“Tried to take her? They didn’t?”
“No. She’s still aboard the Armstrong with Nakamiru,” he said. “They ran over a security cordon and escaped. The Prime Minister declared her an enemy of the state and ordered her arrest. She specifically warned FleetCom not to help her.”
“Where the hell does that leave us?” Hayes asked, looking at his tube of rum and shaking his head. “Both sides of this one stink like a blown recycler.”
“Yah, no doubt about that,” Evanston said. “The question is, if you’ll smell like shit in either case, would you rather do it for the right reason or the safe one?”
“So this is the moment of truth, isn’t it?” Hayes said. “If we make for Mimas, we’re joining the rebellion.”
“Probably so,” he said, shrugging. “That’s why I wanted to tell you what was going on. If they allow us to make port at Ceres Alpha, Lukas Rodriguez will chain us down tight. After the mess the Challenger and Galen made—”
“What mess?”
“They threatened to cut their way out in a full-on gunfight,” the captain said. “We might not even be allowed to tie off to tank up.”
“Then I guess the decision was made for us before we got the orders, wasn’t it?” Hayes said.
“We could always sit it out by letting them lock us up,” Evanston said. “This will blow over once the power grab is over down-system.” Watching his first officer slam his tube of rum, he could tell that idea didn’t sit well. Not well at all.
“Damn it all,” Hayes said. “Why did you have to be right?”
“About what?”
“The reality is far worse than the rumors,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll go give the orders to make way.”
Jakob Waltz: Station-keeping Above Hector Landing Site: L-4 Prime:
“I’ve got motion on the interferometer,” Alyx said, slapping her hand down on the console icon to feed the data to the main screen. She’d been staring at the sensor readouts, without moving, for the last eight hours. “A lot. A gawdawful lot. Like somebody is moving the furniture around.”
Another line jumped. “That’s an actuator signal!” Alyx said, nearly squealing. “It’s his suit.”
“Cori, is that you?” Shona asked, by sheer luck of being the first one to key into the comlink.
“Copy, Shona,” he said. “Where is everybody?”
“They’re all back on the Waltz. Where have you been?” she asked.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “Was in a dark hole and when I woke up I …” He paused for several seconds and the interferometer signal jumped repeatedly.
“Are you still there?” the captain asked after several seconds of silence. “What’s going on?”
“Yah boss. Sorry, I’ve got my hands full,” he said. “Can you send Seva down in the shuttlepod? I’ve got a present for you.”
“Copy,” the captain said, turning around in time to see Seva’s feet disappear as she vaulted toward the EVAOpsDeck. “Say again? A present?”
“Yah. Truth,” he said. “Oh, and I think I need the doctor on standby for when we get up there.”
“You’re injured,” Anju jumped toward the chute, but paused. She appeared uncertain whether she should head after Seva or down to the MedBay.
“Negative on that. It’s not for me,” Cori said. “At this point, I’d say it’s safe to assume that Doctor Whitewind is seriously nutty as a poundcake. I had to thump his braincase to get him to behave.”
Armstrong: Outbound Approaching 1.5 AU:
Katryna’s com traffic slowed to a crawl. Everything she received was coming through Lunar L-2, since Quintana was officially still part of the Union. He was their eyes on what was going on, while they ran dark and deep, toward Saturn and the uncertain future.
She sat thumbing back and forth through the screens on her thinpad when Admiral Nakamiru walked into the private lounge where a week before he had arrested her.
Barely a week and my whole universe has changed.
She glanced up and realized he was studying her. “Do you need something?” she asked.
“No, but I am betting you do,” he said, sitting down across from her.
“I’m thinking something is missing here,” she said, putting her thinpad down and closing the screen.
“If you are thinking it is scotch, I laid in ten cases to your personal stores a week before things went sidewise,” he said, grinning strangely. He didn’t drink much, if at all, and it surprised her he’d thought of it.
“That’s a kindness,” she said, winking, “but that’s not it. I’m wondering why we haven’t received an update from the Jakob Waltz? That has me more than a little concerned.”
“Indeed,” he said. “With all the chaos, remembering to worry about that situation has been lost in the shuffle.”
“Jaxton wouldn’t have forgotten to flag it would he?” she asked.
“Quintana never forgets anything,” he said. “He’s got Tomlinson and the Council up his butt with a telescope, but I am sure he’s got the com-relay side of things firmly anchored to a procedural process.”
“Then that leaves me more worried than the possibility that he’d have missed it in the storm,” she said. “If they’re not reporting in, maybe they’ve been taken or had to do the dirty.”
“That could be,” he said, looking like she’d dumped bricks on him. “It might also be that they’ve been listening to the newswave propaganda and don’t know who to trust. You told them enough to realize they are literally the fulcrum point in what is going on. Even if they want to trust us, they don’t know where to report or if it will make things worse.”
“That makes sense and is far less scary,” she said, feeling her sense of dread lift slightly. “If I could be sure it wouldn’t get intercepted, I’d send them some light. It’s got to be dark where they are too.”
