where nothing was. Her movement monitor, filtering out the storm, showed no sign of anyone in the local area, but given all the air movement, she didn’t really dare trust it.

  Then she saw a light on her monitor. A beacon, less than five miles away, with an Earth signature. Precisely the sort of indicator that a damaged spacesuit would use. One of her people. It had to be. She cursed, then looked at her oxygen gauge, trying to work out whether she dared take the risk, then finally disengaged the system, unplugging the kit and setting out into the whirling storm beyond.

  There was no possible way to tell what waited for her. It had to be one of her people, though she’d expected far more of Volkov and Singh than to set off a beacon that would alert every hostile on the planet to their presence. She briefly contemplated standing back, waiting to see if anyone else headed their way, but she couldn’t take the risk.

  As she made her way clear of the ravine, visibility dropped, and she switched on her short-range sensors, another risk, but one that she had to take if she was going to make any progress at all. She trudged over the terrain, the ground mercifully smooth, periodically making detours around other crevasses in the landscape, narrow gaps that led miles down towards the subsurface ocean, the mysteries that the Tyrants had come here to probe.

  Even after all of this, they still hadn’t really started their primary mission. There was a mystery down here, one that had to be explored, and one man had already died in an attempt to learn the answers. She
wasn’t going to let Ortiz’s death be in vain. Not while there was still even the remotest chance of mission success. She owed him that.

  There was a brief break in the storm, and she looked out into the distance, towards the sight of the beacon. There was something out there. A shuttle, the same design that she’d been flying, though safely down on the surface. For an instant, she wondered if Ortiz had somehow worked a miracle, found some way to complete the destruction of the enemy base without the loss of his ship, but the color scheme was wrong, not matching the livery of Xenophon’s shuttles. She quickly ran through her database in an attempt to work out just which ship it might match.

  Pericles. Of course. So it had been here.

  As the storm resumed, she continued her advance, making her way cautiously to the airlock. The shuttle had been half-buried, whether by the snow or deliberately, she couldn’t tell, but there was no sign of activity outside, no footprints or evidence that the Tyrants had been out this way. It beggared belief that they wouldn’t have known about it. This had to be a trap, and she was walking happily into it.

  She reached for her sidearm, carefully tugging it free as she walked towards the gleaming ship, making her way cautiously to the airlock. There was still no sign of trouble. Theories and guesses began to race through her mind, desperate attempts to explain how the shuttle could have sat here for so long, hidden out of sight. And someone had triggered that beacon. That much was obvious. Someone was guiding her here.

  Reaching the airlock, she brushed away some loose snow with her glove to expose the control panel. The systems were working, albeit at low power, and there was atmosphere on the far side, heat, everything necessary for survival. She punched through the controls, then noticed something interesting. The systems had only been powered up an hour ago. It had been dormant for seven months until then.

  Pistol in hand, she stepped into the strangely-familiar airlock, kicking the snow from her boots before climbing through the outer hatch, locking it shut behind her. The familiar hiss filled her ears, atmosphere flooding into the airlock to replace that of the outside world, and heating elements burst into life to warm the air, bring it to match the conditions inside the shuttle.