“It fabricated the gangways under this guideline,” Dutch said. “Just as we do not have a direct way to study the underlying hardware that provides life support and gravity within the Tacra Un, the facilities it constructs for us will include life support and other control interface systems, that we can utilize, but not study.”
“The inorganic life form Dutch is correct,” the Tacra Un said. “Provide objective specifications, and construction will be made to happen.”
“You have materials available for this?” Rocky asked.
There was a long pause, and then Dutch answered. “It has explained to me that it creates matter as needed. It will not explain the processes of construction, but calls the process kan-che ahku-osht-aht.”
“Location-reduced, static space-time?” Jeph asked, uncertain he had all the meanings correct since science wasn’t the area of the Shan Takhu language he’d learned.
“Approximately correct,” Dutch said. “Therefore materials for construction are unlimited within energy limitations. The process does take time to complete so I would suggest we begin the design development as soon as possible, if we want to avoid further issues with housing personnel from the Armstrong.”
Robinson Biomedical Center: Western Athabasca Valles, Mars:
Dr. Nisreen Sokat was all business, hidden under a carefully constructed mask of casualness. Edison assessed her personality as Tana introduced them. He was shocked that she was the Operations Director for the Robinson Biomedical Center, and that she didn’t appear to be much older looking than the chancellor.
She was a figure of almost legendary stature, in that she was the person who led the first colonists back down to the surface of Mars after the Burroughs Epidemic had played out. Depending on which version of history a person chose to believe, she was either a hero or something far less favorable. Regardless, her reputation as a decisive leader who got things done, and occasionally stomped the shit out of anyone that got in her way, was well deserved.
She hustled them through a labyrinth of underground tunnels until they emerged into a triage center. A staff of doctors and technicians nodded as they marched past, but otherwise no one paid undue attention. Finally, they squeezed into a private diagnostic chamber with a glass wall that overlooked a single bed and the frail body of Tamir bin Ariqat.
“How is he?” Tana asked, looking first through the glass and then at the heads-up display of his real-time vitals along the edge of the window.
“Unconscious and lucky to be alive,” Sokat said, handing his medical records to Tana. “He has a broken left clavicle and signs of multiple impact traumas. He was acutely hypothermic when we found him, and that’s probably what kept him alive.”
“Hypothermic, in an EVA suit?” Edison asked.
“His batteries had died,” she said. “Outside it’s a tossup which gets you first when you lose power, the cold or hypoxia.”
He nodded.
“He also has a twenty-five centimeter wide penetrating wound that entered through the right lumbar region of the abdomen and upward toward his liver. His large intestine was almost bisected, and it destroyed his gall bladder.”
“Peritonitis?” Tana asked.
Dr. Sokat nodded. “Acute Sepsis. There was suppurative discharge through the wound. Indications, from the extent of the infection and the necrotic state of the tissue around the wound, are that it likely happened three or more days ago,” she said. “I can’t say how he survived at all.”
“The wound was left untreated?” Edison asked.
She shook her head. “No, but it’s obvious that no one with any medical background touched him. Someone lacquered the skin around the wound with layers of dermaseal. There was also evidence of fiber embedded in it, so whoever it was, tried to compress the wound to control bleeding without letting the glue cure first.”
He glanced at Tana who was nodding.
“The kindest thing I can say is that it looks like an amateur field job,” Dr. Sokat said. “Someone packed it with omnithrax before they tried to close the wound with a polyweb. It didn’t adhere and that might actually have been what allowed it to drain enough to keep flushing the infection out. As a result, he’s lost a lot of blood and we’ve got him on a full run of macro-inhibitors to try to establish hemostasis.”
“He’s still bleeding out?” Saf asked.
“Not anymore, but we were pumping it in as fast as he flushed it through,” she said.
“Do you have any idea what might have caused his injuries?” he asked.
“My first guess would be an explosion of some sort,” she said. “One side of his body has light to moderate flash burns, but other than the redness and a loss of his fine surface hair, there isn’t any deep tissue damage from the explosion. It looks like the blast was widespread and uniform. The wound appears to be a secondary injury from being tossed against something or projectile penetration. Organ damage and the infection caused by the abdominal wound are the most critical aspects of his injury.”
“An explosion?” he asked. “I assume that, inside Robinson, ground-shock sensors would have picked it up?”
“Most likely,” she said. “But they found him outside.”
“That doesn’t mean he was outside, when it happened. Someone might have carried him out and dumped him there,” he said.
“That would be possible,” she said, “but the security team reported only one set of footprints on the apron.”
“I’m sure records would also show if someone had gone outside?”
She nodded. “Everyone is auto-logged when they go through an airlock.”
“We’ll need to look at those records to be sure,” he said, pulling out his thinpad and scribbling a note. “Are there any outer support facilities around the perimeter of the colony?”
“Other than the spaceport, no,” Dr. Sokat said. “Robinson is the only habitation in Athabasca.”
