Rise of the Valkrethi

by Warwick Gibson

  Ereth went quiet. It looked like his protégé was onto something, but what was it?

  CHAPTER 12

  ________________

  “Remember the EuroRussian experiments with standing waves at Vladivostok?” said Sebastian excitedly. “They generated a signal in different mixtures of gases by collapsing a standing wave inside the column.”

  Ereth nodded. “Matsu Fujimi used to talk about it. I don’t think he saw it as a way of sending an emergency comms signal if the power went down, though.”

  “You’ve been to Prometheus?” said Sebastian in awe. Prometheus was the holy grail, the ultimate research station in the alliance world.

  “No,” answered Ereth. “Matsu came to the South Am block when I was the head engineer on a new accelerator in the Andes. He took an interest in my work. He has an amazingly retentive mind, that one. We keep in touch.”

  Sebastian discovered a new-found respect for his boss and mentor. Still, Ereth hadn’t seen the possibilities in the shaft below them yet, but Serostrina was starting to. She was looking at him with a growing understanding in her eyes.

  “That’s what we’ve got here!” exclaimed Sebastian. “A column of mixed gases. We’re standing on top of it!”

  Understanding dawned on Ereth’s weathered face. He twisted his face around as he examined the idea in his mind to see if it would work. Sebastian was surprised to see how mobile the old man’s face was.

  “Still,” said Ereth doubtfully, “the composition of gases has to be pretty exact, and the length of the column has to be some ratio of the speed of the wave in the gases, I would think. It’s a bit of a long shot.”

  “But worth a try!” said Sebastian. “The first problem is the tangle of cable hanging from the booster station a thousand metres further down. That’s going to dampen the standing wave, and we may not be able to close the isolation doors.”

  The two men looked at each other. Someone was going to have to climb down there, cut the cable away, and close the isolation doors above the booster station. A thousand metres straight down, and a thousand straight back up again.

  Time was critical, and they should get a team onto it right now. The rest of them would try and work out how to get the column of gases idea to work.

  “I don’t think it should be me,” said Ereth, his eyes twinkling. Sebastian laughed. Ereth didn’t let old age stop him from doing many things, but he had just admitted this was one of them.

  “This is a job for the Mersa!” said Serostrina enthusiastically. “We climb better than you, and we have a way of going down very fast, and we have all the technical skills to close the isolation doors.

  “The ‘free fall’ game is something all Mersa play as children. We’re smaller and quicker than you, and the atmosphere on Alamos is less than on Earth, something like it will be lower down the shaft I think.

  “We have competitions for this game. I was best in my village,” she said proudly.

  Ereth looked at Sebastian, then at the keen little Mersa. He tried not to smile. They were so enthusiastic about everything!

  “Cut a trapdoor in one corner of your new floor, Sebo,” he said, “with access to the rungs, and find Serostrina enough heat cutters to take care of the cable.”

  Sebastian called out to one of the Human engineers, who hurried to cut out the trapdoor, on the opposite side of the floor to the alcove. Then he explained the heat cutters to Serostrina.

  Last of all Ereth spoke to the little Mersa. “Thank you for this,” he said quietly. “Do you want to choose the Mersa who go down the shaft with you?”

  Serostrina nodded, then scurried out of the alcove and down the rungs to the patchwork floor.

  “Dammit they’re fast when they want to be,” said Sebastian, watching her go.

  Ereth smiled.

  Sebastian suddenly changed tack. “How long have we been down here now?” he asked.

  “A little over four hours,” said Ereth, checking his comms armband. If only the comms system would reach the Javelins, he thought wistfully, but it was only a short-range system, and certainly wouldn’t work through the layer of rock above them.

  “Then we haven’t got long,” said Sebastian grimly. “Win or lose, the Javelins must be leaving the planet soon. We have a few hours at most.”

  “Anything we said would be guessing,” said Ereth, “and various events could hold them back, or speed up their departure.”