Jakob Waltz: Orbiting L-4 Prime:
Anju completed her exam of Cori and released him back to active duty while they boosted back into a real orbit. They could have hung in station-keeping mode for months or even years, but there was no use burning reaction mass to do what they could accomplish for free on inertia.
Rocky fabricated three small repeaters and they launched them into a higher orbital plane near the gradient shelf that pinned the buoy in orbit. They still didn’t know what caused the threshold, but if they pushed the repeaters up against it, they would orbit above them and provide continuous coverage of the Hector site and the Jakob Waltz no matter where they were relative to each other.
After completing the deployment, Jeph finally arrived at the MedBay to check on their new passenger.
“He’s in surprisingly good shape, all things considered. Other than the bruised ribs and the broken nose,” Anju said as he settled against the windowsill and looked into the diagnostic chamber.
“Well, Cori did him some bodily harm. A good thing he’s a mesomorph or he’d be a lot more beat up,” Jeph said. “Makes me glad that I’ve never pissed off Cori.”
She shrugged. “Physically, he’ll heal.”
“So can we wake him up?”
“It might be better to let him wake up on his own,” she said. “I have concerns about his brain scan. It’s a bit unusual.”
“Unusual how?”
She opened a screen and an image of his brain appeared. “He’s obviously been through an emotional trauma,” she said. “There’s a medical condition called Traumatic Stress Deformation. It’s a physiological brain malformation that happens in some cases of acute psychological or emotional stress. It’s like neurological scar tissue in the brain. When a patient suffers this kind of trauma, the brain will attempt to rewire itself around the places where painful memories are stored.”
“And he has this condition?”
“Perhaps,” she said. She touched the image on the front of the left hemisphere and the image zoomed in. “This is the Broca Region of the inferior frontal lobe. It usually controls cognitive speech function.
What I’m seeing here is an abnormal activity that resembles a low-level continuous seizure. I’ve never seen anything like this, but I think it’s likely the result of trauma. This region is also showing abnormally high levels of blood flow and I can’t even guess why. He’s medicated to the point where he should be exhibiting deep sleep patterns, but it looks like this part of his brain is wide awake.”
“Could it be a product of his being completely cut off for eleven years?” he asked.
“That could be part of it, but we’ve got a lot of case history of people who’ve endured long periods of isolation and this is an unusual presentation. I believe something else is going on here.”
“Will it make him dangerous?” he asked. “Since he’s a meso, maybe we should get Cori in here to be safe.”
“I doubt this kind of condition would make him violent because it’s localized to this one region of his brain,” she said, “but it might be better to have Seva standby if you want a guard on him. No use provoking a reaction, since he and Cori already had some traumatic interaction.”
“Do you know how long he’ll be out?” Jeph asked.
“No clue,” she said. “I dosed him hard trying to get the Broca Region to quit showing overvoltage seizures but even though the rest of his body is clocked out, his brain just won’t quit.”
He turned to look back into the chamber. She had him strapped down to the heavy anchors. “It’s not just me who thinks he looks pretty sturdy for someone who’s been living in near weightlessness for eleven years?”
“That’s one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, tapping her screen and bringing up an image of his full body scan. “His muscles and circulatory system show no atrophy. He’s also got no bone loss whatsoever. Even a meso sheds calcium from bones with long-term light gravity.”
“How’s that possible?”
“Because he hasn’t been living in a light gravity environment,” she said, leaning back against her console and gripping the edge. Her face told him that she expected him not to believe her.
And she was right.
“Talk to Cori,” she said. “When he was inside, wherever he spent the last day, he swears there was earth normal gravity.”
“That just means they’ve got a spin hub in the base down there,” Jeph said.
“He was adamant it wasn’t spin-grav,” she said. “Cori‘s been to earth and said you can tell because there’s no Coriolis effect to it. He said it was mass gravity.”
“That’s not possible,” Jeph said.
“It’s not possible with our technology,” she said, lowering her voice and looking down at the floor.
“Our technology?” he asked, stifling a desire to laugh. “What other kind of technology is there?”
“That’s a good question now, isn’t it?” she said, looking back up at him with a level gaze.
He was still laughing when he pushed through the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jakob Waltz: Orbiting L-4 Prime:
Alyx floated near the VAT holding her cup and looking longingly at the hardball icon on the display. Jeph could feel her pain. Even though he’d ignored it for the most part, until recently Anju had him on restricted stim intake too. He punched the button for her holding a finger to his lips in an unspoken promise of silence.
“We can’t image anything more than a kilometer below the surface anywhere, all the way to the horizon,” she said, winking in gratitude as she turned back to her workstation.
“Makes no sense. SWR should penetrate ice with no issue,” Rocky said.
“Agreed,” she said, putting a graphic of the sensor data up on the main screen. “Whatever is reflecting the signal has created this barrier we can’t see over. As a result, the sensor shadow creates a hard horizon at seven kilometers. Other than one anomalous spot nine klick to the west we can’t see anything else.”
“To call it a reflection is a misnomer,” Dutch corrected. “There is something inside the ice that is absorbing the pulse.”