Tana nodded. “There’s nothing in walking distance. They intended the whole crater floor to be part of the colony, but it was never finished after the quarantine was imposed.”
“How far could he have walked in his condition,” Edison asked.
She laughed. “About three steps.”
“And how big is this apron he walked across to leave tracks?”
She laughed again. “Yah, obviously he made it farther than that, but I don’t see how he could have walked in.”
“There was no rover parked out there?”
“I don’t think they said they’d found one,” she said. “You’d have to talk to security to find out for sure.”
“You wouldn’t know if anyone tracked him back to see if they could find a rover?”
“Rovers all have transponders,” Saf said.
“Unless it ran out of juice and he abandoned it,” Tana said.
“They said his tracks headed east. There is a pass in the crater wall about fifteen klick in that direction,” Dr. Sokat said. “Prospectors used it for ground access to the upper valley. From there it’s about 320 kilometers to the Cerberus Fossae. I think there used to be old mining camps out there.”
“Could he have walked that far?” Edison asked.
“From the camps? No way in hell,” she said. “A healthy normal can walk about thirty kilometers in an EVA suit without extra power packs.”
“But he’s far from healthy,” Edison said, making a mental note of the way her tone implied that normal humans were inferior.
“A rover would have a 300 kilometer range,” Saffia said. “He could have run it dead and then walked the rest.”
“I assume he will be down for a while,” Edison said, raising a questioning eyebrow and waiting for Dr. Sokat to nod. “Then maybe we should take the Katana out there and see if we can find that rover of his. It might give us a starting point for questions once he wakes up.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cell A-106: Security Detention Center One: Galileo Station:
Derek Tomlinson stepped through the door into t
he detention cell. It was a small room, with bright lights and frigid air. He shivered, not so much because of the cold as from how Paulson Lassiter looked, with his legs drawn up against his chest and laying on his side facing the wall. His breathing was so shallow he had to watch for several seconds to make sure he was still alive.
A single table with two chairs sat along the wall opposite to the bunk and the guard that stood behind the Director stepped forward to jerk the prisoner out of bed and over to one of the seats. He snapped a magnetic lock around his wrist and used it to pin one of his hands to the table.
Lassiter offered no resistance to the guard’s manhandling, and showed little recognition that he’d been moved. The drugs they’d used to interrogate him held him marginally this side of comatose.
The guard stepped back and Derek waved his hand dismissively. “I will handle him,” he said. “Wait outside.”
When the door had closed, Derek leaned forward. “Paulson, you need to give us what we want.”
Lassiter sat motionless. A pasty, pink stone.
“Did you hear me? Odysseus will get what it needs from you.”
Hauling his eyes up from the table, he focused on Derek’s face. After several seconds, he shook his head.
“Paulson, I once thought of you as a friend,” he said. “Even though you betrayed me, I don’t want to see this continue. You look like you’re dying.”
“That would be easier,” he hissed.
“If you give us what we need, this will all end,” he said.
“Yes. It will end.” He blinked his eyes several times, each time a different flavor of emotion appeared on his face. “The only thing keeping me alive is that I haven’t let you win.”
“What if I give you my word that I won’t let that happen? I can keep you alive.”
“You can’t be that stupid, can you?” he said, his voice gaining strength as anger fed fuel to his words. “You’ve had me drugged. And now you’ve added torture to your crimes. You can’t let me live, after what you’ve done to me.”
“It wasn’t me,” Derek said.
“I know. You don’t have the eggs for it,” he said. “That only proves why I can’t let you have them. You aren’t ruthless enough to stand up to Odysseus. You’re a spineless waste of flesh.”
The Director bristled at the venom in Lassiter’s tone, but he bit down on it. “Odysseus is protecting us from something more dangerous than you know. It takes more strength to work with it than to stand against it.”
“That’s the lie you tell yourself, so you can stand to look in the mirror every morning,” he said. “But look at what you have done to me. This is what you have become. I am the real face you should see reflected and if you don’t know that, you’re blind.”
“You brought this on yourself.” Derek said as he pushed back from the table and turned away. Lassiter’s words gouged deep, but he couldn’t let that show.
“If you don’t stop Odysseus, nothing will,” he said. “Once it gets access to the fleet, there will be no putting an end to it.”
Derek shook his head. “There is more at stake than politics and power.”
“I wish you could give me a reason to believe that,” he said. “Anything? Even one truth other than that this fragging overlord is bent on dominating all of humanity.”
“Do not tell him anything,” Odysseus said over his implant.
If I could tell him, maybe he’d cooperate. Derek thought
“He already suspects the reality, but do not confirm it. If you do, you will have to eliminate him. The truth must not get out,” it replied.
“Even if I trusted you, there’s no way I can tell you,” he said, after several seconds.
“Of course you can’t,” Lassiter said. “It’s because there is no reason behind it. No reality in what Odysseus has said to you.”
