“Taking the transmitter offline is a violation of safety protocol,” Marti said.
“I know,” he said. “Just do what you can to get me the chance to bring them back. Who knows, if I get lucky, maybe I’ll make it back before she wakes up and calls in my firing squad.”
Chapter Thirteen:
The approach was rough, but Ethan was trying to make up for lost time and came in as hot as the shuttle would handle. As it was, they were a full hour behind Kaycee and Pruitt when they screamed low over the outer buildings of the colony. It was almost sunset local time, even though it was still well before firstshift on the Olympus Dawn, so although it meant they didn’t have long to wait until it cooled down, they were coming in at the absolute worst part of the afternoon.
Before they made their final approach, Marti had updated their destination. “They’ve landed outside what looks to be a large administrative building. There are markings that appear to indicate it is a hospital complex.”
“That figures. She’d want to go to ground in a place she knows well. That’ll give her the home field advantage,” Angel said. She sat in the rear seat adjusting the sling on a laser rifle. He’d ordered them to leave the lethal force armament in the shuttle once they got to ground, but neither of his handlers liked that idea. They’d packed enough firepower to invade the planet, but when he reminded them that killing their cargo was a bad idea, they both agreed to carry stun-pellet pistols.
“The hospital is also the place with the highest risk if it is a contagion,” Preston said, glancing back and nodding. “If it turns out to be a disease.”
“Shuttle Two is approximately 150 meters outside the main entrance to the facility in a cleared area that may be a medical transport pad,” Marti said.
“Is there room for us to put down there?” the captain asked.
“Affirmative,” it said, superimposing a visual feed from orbit onto the corner of their main screen. The clearing was large enough to land a dozen small ships.
“Are they still inside the shuttle?” he asked.
“As far as I can tell from the lack of EM signal, it is powered down,” the AA said. “I doubt they would remain long in the ship without life support systems to keep it cool.”
“Agreed, but I want to come in fast and low anyway, just to make sure they don’t see us coming.” He glanced out the window and nodded. “Cinch up the belts. Here we go.”
Flipping their shuttle belly-over, he used the undercarriage to add aerodynamic drag to their forward motion and bring their speed down without the engines. The ship groaned under the stress, but they screamed to a stop almost directly above the other ship. As he dropped the twenty meters to the ground, he could see the hatch open on the smaller shuttle. It was clear there was no one inside.
The landing gear extended, and they hit the ground with a bouncing hop. “Sorry that was choppy,” Walker said.
“As long as she’ll get us home.” Billy unsnapped his belt, twisted around to grab his pistol out of the locker behind him. He also pulled out a laser rifle, and the captain shook his head.
“We’ve already covered this. Leave the big guns here.”
“But—”
“Technically they are still our passengers,” he said. “Stun pellets will do the job and leave me with a much smaller mess to clean up.”
“Lasers are clean. Do you seriously want to chance letting Pruitt go hands on?” Billy asked, looking skeptical at the captain’s decision.
“You don’t think seventy-five thousand volts will drop him?” he asked.
“Billy’s just a big coward,” Angle teased.
He gave her an old fashioned gesture about her sexual proclivities and then bounced for the airlock door. The gravity was about eighty percent standard and between that and his apparent adrenaline, he almost overshot and narrowly missed smashing into the ceiling.
“You might want to wait a second,” Preston said, tossing him a bag of water. “Wet your clothes down. It will help.” He pitched a second one at Angel.
“Is it that bad out there?” she asked.
“Worse,” Ethan said, nodding and taking a bag from the med-tech. He tore the end off and poured it over his head and down the front and back of his coveralls.
“Current outside temperature is sixty-six degrees,” Marti said.
“Holy frak! Seriously?” Billy stopped and stepped back from the door like he expected to find demons waiting on the other side.
“I don’t drink my pseudojo that hot,” Angel said as she also ripped her water open and poured it over her head.
“At this level the heat will be close to deadly in short order,” Preston said. “We need to not waste any time outside. Especially not in the direct sunlight.”
“Problem is it might be almost as bad inside the buildings,” the captain said. “When we swing the hatch, you’ll need to be looking for shade as quick as you can.” He pointed out the front window toward a wide veranda that ran the length of the building and concealed the main entrance.
“Is that where they went in?” she asked, leaning forward and dripping water from her hair onto the back of the pilot seat.
“I am unable to tell, but I am uncrating my automech and will proceed there first before stopping to scan,” Marti said. The sound of hardware shuffling in the lock came through the closed hatch.
“I want to see if I can recover their shuttle,” the captain said. “I’ll duck in there and check if I can do anything, so I’ll be a minute or so behind you all.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Billy said.
“No. I’ll do this on my own. I know they aren’t in the shuttle,” he said. “They’ll be inside the building somewhere and I want you two to be ready to snag them if they saw us come in and stick their heads back out to see what we’re doing.”
“Cando,” Angel said. The sounds of the automech squeezing through the door diminished and its shadow passed over one of the side ports.
