GEOSYNCH ORBIT OVER KUMASI III
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"We have an orbital match in----3---2---1---Orbit match locked."
Mudrakshar Verma's cool voice echoed in Marla's earbug. She and Earlie were crowded into the secondary weapons station on the command deck of the Sokolov, sharing a combat chair. The flat black display in front of them was configured into 3 w-panes, one showing an orbital plot of the planet with the Great Zimbabwe and the Sokolov in their velocity dance, another the view from the warship's forward cameras, and in the third a colorful, annotated image culled from the sensors on Baxter's suit as he stood in an airlock.
"Main engines at zero thrust. Steering at zero thrust."
Around them, the officers of the Sokolov began to go through a checklist in soft voices. Marla bit her lip, watching the image of the Great Zimbabwe. The ship seemed intact, without visible hull damage or scoring. It was an ungainly monster in comparison to the rakish profile of the Sokolov. The Ifa-class were workhorse ships, with a big rotating habitat and lab ring sitting forward, squeezed around a command and sensor array platform. Behind the habitat ring was an enclosed shuttle dock assembly, surrounded by mushroom-shaped cargo modules, then a flare shield and the bulk of the engines. The Company logo, white on maroon, stood twenty meters high on the thruster farings.
"Earlie, do you have anything on ship-to-ship comm?"
Earlie shook her head, long ears angled back. "Quiet as high grass, sister." Her claws made a tic-tic-tic sound as they worked the console. The view of the Great Zimbabwe tightened, zooming in on an airlock beneath the command deck. The hatch was hexagon-shaped, with a clear window. Marla could see something through the opening.
"What's this?"
Earlie worked the panel and the image cropped, then zoomed again. There was a brief ripple across the w-screen as the console kicked in to interpolate the image. Marla leaned in a little, squinting through her com-glasses. There was an amber light shining above a control panel on the inner door of the lock. She tapped her finger on the w-screen. "Do we have a pattern match for this?"
"Yes," rumbled Earlie in her I'm-working-on-it-already voice. A w-pane unfolded on the console display. It contained a schematic of the airlock control panel, with highlights indicating the meaning and use of each control, light, and display. "There is no interior pressure, but the airlock is in manual mode---no power for the automatic mechanism."
Marla nodded, pressing a fingertip against her cheekbone. "Baxter, did you hear that?"
"You bet, boss." The pilot's w-feed shifted as he looked around the Sokolov's lock. There were two Marines with him and Verma. Both civilians were wearing dark gray e-suits, with bright Company logos on their chests, white-lettered nametags on each shoulder and over the heart. Both Marines were nearly invisible in matte-black suits far slimmer than the Company duds. Both had nametags, but they were not legible in the ambient light. Marla frowned, but Earlie was already working. Text materialized on the w-feed, showing KORO and TOGUNA above the two Marines. "We'll have to crank the lock ourselves."
"One kilocubit," Verma announced. The Sokolov was approaching on the last dying bit of her intersection velocity, coasting in not only to match orbital paths with the Great Zimbabwe but to come within eyeball distance of the abandoned ship. "Three mini-SOX."
"Earlie, are there any other lights? Radio emissions? Any EM at all?" Marla leaned back in the chair. The shock cushion adjusted, cradling her back. The Xelayan tapped up an ambient light gradient over a ship schematic on her main control window. The derelict showed heat and light loss at the personnel airlocks and around the big shuttle bay doors.
"She's cold. Just waste heat from reserve systems," Earlie said, "but there seems to be atmosphere inside from end to end. The hull shielding is blocking everything else, but when Baxter gets the telemetry relay in place, we'll know more. Still no response from the comm system or the urophoton relay." Her shoulders shrugged in a rolling ripple of muscle. "Station-keeping is still online; she's not spinning or losing altitude."
"Two mini-SOX," Verma announced. "Correcting roll with braking thrust."
Marla felt a very faint shudder through the decking under her feet. The feed from Baxter's suit suddenly showed the planet rolling past in the window of the airlock, huge and ruddy tan. Then the Great Zimbabwe slid into view. Marla touched her cheek again.
"Baxter, we're almost ready. Start your checklist."
"Copy that," the pilot replied with the feed-image being towards Verma. Each man would double-check his e-suit, his equipment, the telemetry relay, and their weapons before the lock opened. The Marines were already checking each other's suits. All four men were wearing propulsion packs. Marla's request for a wire-tether fired from the Sokolov to the derelict had been rejected. Aryan had no intention of establishing a physical connection between his ship and the Great Zimbabwe.
Marla turned, looking up across the control station behind her. Aryan was ensconced in a command chair, half enveloped in shock-foam and control consoles. Faint lights from his console display mottled his face and combat suit. Anika sat slightly below him, on his left, and Grisham down and to the right. She and the Xelayan were at a station in the third ring of the bridge, matching the position of the lionheart, Blackmon, on the opposite side of the U-shaped deck. The Afridominian navigator raised his head slightly and smiled, meeting her eyes.
Aryan toggled his voice channel. "Near-space scan, Blackmon-bwana?"
"Clear, Madhya Nirikshak. Two trailing asteroids, six low-orbit, Company peapods (satellites), and no other ships, shuttles, or unidentified objects. No radio or u-wave transmissions except the telemetry from the peapods. Everything's quiet.
"Engines, Mahl-bwana?"
"Hot, Abhi, idling at zero-thrust. The power plant is at 20%. Spin time to AfriPropel is six-to-zero mini-SOX. Repeat, six-to-zero mini-SOX." The engineer's voice echoed in Marla's earbug, coming from the township channel.
"Weapons, Mr. Grisham?"
"Weapons are hot, Navigator. One flash bird rigged and solution locked. The point defense system is online and tracking."
"One mini-SOX," Anika said softly.
Aryan nodded to her. "Full stop."
Anika ran her finger down a control bar on her console. There was another slight shudder. In Marla's displays, a counter indicating cubits-to-prey slowed and then stopped. "Six hundred cubits," announced the pilot. "We have velocity match."
"Are you ready?" Aryan's voice was soft in Marla's ear and she started. A blinking glyph in the bottom right corner of her glasses indicated they were on a private channel.
"Ready," she said, swallowing. This was it. She changed back to the open channel. "Mr. Baxter, have you finished your checklist?"
"Copy that, boss. We're ready to make a walk."
Marla looked sideways at Earlie. "Cameras ready? Suit telemetry online?"
The Xelayan grinned, showing double rows of white teeth like tiny knives. "Cameras live. Recorders are rolling. Suit telemetry is clean. All bio readings are in the green." The cat flicked a claw at a newer, smaller window on the console. Marla saw it showed a string of beadlike lights circling the planet. The peapods Blackmon had picked up. Excellent.
"Mr. Baxter, you are cleared for EVA."
Unconsciously, she bit her lip, eyes fixed on the w-feed of the Sokolov's airlock. One of the Marines, Toguna, punched a code into the airlock control panel. The hatch opened swiftly and raw sunlight flooded into the chamber, picking out every detail with brilliant clarity.
Koro stepped out into the void. He was briefly silhouetted against the monstrous glowing disk of the planet. Chowdhury followed, white jets of vapor trailing behind him. Baxter followed and Marla felt a moment of vertigo as he stepped out over an infinite distance. Then the suit focused on the distant, surprisingly tiny image of the Great Zimbabwe.
"Five mili-SOX count to contact." Baxter's voice was calm, even cheerful.458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3gbqExr2co
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The was a faint clank as Baxter's boots touched down on the metal skin of the exploration ship. Chowdhury landed a moment later, flanking the airlock, while the two Marines held back. From the viewpoint of the cameras on the two Company suits, Marla couldn't see either Marine, but she guessed they were covering the opening, weapons armed and ready.
"Checking lock diagnostics," Baxter said, his voice still light and cheerful. The camera view stabilized on the entry pad. All of the keys were dark. The pilot's fingers tapped on them experimentally. There was no reaction.
"Some emergency power is offline," Earlie commented, tail twitching. Baxter echoed her a moment later. Chowdhury's camera shifted and a plate sealed with four spring bolts came into view.
"Stand by," the gunner said. "We'll try a manual entry."
Despite surface pitting and a faint layer of ice on the shadowed entry plate, Chowdhury's quick fingers released all four bolts, then set the magnetized cover aside to adhere to the skin of the Great Zimbabwe and swung the airlock bar over in a smooth motion.
Marla heard a slight hiss from Baxter as the airlock recessed. Puffs of vapor squeezed out of the opening door as Chowdhury cranked the locking bar around and the hatch swung inward, revealing a dark cavity only barely illuminated by a single amber light.
"I am entering the ship," Baxter said, only the faintest tremor in his voice. Marla linked as the pilot's suit lamps swung to reveal the gleaming white and gray interior of the lock.
"No debris, no organic contaminates, no high-level radioactives," Earlie said softly into a voice log, yellow eyes glued to the environmental sensors relaying from the e-suits of the men in the lock. The brass-colored snout of Chowdhury's ship gun appeared at the edge of Baxter's video feed, swung to and fro, quartering the compartment, then withdrew. "Baxter is inside the lock."
