Dark Beneath the Moon (15 page)

It was a relief when we got close enough and Rei switched the view on the pilot’s board over to the main screen so the rest of us could see it, too. The moon seemed unperturbed by the chaos that had erupted around it a few short minutes ago, and still hung, rotating slowly, like a golden ornament.

“Anything?” I asked Yuskeya.

After a moment’s pause, she said, “The scans of the moon are working now.”

“And?” My voice was tight.

“There’s someone still down there.”

“How many?”

“I read three.”

Three survivors
. From a ship of a hundred and seventy-five. I felt sick, and it was nothing my nanobioscavengers could fix.

“Then let’s get down there and get them,” Baden said.

I nodded. “We’ll pinpoint them as closely as possible and set down. Baden, you take care of that, please. They could be in their shuttle or somewhere on the surface. They might be in bad shape after that blast—look what it did to us—so Yuskeya, I want you to take a full complement of med supplies. And why don’t you change into your Protectorate uniform?”

She raised her eyebrows. “What? Why?”

“Whoever’s down there on the moon, now, I’m guessing you’re technically in charge of them. You’re the only Protectorate officer we seem to have functioning in this system—whatever it is.”

Yuskeya nodded briefly and left the navigation board to Maja. She was only a novice, but we weren’t going anywhere. She settled into the chair, glanced up and caught my eye, and nodded.

“No worries, Mother, I can definitely navigate for a ship that’s about to set down.”

I winked at her. “Carry on, then.”

I got up from the chair and went to stand behind Rei. Hirin came over, too. “Cerevare,” I said, “would you join us?” I motioned her into the empty co-pilot’s seat at the board next to Rei. “Okay, ladies, what do we know about this operant moon?”

Cerevare seemed glad of something to do. Her ears perked forward as she briskly called up the data on the blank screen in front of her. “The composition of the moon alone would be the first thing to suggest it was a Chron artifact. The alloys and other materials used in its construction are identical or very similar to those used in the Chron ships we were able to study. It has a relatively weak gravity, although stronger than one might expect for an object with its mass.”

“So, artificial gravity, you think?”

“Quite possibly.”

Scientific data scrolled up the screen, but I wasn’t really trying to read it. I’d take Cerevare’s word for now.

She continued, “The rings are not the normal accretion of ice and dust and debris, but are also made of alloys particular to Chron construction. They appear to have enhanced solar-energy collecting capabilities. I’d made an educated guess that they’re used to power the workings of the moon.”

“Whatever those are,” I said.

She grinned wolfishly and nodded. “Unknown at this time. I’m not a scientist; my knowledge comes only from the obvious data in the scans combined with what I already know about the Chron. But I do have a guess.”

I raised my eyebrows, waiting.

She held up a hand. “This is only speculation, mind you. If there are scientists still on the moon with whom we can talk, they may already have information to refute my theory.”

“Understood.”

Cerevare turned the skimchair to face me. Her lupine face was animated, her eyes bright with excitement. “It has occurred to me—those unexplained rays that the moon began beaming into the wormhole once the Chron ship appeared to ‘trigger’ it. They were the same as those that affected this ship when we made the skip, correct?”

“They seemed to be.”

“I wonder if they could be a mechanism related to the supposed Chron ability to ‘timeslip’ during the war.”

I glanced at Hirin, then back to Cerevare. “I thought you said you didn’t believe in that ability?”

She shrugged. “Not in time-travel precisely, but they had some ability that allowed them to give that appearance, for certain. Whatever it was that they could do, I think it’s possible that the clues to it lie in this moon.”

Hirin blew out a long breath. “Well, that would certainly explain why the Protectorate wanted to keep this as quiet as possible.”

“That technology, if it existed, would be extremely valuable.”

“Too valuable to let one corporation lay claim to it, that’s for certain,” I said, thinking of how much PrimeCorp would love to get its greedy, exclusive hands on something like that.

Rei pursed her lips. “So if the technology wasn’t on their ships, if it were on a device—like a constructed moon—operating on the other side of the wormhole in question . . .”

“Exactly. There would be nothing for an enemy to find and turn to use against them.”

“Clever,” Hirin said.

“If you’re right,” I mused, “then we’d finally have at least one answer to all the questions the Chron left behind them.”

Cerevare sighed. “It would be nice to have something new, after all this time.”

“Captain, we have them,” Baden said suddenly.

“What?”

“The
Domtaw
crew members. The scientists.” He turned to me with wide eyes. “I think they’re
inside
the moon.”

HIRIN AND I
had a polite debate about who was going EVA to find the folks from the
Domtaw
. He thought he should go, and I should stay on board. Predictably, I thought the opposite. He said stuff about it being important for me to stay in charge on the
Tane Ikai
, and I said things about him working his way up slowly to that kind of activity, after his years-long sidelining for health reasons. He protested that he was fine—better than fine. I asserted that the crew were equally comfortable with either of us in the big chair.

We had the debate in my quarters—well,
our
quarters again now—while I changed my clothes. I didn’t want the crew observing any marital or command-centered spats.

