Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle Read online

  “So you hate your homeworld.”

  “I don’t hate it, Eric. I have no feelings for it one way or the other. I wouldn’t retire there, I wouldn’t want to live there, but plenty of people do and happily at that. Good luck to them.”

  “Hmmm,” Eric didn’t seem convinced. “What do you think of their military?”

  “Professional in the main, well trained rankers from what I saw on the Shan homeworld, but the officers are mostly nobles. It’s very hard for commoners to enter the academy on Faragut. The officers walk about like they have a stick up their butts. They act as if everyone else was born to serve them. Kate told me the same problem exists on Bethany.”

  Eric nodded. “Bethany doesn’t have nobles, but they have founding families, which are about the same. It’s not what you know but who you know with them. Hiller is a rare exception among them in that he was born with some common sense.”

  Gina snorted.

  “Tomorrow we check out Landing,” Eric said changing the subject. “If it looks promising I want to go to phase two by the end of the day. Thoughts?”

  “One of us flies back to Hobbs at the earliest opportunity to collect the base camp habitats and all the gear the engineers need.”

  “Good. We’ll check out things together. If it looks okay, you go back upstairs and get Liz and her people and all their gear. They’re engineers. They can use that expertise to build their own camp.”

  Gina grinned. “Good.”

  * * *

  16 ~ The Prize

  Landing City, Kushiel

  Gina surveyed the blasted and broken city buildings and took another reading. The city was hot as they had thought it would be, but not dangerous to someone wearing an environmental suit with canned air. The habitats were like very big environmental suits in the way they protected the inhabitants, so as long as they washed off contaminants from their suits before entering, they were all good. She reported that to Eric. He was on the other side of the city checking out the structures there.

  “Sounds good, but I haven’t found a good place to set up yet. You?”

  “Not yet,” Gina replied. “I’m heading to the site I saw on my shuttle’s sensors next. I have a good feeling about it.”

  “Okay, but I’m not sure why you think a hot spring is important.”

  Gina just shrugged not caring that he couldn’t see it. Eric seemed to feel the hot spot was a natural occurrence, and that could be true, but what if it wasn’t?

  “Maybe something interesting there,” she said and signed off.

  She couldn’t drive to her point of interest. The city had been severely hammered during the war and its streets were clogged with rubble and fallen buildings. She doubted the thieves had “salvaged” anything here. There really wasn’t anything left, and that was going to be a problem. She knew how she had felt when she saw the destruction, and knew Eric must feel the same way. With such devastation it would be a miracle if what they sought was recoverable. Still, they had to look and be sure before they pulled out. Liz wouldn’t accept anything but positive proof of failure, and Gina felt the same. She knew how important Oracle was to the General.

  She made her way by foot to the place she had marked on her internal map. It took hours of walking and backtracking when she found herself blocked, but finally she found the source of the heat her sensors said would be here.

  She circled the ruined building trying to imagine it undamaged. She gave up after a very brief time. There was little point to the exercise, there was so little left to work with. Most of the walls had been blasted away. Literally. The nukes had not only irradiated the area, the air burst had wiped away entire blocks of buildings leaving a few nubs of walls and the foundations. That is what she had here. Foundations, melted steel, a wall here and there. The main feature was the remnants of the stairwells and elevator shafts. Gina switched to thermal imaging and confirmed her guess that it was the elevator shafts radiating heat.

  “Okay, don’t get excited. It’s not hot springs, but it doesn’t mean you’ve found a power source.”

  Or did it? She supposed a hot spring could have broken through into a basement of a building like this one, but she just didn’t believe it. Waste heat under a building escaping up an elevator shaft didn’t mean anything. Really. It didn’t mean for example that she had found the A.I, or its backup module. It only meant she had found a source of heat on a frozen world. That’s all. Just that and nothing else. She needed to investigate further.

  “Eric,” she said not betraying her excitement.

  “What have you got?”

  “Well it’s not a hot spring, not in the basement of a building. I think we need to go down and check this one out. Bring climbing gear would you?”

  “On my way,” Eric said. “Stay put and I’ll home on you.”

  “‘kay,” Gina said and headed for the elevator shaft to see if climbing down would be a simple matter or whether they would need the engineers.

  They needed the engineers, Gina thought, some hours later as she and Eric dangled from ropes down one of the shafts. They were stymied by what was left of the elevator winching mechanism and the car itself where it had fallen and jammed in the shaft. She didn’t know if the car had hit bottom or not. She tended to doubt it based upon the state of the emergency brakes. She could just make them out, and they had deployed clamping the car in place. The tangle of cable and pulleys was the problem. Why the hell hadn’t the builders used anti-grav cars?

  “We need cutting equipment,” she said.

  “Hmm, we could probably make do with the thermate,” Eric said studying the problem. “Just burn it into chunks and let it fall wherever.”

  Thermate burned at a higher temperature than thermite and should do the job, but just cutting the obstruction into chunks and letting it settle might not be in their best interests. It would all go down, and they needed to go down as well.