Marla looked back at Aryan, still sitting in the command chair, watching quietly, his face illuminated by lights from his combat displays. He raised an eyebrow at Marla's formal expression. "Madhya Nirikshak Verma, Mr. Baxter has boarded and taken possession of the exploration ship Great Zimbabwe, Company registry...." She read off the official registration and identification of the Ifa-class zamani. "I would like to request the assistance of the Afridominian Navy in recovery operations at this time." She bowed politely and the navigator returned the motion.
"Mbopha Verma," Aryan turned his head slightly. The executive officer was waiting with a politely interested expression. "Please render all aid and assistance to the Company representatives in securing their ship and restoring power and environmental controls."
"Han, Navigator." Anika touched her cheekbone and began speaking to the two Marines floating just outside the airlock.
"You may proceed with your recovery operation, Doctor Landers." Aryan nodded politely to Marla. In the cameras, the two Marines entered the airlock as Baxter and Chowdhury moved aside to let them handle the ship-side hatch. A second plate was removed, and the inner airlock opened slowly as Koro operated the manual release bar.
Marla bent over the panel, watching a hallway slowly emerge into the light. Everything was very dark. She looked sideways at Earlie. "Atmosphere?"
"Clear," the Xelayan replied, though she was frowning.
"What is it?" Marla tapped open the ship frequency. "Baxter, hold up."
The video feeds stilled, and Marla caught sight of two stubby black Marine shipgun barrels swinging up, pointing down the newly revealed passageway. Baxter's camera shifted as he swung to cover the now-closed exterior hatch.
"There's....." Earlie twitched her nose, claws tipping softly on the display. "Mr. Baxter," she growled, "is your suit envirosensor working right? Does it show green?"
"Yes," Baxter said a moment later. "Everyone's does."
Marla started to turn towards Mbopha Verma, but the little Mudrakshar woman's fingers were dancing on her panel, and Earlie's array of w-panes and gauges suddenly doubled its number, showing the telemetry feed from all four e-suits. The Xelayan frowned again, black lips curling back from white incisors.
"Ship air is very, very clean," she said a moment later in a slightly disbelieving voice. "I show barely any contaminants, no waste products, just a slightly oxygen-rich standard oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Scattered traces of free carbon and hydrogen."
"Dioxide levels?" Marla leaned over, searching out the air mixture readout for herself.
Earlie waved a paw in dismissal, making the rows of bracelets on her wrists tinkle. "Negligible. Couldn't grow a fern, if you wanted to. It's like no one is aboard, and never has been."
"All right. Baxter, you're free to advance. Head for the bridge with all due precaution."
"Ok...." The pilot edged out into the hallway, his helmet light swinging across mottled gray bulkheads and an irregular-looking floor. "This is funny...."
While the observers on the bridge of the Sokolov held their breaths, Baxter moved to the base of the closet wall and knelt down. His hand---a little bulky in the e-suit----brushed along the baseboard. Bare metal under his fingertips gleamed and shimmered in clear white light.
"Discolored," Chowdhury commented, "like it's been flash-heated."
"Yup....." Baxter's camera shifted again, and fine gray ash puffed up from the deck at his touch. "Boss, could there have been a fire?"
"Huh?" Marla slumped back in her shockchair, biting her lower lip. "Then where's the carbon scoring, the fire-supression foam residue?"
Neither Chowdhury nor Baxter had an answer. After a moment's pause, they pressed on. 458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsHW6HX8J0X
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Marla watched in silence, her frown steadily lengthening, as the four men moved forward along the main access passageway. Hatches revealing half-seen rooms drifted by. Everywhere, power was out, and the ship was dark and silent. When they entered what the ship schematic described as a crew common area just forward of the main lab ring, she opened the suit channel again.
"Baxter, turn slowly so I can see the whole room."
The camera view panned, and Marla doubled the size of the w-pane and dialed up feed magnification. Baxter's camera slid across tables, chairs, countertops, drink dispensers, refrigerator, and synthesizer doors. "Stop. Stop right there. Baxter, do you see the door of the refrigerator?"
"Yeah----What about it?" Baxter's pistol could be seen on the bottom left of the screen, steady on the suspicious door. "Looks like a refrigerator door. Must be the snacks locker."
"Have you ever seen a ship fridge door that wasn't covered with stickers, leaflets, announcements, or photos from home?"
Baxter didn't answer for a moment, and his camera flicked back across the rest of the common area. "There's nothing here," he said, surprised. "It's like they cleaned up the place and left or---- there was a fire and it burned up everything."
"Made a very clean job of it then," Marla said in a dry voice.
"More than that, look at this," Chowdhury said, and his camera view drifted over to a food prep counter set into one bulkhead. Marla turned her attention to his display. There was a rack of chef's knives pinned to the surface on a heavy magnetic strip. She hissed in alarm.
The muzzle of Chowdhury's rifle touched the hilt of one of the knives. Where a heavy rubber or wooden grip should have enclosed the steel tang, there was nothing, just bare gleaming metal. "This was a set of Pettigrew cooking knives from Neo-Gaul on Gbe. These models have walnut handles and surgical-quality blades. Very expensive."
"Check the rest of the room," Marla said, feeling suddenly cold. "Check for anything organic, anything at all."458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5lxDxhAhnE
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"Nothing here either," Baxter said in a dead voice. He was standing on the bridge of the Great Zimbabwe, one hand pushing the navigator's chair back and forth. There was only a bare metal frame, lacking any plastic, leather, or fiberfill. "Everything's just---gone. This is crazy!"
Chowdhury's cameras shifted, looking across the display panels of the command station. Like everything else, they were dark and mottled by heat. The gunner rapped the knuckles of his e-suit on the glassy plate. "Aren't those touch-panels plastic? What about the corridor walls, the doors---aren't they plastic of some kind? Why were they just melted a little, and not completely destroyed?"
Marla and Earlie looked up. They had been poring over the shipyard diagrams and materials lists used in the construction documents on file for the Great Zimbabwe. Marla rubbed her face. The maze of ship documents was giving her a headache. "I...."
"Command panels are made with an electrically active composite, which is not a long-chain polymer, Mr. Chowdhury." Mbopha Verma's cool, correct voice intruded on the circuit. 'The range of materials taken from the ship is rather distinct."
Marla's glasses flickered and Aryan's private channel glyph was winking again.
"Yes?" she said, turning away from Earlie. She was beginning to feel sick.
"We think the ship was attacked by a 'cleaner' agent of some kind." Aryan's voice was very calm and steadying. "Only certain molecules and sets of longer-chain compounds were affected. Particularly, those which form organic life. Paper, glue, bedsheets....all those things were swept up in the general criteria."
"A weapon." Marla felt a band of tension release from her chest. Vague fears crystallized and she felt relieved. See, she thought, the universe is filled with reason. "Something from the planet?"
"It might be." Aryan sounded thoughtful. "There have been reports of illicit activity in this region, but no human miners would have access to this kind of a nanoweapon. You should continue searching the ship. Maybe something survived in one of the lab habitats."
"Of course," Marla turned back to Earlie. The Xelayan was talking Chowdhury and Baxter through the removal of an access panel under the command display. "Earlie?"
"One moment. Yes, Mr. Baxter, use some muscle. You won't break anything. There! Now look inside."
Baxter hesitated, heart rate spiking on the monitor, and his pistol and a detached lamp went first. In the dark cavity, ranks of crystalline system modules sat quietly, without showing any signs of activity.
"Still no power," Earlie grumbled to herself. Zorblax Chowdhury, please take out a w-pad, if you have one. I'll send a detailed ship schematic to you. I want you to go down to engineering and start checking the power-runs out from the batteries and fusion plant."
Baxter muttered something obscene and crawled out of the access panel. Chowdhury said nothing. Both men kicked down the long central access passageway, gliding expertly from stanchion to stanchion, their suit lamps flaring on the white panels and dark openings onto surrounding decks.
"Amira-sahib?" Marla looked across the dim, softly glowing command deck of the Sokolov. "Could your Marines search the rest of the ship?"
"Yes," the exec answered. "I will send another pair across to secure the bridge while Koro and Toguna search deck by deck."
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Baxter grunted, putting his shoulder into a length of maathaium pipe. The pipe extended the manual locking release on a massive pressure hatch marked with radiation warning symbols. Chowdhury had his helmet pressed against the metal surface, listening. The pipe squealed, the sound tinny and faint after echoing through the pilot's gloves and suit.
"Nothing," Chowdhury said over the open channel. "The bolts aren't backing out."
"Is there another way in?" Baxter spoke to the air.
On the Sokolov, Marla shook her head. Earlie's entire control panel was covered with schematics showing the engineering space, the reactor cores and every crawl space, access tunnel and passage in the aft half of the Great Zimbabwe. The Xelayan's ears were twitching in frustration.
"No, Mr. Baxter," Marla said wearily, only half-listening to the men on the ship. "Mbopha Verma says the reactor has gone through an emergency shutdown procedure. That hatch is the only access, and the manual lock mechanism should work."
"Sorry chief, there's no joy here." Baxter worked the pipe free from the locking bar, and then slammed the length of metal into the hatch in frustration. There was another tinny echo. The pilot swore again, and this time he didn't bother to keep his voice down. "We'll have to burn through this door to get to the other side. How thick is the damn thing?"
