“Helm, could we make that rendezvous?”
“Yes sir,” the navigator said. “Won’t be fun, but we can do it. Means jamming the brakes a lot harder, but we’re about ninety-five minutes out from that position.”
“Do we know if the Galen has enough reaction mass left to pull it off?”
“They’re a lot tighter than we are, but probably,” the helmsman said.
“When do we pass the last commit threshold on making that rendezvous?” she asked.
“No more than ten minutes for us. Less than that for the Galen.”
“Understood,” she said, swiveling her chair to look at her com screen. “Get me on visual with Takata on the Galen.”
“He’s waiting for you on channel one,” the com officer said.
“Enjoying the ride, Carter?”
“Not as much as we’re about to, I think,” he said.
“So you think we should do it?”
“No, but if what Ashwell said is true, we don’t have much choice,” Carter said. “I think it’s convenient that they waited to contact us until we were too close to get confirmation from the admiral. I checked and their round trip com delay is just over two hours at this point.”
“Yah and we’re ninety-five from rendezvous. If they’d waited another ten minutes we’d be past the threshold,” she said. “A tight window is a scary place to get stuck.”
“Ours is even smaller. Drop dead for us is in about four minutes. After that we don’t have the mass in the tanks to burn harder. We’re down to under two percent reserve.”
“So do we commit?”
“Yes,” he said. “But let’s widen out, just in case. I’ll swing out 500 klick to your starboard aft. And remember, if it gets ugly, what they don’t know can hurt them. A lot.”
“Agreed,” she said, flipping off the screen and switching back to her local comlink.
“Communications, send the Roswell a confirmation and our ETA. Tell them we’re coming in hard and hot and we need them to be ready to tank us up stat.”
“Yes sir,” the com officer said.
“Helm, plot a course for those coordinates and execute concurrent with the Galen. We want to make sure we get there together.”
“Now it gets interesting.”
Jakob Waltz: Orbiting L-4 Prime:
“Chei and Seva, report to the ConDeck,” the captain’s voice boomed over the com.
When Chei arrived on the deck, it looked like hell was coming unhinged. Rocky was heads-down working at her console and the captain was pacing around behind Alyx. It took work to pace in maglock boots, so it looked more like stomping.
Kiro and Shona were busy prepping for an engine burn and had several control screens around them in a cluster.
Seva came rocketing up the chute and bounced off the ceiling before she snapped her feet into a perfect landing on the deck beside him. She’d obviously been in the shower. She was still pulling her jumpsuit over her upper body.
“We’ve lost the TICS,” the captain said, glancing over his shoulder in their direction.
“Lost it?” Chei said, pushing over to join Alyx at her console.
“Yah, nojo,” she said. “One minute was there and the next, not.”
“Is not blowing steam either,” Rocky said. “Is like TICS shut off.”
“No cando,” Chei said. “The reactor doesn’t turn off. The control rods have to drop back into the core, then the thermal lines have to cool down. Would take a minimum of several hours.”
“Well, nothing is venting out of the hole.” The captain pointed at the image from the optic on the surface to make his point.
“It might have fallen into a cavity and the radiators might not be in contact with anything. Is it still upright?” Chei looked over at Rocky.
“Unknown,” she said. “We are receiving no data on any channels. Is dead.”
“Is the processor functioning at all?” he asked
“Also unknown. All channels are off. Is nothing transmitting on any frequency.”
“What was the last recorded reading on the radiator circuits?” he asked.
“Nominal. 406 Kelvin,” she said.
“Do we know it didn’t fall into a hollow?” he asked, looking at Alyx, who was staring at an image from the GP radar they’d set up at the bore site.
She shook her head. “Doesn’t look like it, but it was within a meter of the barrier.”
“We’d talked about the barrier being a field of some type,” Jeph said. “Maybe it’s close enough for that to be interfering with the telemetry?”
Chei nodded. “That’s a thought, but we should go take a look.”