  Sebastian sighed. “I wish we knew what was happening up there!” he groaned.

  “So do I,” said Ereth softly, “so do I. Now, let’s dig up the EuroRussian data on the column experiments. It should be in the memory banks of the schematics tablet. It’s got every damn formula in 800 years of scientific research stuffed into it. The file we want should be there too.”

  They got down to work.

  Serostrina and her two helpers were ready to descend into the shaft by the time the crude trapdoor was finished. They stepped carefully into the darkness below Sebastian’s improvised floor, and switched on the lights Ereth had given them. The rungs fell away away into the darkness below them, one set for each quarter of the shaft. Then they launched themselves into space.

  They were soon far below the booster station. The three Mersa switched off the linguist earpieces so they could communicate more quickly, and the flute-like scamperings of the Mersa language passed swiftly from helmet to helmet. Three beams of light sought out the rungs in the shaft as they fell rapidly downward, their intense concentration never slipping.

  “450 mark,” said Serostrina, checking a pressure meter strapped to her forearm. The Mersa were moving swiftly in a controlled fall, guiding their descent with a brief touch at every tenth or twelfth rung, slowing themselves to a descent rate they could manage.

  “500 mark,” reeled off Serostrina. If they maintained this speed they would be at the booster station in a matter of minutes. There was still no sign of the fallen cable, and that was good. The less of it they had to manhandle past the second booster station the better.

  Serostrina barked a short little Mersa laugh. Manhandle was a Human word she had picked up. But they couldn’t manhandle it, they would have to Mersahandle it. Human was a funny language.

  The heat cutters in her waist pack began to move around in the near weightless conditions, and she concentrated on maintaining her balance, keeping her semi-flying descent straight and true.

  “700 mark,” she said, and began to think about slowing herself at the end of the drop. It was all very well to use the planet’s gravity to their advantage, but that left a lot of kinetic energy to bleed off when they got to the end of the fall.

  “750 and starting to slow,” she warned the others. They overshot her a little, and then the small group was level again. The strain was beginning to show on all their faces, as the gloves of the suits made more and more contact with the rungs, and bodies came out of the horizontal to an almost vertical position. Too much, too soon, and the feet of the suits would start to clip the rungs – at a time when they were still going far too fast.

  “850 mark,” reeled off Serostrina. There was still no sign of the booster station in the shaft below them.

  “950 and preparing to close,” said Serostrina, having reduced her speed to something she felt she could control safely. A few more rungs flipped by, and she grabbed the next one, releasing it as the strain came on her arm and grabbing the following one. In a few, short, sharp jolts she had come to a complete stop.

  She looked around. The others had made it okay too, one above her to her left and one slightly below her to her right. Then she looked down, and saw the inset shadow of the second booster station, right where she expected it to be. Of the cable there was no sign.

  She clambered down to the alcove, and saw the broken end of the cable where it was fixed to the top of the station. Its own weight and speed had been too much for it.

  Well, that was a blessing, it was one more problem she didn’t have to worry about. It looked like th
e cable was still intact in the shaft below, and they still had power at the station. The occasional point of light flared deeper in the shaft, followed by a dull boom, but there was nothing that threatened them where they were.

  The Mersa took up residence in the alcove that housed the booster station, and Serostrina fed in the codes for the isolation doors. It took a minute to change one of the comms armbands to the same frequency as the booster station, and then they retreated up the shaft.

  Serostrina sent the activation signal, and the isolation doors closed smoothly, forming a tight seal. She nodded her satisfaction.

  “Let’s see what you’re made of,” she said to the two Mersa with her. It was a challenge, and all three started climbing fast, chortling as they did so.

  Though weighed down by the now unnecessary heat cutters, Serostrina kept up with the others, pushing herself until the suit’s temperature and humidity systems were on full and barely doing their job.

  Climbing was a skill that required strength, and the Mersa weren’t much better than an athletic Human. Still, a certain amount of Mersa pride was at stake, and they kept up the gruelling pace.