Marla listened to the other channel for a moment, chewing on her lip. "Too thick, Mr. Baxter. It's supposed to restrain the core in case of a failure."
"What do we do, then?" Chowdhury stood up, the pilot's lamp tossing a huge shadow behind him. "Run the ship from the batteries? We can't get at them either. Everything's through this door."
Marla sat up straight in her chair, a vague thought trying to worm free of her tired brain. "Earlie, show me the electrical connections for the hatch mechanism."
The Xelayan nodded sharply and a tap-tap of her foreclaw zoomed a section of the schematic into full view. Marla hunched over the panel, fingertips brushing over the band at her wrist. A tickling feeling of clarity welled up, banishing her fatigue. She punched the schematic onto the w-channel shared by the team on the Great Zimbabwe and the watchers on the Sokolov. "Aryan-sahib, do you see the display on your three?"
A muttered acknowledgment echoed over the Sokolov-side channel from Engineering. The thaai was down in his engine room, watching a duplicate of the video feeds in front of Marla. "I do. Yes. I believe such an approach would succeed. Mudrakshar Amira?"
"I agree," the exec said. She had her own echo of the schematics. Amira turned to look inquiringly at the navigator. Aryan frowned.
"Grisham-bwana, threat status?" The navigator was very slowly stroking his beard.
"No change, Aryan-sahib." The armaments officer made a sketchy bow from his position on the bridge.
"Two ratings and a work carrel," Aryan said, nodding to his exec. "They'll need the cargo space for the power cell."
Marla turned back to her panel and toggled to Baxter and Chowdhury's channel. "Baxter, an engineering crew from the Sokolov will be joining you shortly with a portable fuel-cell unit." She glanced down at the diagrams. Earlie's long, claw-tipped finger slid under her arm, indicating a section of the corridor. "You can speed things up, I do think, if you move---ah, about five meters back down the corridor---there will be an access plate---ah, from your current vantage, overhead ---marked with an engineering glyph. Remove the plate and you'll find a pair of power-runs that lead to the hatch motor....."
"Understood," Baxter cut in, already moving with his length of pipe. He kicked away from the blast door and tumbled gently to fetch up near the panel. "I see it...."458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVxKBJag1iv
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Beep beep beep!
"All units, hold position!" A raspy voice barked across the shipside channel, overriding Baxter's comment. Marla flinched back from the panel as a series of warning glyphs flashed on her display. An audible tone silenced the quiet chatter on the bridge of the Sokolov. "We found someone."
"Who is this?" Marla hissed at Earlie, waving her hand in front of the display board. The Xelayan bared her teeth in response, almost spitting, but white claws flashed and the video feeds of all the men aboard the Great Zimbabwe leaped into view on the panel.
"This is "Mashujaa (Sergeant) Toguna, Landers-bwana." The Marine's Swahili accent was very dry and controlled. On the medical feed, his heartbeat had ticked up a little, but his respiration was holding steady. "W-channel six."
"Got it," Marla snapped, then she froze, grasping the image being projected from the Marine's suit camera. In comparison to the quality of the video thrown by the Company suits, Toguna's transmission was as sharp as a 4w broadcast at home. "What..."
"Three bodies, ma'am," the Marine said, gliding forward, his boots making a shhhhh-thup sound on the deck as he moved. The muzzle of his shipgun was not pointed at the sprawled gray-and-tan shapes on the open decking in front of him but at the dark recesses of some enormous open space. At the very edge of his camera's field of view, Marla caught sight of the second Marine also making a slow advance, gun at the ready. "They're wearing Company tags."
"Where are they?": Marla muted her throat mike, whispering to Earlie.
"The main shuttle bay, sister." Earlie zoomed both Marine camera feeds and jacked up the ambient light amplification.
A huge space sprang into view, curving walls looming overhead and the heavy, blunt-nosed shape of a shuttle filling the darkness to the right, a pale light gleaming in the cockpit windows. Directly ahead of the two Marines, three crumpled shapes in e-suits were sprawled on the decking just a mili-cubit or more from some kind of an access hatch. Marla felt a creeping chill at the loose, floppy limbs of the suited bodies.
"Earlie, what's behind that hatch?" Marla was whispering again.
"The starboard power, data, and environmental venting lines." Earlie was distracted, staring at her displays. "Wait one, wait one...."
Marla ignored her, watching in sick fascination as Toguna advanced on the bodies, the glare of his uit light throwing them in sharp relief against the corrugated decking. The Marine paused, gun high, and gave the side of one of the helmets a soft kick with his boot. There was no sound, but the anansiglass helmet rolled over, revealing emptiness. The suit tag read CHUKWU.
"The master engineer," Earlie said after a moment. "Chukwu, Laila Zuri. Company employee, six years. Master's chief certification and engineer aboard the Great Zimbabwe for three years."
"Mashujaa, check all the suit seals." Aryan's voice was very calm and even over the channel. Mudrakshar Amira, please halt the movement of the engineering team toward the Great Zimbabwe."
Toguna's gloved fingertips slid back the metal plate covering the environmental controls on the empty e-suit. A row of faint green lights appeared. "Suit integrity intact, sir."
Marla sat back in her seat, a tiny bead of blood oozing from her lip. Damn!
"Check the other two," said in a conversational tone. "Toguna, advance to the power panel door and open the accessway. Chowdhury-sahib, please observe vah-hai Koro's suit camera."
A distant Haan! (yes) echoed in the silence on the bridge.
Toguna stood up, his camera view swinging to check the rest of the boat bay. Though his shipgun was still at high port, Marla thought the man had stopped worrying about something leaping out of the darkness at him.
"Navigator Aryan...." She started to say, but the navigator met her eye and shook his head slightly.
"The Great Zimbabwe is now under level-two quarantine, Marla-bwana." He said quietly. "Something consumed the men inside those e-suits after they had a sealed environment. We must presume everyone aboard is in the same danger---indeed, they may already be exposed---and we cannot risk the Sokolov as well."
"How long----" Marla was almost immediately interrupted by Earlie sinking a claw into her shoulder, and Verma's voice grumbling over the engineering channel.
"Aryan-sahib, look at the feed from Koro's suit." The engineer's voice sounded both depressed and filled with righteous anger. "Sloppy civilian contractors..." He muttered.
Koro's w-feed showed the inside of the utility run, a circular space filled with the heavy blue shapes of air and water returns, the darker reddish channels of data feeds, and the charred black traces of power conduit.
"What happened to all of this?" Koro snorted, poking at the ruin inside the utility tunnel with the tip of his rifle. "Everything's all burned up!"
"Stay alert, vah-hai." Toguna's voice was very sharp on the comm, and the mashujaa was almost immediately in the accessway, shining his lamp up and down the shaft. "Back up and cover the boat bay. Thaai Mahl, are you getting a good feed from my camera?"
The mashujaa panned his lamps slowly over the tangled mess, letting the engineer get a good look.
On the bridge of the Sokolov, the navigator leaned on the arm of his chair, watching Mahl's face twist in thought on the w-feed from the engineer. "Well?"
The engineer scowled into the pickup. His bald head was shining with a faint, fine sheen of sweat. "Poor materials, Navigator." A thick finger stabbed at a screen out of the range of sight. "We'll need a sample, but I'll say now the material used to insulate and EM-screen the power conduits was inferior---using some kind of organic in the composite. Something the weapon attacked and stripped away." Mahl shrugged his heavy shoulders. "The conduit temperature spiked from all the waste heat, and then the superconductors failed and power went out."
"Did conduit failure shut down the fusion plant?" Aryan was smoothing his beard again.
"Unlikely, sahib." The engineer looked off-screen. "All three of these suits have engineering cert badges on them. Maybe the attack started on the starboard side, power started to fail unexpectedly and they started a reactor shutdown, then moved to see what was happening."
Aryan nodded to himself, sighing. "And fell dead on the way, consumed."
"Navigator?" Marla had risen up in her seat, tucking one leg under. "We've found something interesting."
"What?"
"There are higher levels of waste products in the hangar bay," Earlie said, her throaty voice rolling and rumbling. "Complex carbon chains, waste gases, long chain organics. The sensors on the Marines' suits are starting to pick them up. And..."
Aryan raised one eyebrow and leaned forward. "And...?"
Marla tapped a control on the display panel and a section of video doubled, then tripled in size. A window, glowing with light, and a shadow against a bulkhead were plain to see. "Someone's alive inside the shuttle!"458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYkWUfSAHoe
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"Clip on." Dana Toguna tossed Koro a monofil line tab. The diiw (corporal) caught the metal hook deftly and snugged the line to his belt with the ease of long practice. Both Marines had dialed down the audio on their comm sets, so the argument on the bridge of the Sokolov was reduced to a dull thunder in the background.
"It is clipped," Koro replied after testing the line. He slung the angular black shape of his shipgun over one shoulder and adjusted his gloves, bringing magnetic surfaces around to the palms. Toguna removed the little winch from his belt and adhered the metal box to the doorframe of the power conduit accessway. "And it is now anchored."
"Anchors away, then." Toguna grinned, white teeth visible through the faceplate of his suit. He kicked off from the wall and sailed across the boat bay. As he approached the nose of the shuttle, the Marine tucked in his feet and rolled. Now feet first, he slipped past the window and reached out with both hands. The gloves slipped along the pitted, rusted surface of the shuttle, then slid to a halt.