“And you’ve ruled out sensor failure?” Jeph asked.
“I do not think it is possible for it to be a sensor issue,” Dutch said, managing to sound insulted. “The depth of the scan is limited, but the algorithms I have developed to compensate for the transmission issues, all show similar results.”
“What is it then?” Jeph asked, floating over and taking the empty pilot’s seat.
“Who knows?” She shrugged. “It’s like we’re hitting a wall.”
“Or falling over an event horizon of some form?” Danel suggested, glancing at Chei. “I don’t think anyone’s ever used SWR to look at a black hole?”
“I don’t think so either,” Chei agreed. “Although my money would be on pockets of quantum quicksand. It’s possible whatever’s creating it starts out with bubbles of distorted space and that’s what we’re seeing.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” Danel said. “There could be some kind of facility under it that we can’t see.”
“Can we extrapolate anything from the shape of the bubbles?” Jeph asked.
“They look like a cluster of grapes,” Shona said.
“That helps a lot,” Alyx said, shaking her head. “It’s a cosmic fruit bowl.”
Shona stuck her tongue out and made an obscene sound. “That can’t be natural can it?”
“Grapes are natural,” Dutch said. “However, I would concur that this may be an artificial construct. The portions of the sphere surfaces we can see appear to be uniform in size and distribution.”
“What’s the cone-shaped thing under the Hector?” Jeph asked.
“A dead zone in the sensors,” Alyx said. “Might be damage from when the ship went in. We can’t get anything to image that region, but it looks like a failed component and not like the rest of the impenetrable shell.”
“Alright, then what about this thing sticking up way out there?” he asked, pointing to the anomalous shape that protruded over the edge of the map.
“That looks to be another one of the spheres, but it extends upward far enough to be visible above the sensor shadow created by the structures below the Hector,” Alyx explained.
“Maybe it’s a tower?”
“There appears to be a connecting superstructure beneath the area,” Dutch said, zooming the image in to show a spiral framework below it.
“Does it stick out of the ice?” Jeph asked. “I don’t remember seeing anything like that on the optical imagery.”
“Negative. It’s under the equatorial upthrust ridge,” Dutch said. “It is a substantial structure, however. The sphere itself is approximately one kilometer in diameter.”
“If we can’t figure out what the hell it is from the sensors, can we bore down to this barrier or whatever it is?” the captain asked.
“We could drop a TICS and let it melt a shaft through the ice until it hits the wall,” Chei suggested.
“TICS are not designed to bore tunnels,” Rocky said.
“They aren’t designed to explode either,” Chei said. “I can make it work.”
“There’ll be structural problems going that deep,” Danel said. “The ice isn’t consistent density and might not hold. We’ll also be fighting the steam vent causing the walls of the shaft to soften and degrade. Then once it gets past a certain depth, the sublimated ice will refreeze and might seal the opening. If that happens, it will build pressure and blow out.”
“Would solve problem, would it not?” Rocky said, grinning.
“What would be the maximum depth we could bore?” Jeph asked.
“Pulling numbers out of deep space?” Danel scratched his chin. “The ice is water, methane, carbon-dioxide, nitrogen, and ammonia. Given the ambient temp, we’d probably be able to get 500 meters give or take.”
“If we call that the hard depth limit, are there any places we can see, where it’s shallow enough?” the captain asked.
“The area in the vicinity of the Hector is all well beyond the l
imit,” Dutch said. “However, the tower appears to come within less than 150 meters of the surface.”
“Then I think we should give it a shot,” he said.
“Before we do, it might be worth remembering that we could be drilling into an enemy base of some kind,” Danel said. “Just because some people don’t hold much respect for former Chancellor Roja, doesn’t mean she wasn’t right about this thing being full of hostile bad guys.”
“How long will it take to melt a shaft that far down into the ice?” Jeph asked.
Danel shrugged, looking at Chei for an answer.
“We’d have to be careful not to burn down too fast and risk caving in the tunnel,” Chei said. “Days at least, maybe weeks.”
“Then I’d say, we’re in no rush to figure out what to do if we poke a stick into the hornet’s nest,” the captain said. “It seems they’re all still asleep.”
FleetCartel Executive Offices (Secure Evidence Area): Galileo Station:
Chancellor Tomlinson leaned back in the desk chair that used to belong to Katryna Roja. It amused him to realize that everything Roja once owned, he now held within his power. He often came to her office, pushing past her doors and what was left of her staff, like a king. No one dared challenge his right to be here.
He used her own secure deskcom to confer with Paulson Lassiter. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his console since they had recoded everything after they retrieved her data. This was as secure as anywhere in the universe. “We’ve got assets we need to consider moving onto the playing field,” he said, putting his feet up and smiling.
“It may be premature to do that,” the Steward said, studying the room behind Tomlinson with mild curiosity.
“I disagree,” Derek said. “Right now might be the best time. Roja’s on the run and the council would back the idea of stopping her, at almost any cost.”
“Perhaps,” Lassiter said, shaking his head. “But the public would stand very much against it.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 27