“More like they’re shut off,” Anju said.
“You’re all on the ship’s air?” Jeph asked.
“Da,” Rocky said. “We are open faceplate.”
“Then, if it’s a power failure on his suit, he should still be breathing,” the doctor said.
“Any chance that the ConDeck has RF shielding?” Jeph asked.
“Would be possible, but is not standard design,” Rocky said, handing her tools to Chei and pointing at the connections she wanted him to finish. “Stay here and complete this work.”
He nodded, visibly biting back on an argument. He stuck his head into the open access panel and started splicing the remaining connectors into place.
“I’m not liking this,” Seva said. “I don’t think he’d have gone in and then locked the door behind him.”
“Agreed. What is your location now?” Rocky asked, bounding headlong up the gangway. “I am on my way. Wait for me.”
“I’m outside the main door to the ConDeck.”
“I will be there in fifteen seconds,” Rocky said. “We will enter together.”
Bouncing off the deck plating at the end of the short corridor, she could see Seva had her gun in her hand and looked nervous. “I am approaching from behind you.” Better to announce her arrival than to risk friendly fire.
“Is there another way in?” the captain asked.
“Ventilation ducts and service conduit behind main computer,” Rocky said, skidding to a stop against the hatch.
“One of you cover the service conduit,” he said. “And the other one reset your torch to cut that door open.”
Rocky grabbed the handgun from Seva’s hand and twisted the power setting until it was back in its standard position. She flipped the end off and dropped it. “After you complete cuts here,” she pointed to three spots on the bars holding the door closed, “replace aperture and reset the torch to pulse mode. You are too big to get into conduit. I will be in position in one minute or less.”
“Ja,” Seva said, stepping to the door and firing up the torch. Sparks rained down in a slow cascade as Rocky was running again.
“I’ve pulled up the ship schematics and it looks like there’s an emergency airlock on the ConDeck too,” Jeph said.
“Da,” Rocky confirmed. “But is sixty meters below surface. Cannot be opened, hatch swings outward.”
“So that’s out,” he said.
Rocky hurled herself toward the entrance to the conduit. It was against what had been the deck and now was the ceiling. She grabbed the edge of the panel and pried it loose with her fingers to send it flying. She slithered into the tunnel and flew toward the ConDeck.
“Am almost in position,” she said. “When you are ready, I will enter under helm station near middle of room.”
“Copy,” Seva said. “Two bars cut and I’ll bend the third one.” She grunted and her mic picked up the sound of twisting metal.
“Remind me to never piss that woman off,” Danel said.
“That’s pure adrenaline,” Anju offered.
“So remind me never to scare her, and then piss her off,” he said.
“Lights are off inside,” Rocky whispered.
“Copy,” Seva said, letting out a blast of air that rattled her mic. “On your signal,” she said.
“Now!”
In the next instant, the engineer watched a human torpedo flash past. “Blyad!” she swore as Seva rocketed across the room, spinning like a bullet. Her lights tracked everything in a dizzying spiral.
“He’s not here,” Seva said, bouncing off one of the display screens and exploding it into a million pieces of sparkling debris. Her magboots snapped into place and she stopped in a standing position on the ceiling deck.
“Do not do that again,” Rocky said, crawling out of the conduit. She swept the room once with her handbeam then added, “I concur. He is not on ConDeck.”
“Still no telemetry for him, but I do see you both,” Anju said. “The ConDeck isn’t shielded.”
“Check the emergency airlock,” the captain said.
“Behind that panel,” the engineer said, pointing with her light to a position beside Seva. “If possible, try not to destroy door this time.”
“Sorry,” she said, being gentle with the panel. Behind it, a small hatch stood open. Her suit lights showed that there was nothing inside the lock. She pushed through and looked around.
“No power,” she reported. She slammed herself against the manual release for the outer door. “It’s not moving.”
“Encased in ice,” Rocky said.