"Quietly now," Toguna breathed over the combat channel. "Show me what's inside." Koro spidered up to the forward window of the shuttle and paused just out of sight of anyone inside. Tugging one of his shoulder cameras free, the marine eased the filament up to the window's edge. The mashujaa, watching the spyeye view on a tiny, postage-stamp-sized popup inside his helmet, made a scooting motion with his hand. "Just one hair more...."
Then he could see inside the cluttered, dirty cockpit of the shuttle, and----through the pressure door in the main cabin---two people sitting on facing piles of bedding. As he watched, the man tossed a playing card onto a pile between himself and the woman. Moisture was dripping from the walls of the shuttle, and the mashujaa made a face. Mold? They're certainly alive. Not disintegrated at all...
Taking a breath, Toguna dialed up the volume on his comm.
".....the ship is entirely safe," Marla said, again, her voice rising slightly. "We've had men aboard for two hours and nobody's been affected, there are waste gases loose in the boat bay, and they haven't been destroyed...."
Aryan, his patience fraying---though only the mashujaa or one of the crew would have been able to tell---interrupted. "Dr. Landers, I will not put my men, or my ship, at risk. Until we know exactly what happened and why, I will not put another man or woman aboard the Great Zimbabwe."
"Ah, sir? Aryan-sahib?" Toguna made a face in the privacy of his suit. Luckily, the cameras only pointed forward, not at his grinning mug. "Madhya Nirikshak?"
"Haan, Dana?"
"There are at least two people alive inside the shuttle, sir. They've been there quite a while. Shall I venture aboard and ask them what they know?"
"No," Aryan said, a slight edge in his voice. "If the contaminant is still loose on the Great Zimbabwe, you'll only place them in danger. Hook up your exterior comm to the shuttle's data port and speak to them that way."
One of the other channels carried a muffled voice, and Toguna realized Landers-bwana's voice channel had been muted from the command deck.
"Haan, sir." Toguna signaled to Koro, then took two long, bounding steps to reach the shuttle's airlock. The corporal walked sideways down the hull to meet him, spooling up the monofil as he went. "Time for first contact, Diiw. Undo the comm port cover, would you?"
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"We don't really know what happened. They just fell over, you know, and we couldn't raise anyone on the ship-to-ship comm channel."
Marla suppressed a sigh, staring at two grimy faces framed by the shuttle's w-cam. On her left, security team crewman Zuri Nkrumah's bearded visage stared out at her with sick desperation. Beside him, nose screwed up in a grimace, her entire body turned away from Nkrumah, crewwoman Olivia Meyer seemed equally despondent.
"Tell me what you saw," Marla said again. "From the beginning."
"Well, ah...." Zuri groped for the proper words.
"Shut up, idiot," Olivia said, pushing him out of the field of sight. "I'll tell you, ma'am. We've been having problems with the shuttle engines ever since we arrived," the crewwoman began. "After five or six trips down to the base camp, they started showing warning lights on the afterburner and air intake ducts. Finally, shuttle two refused to power up groundside---claimed the engine would overheat. So we took number one down to base camp and pulled the whole engine assembly out of number two." She jerked her thumb over one shoulder. Something large and bulky, wrapped with shockfoam and cables, filled most of the cargo space on the shuttle.
"We brought up Doc El-Mahdi at the same time---he was in a big hurry! And Doctor Nefertiti----she wasn't in such a hurry. They went upstairs, but we were working down here to prep this bastard to unload."
"Did anyone else ride up with you? Did you close the airlock after El-Mahdi and Nefertiti left the shuttle?" Marla was chewing on the stub end of a pointing stylus.
"Always!" Meyer nodded sharply, waving her hand off to one side. "Standard procedure. The bay doors are airtight, but the boat bay is considered an unsecured environment. You lock in and out of the bay, or the shuttles when they're aboard. And it was just these two. Nobody else wanted to ride up with them, not when they were in such a mood!"
"When did you notice something was wrong on the ship?"
"An alarm went off shipside," Meyere said. "We heard the horn go off and I ran into the cockpit. Zuri---" The crewwoman's lip twisted slightly"---called the bridge. We heard some noise, some shouting for maybe thirty seconds, and then nothing." She pointed off towards the front of the shuttle. "Then the lock cycled and Nkosi Mutasa and two others ran into the bay. I called on the comm, and she said something was attacking the ship. Then she made sort of a choking noise, we saw a hot glow inside their helmets---and all three of them fell over."
"And then?" Marla frowned at the ragged plastic end of her stylus.
"They didn't move. We couldn't get anyone on the ship-to-ship channel." Olivia shrugged. "The bay doors were shut, and we couldn't get them open by remote. We didn't dare go outside, not with three people dead in suits right in front of our eyes. With the shuttle parked inside the bay, we couldn't even raise groundside on the comm. So we've been waiting for weeks, hoping something would happen. Something good, that is." She ventured a smile. "Can we get out of this tin can now and get a shower?"
"You can have a bath when we get you out," Marla promised with a smile. "But right now we've got to figure out how to get you out of there safely. I'll call you back in a moment."
She shut down the channel, then turned to face Aryan. The navigator and Nkosi Verma were talking, heads close together, at the exec's display board. "Navigator Verma?"
"Yes, Landers-bwana?" he seemed tense, and she knew he was bracing for another argument about the quarantine.
"I would like to transfer my crew and supplies---and the loan of a fuel cell, if you will---to the Great Zimbabwe."
For a moment, Aryan said nothing, staring at her with narrowed eyes. At his side, the nkosi allowed herself the ghost of a smile. Then the navigator visibly shook himself and nodded.
"You're sure of your analysis? Sure enough to risk yourself and your team?"
"Yes," Marla said in a firm voice. Oh lord, I hope so! But we can't just sit here for weeks. Every day burns away at our shoestring budget and our tiny little bonuses.
"Very well." Aryan glanced at his exec, who had stepped down to her own board, attention already focused on her landing schedules, thin rose-colored lips moving silently. "Amira-sahib, we will leave Mashujaa Toguna and Diiw Koro aboard as a, ah, loan to Landers-bwana and her group. For the moment. After the quarantine period has passed, we'll want them back." The navigator raised an eyebrow at Marla, who smiled in relief.
"Thank you," she said, making a heartfelt bow."
"Please don't damage my crewmen," Aryan responded on his private channel. "Good luck."
"There is one more thing...." Marla felt her stomach clench, knowing she was likely overstepping the bounds of hospitality. "If you could loan as an engineer's mate, I think we could get the power plant on the Great Zimbabwe working again."
Aryan frowned. Marla kept her face impassive. The navigator looked sideways, listening. He frowned again and said something into his throatmike. While Landers watched the navigator argued momentarily with someone, then gave up.
"Nkosi Mahl will be joining you on the Great Zimbabwe," Aryan said in a tight voice.
Marla must have shown some of her astonishment openly. "I see."
"He," Aryan continued in a bland tone, "wants to see the damage caused by this weapon for himself. I believe he desires to submit a technical paper to the Nyota Mekaniki College on Jiri. You should get ready to move your equipment."
Marla nodded again, in thanks, then began gathering up the w-pads, writing styluses, and other bric-a-brac that had accumulated around the secondary weapons station. Earlie was still hunched over her board, watching the feeds from the various suit cameras.
"I'll see you downstairs," Marla said, thumping the Xelayan on one furry shoulder.
"Ya-ha," Earlie answered absently. "Be there in a bit."458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfdkvwhDDNQ
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The main airlock of the Great Zimbabwe cycled and Marla stepped through a dark, echoing passageway. A string of fading torches cast the main access corridor in the twilight, each shining dot "throwing" a circle of sad blue-green light. She looked down at the enviro readouts on her arm---everything shone a friendly green---and she stepped aside to let Nkosi Mahl drag the battery pack into the ship. Earlie followed, swimming through the opening with a flotilla of duffels, gearboxes, and tools floating around her.
"Are you going to the command deck?" Marla lifted her chin in question. The Xelayan shook her head.
"No, down to Engineering first. If we can get the hatch to the control compartment open we'll reboot the ship's main comp before we try to bring up the reactor core. What about you?"
"I'm going to wander around," Marla said, looking at the readouts on her arm again. "The lab ring, I think. Keep channel four open." She looked over to Mahl. "Nkosi, could you use someone familiar with the ship systems?"
"Haan!" he answered dubiously.
Marla clicked her teeth, changing the comm channel. "Mashujaa Toguna, could you tell Ms. Meyer to suit up and go to Engineering? Nkosi Mahl will be waiting for her." She paused, listening. "I don't believe that the ship is infected anymore, Mashujaa. You and Diiw Koro are proof of that, at least in my eyes. We would all be dead by now if the weapon stayed active onboard."
There was an affirmative grunt on the channel and Marla smiled at the lieutenant.
"Crewwoman Meyers will be along presently. Good luck---I'd love to see some light and heat in here."458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwrstM3pCed
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Marla followed the battery pack---guided by Mahl with a clever little handheld gas-jet unit---down two main decks, then swung out of the access shaft to let her boots adhere to the doorframe of a big, doublewide portal labeled xa lab one. The pressure hatch was sealed, and she swore quietly to herself. Of course, it's sealed. Everything is.