  “We do it?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Hmmm,” Eric said thoughtfully and panned his light over the debris. “I think so, but carefully. Look there and there.”

  Gina eyed the places he nailed with his light. Two pulleys. She nodded. “You thinking to cut through those and let the cables spring free?”

  “Exactly. Cut those pulleys into chunks. The cables will uncoil explosively. That might clear a way through and down to the car. If it does then great. If it doesn’t we cut again.”

  “Okay,” Gina agreed. “Hang here and I’ll be right back.”

  She started back up the shaft to get the thermate from Eric’s APC. He had parked closer than she had, having found a clear route on the far side of the city from the shuttles. It took her a little over an hour to make the round trip. She found Eric exactly as she’d left him, dangling from his rope and staring at nothing. She hated it when the old ones did that. It was like finding a droid in sleep mode. They became statue still and just went away, whether into memory or thoughts, she didn’t know.

  “Eric?” Gina said.

  His head swivelled like a targeting sensor and his eyes! They were empty, but then a second later awareness flooded back and with it his Humanity. He was back, but if this was him, what had been looking out of his eyes just then? She shivered; she didn’t want to know. She passed him some of the thermate, keeping back a sizable amount for later. She had more up top as well, safely out of the way.

  “You want me to do the other one?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Eric said and quickly went to work.

  She had to admit he was quick and precise. She could have done the job and would probably have gotten the same result when they lit it off, but he was faster. Like he’d told her on Thurston that time; he was a dab hand with explosives.

  Gina climbed out of the shaft leaving him to it. Eric joined her a while later but only briefly. He touched off the thermate remotely almost the instant he reached her, and then after the smoke had cleared from the shaft, they descended together to admire the results.

  G
ina looked over his handiwork and decided they were heading in the right direction but weren’t there quite yet. This time she helped Eric set up. She wrapped the cables with the thermate bandage, wrapping it nice and tight before adding the detonator and then spraying the entire thing with the aerosol. The quick setting nanopolymer was designed to contain the heat and gasses only briefly before succumbing. The result was that the thermate would melt everything inside to a semi-liquid state before bursting outward in a shower of red hot metal particles. She set up four charges, and Eric three more. The detonators were all on the same channel and would ignite together.

  This time when they lit off the charges they had to wait ten minutes or so for the smoke to clear and the metal to cool down. Vipers could survive a punctured suit even in these conditions, but why put themselves through the discomfit? When the smoke had cleared and thermal imaging suggested the scrap had cooled, they lowered themselves down the shaft for the third, and hopefully final, time.

  “Looks good,” she said. There was still plenty of scrap cable in the way, but the central area was clear all the way through. “Me first?”

  “If you like,” Eric said, sounding amused. “You did find it after all.”

  “Yeah, I did find it. Looking forward to our boat trip?”

  “Getting ahead of yourself aren’t you? We don’t know there’s anything down there.”

  “There’s something,” she disagreed. “I don’t know what or how useful it is, but there’s something.”

  Eric didn’t argue. Wise of him. The heat source alone made this one worth investigating, and was why they were doing this location first and not some other random site.

  Gina lowered herself carefully through the entangled cables, keeping to the middle of the cleared zone. She managed not to snag her suit and once past, she allowed herself to fall faster. The car was a long way down, but she soon reached it and was standing on its roof watching Eric make his descent. Before he did, she had the hatch open and peaked inside.

  “I wonder who they were,” she muttered when Eric joined her to look into the car. “Three strangers, three friends?”

  “Doesn’t matter now. They’re closer in death than alive.”

  Strange sentiment, Gina thought, as she dropped into the elevator. She tried not to land on the skeletons, but Eric had no such sensibilities. He landed with a crunch and a puff of bone dust as one of the skulls disintegrated beneath his boots. She didn’t protest. She was too interested in forcing the doors apart.

  “Give a hand would you?”

  Eric stepped beside her and they heaved the doors apart to reveal darkness. He directed his light and revealed an empty corridor stretching ahead. Gina could tell it was the source of the heat despite her suit, or maybe because of it in a way. Condensation immediately began forming on its exterior surfaces when the warmer air touched it. The moisture flashed to frost almost immediately.

  She turned on her own lamp and panned it around, looking for anything that might tell her what she had here. This wasn’t a basement access for instance; too well appointed. It looked like any other corridor in a generic office building, but not like something leading to a machine room that typically serviced such buildings. There was carpet on the floor for one thing; a clue that said to her that people and not machines were expected to use the spaces down here.

  She advanced along the corridor nailing a door with her light. It was locked, but she twisted the handle with smooth inexorable power listening to the mechanism. The pop and crunch made her happy. Silly really, but the little things about being a viper still thrilled. She opened the door and scowled. Eric peered over her shoulder at the cleaning supplies and chuckled. She growled under her breath and closed the storeroom door. They moved to the next door. Unlocked this time. It was an office. Eric entered first and Gina followed.

