InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Makes sense,” Joyce said. “But that still includes a lot of terrain.”

  Carl shook his head. “You’re reasoning like colonists or engineers. But reasoning like a spy ….” He trailed off as something tickled the back of his brain.

  “Unexplored, sure.” He spoke to himself. Thinking aloud sometimes helped. “Near water? Maybe. We don’t know that the Interveners need water—but if their human agents ever visit, they would. But far from civilization? I don’t know about that. Maybe just far enough.”

  Joshua frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Hide your base in the hinterlands, and your only access is by flying in. Once upon a time, that would have worked fine. Now there’s traffic-control radar, and satellites always watching, and human ships ever coming and going. To avoid attention, you’d want to fly to your base as seldom as possible.” The more Carl thought about it, the more logical that seemed. “Near ground transportation seems more probable to me.”

  “Then why has no one seen the base?” Joyce asked. “Could advanced alien tech disguise an installation that well?”

  “So it’s not there at all,” Joshua interpreted. “Dumb idea. Sorry.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Carl said. “Close to ground transportation doesn’t have to mean on top of a city. A base might be remote and just a few klicks from a train track or major road.”

  “Makes sense,” Joshua conceded.

  “Close enough to ice and ore veins to foresee that humans might in time build nearby.” Carl pondered some more. “But for all that, someplace with immediate surroundings as worthless-seeming as possible.”

  Joshua’s eyes glazed over, his attention elsewhere, refining his map. The candidate terrain receded to a tracery of ground corridors—still too extensive to search. Then uneven dashed lines replaced solid corridors. Some of the dashes shrank.

  “What have we narrowed it down to?” Carl asked.

  “Better than a hundred thousand square klicks,” Joshua groused. “Call it Pennsylvania.”

  “Look near lava tubes,” Joyce suggested. “Shelter that doesn’t look like shelter, and that provides ample shielding from cosmic rays.”

  Lava tubes? Carl netted a look-up. A lava tube turned out to be an underground channel through which lava had once drained. Harder, higher-melting-point rock able to withstand comparatively cooler lava, he supposed. As dead geologically as the Moon seemed, its surface had once seethed with magma. Of course the Moon had lava tubes.

  On the color-coded map display, the candidate area had shrunken further.

  “South Carolina-sized,” Joshua offered.

  Carl pivoted, taking in the graphic. Inspiration did not strike. He pointed at random to a candidate area. “Zoom, please.”

  A half meter inward from the wall, another holo opened. The close-up told Carl nothing new. “Is this real-time data?” he asked.

  “Composite historical data,” Joshua said. “It does away with shadows.”

  And, for that matter, the composite data put the entire hemisphere in daylight. Three nights earlier, when Carl had left Earth, the Moon overhead had been waning, several days past full phase. “Show me the same region, with as close as public sats have to real time.”

  The pop-up sprouted long shadows.

  “Hard to see much this way,” Joshua said.

  “Zoom in tighter,” Carl answered. Still nothing. “Tighter still.”

  At full magnification, the real-time image encompassed a narrow swath of terrain, with a surface tramway running along the strip’s center. Almost, he had … something. “Follow the rails.”

  “Which direction?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Carl said. Because his subconscious was still being coy.

  Their view undulated along the railway, skirting craters and mountains, on occasion bridging a crevasse, twice “flying” over trams. The second tram was parked on a rail siding, offloading. An uneven thread—dark gray, almost charcoal, against lighter gray—led away from the rails. Churned-up regolith.

  “Go back to that rail spur,” Carl said. “Follow those boot prints.”

  Looking skeptical, Joshua complied.

  “Just bear with me,” Carl said.

  In dots and dashes, the trail led to an inflatable shelter. The lunar regolith around the campground was churned.

  “Prospecting or mining,” Joyce surmised.

  Carl puzzled over the many interruptions to the trail. Lost in shadow, sometimes. Ground too hard, or the regolith too thin, to show boot prints.

  If there were Interveners on the Moon, they had evaded detection for a long time.