Feeling foolish, she found the manual locking bar and----straining to keep her foot wedged against the bulkhead for leverage---managed to crank the hatch open enough to get her suit through. On the other side, she paused, staring at the opening. Her arms were sore, but part of her brain was making a frightened sound. I might have to flee back this way...
"No, she said aloud, though her throat mike was muted. "No I won't."
Dialing her suit lamps to a more diffuse illumination, Marla pushed off gently and made her way forward through the ring. After a few minutes, she pulled herself up short, staring through a thick oval window into the next lab. The hatch was sealed tight, the chamber dark, but the fragmentary light of her suit lamps picked out the shape of a clean-box with something bulky inside. Some kind of debris was scattered on the deck, and there was a subtle sense of disorder among the white and steel surfaces.
Someone working on something when the disaster overcame them?
"Damn!" The hatch was sealed, and the pressure seals closed. The chamber had no manual lock---indeed, a heat-distorted label declared the space beyond a "secured environment." Marla clicked her mike on. "Earlie? How long until we've got power?"
There was no answer. Marla froze, listening to the warble of static and an intermittent, distant pinging sound. Suppressing a cold shiver of fear, she changed the channel again. "Landers to the Sokolov, come in please."
There was still no answer, but---obscurely---Marla was a little relieved. Something's blocking my suit comm, she thought. That's it.
Only slightly less apprehensive, she made her way back to the access shaft, pushing away from the handholds set into the ceiling and floor. Squeezing through the hatchway, she breathed a sigh of relief to hear channel four wake to life with Earlie and Olivia chatting amiably while they worked.
"Earlie? How long until we've got power?"
The Xelayan made a coughing sound---laughter---then said: "We haven't opened the door to Engineering yet, but we're close. One of the hatch motors burned out and Mahl is replacing the mechanism. So I'd say another hour, at least."
"Thanks," Marla muted the channel, staring around at the cold darkness filling the ship. The main accessway seemed bottomless, even with a receding line of torches shining in the dimness. Somehow, the faint little pools of light only made the gloom seem more encompassing and complete. Disheartened, she sat down, swinging her boots over the shaft. "I guess I'll just wait, then."
After an endless mazao (minute) she pulled a w-pad from the cargo pocket of her suit and thumbed it awake. Might as well get some work done, she thought glumly. So something got loose on the ship, something which must have propagated through the air, a gas or vapor---how else could it move so fast and be unseen? Air is easy to penetrate, and permeates almost everything. An aerosol of some kind... She called up the ship schematics Earlie had been using to follow the power and utility conduits. Her pad still held the modeling and time-regression software she'd used on Jiri, which could understand the volume of the ship, the rooms and chambers, and even the lack of organic artifacts.
Just like a site abandoned for so long all the organics have decayed away, she thought after thirty minutes. Hmmm...that's a good lab exercise for first-years.
Steadily brightening light broke her concentration, and she looked up to see the pilot scooting up the shaft towards her. A little embarrassed, she tucked the w-pad away. "How goes it, Mr. Baxter?"
"Good," he answered, cheerful humor returned. "All is open, and Mahl's got his battery hooked up. Looks like the ship's fuel cells still have some juice, though. Environmental was still working for a while after the accident. Earlie's starting up the comp from local power. I'm heading for the bridge to check the relays and get the main comm array running."
Marla smiled. "Good. Now, about main power....?"
Baxter waggled his head ambivalently, inducing a slow spin. "No promises there. Mahl wants to check every centimeter of the reactor to make sure nothing got eaten away by our little friend. Can't say that I blame him."
"No, I suppose not." Marla rose, one hand clinging to a railing surrounding the hatchway. "If power comes back up, I'll want you to unlock the hatches in the lab habitat for me. Don't open them, though. I'll take care of that."
Baxter nodded, then kicked off, flying up into the darkness, his helmet haloed by the flare of his lamps. Marla watched him go, feeling the darkness close around her again. Her suit was starting to smell, even after just a couple of hours inside. Just like on Jiri. Maybe the showers will function, she thought hopefully. Then she realized all the towels on board would have disintegrated and she was depressed again.458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnkHIrj4qh5
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The wall against Marla's back trembled and her eyes flew open. For a moment, she was disoriented---she'd fallen asleep listening to the fans in her suit---and saw only darkness sprinkled with faint lights above her. I'm outside?!
Then she looked down the main shaft and saw a ring of lights flare on----a section of overheads 100 feet away, near the ring hub into Engineering---then another and another. Marla stood up, grabbing hold of the nearest handhold, and the wave of lights washed over her. The deck continued to tremble, echoing the sound of a distant power plant turning over.
"Backup power is up in Engineering," Earlie growled in her ear. "Some of the emergency lights are on. I'm starting the heat exchangers and air circulation."
Marla swung into the lab ring and crabbed down into the first tier of labs. Puzzles, she stared around---the lights were still out---then they flickered on, one by one, casting a steady daylight radiance. She blinked and her helmet polarized slightly. In the clear light, the stark emptiness of the work cubicles and rooms was even more striking.
All gone, everyone's work destroyed, she thought sadly, shuffling up the curve of the lab ring. Whatever they didn't note down on comp---lost forever. She reached the sealed doorway to the clean room and looked inside. Here, most of the lights were still off, but two spots shone inside the containment chamber. A rust-red and ochre cylinder stood in a stainless steel cradle, anachronous and startling with irregular chips and flakes of stone amid the clean, smooth lines of the lab. Marla swallowed. The artifact---what else could it be?---was sectioned, cut clean in half as by a surgical beam. A metal-clad emitter ring hung poised above the cylinder, distended from an equipment pod. She guessed the cut was very narrow, maybe only a millimeter across.
She began to sweat again, and the fans spun up in the suit, trying to keep her temperature constant. Reflexively, she looked down, checking the pressure seal on the door. With power restored, the panel showed three green lights and one red. She blinked.
The door seal failed. Oh, God! Marla stepped back, and then stopped, gritting her teeth. Too late now, too late weeks ago. Whatever was inside escaped, ate through the containment pod, through the door seals, and right out into the ship. She unclenched her hands and stared at the door. Adrenaline hissed in her blood, making her arms tremble.
After a long moment, she clicked her mike open. "Earlie, are you busy right now?"
A growl answered and a string of curses. Marla smiled, though the motion felt strange. "Yes, sister, I can wait. I'm in lab ring one. Take your time."
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Marla sucked the last of a threesquare from her food tube and stood up as Earlie and Chowdhury drifted down into the lab ring. The Xelayan was still surrounded by a cloud of tools and cargo bags, but the gunner seemed to have accumulated some of the bulkier items.
"What's our status?" Marla asked, catching Earlie's paw and drawing her to a stop on the deck. Earlie yawned in response, showing an ebon mouth filled with white teeth. Her fur was rumpled and one ear lay flat back against her head while the other was canted forward.
"All we have is glarr'feath---tail feathers," the Xelayan snarled. "Fuel cell power is up, main comp is up, the main reactor is still down, and we're lacking power in most of the ship." A gloved paw flexed and Marla noticed the Xelayan's e-suit was fitted with a flexible metal mesh to accommodate extended claws. The fine mail glistened like fish scales. "Mahl-sahib thinks this tangle-tailed weapon chewed up most of the power conduit ruins. Some survived, so we have lights in the main core and some sections, but everything replaced three maintenance cycles ago is gone."
Marla wrinkled her nose. "Bad parts?"
Earlie nodded. "The repair logs show they swapped out most of the original conduit for new three years ago, as part of a systems upgrade. The new conduit was supposed to have a higher load tolerance, so they replaced all of the high-draw lines with this zorblaxandar---sorry---inferior product. So the lights are on, some comp panels are up, but most of the hatches don't work, and the drivers are offline, along with sensors, weapons, and the boat bay doors."
"Okay," Marla stared at the hatch into the clean room. "What about this one?"
Earlie shrugged. "The lights are on, try it.
Marla took a breath, nodded abruptly, and stepped to the door. Then she stopped, unwilling to touch the controls. She felt Chowdhury and Earlie staring at her and became aware of the man's shipgun, raised and pointing past her at the door. A smile twitched her lips. Instinct! Danger in the high veldt! As if his gun will stop this thing if it's still in there. Her forefinger stabbed the button and the hatch trembled. A motor whirred---the sound audible even through her suit insulation----and the heavy steel recessed, then drew up into an overhead panel.
There were bits and pieces of metal and ceramic scattered on the deck./ Marla recognized the metal inserts from the soles of a pair of dig boots similar to her own. The deck surface was a dark, irregular metal, and she realized the usual nonskid coating had been destroyed. She padded across the deck, giving a wide berth to the tumbled parts of a belt, a pen, a scratched and dented w-pad. Her eye shied away from two irregular shining white pebbles. Someone's teeth. As if I needed to see that, she thought fiercely.
The comp panel running the isolation chamber had power but had gone through an abrupt shutdown. Marla studied the glyphs for a moment, then tapped in RESTART and RESUME. Earlie leaned in at her side, staring into the chamber.
"These are the seal status indicators?" The Xelayan ran a metal-sheathed claw across a line of winking red glyphs. Marla nodded, watching the system boot up. The panel seemed sluggish, and one pane displayed a constant list of init errors. Earlie hissed. "Sloppy work." The whole seal is gone. Why don't they make them of solid metal or ceramic?"