“And there is no other way out of there?”
“Negative,” she said.
“He can’t have just vanished,” Seva said.
“And gravity can’t be a weapon either,” Danel said.
“Truth,” the captain said. “Alyx says that Chei has the last of the connections completed. For now, all of you need to get back to the ship.”
“We should stay and continue search,” Rocky said.
“Negative,” Jeph said. “Once we have the sensors calibrated and working, we’ll use them to look for him.”
“But sir —”
“That is an order,” he said, cutting her off. “Cori can kick all our asses in a fair fight and if someone down there took him out without him getting a word off, they’ve got to be a lot more badass than he is.”
“Seva and I can do this,” she said.
“No, I will not risk your lives until we know what we’re looking at,” he said. “Pull out now.”
“Yes sir,” Rocky said, looking at Seva and nodding toward the door. From her expression, she could tell that for once they were in agreement.
Armstrong: Outbound Approaching 1.5 AU:
Under acceleration, the entire ship had gravity. Down was toward the stern and the ConDeck was at the top of a mountainous skyscraper. When the ship was in freefall, only the spin section had gravity and that pointed outward at a right angle to the line of thrust. It meant the floor configuration that Katryna learned while the Armstrong was in halo orbit around Galileo no longer made sense.
The giant spinning torus had rooms that hung from swinging mounts and a floor remained a floor when under acceleration although the doorways changed where they led. It was impossibly confusing even to a veteran of FleetCom service and had resulted in more than one embarrassing moment as she had to stop and ask for directions from her quarters to the mess hall or any of the other places where she needed to go. The AA and its guidance lights helped some, but on more than one occasion it seemed to be confused too.
“I don’t know who the hell came up with this movable floors idea, but he should be forced to live here and deal with it for all eternity,” she said as she and Nakamiru made their way to her quarters. He was escorting her back from the officer’s mess and seemed almost as lost as she was.
“It sounded like a good idea when I proposed it,” he said, looking down at the floor and frowning. “I did not expect it to end up working quite this way though.”
“What were you thinking?” she asked, “This is insane.”
“We talked about a design with rooms that had two floor orientations, but when the ship transitions from thrust to spin, we’d need a huge percentage of the crew dedicated to just rearranging the furniture,” he said. “The standard charter profile for the Armstrong is for long-term fixed deployment. It is intended to be a portable base of operations more than a ship of the line. We anticipated having one crew trained for transit and then another would shuttle in to handle things once it got on location.”
“So it’s just our luck that we’ve got one crew having to do double duty,” she said, stopping as he pointed to a door. Somehow, he’d managed to lead her to her quarters.
“Exactly,” he said, following her in and waiting for her to sit.
“This brings us to a discussion we need to have. Have you decided where we are going?” he asked, settling onto a chair and leaning forward to rest his
arms on his legs. “Even at a half-g, we’re still piling on velocity.”
“Going nowhere fast, aren’t we?” she said, nodding.
“Nothing says we need to set our course for an existing station,” he said. “We can operate in the deep-system for an extended period. Easily in excess of ten years if need be.”
“I know, but we can’t do that,” she said. “Every minute we hide gives Tomlinson more time to consolidate power. He’s been building a war fleet. We need to muster our allies and make preparations to stop him.”
“Agreed, but so far we’ve got three multicruisers and the Armstrong,” he said. “We’ve probably got a fair underground following too, but Jeffers is right, they won’t survive long when he starts strangling them.”
“We need to set a rally point and go from there,” she said. “I think Mimas makes sense, since we’re generally bound for Saturn already. It’s small and far enough from anywhere to make it costly for them to attack.”
“SourceCartel manages most of the facilities there,” he said. “They’ll report us as soon as we enter the system.”
“And if they’re planning to make it a fight, we stay just long enough to lure them out of hiding and then we move on,” she said. “We might not need reaction mass when we get there, but the rest of our fleet will and it won’t hurt to tank up ourselves.”