  “750 to go,” encouraged Serostrina as the shaft drifted by on either side of them, reducing to a small black hole above where their lights faded out. It was going to take a while.

  At the top of the shaft Ereth and Sebastian had worked out a plan to use the shaft as a giant column of signal-generating gases.

  “The figures for the size of the column and the speed of the pulse through it look good,” said Sebastian, somewhat surprised, “but we still have the problem of how to generate such a large standing wave.”

  “We build it up little by little,” said Ereth, assembling some interesting looking equipment by the small wave generator they had adapted from other uses. Sebastian sat down beside him in the alcove.

  “I figure we can put at most two percent of the energy needed into the wave each time it makes the trip up and down the shaft,” continued Ereth. “Then there’s the loss of energy to friction. It will heat the shaft up marginally but that energy will drain away into the surrounding rock.”

  Sebastian nodded. He raised one eyebrow as a question, and Ereth caught his look.

  “It will take maybe 70 cycles, no more than 100, before we can release the energy as a comms squawk,” said the old engineer. “And we’ll have to mechanically supply some of the momentum with each cycle.”

  Sebastian and his team fixed the small wave generator to the underneath of the floor, and the Mersa team arrived back at the top of the shaft as they were finishing. Once he had explained to the rest of the group what was going to happen, Ereth set the system running.

  It took just under four seconds for the pulse to travel down the shaft, bounce off the isolation doors at the bottom and return to the top of the shaft. Each time it did so they added more energy to the wave, some from the powerpaks they had with them, and some was a mechanical input from an oversize drum mechanism Ereth had set up. Their timing had to be prefect, and it was going to be tiring work.

  CHAPTER 13

  ________________

  “Pulse at fifty percent of the minimum required,” said Ereth after a few minutes. They all knew the first part would be easy, but now the percentage would climb more slowly.

  The pulse was soon strong enough to give the patchwork floor a good shaking each time it reversed at the top of the cycle. When it got too uncomfortable, Ereth halved the length of the wave.

  “Standing by, training pulse sent – now,” he told them, and immediately the frequency doubled, a pulse of half the size hitting the underneath of the floor every two seconds.

  He repeated the process when the energy in the system was at eighty percent of the minimum required, and held it there as the energy level approached a hundred percent of minimum. The floor was getting hit by a good-sized thump every second now.

  “You build this thing strong, boy?” asked one of the older engineers, fixing Sebastian with a grin.

  “Built it stronger than a containment chamber on a starship,” said Sebastian proudly. “Damn thing can take anything you throw at it!”

  Amused faces replaced worried ones around the circle.

  “Running at 102 percent,” said Ereth. The busy figures around the drum generator sent several tired looks his way as they struggled to keep the output steady.

  “Have to make sure it works the first time,” said Ereth, noticing the strain on their faces. “You wouldn’t want to have to do this again, would you?”

  The drumbeat of the pulse against the underneath of the floor grew steadily louder.

  “Getting ready to collapse the wave,” said Ereth, shifting his hand to the wave generator so he could send a counter pulse down the shaft. “Coming up to 105 percent, on 105 percent, collapsing the wave . . . now!”

  The beat of the pulse jumped to many times a second, then leaped off the scale in a continuous roar. Something hit the underneath of the floor and buckled it upward, throwing Human and Mersa alike off their feet. The gases in the shaft were forced to absorb the energy previously in the wave, and emitted it a moment later as a burst of energy in the ultra high radio spectrum. In the booster station alcove, Serostrina ripped the headphones off her head as an audible squeal came through.

  “Comms squawk produced!” she shouted down to the others. There was the tortured rasp of metal far below, as the lower isolation doors buckled in turn, and then everything went silent.

  “Everybody all right?” said Sebastian, as he turned one of the powerpaks at his feet to a broad beam and lit up the chaotic scene. The powerpak dimmed, then held. There was very little left in it after the drain that had produced the standing wave.