Marla shrugged, concentrating on getting the panel operative again. "Company probably bought from the low bidder. Here we go...."
A w-feed opened on the panel, showing the interior of the isolation chamber and the rocky, corroded-looking cylinder. Marla slid a control down, and the image rewound with a flash, ending with a similar image, though now the cylinder was intact and the lighting slightly different.
"Replay," Marla muttered, finding the glyph for movement-returning-to-the-source and tapping the stylized warrior in a loincloth holding a spear in his left hand. ".....with audio overlay." Another tap and a timer began to run in one corner of the image.
For a moment there was no sound and Marla frowned. Earlie laughed softly and her claw-tip danced across a series of controls. An excited male voice suddenly filled Marla's helmet comm.
"...on Binay, in the month of Yunyambele, an artifact described by image log eight-eight-three was recovered from the surface of Kumasi III with some assistance from Miss Li, a post doc performing a routine geophysical survey of the planet. This is the first artifact we have found which is of an obvious and patently manufactured origin." There was a throaty, satisfied laugh, and Marla's nostrils flared. She decided she did not like the speaker, whoever he was. Assistance? You mean this Li found the damn thing and brought it to you like a good little student---or did you take it from her?
"Initial analysis shows a metallic cylinder surrounded by a matrix of sedimentary rock. The encrusting mixture is of interest, indicating the cylinder lay in mud or clay. Preliminary isotropic decay readings suggest an age for the matrix of nearly three million years." The laugh came again, and this time there was a sense of relief in the voice. "This places the artifact well within the timeframe of known Amma na nyama activities."
Marla felt the cold chill flood back into her stomach. What an idiot!
"Doctor Li has suggested that we isolate the artifact and send it back to the Company labs for more extensive examination, but I think it is safer and more prudent for us to make an initial survey here, aboard the ship." The voice settled, becoming pandemic and measured.
"She suggests the object may be dangerous, but if so, would it not be wiser to examine the artifact here---far from inhabited space? Any violent event would then affect only this one ship, and of course, myself. A loss, to be sure, but far better than losing Jiri or New Beijing!"
Marla shook her head in amazement at the man's ego. She could feel him thinking, even through the distance of the recording, and he was so, so eager to see what was inside the cylinder. Any real thought of caution or wariness was entirely disregarded.
"Luckily," the voice went on, "the limestone matrix does not interfere with most of our sensors here in the lab. I am going to try a low-power microwave scan first, just to see what the exterior really looks like...."
A succession of images unfolded---the cylinder's crusted surface was mapped, showing each ridge and bump and crevice in the stone---then the cylinder itself, a smooth metal tube, closed seamlessly at each end. There were no markings or signs on the outside of the metal, or at least none shown by the initial scans.
"I am initiating a low power intrusive scan, to see if the surface is permeable to x-ray."
Marla forced herself not to flinch as an emitter ring descended and began a pass along the length of the cylinder. At her side, she felt Earlie stiffen, and Chowdhury mutter: "Idiot---what if it's a booby trap or a bomb?"
The image of the cylinder on the w-pane didn't react, and a second image replaced the first. A murky picture showing the outlines of the limestone matrix, a metallic shell---very thin---and then a cavity within.
"Odd," echoed the voice from the past. "Half of the tube is solid, half empty. Wait---perhaps the solid half is only very dense....":
The image zoomed, focusing in, and zoomed again, revealing a dense, interlocking system of membranes and fluted intertwined protrusions.
"Could be a lung," Chowdhury said, staring sideways at the display.
"This is a structure," the voice continued, "very, very dense. The separations between the alveoli-like structures are barely measurable. Yet they exist. Hmmmm....an information storage structure? Could this be a book?"
Marla had to suppress a start; the hard, dry voice of Ramesses was whispering in her memory. A book? Or some other storage media?
The man's voice started to trend upward, filling with a rush of excitement. "It has to be a book," greed dripped into his voice. "Or a visual storage mechanism. Ah, what a prize that would be! But how is it accessed?" The image shifted to focus on the empty half of the cylinder. "And what is this space for? Why use only half of the container? Hmmm... perhaps the empty half is not truly empty?"
A glyph appeared in one corner of the recording, showing the visual feed was switching to a different sensor. Marla squinted at the icon but didn't recognize the symbol. "What's that?" she asked.
"Super-shortwave sensor," Chowdhury answered with a slight hesitation, face tense. "It interpolates to sub-x-ray definition for medical use—but he's a fool to use a high-power probe on this thing."
"... beginning scan," the recording announced. The image tightened, flashed blank, then focused again. The "empty" half of the tube was momentarily revealed as a murky soup of tiny spinning particles, then the image jerked, the tube split in half and there was a warning whoop of sound from the recording. Then everything went black and the panel beeped quietly, indicating the end of the image file.
"Well," Marla said after a moment. "I guess you should have been here, Mister Chowdhury."
The gunner shook his head, his face a tight mask. "I'm not disappointed to come late. If I had been here before, I would have put the bastard down."
With that, Chowdhury left, swinging angrily out of the lab and bounding off up the ring toward the main accessway. Marla watched him go but said nothing, and did not call him back. Instead, she turned to Earlie and said: "Can you make this panel play back the last part frame by frame?"
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Sighing with relief, Marla thumbed the release mechanisms for her helmet and heard a sharp click as they retracted. Fresh, chill air bathed her face. The ship would be cold for hours until hot air streaming from the heaters permeated all compartments. Then it would be too hot until the environmentals adjusted themselves. She sat down—in something like true gravity—and tugged the helmet free from the e-suit. Sitting across from her in the crew common area, Baxter slid a cup of fresh, hot coffee to her.
"There's no milk, but there is some creamer," he said.
"Thank you. Black is fine with me." The cup was warm in her hands. Three sugar packets from a pocket of her e-suit disappeared into the oily black liquid. She took a long swallow, feeling warmth flood her chest. "Better," she said after finishing the cup. "Better. Are the Lieutenant and Meyers still down in Engineering?"
Earlie nodded, her attention focused on sucking pale red fluid and chunks of raw meat from a mealbag.
Marla studiously kept her eyes away from the Xelyan dinner. "Mister Baxter, do we have flight control and comm up?"
"After a fashion," the pilot said, putting down his cup. "Attitude controls are mostly working, though there are still miles of conduit to replace for the main engines. Luckily, the fine control jets use compressed air and need only on/off signals to operate. They work fine—since they're mechanical. Navigation is up, and we have lost some planetary altitude, so when we do have engines live again I need to make an adjustment burn to put us back in the proper orbital. We have a spin in this hab ring, but not the others. The main comp is up, so you have shipboard comm and info retrieval—if you can find a working display."
He turned toward Earlie, who was squeezing the mealbag in one paw, making thick goo ooze into her open mouth. Baxter jerked back toward Marla. "Ah ... we've found the experimental transmitter, which is on its own fuel cell system, but I haven't messed with it. The cat can do that later, I guess. The main comm array is down until we rebuild power, but we're close enough to the Cornuelle that our suit radios still work."
"Unless you're in the labs," Marla commented, "which are shielded."
"What did you find down there?" Baxter stole a glance at Chowdhury, who was sitting with his own cup in his hands, content to say nothing. The two Marines were equally quiet and unobtrusive, sitting back from the edge of the table. Out of his combat suit, Toguna was of medium height, very fit, with broad shoulders and curly blue-black hair. Koro was thinner, with a lanky build and a ruddy complexion. Zuri, still looking miserable, sat beside Parker, slowly chewing on his thumb. "Did you find the ... weapon?"
"Yes." Marla drained her cup and set it down on the spotlessly clean tabletop. "One of the scientists working on the planet—a geologist named Li—found some stone cylinders in one of the canyons on the big mountain range. She brought an artifact back to base camp and showed her find to Doctor El-Mahdi, the dig supervisor. I think—not from anything said in the record, but hearing between the lines—the lead archaeologist, a man named Cross, then took the cylinder from El-Mahdi and returned to the ship."
Marla looked down at the table, finding a ring of coffee-colored condensation where her warm cup had stood on 'the cold metal. She squeaked her finger through the liquid, drawing a line down the middle of the circle.
"Cross tried to see what was inside the cylinder with a high-powered sensor. Half of the tube seemed to be empty—but it wasn't, not really. Half seemed to be filled with a tightly packed membrane, like the filaments lining a human lung. The lab's isotope decay analysis estimates the cylinder is almost three million years old." A sharp, short laugh escaped her. "Cross was pretty sure the device wasn't working anymore, or if it was, it was a kind of book or information storage device, like a 3w pack. Well, he was right, in a way."
Her finger slashed across the circle of moisture.
"His probe injected enough energy into the empty chamber to make a sort of gas of very, very small particles expand violently. A thin wall between the two chambers broke down and the gas flooded into the membranes within a fraction of a second. They mixed, violently, and the cylinder broke open."
"A binary round," grunted Toguna, his brown eyes gleaming in the darkness. "But not the usual sort of explosion?"