“Let’s move,” the captain said as he pulled the inner door open and gasped. The residual heat from when the AA had moved its skinsuit out, lingered like an oven in the airlock. “Grab a visor and go. Don’t bother closing the inner door. Leave it open and clear out.”
“I will close it behind you,” Marti said, reminding him that it still had teleoperation control of their shuttle if needed. Or convenient.
Preston took a deep breath and nodded as he leaped up and pushed out on the heels of the handlers.
Grabbing an emergency tool kit from the small locker under the pilot’s seat Walker jumped through the lock and out onto the dry ground. The moss like grass covering crackled under his boots and he looked down at it as he reached back in and grabbed his visor. It was the same grassy plant life that had been in the backyard of the house of terrifying meatloaf, but instead of being living and pliable, this was dead and decomposing to dust.
“Captain, do not waste time,” the AA said over the comlink in his visor.
“Roger that,” he said, darting into the shade of the other shuttle’s open hatch. He stopped his forward velocity with an outstretched hand and immediately regretted it as the metal edge of the doorway seared his exposed skin.
“Shit!” he roared, looking at the red scalded skin on his palm. “Don’t touch anything with a bare hand.”
“Boss, do you need help?” Preston asked. “I can come back out there—”
“Negative, stay in the shade and let me get this done,” he said. He flipped open the tool kit and grabbed a glove for his good hand. He didn’t want to put anything on the burned one, so he fumbled trying to get the good one protected as he looked around. The air inside the shuttle almost vibrated with heat.
Stepping up to the pilot console, he took a gloved finger and tapped the activation icon. Miraculously the system lit up. He glanced over at the communications panel and tapped it. It also came on. “Marti, it looks like it’s powering up,” he said as he fired up the life support controls. Cool air blasted out of the
overhead recycler duct.
“I have a telemetry uplink,” the AA said. “I am testing the teleoperation system now.”
The floor plates vibrated and the artificial gravity shuddered several times as standard grav and the local gravity flickered on and off. “That doesn’t feel right,” Walker said. He held his blistered hand up in front of the cold air coming out of the vent while he waited for the ship to power up the rest of the way.
“The artificial gravity system is above safe thermal limit and will not establish,” Marti said through the shuttle’s comm system. “Otherwise I have full control of all systems.”
“So you can fly this one home?”
“If you wish me to,” it said.
“Yah,” he said, glancing out the side window at their other shuttle. “No wait. I want you to take both shuttles up to 300 meters and keep them there. Hopefully, that will put them both out of reach of Pruitt’s whatever-it-is. Then if we need them, you’ve got them preflight ready and on standby to get us out of here.”
“Understood, Captain. As soon as you are clear, I will remove both shuttles from the landing zone.”
“If there’s any question whether you can maintain control of either shuttle, move them as far away as necessary to protect them.” Looking around, he nodded. Taking a last deep breath of the already cooler air, he threw himself back out the door and trotted toward the hospital. He was about halfway across the distance when he heard the nearly subsonic thrum of the shuttles launching into the air.
Preston had his medkit open and was holding a tube of skinseal and a wet cloth in his hands when the captain skidded to a stop on the veranda. Grabbing Ethan’s hand and twisting it so he could look at the burn, the med-tech flipped his exam visor over his eyes with a toss of his head.
“It’s a mild second stage burn,” he said, after several seconds. “You’ve got minor cellular damage to the skin. It’s not too serious, but it’ll hurt for a while.”
He put the damp biogauze over the red area and reached down into his kit for a sprayer. “This will numb it until we can get up to the ship and do a regen on it.”
“It’s not that bad,” the captain said, frowning as he pulled his hand away and lifted the gauze.
The med-tech snagged it back and gave him a surprisingly firm glare. “If you want to put a glove on this hand so you don’t burn it again, you have to let me treat it,” he said.
“Yes sir,” the captain said, grinning and winking at Angel who was snickering. Preston was young, and although none of them admitted it to his face, they all respected his medical skill.
“What do we know?” the captain asked as he waited for the med-tech to finish doctoring his hand.
“Inside temperature is nine degrees lower than ambient outside,” Marti said, using its local audio channel on the automech. “Once your repairs are complete, I recommend we proceed inside.”
“That’s still damned hot, but is there power on inside?” he glanced toward the horizon where the red disk of Kepler-186 was just edging toward the top of the tallest buildings in the distance.
“I do not detect electromagnetic fields, so I doubt that is the case,” it said. “The building appears to have several sub floors and convection is pulling cooler air from underground, up through the central core of the building. It appears this was an element of the structure’s design.”
“Do you detect any life signs?”
“Negative,” it said. “The building itself has major metallic components in the sub floors that limit my effective scanning range.”
“Boss, they got inside through here,” Billy hollered from where he stood in front of a different section of the hospital face. Signs in the overhead said it was the triage department. “It looks like someone pried a service door off the tracks.”
“You think it was them?”