“I figured you’d say that,” the captain said, nodding to Kiro. He punched into the shipwide com. “All hands prepare for engine burn. We’re going back to station-keeping mode over the borehole site.”
Borehole Site: Surface of L-4 Prime:
The shaft curved slightly as the TICS descended into the ice. Even though almost direct sunlight flooded the entire length, they had to take one pod more than halfway down before they could see the bottom. The heat had melted a shaft more than double the width of a pod, so it wasn’t as tight as it looked on the way down.
Seva carried Chei on the jumpseat of her pod and Kiro hung back on the surface, with Cori dangling from a cable into the mouth of the opening. They were trying not to block the sunlight with the shadow of the second pod, so Kiro kept the tether pulled tight against the side of the shaft.
“I don’t see the TICS down here,” Chei said. “But there‘s definitely something solid down at the bottom.”
“Something solid?” the captain asked. “Could the TICS have hit it and deflected laterally?”
“Could have. The end of the tunnel looks like rock maybe, but the shadow of the pod is making it hard to see. It’s a little darker than the surrounding ice, but even that’s odd looking,” he said. “Seems a lot higher density than most of the ice we’ve seen out here.”
“Can you get a sample?” Jeph asked, “I am sure Danel would like to see it.”
“Cando.” Seva extended one of the pod’s arms backward to anchor the pod to the shaft wall, then brought out the fine tool arm and drilled into the ice. An extraction tube snaked up to collect the scattering debris. “That’s fragging hard ice,” she said. “The bit’s cutting from heat fracturing, not the edge. Real slow.”
“While you’re making snow-cones, unspool me some line, I want to go down to the bottom and see if the boss is right. If the TICS hit rock, it might have skated sidewise on a gas vent.” Chei pushed back from the pod and let himself fall to the end of the tether. “Give me thirty meters slow. Once I am boots down, I’ll need some walking slack.”
The cable unspooled faster than he fell for most of the way. It snapped tight about two meters from the floor and he bounced back against the line. The curve of the shaft allowed him to drag a hand against the side as he slid downward, so he only recoiled a few meters. It was a sloppier landing than he liked, but he was at an easy drop height given the gravity.
“Felt like a hard bounce,” Seva said. “You good?”
“Yah. Got two meters to freefall,” he said. “I will drop to the floor and then you can feed me another ten.”
“Do you see the unit yet?” The captain asked.
“Negative, but it’s pretty dim, and this ice isn’t reflecting much down here. It’s darker than I’d have expected.” He flipped on his suit lights and focused on the wall at the end of the shaft. “The hard end looks like matte-gray smooth stone. Almost like the fused regolith streets in New Hope City.”
“Could be, I guess,” the captain said.
“I am cutting loose and dropping. Seva stand by on feeding more tether until I’m sure where the damn unit is. I don’t want to be tangling up my feet down here while I crawl around.”
“Copy, almost done with the drilling and then I can reposition down if you need more light.”
“Negative. Let me recon thi
s first,” he said. Reaching up to his clip, he cut loose and allowed the feeble gravity to drag him down. “Bombs away.”
He reached out to cushion his landing, twisting as he fell. As he touched the surface, something grabbed both his hands and jerked him forward, face first into absolute darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Jakob Waltz: Station-keeping Above Borehole Site: L-4 Prime:
Ian had figured it out years ago and once Danel understood what he was trying to say, he saw it instantly. “Ekahta ahn shada-Tacra-Un.”
Gravity is the message of L-4 Prime.
“Frag me,” Danel swore as he stared at the screen. He’d asked Dutch to show him the inertial sensor readouts of the shockwaves and it all made sense. Not precisely gravity, but force. The shockwaves.
“How did we not see that before?”
“See what?” Anju said, looking over his shoulder at the screen.
“The message,” he said, pointing at the display like it should make sense. He spun around. “Are they down there yet?”