"No." Marla shook her head ruefully. "The gaslike particles, I think, were some kind of tiny nanomachines. They dissolved the membranes—destroyed them—but at the same time, they learned a pattern from the arrangement of the filaments. In less than a second, they were trained and they acquired enough raw material to duplicate themselves. Pressure expanded ..."
Three fingers stabbed into the circle and swirled the last fragments of moisture out into an unsightly blotch on the tabletop. "The weapon was released from its container and into the atmosphere." Gretchen sighed. "Clarkson had failed to evacuate the examination chamber, which ordinarily would not have been a problem, but in this case, the waste gases in the unit atmosphere were fuel for more nanomachines. I'm pretty sure the machines ignore plain atomic components—O and N and so on—but they chew up C02 for lunch, and any kind of long-chain molecule in their attack pattern for dinner. Pressure built in the chamber, and the eaters reached the pressure seals.
"If the Company had not purchased cheapie containment pods," Marla continued, "the eaters would have been confined. Their programming did not happen to include the stainless steel forming most of the pod walls. Unfortunately, a flexible sealant forming the join between the instrument package and the main unit was composed of long-chain polymers which were on the 'menu.'
"They escaped into the power and data conduit above the containment unit. The sheathing of the power cables gave them more food, allowing them to reproduce at an exceptionally rapid rate. I would guess, from the cut-off time of the recording unit, that they dropped power in the lab ring within sixty seconds of escape, and had penetrated into the starboard side of the ship within two minutes. Less than ten meters away is the starboard power coupling beside the boat bay. As the wavefront propagated, power collapsed, and the engineering team—who had no idea, I imagine, that Doctor Cross was even aboard— started an emergency shutdown of the grid.
"Within five min-NOX, everyone on the starboard side of the ship was dead. The engineers, who had suited up on the run, will have run right through the weapon cloud without even noticing anything. Then, by the time they reached the boat bay, the eaters would have reproduced inside their suits ... and you saw the result."
"Wait a moment." Toguna leaned forward, his black forehead creased in thought. "What happened to the eaters after they filled the ship?"
"They ate themselves." Marla looked around for something to clean up the puddle, then grimaced. No rags. There are no rags. "The last of their programming broke them apart when there was nothing left to consume. All they left behind was a cloud of component elements."
"What happened to that, do you suppose?" Toguna looked mildly disgusted.
Marla nodded toward the rear of the ship. "Most of it was likely circulated into the air purification system, which continued to run on backup power while it detected impurities in the air supply. But when the cloud was processed, there was nothing but pure air left, and the system shut down automatically. The rest of it was probably collected here and there, as a grainy white powder —"
Baxter suddenly snorted, coughing and spraying coffee across the conference table. He made a yucky face as he turned to Marla. "You mean this isn't a nondairy creamer?"458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnAHwfCclFR
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Her ears covered with a thick cap of Solarian luminafluff, e-suit helmet parked on the display panel, Marla leaned back in a chair reduced to metal strips in the lab ring control cube. Curving hallways lined with hatches stretched up to her left and right. Light from the lab holding the broken cylinder spilled out into the hall. It was still very cold—the heaters in the lab spaces had failed to activate with the rest----and Marla's breath puffed white as she hummed loudly to herself.
On the display---only half of which were working----w-panes were running, speeding through the day of the accident. A crewman wandered through one feed, eating pine nuts from a bag, then out of one frame and into another. Mostly she watched empty rooms and quiet machinery idling on standby. All of the scientists were down on the planet, working at the main camp. Marla sighed, bored, and speeded up the replay.
Almost immediately, blurred figures appeared and she dialed back ten min-NOX. "Finally!"
A tall, lean man with a neat beard- and field jacket swung down from the hab access tube, landing heavily in partial gravity. His hair was silvered, with a few streaks of black remaining, and he was wearing a heavy pair of sunglasses. A battered, grimy fieldpack, bulging with a heavy weight burdened narrow shoulders. "Doctor Cross—coming home with his prize," Marla murmured, keenly interested, watching the man hurry into the number one isolation lab. A moment later, a woman entered the lab ring by the same tube. Her tied-back hair was long, black, and very curly. She was also dressed in field kit, with a pocket-covered vest, sunglasses perched on her forehead, and linen pants tucked into her boots. "And our mathematician in residence, Doctor Nefertiti."
Marla felt a pang, seeing such familiar-looking people. She'd never met either of them, though the faces matched the briefing materials provided by the Company. But they felt so much like her friends on Jiri, or the other graduate students and professors at the university. And now they're gone, rendered down for Baxter's nondairy creamer.
She ignored Cross in his lab, following Nefertiti from camera to camera as the woman wound her way through the maze of cubicles and rooms. The mathematician was pushing a g-box in front of her, a dented steel case with a built-in zero-g, controlled by a hand unit. On the far side of the lab ring from the main control station, she stopped in front of a heavily reinforced hatchway.
Marla sat up, puzzled. She'd walked through the whole ring ... she hadn't noticed a security door. But Nefertiti's image punched in a keycode and the heavy blast door swung up and away, revealing a specimen vault and a bit of a room filled with racks of bins and cargo crates stacked on the floor. Then the door closed, and she was left with a nice picture of the hatchway.
"Well. What does Doctor Nerferitit have in her box, which was so valuable it went straight to the vault?"
She advanced the recording, flipping ahead ten minutes. No change. Then she blinked—a smoky haze swept down the corridor, flames leaping from empty air. The flooring blackened and warning lights began to flash. Lighting in the hallway flickered, then failed. Marla tasted bile, knowing what had to happen next.
The hatchway cycled up, and Doctor Nefertiti stepped out, alarm clear in her round Nubian face. She started to call out, raising her left arm—the shining band of a comm winked in the remaining light. Marla bit her lip, teeth clenched tight. A gray cloud coalesced out of the air and Nefertiti staggered, throwing up her hand uselessly. Her clothing vanished in a sudden flame, burning away with frightening speed, and then her flesh sloughed away into nothing, and there was a flash of bone and red meat.
The gray-and-black cloud lingered for a moment, then dispersed in a drifting cloud of white dust and bits and metal fragments scattered on the floor. The hatchway remained open for a moment, and Marla could see the edge of the g-box, then the door rumbled shut, extinguishing the vault lights, and plunging the hallway into absolute darkness.
The video replay ended with a bing and a motion-halting glyph.
"Not an easy thing to watch, is it?" rumbled a voice at Marla's shoulder. Mashujaa Toguna was standing beside her, his black Marine e-suit blending into the room's dimness. He had a bundle in his hands. "My apologies for disturbing you, madam, but I thought you might need something for the cold." He grinned. "But that's a prettier hat than I had in my ruck. I like the.....ah...xanthor?"
"Oh." Marla touched the thick, felty plush of the cap on her head. "My mum makes them for all the kids," she said, tugging at the brightly-colored shapeless mass. "Thank you for the thought, Mashujaa. But Zoomar had its own bad weather, and Jiri was bitterly cold. I've plenty of warm things."
Marla managed a smile, thinking of trudging across the brittle, rocky permafrost to the Sigi Tolo site, stiff in a triply-insulated e-suit and respirator. The Marine had a gray-green service wool cap and a pair of gloves, also a foul olive color, in his hands. Good enough for our slowly heating ship, she thought with a hidden frown, but not good enough to keep your hands and ears attached on Jiri.
"Good," he said, stuffing the cap and gloves into a cargo pouch on the front of his suit. "Do you need help getting that vault door open?"
Marla started to shake her head---she had a video of Nefertiti's keycode---but then refusing the offer might be impolite. Might need a big, brawny Marine sometime. She stood up, snugging the sherpa cap under her ears. "Thanks, she said, "I don't think there'll be any trouble, but you never know...."
The vault door proved to be hidden behind a standard wall panel. Marla supposed the panel had slid down automatically during the power outage. Toguna's combat bar made a suitable lever to pop the panel free from the floor, and then he rolled it up with one hand. The vault hatch was sealed, and Marla stepped in---lips pursed in concern---to find the keypad in ruins. All of the pressure surfaces had eroded away, leaving only a contact panel and some pitlike holes where wires, perhaps, had once run.
"This will do the trick!" Marla rapped the panel without a result.
"Madam, permit me to try," the Marine waited politely until Marla stepped away, then drew a w-pad from his belt, unfolded a set of waxy-looking stems from the back, and---humming softly to himself---matched them up with the holes. After a moment, the w-pad beeped and the schematic of a keypad appeared on its glassy face. "Give this a try," Toguna said, suppressing a pleased grin.
Marla tapped in the code recorded by the surveillance cameras. The vault door made a chuff sound, then rolled quietly away into the overhead. The vault room was entirely dark. "Very handy," she said, handing the device back to the sergeant.
"We aim to please," he said in a particularly dry tone, flicking a torch against the far wall. "Nyame bless, do they make such a ghastly mess all the time?"
Marla stepped into a crowded room, now lit by a pervasive blue glow. Dr. Nefertiti's g-box was sitting on the deck amid a wild jumble of straw-shaped mineral core samples. She stepped carefully around the striated tubes----most had broken apart, leaving a wash of grit and sand on the floor---and picked up the controller for the g-box. It whirred to life, and the box lifted up and drifted to an empty section of deck.