“Perhaps not,” he said, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter. Your only path through this, that doesn’t end badly, is to cooperate. You can’t last forever. Eventually, we will get the command codes out of you.”
“I will resist you to my last breath,” Paulson said, his tone delivering it with the certainty of steel. “I have no choice.”
“I ordered a deep Brain Engram Scan.” The director got up and walked over to the door, rapping on it to get the guard’s attention. Turning back, he watched Paulson crumble into himself. “They tell me it will take a while to get set up for it. I think you need to take that time to consider what comes after that. If you survive the procedure with your mind intact, then it will be much harder for me to find a justification for Odysseus to keep you alive.”
FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:
Admiral Quintana stood in place on the command riser watching as the tactical display showed the progress in deploying the last of their defense net. Once completed, it meant they sat inside a spherical shell of automated laser turrets surrounding the station out to a distance of 2,000 kilometers. The grid formed a web of progressive resistance with the inner edge at the weapons range of the lasers mounted on L-2 itself. Dozens of beams could continuously target any ship approaching the station, well before they got into range.
The turrets themselves were small and hard to detect until they opened fire. Less than five meters in diameter, they were nothing more than two lasers, a reactor, and a set of station-keeping engines. The design made them simple and fast to manufacture, which also meant they could produce replacements quickly to reinforce positions lost in a battle. Since the sneak attack to capture Tana Drake had blindsided them, they’d spent all of their energy pounding these together and had dedicated one entire repair dock to fabricating nothing but spares. Now that the shell was in place, they would focus on building up a stockpile of reserves. At least until their supplies ran out.
“Two minutes to deployment,” Erin Sage announced. She’d been the approach team controller when the attack came that had forced them to rethink their defenses. Quintana had promoted her to a newly formed position as Defense Coordinator. Now she managed the defense net and Approach Control.
“Admiral you’ve got Graison Cartwright from Tsiolkovskiy on a private channel,” the com officer said.
“Put him through to the riser,” the admiral said, anchoring into a seat in front of a console.
“What can I do for you?” he asked as the face of the Chief Administrator materialized on his screen.
“Deploying the cruisers to Galileo seems to have had an effect,” he said. “Rachelle Pallassano just contacted me.”
“As in the mayor of New Hope City?”
He nodded. “Seeing the level of our commitment to this, she’s ready to declare independence from Galileo and is asking if we can help her maintain security while she pushes Tomlinson’s people out.”
“That’s good, but I don’t know what we can do,” Quintana said, running his fingers through his beard while he weighed out their options. “She’s got almost as many cops as we have total personnel up here.”
“Yah,” Graison said. “I told her we can send her a few from here, but I think she’s more worried about bombardment. Her upper dome is the oldest major structure on the moon and it’s a crap-ton more vulnerable than she wants to admit.”
“Nojo,” he said. “When does she want to do this?”
“As soon as we can cover her,” he said. “She told me she has the full support of her town council right now, but that political will is fickle and can change in an instant. The longer it takes before she can declare, the more likely it is that her support will collapse. Sooner is better from her chair.”
The admiral called up the deployment plan of their ships to see if they had anything available. “We’ve only got nine multicruisers in Zone One now. Technically, the five working the corridor from TFC to L-2 puts one cruiser in her sky for a few minutes out of every ninety-five minutes.”
“I think she is looking for something more serious,” he said.
“We can change the orbits to giv
e them more time above the horizon for NHC, but that will thin down the coverage in the corridor.” He glanced up at the tactical display on the main screen. The last of the defense net icons had just turned green. He drummed his fingers on the console for almost a minute while he debated how much risk he could justify to protect a potential new ally. Finally, he nodded.
“You get Carranza Pratte to commit to fabricating some ground-based laser platforms for them and I’ll swing two squadrons of interceptors with support crews to give them short-term coverage,” he said. “We’ll shove one of our L-2 picket ships into the corridor patrol and modify the orbit of the ones already there so she has closer to thirty minutes of flyover out of every turnaround. Until we get more of the fleet down here that’s the best we can do.”
“I‘ll pass the word,” Graison said, relief playing over his face as he signed off.
“I thought we’d decided that it was a bad idea to hold territory,” his first officer said. She was floating behind him and set her feet down on the deck with a click. “We will be spreading ourselves thin, if we have to deploy ships to protect New Hope City.”
“I know,” he said, swiveling to face her. “But as long as we only have to patrol, it won’t be bad.”
Ylva walked up and tapped the screen where he still had the deployment plan open. “How many ships would they need here to take out a multicruiser? Eight? Ten? If we have ships orbiting and spread out, we’d need to group our forces to keep them from picking the ships off one at a time. That would draw everything we’ve got currently protecting the corridor to the far side of the moon.”
“Maybe.”
“Then for the sake of protecting New Hope City you’d let as few as ten enemy ships pull our defenses completely off of L-2?”
“What choice do we have? We need allies.”
“Then we need to make sure they’re giving us something other than moral support,” she said. “Politics make for bad strategic decisions.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 62