  “Refine the search, Joshua,” Carl said. “Find spots along the rail-and roadways that run right up against rough terrain.”

  “Define rough.”

  “Like the apparent gaps in this trail. Areas that won’t take boot prints or vehicle tracks.” Carl thought some more. “Especially any narrow passes.”

  Along the walls the candidate terrain shrank way back, to scattered pockets.

  One by one, Carl examined them.

  CHAPTER 29

  In graceful arcs and long straight-aways, the maglev railway extended, seemingly without end, across the basaltic plain that was the Ocean of Storms. Fields of solar cells, black to absorb the unfiltered sunlight, ran alongside the guide walls and rails. Craters and hills, crevasses and railway, all dissolved into a blur as the tram tore across the stark lunar landscape.

  Skimming the ground, a klick per second seemed faster than the fastest spaceship.

  Nearing a pre-programmed waypoint, the tram began to brake. On the virtual map in Carl’s mind’s eye, a switch icon began to blink: the transfer from this main circumpolar route onto east-west tracks. “Two minutes,” he said.

  Joshua only grunted.

  They had departed Tycho City with a list of twenty-four candidates. Ten site surveys later, given the Law of Averages, the surprise would have been having found something interesting. Carl kept the math to himself. Joshua was grumpy enough already.

  They surveyed from east to west, staying ahead of the Sun. With Carl’s usual luck, the Intervener base they sought would lie just east of the terminator when first they had set out: in darkness, impractical to search, for almost two weeks. With his more recent luck, there was no Intervener base to be found, or he had misjudged where to look.

  Either way, he might not be searching in two weeks. In less than one, the Powers That Be expected him to appear for a second round of questioning in the ongoing inquest. At least this time the Agency had offered to hold the session at the main UPIA lunar station.

  Inertia threw Carl against a wall, and Joshua against Carl, as the tram took the banking turn onto the intersecting tracks.

  “Ten more minutes on this leg,” Carl said.

  Joshua grunted again.

  Nearing preset coordinates, the vehicle began to slow. A side spur appeared in Carl’s mind’s-eye map. “Almost there,” he said.

  The tram swerved onto the spur and they came to a halt. To their right, slumped with unimaginable age and the patient, relentless weathering of micrometeoroids, was the rim of a small, nameless crater.

  At the tram’s great cruising speed, only minutes separated their stops and they remained suited up. (The slog from the rail siding to a suspect area had yet to be less than an hour.) They unloaded a minimal amount of equipment, entered the doorlock code for the rented tram car, and started toward the nearby crater.

  They climbed in silence up the jumbled, sort-of ramp where some of the crater wall had collapsed. They hiked almost halfway around the rim to the lip of an intersecting, somewhat younger crater. It was a mere two billion years old. Far around the rim of that second crater, they switched to the rugged rim wall of a third. From it they made their way to a zigzag chain of low rocky hills. At every deep shadow or hint of an opening they surveyed with portable ground-penetrating radar.

  And, time and again, they found nothing.

  Bounding
like kangaroos across crater floors, they would have reached their goal in minutes—while leaving, in the eons-deep dust, an unmistakable trail of boot prints. Instead, sticking to the rockiest, most uneven terrain, they spent over an hour reaching the sinuous rille, hundreds of klicks long, that was their goal. They followed the ancient trench until it became roofed over.

  Eons ago, a river of magma had flowed here. Where molten rock had drained from its stony conduit, it left behind a natural cavern. Places the tube had subsequently collapsed became valleys. Where the tube penetrated deeply enough beneath the lunar surface, not even the endless hail of meteoroids had brought down the roof.

  Every deep lava tube offered a haven from radiation and celestial bombardment—and prying eyes.

  Joshua peered into an opening. He said, “Looks like every other lava tube.”

  “It would,” Carl reminded him. “Anything unusual will be deep inside, out of sight.”

  Portable radar revealed nothing unusual within.

  Flashlights showed nothing, either.

  After half a klick’s hike into the tube without finding anything, they turned back.

  “Eleven down,” Joshua grumbled.