“Divide and conquer?”
“Even if we can’t conquer, drawing them into the light can’t hurt in the long run,” she said.
Jakob Waltz: Station-keeping Above Hector Landing Site: L-4 Prime:
“How much longer before you can go live?” the captain asked from his station on the EVAOpsDeck.
“We’re dealing with an odd discontinuity,” Alyx said. “It might be an artifact of the Hector’s AI trying to maintain control of the sensors.”
“Once I am done with the isolator routines, I will be able to bring the system online,” Dutch answered. “Another thirty seconds.”
“Time is critical,” Jeph said.
“I’m doing the best I can, but this is hammered together,” Alyx said, a flash of resentment kicking acid into her tone. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “We weren’t expecting the need to rush into this.”
“I know,” he said, floating up to give her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Just do what you can.”
“First thing that will come up is the basic electromagnetic receiver,” she said. “It’s the least sophisticated hardware and we might get lucky, since he was wearing an exosuit under his EVA gear. His suit has a separate power supply which might give us a detectable controller signal to lock onto.”
“Just tell me if I should send them back down,” he said.
She watched the sensor screens load as the interface came online. After several seconds, she shook her head. “He’s either not in his suit or he’s not in the Hector.”
“Are you sure it’s working?” Jeph asked.
“Yah,” she said. “I can pick up the RF from the internal grid of the ship but there’s nothing other than the base system frequencies. His suit has to be offline.”
“We’re negative on Cori’s suit,” Jeph said into the com. “Lock down the pods and come on in.”
“Unfortunately, there’s no biosensor component in the Hector’s kit,” Alyx said. “It’s like the one we’re carrying. Pure physical sciences.”
“The sensor hardware on the Hector has a wider range than the HDA we had, but is not as sophisticated,” Dutch said.
“It’s older,” Jeph said.
“It has a much lower resolution and is not dynamic,” it said. “Additionally we have limited uplink bandwidth, so integration of data is much slower.”
“I understand,” he said.
A new line appeared on the screen as Dutch delivered more data. It danced across the bottom of Alyx’s display. “That’s odd. It looks like the motion sensing interferometers are picking up a low-frequency humming coming from the ice around the ship.”
“Humming?” Shona asked from where she sat at her navigation console.
“Yah. Like … well, like humming,” she said, shrugging. “Vibration. A fairly substantial one too. But it doesn’t look like it’s coming from inside the Hector.”
“Is it the same thing that Kiro got with the seismograph?” Danel asked. “He thought it was a thermal pump motor.”
“Way too intense to be the pump in the seismo,” she said. She tapped an icon and loaded the data from the unit they set on their first landing party and overlaid them on each other. “It’s the same sound.”
“That might be a natural occurrence,” Danel said. “There’s a big volcanic field on earth where people used to report hearing the steam rising before it reached the surface. When I first looked at the ice, I noticed all these little fissures and geysers. Those could be vibrating as the gas seeps out.”
“It could be ice sublimating,” she agreed. “But there is no time base correction on the graph. The seizmo is 250 meters from the Hector. Wouldn’t there be some phase delay?”
“You’d think so,” Danel said. “It could be a wide reservoir of cryofluid. That would create a wave damping region that might—”
“Let’s save the science debate until we’ve recovered our crewman,” Jeph said. “Would these motion-sensing interferometers be able to detect someone moving around inside the Hector?”
“They’re sensitive enough to detect angstroms of motion,” she said. “I’m sure they’d detect him walking, if he was using his maglocks. Otherwise, it might be hard to pick out of the hum.”
Another line appeared on her sensor readout. This one translated into a three-dimensional shape. “What is that?” Jeph asked.
“That should be Standing Wave Resonance,” she said. “But that doesn’t look right. Not at all.” She leaned forward and tapped in commands. The image changed slightly, but the shape never altered. “Is this calibrated right?”