  The room was partitioned into work spaces each one containing a desk and computer. She played her light over the nearest work station. It had been left neat, as if its user had just left for the night and planned to return the next day. Without a power source she couldn’t begin to guess what kind of business had been conducted here, but Eric hadn’t even glanced at the computers. He’d made a beeline for the waste bins.

  The waste bins?

  Eric dug through the trash and selected a discarded flimsy. He read it and then another. “Not what I hoped.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing important. Just an old memo.”

  Gina left him to it and stepped back out into the corridor to investigate the other doors. She entered offices to scout around. Most were executive offices with an outer room for an assistant and a plush inner office for the exec. She didn’t find anything interesting until she came to a stairwell.

  She forced the door open against fallen debris from above and found the stairwell lit by emergency lighting. She blinked in surprise. The emergency lights had power, but from where? She advanced further climbing rubble and edged toward the stairs going down. It was blocked with fallen rubble, but she thought she could detect a hum of machinery. The sounds of her suit PLSS tricked her ears. There couldn’t be active equipment—she glanced sideways at the dimly glowing light panel, but then again...

  “Eric, I’ve found something interesting,” she said over her comm. “Come take a look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Emergency lighting in the stairwell at the far end from the elevator,” she said. “I think I hear something.”

  “On my way.”

  She tried to get a better position to listen for that humming sound, but the helmet made it useless. She hesitated for a second, but then took a chance and removed it. Her eyeballs tried to freeze as the cold hit her face, and alerts started flashing upon her display. The temperature was higher than outside as she had noted before. Wind chill alone made a big difference, but even so it was still well below zero. Her breath puffed into fog and drifted toward the corridor carried along by a current of warmer air coming up through the rubble in the stairs. She switched to infra and was excited to see the faintly glowing current clearly. She coughed and then again. The air was toxic as her display warned and it irritated her nose and throat. Sulphur dioxide was a key ingredient in sulphuric acid. In other words, she was breathing sulphuric acid in a gaseous mist. She coughed again.

  >_ Sensors: Environmental health warning, sulphur dioxide in dangerous concentrations.

  >_ Diagnostics: Warning, lung capacity impaired.

  >_ IMS: Repairs in progress.

  Yeah, yeah. What else was new? Gina dismissed the warnings, and still coughing, laid down to put her ear against the rubble. She upped the gain to amplify input to her ears, and grinned. Definitely something going on down there.

  Gina winced and hastily returned her hearing to normal as Eric arrived, his footfalls booming in her head like a rampaging dinosaur. She climbed back to her feet and put her helmet back on, taking deep cleansing breaths to flush her lungs of the toxic crap she had been breathing. Some of the warnings on her display winked out, while others slowly changed, edging back to safe or normal parameters. She eyed her radiation dosimeter. It continued to glow balefully. Particles of radioactive dust must have entered her suit. She would need to decontaminate the suit inside and out as well as herself. She cursed the need, but wasn’t too worried. The dose wasn’t fatal for a viper, or anyone else for that matter. It was equivalent to an x-ray, no more than that, but it was still a high amount for such a brief exposure.

  “Definitely something down there, Eric. I can hear machine noises, and there’s a warm air current coming up from below.”

  Eric must have switched to infra as she had done because he nodded. “I see it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s our first and best indication that something’s here,” Eric said. “We won’t know what it is unless we get down there for a look.”

  He edged passed her and studied the tons of rubble filling the stairwell, and then stood cra
ning his neck to study the shaft overhead. He started climbing upward until he ran out of room, shining the powerful beam of his lamp up into the darkness. He came back down.

  “Let’s go back. We need Liz’s people.”

  Gina nodded and together they headed for the elevator shafts and the ropes hanging there.

  Base camp, Landing, Kushiel

  The engineers were good, Gina was pleased to note. They had thrown themselves eagerly into their work after being idle aboard ship so long. They had barely been on site a few hours after the trip from Hobbs, and the base camp was already laid out. The first dome was under construction, its supporting framework spreading one triangular formation after another linking together in a circle and beginning to arch upward. Other domes were just a pile of crates and metal tubes as yet, but the ground had been prepared and the foundations poured. Amazing stuff, nanopolymers. Even in such terrible conditions it worked as designed, poured directly onto ice even! Without good foundations and floors, they couldn’t pressurise the domes. The thick plastic circular platforms were already being covered with snow as the clear skies they had praised when they landed, gave way to another howling storm. The engineers worked on, ignoring the blast of icy wind. The dome’s skeleton took after its masters, ignoring the winds as it climbed and linked to its neighbouring structures.

  “It’s going well,” Liz said privately on her helmet comm, perhaps interpreting Gina’s watchfulness as worry. “The frame can handle much worse than this.”

  “I’m not worried. Your people seem satisfied with things. What about the walls?”

  “As long as we leave certain panels out for the wind to pass through it will be fine. If we build by the book, the walls would turn into a windbreak and might be carried away. The domes rely upon the structural integrity of neighbouring panels if you know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”