  • • • •

  Site twelve was as unnoteworthy. Returning from that trek, leaving their rental vehicle parked on the rail siding, they fit in a much needed meal and a few hours of sleep. Site thirteen showed boot scuffs, several recent bore holes where someone had taken core samples, and the broken tip of a drill bit: an unknown prospector’s half-hearted mineral survey.

  In the foothills of Montes Carpatus, almost one hundred klicks to the north of Crater Copernicus, nestled candidate site fourteen. There, in permanent shadow, deep inside an ancient lava tube, they encountered a metal bulkhead. Set into that wall was an air lock.

  • • • •

  Two layers down in the bountiful freezer, excavating steaks and lobster tails, Joshua’s gut began rumbling. The camping meals he and Carl had lived on for days tasted like cardboard. Rehydrated, they tasted like soggy cardboard.

  “Do you suppose they keep an inventory?” Joshua asked.

  “Leave stuff exactly as you find it,” Carl reminded, busy searching the shelter’s other room. So far everything there had looked mundane, too. Life support, power-distribution panel with backup batteries (chiding himself in a stage whisper for not spotting solar panels up above; they had to be out there, somewhere), a pair of 3-D printers, a cabinet/closet, battered furniture—all of it, if sometimes on the antique side, quite ordinary. Rather than uncovering an ancient alien outpost, it appeared they were merely trespassing.

  Joshua lifted out a stack of meal boxes. “This freezer must hold hundreds of meals. You want me to check them all?”

  “For now, just sample—by which I mean X-ray, not eat. Look for anything out of place. Make sure you get all the way to the bottom.”

  Before his hands froze, Joshua changed for awhile to checking out other parts of his assigned room. Beneath the mattress of the neatly made-up cot. Inside the cabinet. In the single drawer slung beneath the lone, scarred, lunarcrete table.

  “Carl, I found an old pocket computer. And the odd thing? No wireless interface. The socket for it is empty.”

  “Human made?”

  “Yeah, as far as I can tell. With more capacity than my implant, but nothing unusual.”

  “Okay. Keep looking.”

  Humming to himself, Joshua went back to excavating the freezer. Until—

  “Gotcha!” Carl announced.

  “What?”

  “Something worth booby-trapping. Come see.”

  In the back room, Carl had sprung a disguised door. What had seemed like a wall panel now gaped into the room. Beyond the opening, extending for at least thirty meters, was a passageway lined on both sides with enigmatic equipment. Where that equipment did not block Joshua’s view, the walls, floor, and ceiling were a rich, mottled green. Copper, he surmised. Compared to this tunnel lining, the Statue of Liberty—three centuries weathered—was pristine.

  How old was this place?

  “What’s all this?” Joshua asked, camera in hand, panning through the doorway.

  “I have no idea.” Ducking his head, Carl stepped into the passage. “Something worth protecting. The latch was rigged to go boom.”

  He stopped after about five paces. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “I can quit beating myself up over not finding solar panels. To judge from these coil configurations, this is a fusion reactor. Apart from the coils, though, I don’t recall ever seeing a fusor like it. I know I’ve never seen a unit as compact.”

  “Intervener?”

  “Insufficient information.” Carl continued along the passage. Coming to the end, he looked to his left. And flinched.

  “What?”

  “Remember me mentioning a coffinlike sculpture of Banak’s?” Hiding in plain sight. Sitting in his workshop, just another artsy-fartsy construction in a room full of them. Who would have given it a second thought? I didn’t.

  “The one he blew up?”

  “And almost me with it.” Carl pointed at something recessed behind the last equipment rack. “I don’t know whose shelter this is, but they have two empty ‘coffins’ just like the unit Banak had.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “Carl, thank you for coming in,” Helena Strauss said. Her office could have been an executive suite anywhere.