“It is,” Dutch said.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said, leaning back and dragging the image around on her screen.
“What’s wrong with it?” Jeph asked, pulling himself in closer to study it. It looked like a cluster of black grapes.
“We use the SWR sensors to determine the internal structure of ice,” she said. “It works a little like medical magnetic resonance imagery, but instead of magnetic fields, it senses minute fluctuations in mass density by detecting gravitational variation. It basically lets us see through solid objects.”
“Right, I know the basics,” the captain said. “So what’s the problem?”
“Normally it can see through anything,” she said, drumming her fingers on the arm of her seat and chewing on her lip. She shook her head and looked at Danel. “Can you think of anything that would give us an impenetrable hard bounce on SWR?”
“No,” he said, crowding in between her seat back and Jeph, to look at the screen. “That’s impossible.”
“Then I’m thinking we’ve got something impossibly solid down there,” she said. “And whatever it is, it’s frakking huge.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Archer: Trans Ceres Orbit: 310 million kilometers from Galileo
Captain Nathaniel Evanston sat in his ready room, with his feet extended and his hands tucked behind his head. Loosely tethered to his seat, he almost floated as he tried to relax. It wasn’t helping that the chaos down-system was spinning up into a full-on typhoon and the idea of resting was becoming a fool’s dream. Four days ago, Admiral Nakamiru ordered the Archer to blackwall all com traffic not coming directly through FleetCom channels, but his position as a Fleet Operations Captain left him with access to the newswave, even while it kept his crew in the dark.
“Sir, we’ve got new orders coming in,” Anson Hayes face appeared on his com screen, looking more than a little concerned. “FleetCom is ordering a course change.”
“Is there a problem with it?” Evanston asked. Pulling his feet down and anchoring his maglocks to the deck, h
e sat up to face his first officer.
“The orders are irregular,” he said. “They’re coming through Lunar L-2 and are signed by Admiral Quintana, but it has him listed as acting Fleet Operations Commander.”
“Ah, got it,” he said, nodding. “Set the heading with helm, then report to my ready room before we make way. I think it’s time I bring you up to speed.”
“Yes sir,” he said, cutting the link.
Evanston pushed away from his desk and opened the small locker where he kept his personal supply of rum. Grabbing the bottle, he shot two drinking tubes full and brought them back over to his desk as his first officer appeared at the door. He handed one drink to Anson and nodded for him to take a seat.
“Does this have to do with the special upgrades we were getting at Ceres Alpha?” Hayes asked, floating over and anchoring himself in place.
“Probably that too,” the captain said. “Where are they sending us?”
“Mimas Station,” he said. “Best speed.”
Evanston settled into his seat and nodded. “That makes sense, it’s a FleetCom shipyard. After that hard burn chasing the ship that kidnapped Ariqat, that will put us short on reaction mass, won’t it?”
“We’ll be running on vapors, but we’ll make it,” Hayes said. He slugged down the tube of rum and blinked once as it hit bottom. “So what the frag is going on? First the orders to mount guns on the ship, then the com blackwall, and now Quintana’s in charge of fleet operations. None of this makes any kind of sense and a lot of the crew is getting twitchy.”
“I’m sure they are,” the captain said, pitching him the bottle. “The truth is probably stranger than the rumors they’re telling themselves.”
“If you say so,” he said, filling his tube and tossing the rum back.
“Three days ago, Chancellor Roja was arrested.”
Hayes laughed. “That’s a joke, right?”
Evanston shook his head. “Admiral Nakamiru sent word out in advance. They knew it was going to happen several days before it did, but were hoping to avoid it. He said they suspected a coup was coming for more than a month, and they were trying to get some assets strategically positioned, just in case. When Derek Tomlinson accused the Chancellor of high treason against the Union and three counts of murder, he forced their hand. She was in house-arrest aboard the Armstrong until Galileo Security tried to take her into custody, about thirty-six hours ago.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 26