“Probably,” she said, shaking her head in confusion.
“We have to get them out of there!” he almost screamed, launching like a missile past her and rocketing upward through the chute.
He bounced to a stop after ricocheting off the ceiling and the floor of the ConDeck, and smashing into the back of Rocky’s seat. She nearly tumbled into her console.
“What is your malfunction?” she said, spinning to glare at him.
“Get them out of there. They’re in danger,” he said.
Jeph twisted in his seat to look at Danel. He shook his head and keyed into the comlink. “Chei, stay alert, Danel says you may be in danger down there.”
“Get them back to the ship,” Danel said.
The captain held a finger up and tapped his mic again. “Chei, do you copy? Danel says you might be in trouble.”
Silence.
“Seva, are you eyes on Chei?”
“Negative. I’m digging ice out of cracks,” she said. “Let me move the pod to check. He’s not on the tether since he wanted to see if the TICS went sidewise down there.”
“They need to get back to the ship,” Danel said.
“Yah, I heard you the first time,” the captain said. “Why?”
“Let me drop on down and get eyeballs on him,” Seva said.
Danel shook his head vigorously.
“Negative on that Seva. Stand by,” he said.
“The shockwaves were a message,” Danel said.
“A message? Like a transmission of some kind?” The captain leaned back and straightened in his seat.
“Not exactly,” he said. “More like a mathematical sequence.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet, but that’s not a weapons lab down there,” he said. “You need to get them out of there. NOW.”
He tapped back into the comlink. “Seva you still can’t see Chei?”
“Negative,” she said. “I see his line, but not him. Like I said, he was looking sidewise for where the TICS slid. He might not have hooked back up yet. I can get all the way down there with the pod.”
“No,” Danel said.
“Is no biometric on Chei’s suit. Is offline,” Rocky said from where the doctor would have been, if she hadn’t been babysitting Dr. Whitewind.
“We’ve lost his signal. Seva pull out. Something’s up and we need to rethink this. Return to the ship.”
“No,” she said. “Respectfully, boss I will not leave one of us behind again.”
“I volunteer to go look for him,” Cori said. “Kiro drop me some line and then I’ll hook over to her pod.”
“I’ll re-anchor to the walls,” Seva said.
“Cori, only go far enough down to see the bottom and whether there are any side drifts. If you don’t see him at that point, you need to make the call. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir,” he said.
Jeph turned around in his seat and drilled Danel with his best hairy eyeball. “Now, you want to tell me what the frag set you off?”
“I think that iceball is like nothing any of us have ever seen before,” he said. “Ian was trying to tell us that the shockwaves were a message. Something designed to get our attention.”
“Never seen before?” Jeph asked.
Anju appeared at the railing, with Ian in tow. Jeph sighed and shook his head “Ah, I get it. She’s been talking to you about her alien intelligence theory.”
“What? No,” he said, blinking in confusion. “But yes. Two hundred years ago, before the collapse, scientists used to spend a lot of time and resources scanning the skies for signs of extrasolar civilizations.”
“Right, I read about that. It was a huge waste of resources,” the captain said.
“Nobody knew what to look for,” Danel explained. “They spent a lot of time debating what a message from an alien world might look like.”
“I am transferring over to pod two,” Cori said over the com.
The captain held up his hand, so he could listen to the exchange from the surface. He pointed at the biometric display and then made two fingers at his eyes, making sure Rocky understood he wanted her staring at the screen.
She nodded.
“How far did you let him drop?” Cori asked.
“Thirty meters,” Seva said.
“Then give me twenty and it’ll keep me clear of the floor,” he said. “If I can’t see anything, we’ll slow feed from there.”
“Under no circumstances do you touch anything down there,” the captain said.
“Copy,” he said.
Jeph looked back up at Danel. “Go on.”
“One of the more popular ideas for what we should expect a message from aliens to be was some kind of mathematical progression. Something universal and easily recognizable. Like prime numbers, or Pi, or Phi. Something obvious.”