“It’s hard to tell. It’s a huge door, but there are boot prints in the dust,” he said. “Fresh ones.”
“You’re good to go as soon as the skinseal cures.” Preston said, snapping his kit closed and smiling. His coating of water had already dried and sweat was turning his jumpsuit dark around his collar and across his chest.
At least he’s sweating this time.
“Let’s get inside and out of the heat,” Walker said, jerking his head in Billy’s direction.
“Like fifty-seven is cool,” Preston said.
“It’s all relative,” Angel said.
Chapter Fourteen:
Inside the doorway, a large space opened onto a reception area. Several desk consoles, each with an attached diagnostic archway, lined an entire wall of the room. It was dark and lifeless with only a sliver of orange light slicing across the floor from the broken door to provide illumination.
“This was obviously a medevac receiving area,” Preston said as he walked toward one of the desks. He clicked on a handbeam and scanned the area behind and under the workstation.
“Why do you say that?” Billy asked.
“No signs,” he said, flashing his light around the room. “That tells me that anyone coming through the door here would know where they’re headed, and what they’re looking at. Public areas always have signs directing traffic to the reception desk and waiting areas.”
“Good catch,” Ethan said. “So this would be familiar territory for Kaycee?”
“Not necessarily,” Marti said as it turned on a set of high-power lights that illuminated the entire room. “Dr. Caldwell is a Medical Research Doctor and may have no triage specialty background.”
“While she was treating me for my sunstroke, she told me she’d done time as an intern in an emergent care hospital,” Preston said. “But she also said there were three hospital facilities in Starlight.”
“Would they all have the same floor plan?”
“Who knows,” he said.
“Standardized design modules would mean similar functional elements, but there could be substantial variation to address specialized services,” Marti said.
“So we know that gives them an edge, but we don’t know how big an edge it is,” Billy said.
“Now that we’re inside, can you scan anything else?” the captain asked, walking over to the automech and grabbing bags of water from its carrying rack. He tossed each of them one and they all hosed themselves down again. It didn’t help as much this time since the water was warmer than fresh urine, but evaporation would eventually kick in and cool them off a little. Hopefully.
“At this point I can tell that there are at least four sub floors beneath us,” it said, shining a beam toward an open doorway.
Kaycee said there were emergency shelters under the hospitals and municipal buildings,” he said. “Is that what you’re seeing?”
“The air appears to be several degrees cooler deeper inside the building,” it said. “It would be logical to assume that the shelters would be built far enough underground to maintain temperature. If they are seeking survivors, this would be where they would look. The environment is certainly more conducive to this possibility.”
“The tracks head in this direction,” Angel said. “But the dust gets thinner further from the door. If they don’t step in something to make a mess, it’s going to get harder to track them from footprints.”
“Are you picking up any carrier signals from commlinks?” Ethan said.
“Negative,” Marti said.
“Chances are they went this way. Since we don’t know what they’re looking for, other than cool air and survivors, this seems like the only path that makes sense,” Angel said.
“I believe proceeding deeper into the building is a sound decision,” the AA said.
“Agreed,” Walker said.
“I will take point,” Marti said, retracting its legs and arms to squeeze through the door as it crabbed forward into the narrow hallway.
“Are you sure you’ll fit?” Billy asked as he watched it duck down and push the door open wider with one of its heavy arms.
“I am desi
gned to fit through any standard human egress,” the AA said.
“This looks like an administrative section,” the captain said as he followed the automech into the hallway. “It’s all offices and conference rooms.”
Marti marched toward the opposite end of the corridor with its legs partially retracted, bouncing forward like a tap dancing spider on stims. It was effective, but strange and amusing to watch.
“Shouldn’t we check the rooms as we go by?” Billy suggested as he and Angel both paused to open the first doors they passed.
“You may do so if you wish, but I am scanning them,” it said, stopping and turning its head to focus one of its eyes back at the handler. “Unless I encounter a shielded area or other obstruction to my sensors, it will not be necessary to investigate those locations manually.”
“I just don’t think it would be good to let them get behind us,” he said.
“I think we’d be better off pushing forward as fast as possible,” Ethan said. “If they’re checking rooms as they go, our advantage is Marti’s scanners. Let’s not waste that.” He didn’t want to take any longer than necessary to catch Kaycee and Pruitt. He was painfully aware that the longer it took, the less likely he was to keep things with his Triple-C from blowing up. Every minute wasted down here, was one more that could send his career permanently into the pit.
Angel had walked ahead and was rounding a corner at the end of the hall. “There appears to be a lift shaft here,” she hollered back. “The door is closed but there are scuff marks on it.”
“Like it’s been pried open?” the captain asked as the rest of them joined her on the lift landing.
“Yah,” she said as she set her hands against it and pushed it sidewise. It moved, and a blast of cooler air washed out of the empty space beyond the open door.
“That’s amazing,” Preston said, sighing and stepping forward to enjoy the sensation.
Echoes of Starlight Page 10