  There were groans of pain, and the more able of the group rushed to tend those who had come off worst. Sebastian found Ereth, and swore as he noticed the old man’s pale colour through his faceplate.

  He called up Ereth’s medical stats on the small screen below the name tag on his suit. His pulse was weak, and unsteady, and his breathing was very shallow. “Dammit!” swore Sebastian, as he realised that could mean internal bleeding. There was nothing the others could for him while he remained in a suit.

  The Javelins were Ereth’s only hope now – and the only hope of a number of others, he realised, as he looked around the shaft and saw the number of injuries. The only hope of them all, in the end, was that the Javelins were still above the planet, and had somehow heard the comms signal.

  “Something tore deep in the shaft as the wave collapsed, what do you think it was?” said Serostrina, coming to help Sebastian with Ereth.

  “The isolation doors,” said Sebastian, “pretty certain of it. We can only hope they didn’t give way until the comms signal was strong enough to be picked up by the Javelins.”

  “It sounded like a good, strong signal to me,” said Serostrina. She was beside Sebastian now, monitoring Ereth’s medical stats. Sebastian had leaned against the wall and lifted Ereth against him. He was doing his best to cradle him gently. The others who were injured received similar treatment.

  The little group turned off all the powerpaks but one, and huddled in the darkness on the buckled floor.

  “All we can do now is wait, and hope for rescue,” said Sebastian philosophically. Serostrina smiled, and took his hand. She patted it in a very Human gesture. High above them, on the edge of the atmosphere about the ice planet, the fate of the little group was being decided.

  Air Marshall Cagill watched the captain of his command ship finish the pre-flight routines. The captain confirmed readiness to depart a few moments later. The rest of the 30 Javelins in the flight group began to report in, one by one.

  Cagill’s thoughts turned inward. This had been such an incredible victory for the alliance – once the Valkrethi had arrived – but it rankled that he had lost the accelerator staff at the depot. He felt responsible for that loss. His squadron had been too busy to keep track of everything.

  He sigh
ed. Such were the fortunes of war.

  Then the open channel for the Javelins burst into life above the comms officer’s console.

  “Case to Air Marshall, comms signal from depot, repeat, intelligent signal from depot!”

  At first Cagill wondered what had possessed Ayman to omit the proper call sign, ‘Ayman Case of Javelin two niner four to command ship,’ but he sat up in his chair as the full meaning of the message sunk home. He held up one finger to indicate he would take the call, and his comms officer patched him through.

  “There’s nothing left of the depot,” he said sharply, wondering what Ayman meant by his call.

  “Signal’s coming from under the depot, Sir,” said Ayman briskly.

  “A natural cavern in the rock?” queried Cagill, trying to make sense of it all.

  “We think it’s the heat exchanger shaft, Sir,” said Case.

  “Request permission to return to the surface,” he added, though strictly it was the Air Marshall’s call.

  “Of course, Squadron Leader,” said Cagill, a smile growing on his face. He shook his head in wonderment. How in all the hells thought up by classical writers had the staff in the depot managed it?

  His face fell. A comms signal didn’t tell him how many of the accelerator staff were still alive. Cagill wanted to go down to the surface with Ayman’s ground party, but his role was to remain here on his command ship. However the accelerator staff had survived, he mused, it was going to be an extraordinary story.

  He roused himself from his reverie, and opened a sub-space connection to Earth. Cordez’ staff got their boss to the other end of the call.

  “Some of the nuclear accelerator staff are still alive, maybe all of them,” said Cagill, without preamble.

  “That is good news,” answered Cordez. It had struck him the same way, that the loss of the people at the depot marred an otherwise outstanding action against the Reaper ships.

  “Your last report described the depot as nothing but a puddle of slag, how did they survive?”

  “Heat exchanger shaft, apparently,” said Cagill. “Ground party are on their way to the site now. I’ll let you know as soon as more information comes in.”