“And you think we’ve received a message like this?”
“Dutch, put the data you showed me in MedBay up on the main screen,” Danel said. “That’s a string of prime numbers plain as hell.”
“Where did that come from?” the captain asked.
“That’s our inertial sensor data from the shockwaves,” Danel said. “I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet it came from somewhere just the other side of that wall down there.”
“Ekahta ahn shada-Tacra-Un.” Ian said, pointing at the screen and nodding.
“Gravity is the message from L-4 Prime,” Danel translated. “Even if it isn’t an extrasolar contact, we’re in over our heads.”
Jeph stared at the screen for several seconds before he keyed back into the com. “Listen carefully to me,” he said, his voice calm but insistent. “You are to stop what you are doing immediately and get clear of the shaft. You are in extreme danger. Get out now. That is an order. Get out.”
Ice Freighter Roswell: Near Hyperion:
Ronen Ashwell went through the Fleet Academy and knew how their multicruiser captains worked. Even though he was technically Fleet, he mastered the Roswell for SourceCartel and was a Source man in his heart.
He heard that Roja killed Chancellor Ariqat and the DevCartel Chancellor too. She wouldn’t be on either of these two multicruisers, but cutting these ships down would be good practice for what he intended to do when she did arrive.
Ronen participated in planning the attack and worked with Chancellor Tomlinson’s staff on the timing and details. The scenario played out in his mind every day since they gave him the position to lead the ambush, and he knew that although it was dangerous, they’d be able to get it done before the multicruiser captains knew what hit them.
“Skipper, they’ve confirmed and are changing their braking curve, they’ll get here in eighty-seven minutes,” his helmsman hollered across the ConDeck.
“Bueno,” he said. “Send word to form up. We don’t want to be shifting places when they get here.”
Ice haulers were nothing more than lumbering ice
processing factories, with engines on one end and a small living compartment on the other. They weren’t as maneuverable as the multicruisers they were hunting, so getting into position first was critical.
The other issue Ashwell’s ships faced, was that their modified cutting lasers were only good for about two kilometers. Theoretically, that wouldn’t be a problem, since they had to get within snorkel distance to pump slurry into the cruisers’ tanks. They’d be well within two klicks when they opened fire.
The plan was to spread three of his ships out and surround the Challenger. His ship would approach from above and to the rear of the Command Deck, near the environmental fluids tank. The Brownsville and the Lansing would snuggle up aft port and starboard near the big reaction mass tanks. Diagrams that Ceres Alpha supplied, showed that these approach vectors should put them outside the firing arcs of the guns installed on the cruiser. The Atlanta would go after the Galen at the same time. Since it was unarmed and almost out of reaction mass, it should be like worm fishing in a shot glass.
All four ships would attack when he took out the communications antenna on the Challenger. The other two in his group would go for the engines and reactors. If they could silence both cruisers in the first volley and cut the power to the guns on the Challenger, the rest of the operation would be a matter of mopping up the mess. Surgical precision, done by sledgehammers.
Borehole Site: Surface of L-4 Prime:
“Boss, we can’t leave him down here,” Seva said, her voice pleading. Leaving Cori behind had almost killed her, and he was in a spaceship. Chei was substantially more exposed, with only an EVA suit for protection.
“We won’t,” Jeph said, “but you need to get back to the ship and we need to get better tools in your hands before you go back down there. This might be a world more dangerous than you can imagine. We need to do this smart so the rest of you don’t get killed.”
“What’s changed?” Cori asked. He still dangled from the end of a tether in the shaft below Seva.
“That will take some explanation,” the captain said. “Just pull out and we’ll talk when you’re back. But do it now.” His voice cut with an edge he seldom used. Steel and sharp.
“No sir,” Seva said, iron reinforcing her will as she argued. “I left Cori down here and I damned sure won’t leave anyone again.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 29