"No," Marla said absently, "the core samples will have been in packing material and a cargo crate---they're just stuffed cellulose and a sealant---very tasty, I imagine." She keyed the box to open, and the top latch released with a clunk. Kneeling, she lifted the lid and shone her hand lamp inside.
"Oh, now...." She let out a long whistle of surprise. "That's so beautiful!"
Warily, Toguna leaned over. Inside the box was a lump of stone---perhaps half a meter long and ten centimeters thick----a deep sandy red streaked with cream, glowing in the light of Landers's lamp. Marla brushed a fine layer of sandstone dust away, revealing a handsbreadth-wide whorl. A tapered tail of ribbed shell curled around the impression of stalklike legs.
"See, Mashujaa? The fruit of some ancient Kumasian sea, preserved by chance in sandy mud, along with our----friend."
Most of the fossil was buried in the stone, and lying alongside the ancient cephalopod was the unmistakable shape of a machined metal cylinder. Like the artifact in the isolation lab, the cylinder was crusted with limestone aggregate.
Marla bit her lip gently, tracing the outline of the device with a gloved finger. "Li's geological survey found wonders."
Toguna stood up, his face pale. "Ma'am---I know you won't like to hear this----but we should jettison this thing right away. What if it goes off like the other one?"
Marla looked up, face pinched with distaste. At that moment, she suddenly knew exactly how Cross had felt, clutching the prize close to his chest, rushing to make the first analysis. He would see what nobody had seen in three million years---he alone would look upon the mystery revealed and he alone would learn the truth....But the open fear on the Marine's big, pug face was too real to ignore. She looked back at the cylinder, at the marvelous hunk of shale, at the delicate beauty of the shell and its ancient inhabitant, all trapped together by circumstance. The most beautiful, most striking, most wonderful thing I've ever seen. How did Nefertiti keep from taking this to her laboratory, subjecting it to her experiments? Li had the very look to find this. If the cylinder is an Amma na nyama device....my God!
"Madam?" Toguna touched her shoulder, gently, shaking her out of the reverie. His voice was soft and insistent. "Dr. Landers, we have to isolate this weapon. Now!"
"You're right," Marla stood up, shaking her head. She felt a little shaky. "Let's seal up the g-box and put it in an airlock we're not using. That should hold the eaters if they escape, and we can vent the lock to space if we must."
"Doctor, listen to me," Toguna stood as well, towering over her. His dark brown eyes were filled with worry. "We have no way of knowing if this cylinder holds the same kind of nanomechs as the other one---this one could be an explosive, a nuclear, an antimatter bomb, anything. Poking something like this, even with a really, really tiny stick, is bad, bad business. The procedure says to put the whole box on a carryall and have the Sokolov boost it into the sun."
"No! Don't even think about it!" Marla stepped between the Marine and the box. "This artifact is worth my whole career, Mushajaa. Worse, it's worth a mansa's ransom for the Company and for the Company's primary contractor, which is the Afridominian Navy." She stopped, searching his face. He looked back, so plainly worried for his own safety, for her life and the others on the ship, her anger drained away as fast as it had flared up.
"I'm sorry, Mushajaa, I've no right to shout at you." Marla put her hand on his arm. "Like you, I'm under pretty strict orders---and my first order is to make sure things like this are brought back intact and well documented. So even if we talk to Navigator Verma, the answer is going to be the same---the cylinder stays and comes back to Afridominian space with us."
Toguna's eyes narrowed, and one had made an abortive movement to his comm pad, but then he nodded, taking a long look at the battered, rusted box on the floor. "Are you going to try to study it on the ship?"
"I...." Marla paused! Why lie? He'll know, and you'll look like a jackass. "Yes, I have to try. But---I'm not going to try anything invasive, or high energy, and I'm going to run passive scans on this thing for a day or two first."
Toguna gave her an arch look and she blushed. "Really, Mushajaa. and we'll be sure to evac the airlock of any atmosphere. I'll be careful!"
"Of course, madam," he said, picking up the g-box controls. "Why don't you summon Baxter---or Chowdhury if our coffee-drinking man is still working up his lunch---and have them get the number three airlock ready, while I angle our little friend here out of this place?"
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"You see? All safe and sound." Marla leaned against the wall of a cargo bay, watching the atmosphere gauge sink toward zero pressure. Koro and Toguna were packing up a welding kit they'd found in one of the workshops. Inside the airlock, the chunk of shale and its ancient passengers were firmly secured in a hexacarbon cradle. The metal cage was oriented towards the outer lock door on a pair of rails. A scratch-built launching mechanism---half blasting putty and a comm-controlled detonator---rode beneath. Two metal-cased sensors Marla had scavenged from the lab ring were pinned up on the gleaming white walls of the airlock.
"You seem a little more relaxed," Toguna said in an offhand way, as he coiled up a length of comm cable. He was trying not to smirk. "Now your precious baby is on the other side of the lock."
"Maybe," Marla said nodding. "I...."
Her comm warbled, and Earlie's voice filled the air around them. "Huntsister, the main comm array is working, and there's someone who wants to speak to you."
"Patch 'em th rough," Marla said, turning away from the two Marines. "Someone on the Solokov?"
"No," the Xelayan said in a sly voice, "I managed to whisker the camp planetside. Everyone seems to be alive---but they're pissed and hungry and want to know if the showers are working."
Damn. Marla clicked her teeth, cursing herself for forgetting about the scientists stranded on the planet. "I'm a fine leader," she muttered. "We should have called them first thing. They must be half-mad with fear from being abandoned."
"I wouldn't say half covers the strength of their feeling," Earlie commented. "You wish to take this call from the bridge?"458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9y6o2rLzif
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"Doctor Lennoxse, I'm sorry, but Dr. Cross," Marla repeated for the sixth time, is dead. Everyone who was on the Great Zimbabwe, save for crewman Nkrumha and crewwoman Meyer, is dead."
In the w-pane beside the captain's chair----now covered with an Afridominian Marine field blanket---a thin, distressed-looking woman stared back at Marla, her face framed by the hood of an e-suit which had seen better days. Two men crowded behind her in some kind of shelter---Marla could make out the roof strut characteristics of an extruded building----and both of them seemed to have grasped the facts of the matter, to judge from their stunned expressions.
"I---I don't understand. He just went on the shuttle..." Lennoxse had faded blond hair and high cheekbones. Marla guessed she'd been very pretty when she was younger, but years spent in the glare of alien suns had not treated her kindly.
"Magrieta," Marla leaned forward, catching the woman's eye. "I know it seems very sudden, but you've been out of contact with the Great Zimbabwe for weeks----surely you thought something had gone awry aboard?"
"Yes....." Lennoxse swallowed and seemed to become aware of her surroundings again. "I just hoped---he was still alive."
"I'm sorry, but there was an accident, and the crew, Dr. Cross and Dr. Nefertiti, were all killed. Now---is everyone at base camp all right? Do you require medical assistance?"
"We're fine," rumbled one of the two men, a hulking bearded face with a stout nose. "And very, very glad to hear from you, Doctor Landers. I am Zhang Weimin---ni hao!"
"And hello to you, Doctor." Marla bobbed her head in greeting. "I know you all want to get a real shower and a different brand of ration bar, but there's going to be a delay before we can bring you back up to the ship."
"What do you mean? Is there still a problem?" the other man---a smaller, wirier fellow---pushed his face into the camera. "Don't you have a rescue ship?"
"Mr. Patterson," Marla smiled amiably in greeting. "The Afridominian Navy has been good enough to bring us here to help you, but accommodations are lacking on the Sokolov for guests. There is also a problem with the shuttle engines, which has yet to be resolved. When there's a place to put you on the Great Zimbabwe, and we can retrieve you safely, we'll do it right away."
What a fine manager I make, passed through the back end of Marla's brain. Next I'll be expressing my profound sympathies at their recent layoff.
Zhang frowned, heavy black eyebrows beetling in worry. "What kind of accident, Doctor Landers? Has the Great Zimbabwe been damaged?"
"She's.....a little Spartan right now, Doctor," Marla---watching the faces of the three scientists on the planet---decided not to explain the events of the artifact and its activation. Not today, at any rate. "The accident that killed the crew also---destroyed most of the amenities aboard. Luckily, the Sokolov has been able to supply us with new bedding, towels, and food." If you call Marine ration bars and olive-colored threesquares food.
"In any case, we should have a shuttle ready to go in a day or two, so recall your field crews and get everyone ready to ship up.'
Lennoxse nodded, turning away with a distant, scared expression on her face. Patterson was already gone, leaving only the bearlike Zhang with a troubled look in his eyes.
"Is something wrong, Doctor?"
"Ummmm." Weimin twisted the ends of his mustache with a nervous motion. "Almost everyone is in camp. Since the Great Zimbabwe quit responding to our hails, I fear morale has suffered. No one is even working in the excavation anymore. But one of us, I fear, is not here. She's gone, out wandering in the wasteland."
"Who?" Marla felt irritated, but at the same time, she knew who it must be, even before Zhang said her name aloud. Who else would I want to speak to? Who do we need to speak to?
"Our own dear Li Mei," Zhang said sadly, scratching a sore on the side of his nose. "She left in her Li Wei the same day Cross and Nefertiti went up to the ship. We've heard nothing from her since, not so much as a word."458Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNgllDm06Tr