  Carl scarcely recognized her as the young woman who had called the intermission in his welcome-to-Earth inquisition. Her tailored suit had been replaced with a typical Loonie jumpsuit. Her hair hung loosely down around her shoulders. On Earth, she had moved gingerly; here, she was as graceful as a lynx. She just seemed at ease, whether from the genial gravity—with which Carl could relate—or because the Armstrong City UPIA complex was her small pond. Or, he dared to hope, because the inquest into Danica’s death and the surrounding events had cleared him of wrongdoing.

  None of those theories stopped him from wondering why Strauss had been on Earth when Carl had, kind of, met her. Or whether, somehow, his summons here had had something to do with his extracurricular activities. He and Joshua had stayed offline, in theory untraceable, throughout their outing. By the time, approaching Tycho City, he had rejoined the infosphere and retrieved Strauss’s message, he hadn’t had much time to back-trace for clues he and Joshua might have left to their recent activities. As it was, he had almost been late to his “appointment.”

  “What can I do for you, Agent Strauss?” he asked.

  “Helena.” She indicated a chair at the office’s oval conference table, and then took a seat herself. “Off the big rock, we’re informal. How goes your downtime?”

  “Interesting place, the Moon.” He would not have volunteered more than that if his purpose were a holiday. Gracious manner be damned, Helena had not called him in just to chat—not while dropping station chief into her summons—nor had her curt message offered any information. Of course, if the Agency hadn’t tasked someone to keep tabs on him, he would have been surprised.

  “You’ve been keeping interesting company,” she said.

  With cameras all over public places on the Moon, he hadn’t expected his encounters with Joshua to go unnoticed. He still hoped that their recent excursion remained off the grid. “Is that so?”

  “Joshua Matthews. Really? He’s the butt of jokes across the Solar System.”

  “He was approachable,” Carl improvised, “and I wanted to meet his grandmother. I imagined her take on the Snakes would be interesting. I did get to meet Joyce, but in the main I’ve been hanging out with Joshua. He turns out to be a nice guy.”

  “When sober, perhaps.” Helena grinned. “Okay, about me asking you in. It’s not about the inquest. That’s ongoing.”

  He waited.

  “Your reporter buddy has shown up in Saturn system. I know you’ve been trying to contact her.”

  Unable to reach Corinne while on his long flight to Ea
rth, he had radioed back to Ariel to have his message relayed through the base’s high-powered transmitter. Helena knowing about that indicated the inquest had reached out to Uranus and his erstwhile colleagues. That had been bound to happen; the only question had been how long it would take.

  “Is Corinne safe?” he asked.

  “She’s fine.” Leaning forward, Helena folded her arms on the table. “I wouldn’t take her silent treatment personally. Best guess is she ignored all contacts rather than acknowledge a stay-away message.”

  “That sounds like Corinne,” he agreed.

  The public Corinne. He knew that her planned visit to Discovery, the starship nearing completion, was mere cover to make her trip to Ariel—to recruit him—less noteworthy. She ought to have been glad to be turned away. Why hadn’t she taken the opportunity?

  “There was a construction accident aboard Discovery,” Strauss went on. “Resolved soon enough, without permanent damage, but dramatic. Onsite investigators canceled press access.”

  “And a journalist was determined to see it anyway? Shocking.”

  “I suppose not.” Strauss straightened. “Consider this update a professional courtesy. Till project security decides what to do with your party-crashing friend—quite likely ordering her back to Earth—she’s not being allowed comm privileges. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Does courtesy extend to letting me send a message to Corinne?”

  “Afraid not.”

  It hadn’t hurt to ask. “I appreciate it, Helena. The update, that is. Don’t quote me, but shipping Corinne straight home sounds like a great idea.”

  Because her pilot looks more and more like an Intervener agent.

  Yet again, Carl was tempted. With access to Agency resources, how much more might he learn about the hidden base?

  And once again, Robyn’s recorded warning—and the implausible coincidence of her assassination and her backups disappearing—silenced him. Security had been compromised. Despite media yowling and politicians posturing, the Agency had yet to indicate any progress in their investigation.

  For all that, Strauss hadn’t had to share the news of Corinne’s safe arrival. He was only in her office because the station chief expected a favor in return. “What is it you want to know?”