In the end I had to do the thing I’d tried to avoid. “Well,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and holding his gaze, “it comes down to this. I am the current Captain of record of this vessel, and I am asking you to take the chair while I’m not on board.”

I didn’t say
ordering
. That would have brought everything between us to a head, and that would have to wait.

He stiffened anyway, his muscles going taut under my hands. “Well, if that’s how you put it.”

I slid my hands down and wrapped my arms around his chest, resting my head against it. “Hirin, I just got you back. I don’t want you taking risks. It’s too soon, and you’re still regaining your strength. I know you’re feeling great, but—I need a little longer.”

For an anxious moment I didn’t think he’d relent, but then he hugged me, hard. “Mostly the same reasons I don’t want you to go.”

“I know.” I pulled away. “But I think the crew needs to see that I’m handling things, you know? This situation—”

He nodded. “—is bad. I’m trying not to think about it, but we’ll have to, soon.”

“Agreed. But first we have to see if there’s anyone on that moon that we can save. And I think it’s good for the crew to have this to focus on.”

He kissed me then, and that was the end of the argument. At least for that round.

I thumbed my implant to open the ship’s comm. “Rei, take us down to the moon. Yuskeya and Baden are with me.”

I met Yuskeya and Baden at the rear airlock, and we climbed into our EVA suits. Yuskeya had done as I’d asked and changed into her Protectorate uniform. The rows of coloured starburst pins, from pale blue Dark Cadet through the ranks to her silver
Commander’s insignia,
gleamed at her throat. They were visible through the clear section of the suit where the helmet and neckline met, for which I was glad. I didn’t know who the
Domtaw
survivors might be, their rank or position, or what they might think of our arrival. Or if they had any notion of what had happened to their ship. But Yuskeya in her uniform radiated an extra air of confidence and competence that I was happy to have beside me.

We loaded three extra EVA suits and Yuskeya’s medical supplies onto one of the anti-grav cargo sleds, and cycled through the airlock. Rei had set the
Tane Ikai
down close to the shuttle that had brought the scientists over from the
Domtaw
. Once we were close enough, it hadn’t been difficult to find them. Their shuttle crouched near the doorway to what resembled a sod house from Earth’s ancient history, built right into a rise in the surface of the moon. The Chron hadn’t simply built an artificial sphere. They’d taken the trouble to create the illusion of a real moon, with uneven surface topography and a convincing layer of regolith. Only scans or close inspection would reveal the operant moon’s true nature.

“I don’t think we have the technology to build something like this even now,” Baden observed, his voice tinny and small over the suit-to-suit comm.

“We might have the tech, but I can’t imagine the cost,” Yuskeya said.

“I hope the door isn’t locked,” I said as we paced carefully across the surface.

“And me without my lockpicks.” Baden’s voice held a grin, even over the comm. He hadn’t had a good adventure since our encounter with the PrimeCorp agent who’d tried to take out the
Tane Ikai
in the
Keridre/Gerdrice
system, all of six weeks ago.

Yuskeya was silent as we made our way to the doorway. The moon’s gravity was enough to keep us on the ground, but I wouldn’t have wanted to try bouncing on a trampoline. Our tether to the surface felt as tenuous as a spider’s web. I hoped it was comparably strong.

It wasn’t locked, and opened into a tiny foyer, the walls formed from something similar to plasteel. Beyond that was a transparent door leading to what appeared to be a fairly standard kind of airlock system. A control touchpad lay embedded in the wall to the right of the door, labelled with symbols that meant nothing to me. A sort of frosted panel above the door emitted a pale light, limning the foyer with enough light to see, but it wouldn’t shine beyond the entry.

“Cerevare?” I said. We had full video and audio link to the bridge of the
Tane Ikai
, where the others watched us and waited.

“Here, Captain.”

“Can you see these symbols? Any idea what they might mean or how we can operate this door?”

She was silent, studying the symbols through my video link. “Yes,” she said finally, “they’re similar to the controls on the Chron ships. I would guess . . . Press the top button to open the door, and the bottom one to close it. Of the others, I’m not sure, but you aren’t planning to remove your suits anyway, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks—I didn’t want to have to blast this door open without knowing what or who is on the other side.”

I stepped forward and pressed the button Cerevare had indicated, and the door slid, somewhat surprisingly, down into the floor. There was no rush of air escaping as it did, so I assumed the scientists hadn’t bothered with trying to figure out the Chron pressurization system, either, or didn’t trust it. Or maybe it wasn’t working. Whatever, it probably meant that they were still wearing EVA suits, which was good. We might have brought our extras along for nothing, but at least we wouldn’t have to struggle them into the suits if they were wounded or unconscious.

I examined the area once we’d passed into the airlock and found the buttons to close the door behind us. It slid up into place smoothly. At the next door I followed the same procedure.

Which put us inside what I suppose you would call the moon proper. A corridor stretched out before us, the walls forming a rough octagon shape. It snaked down and to the left about twenty feet ahead. The sides were smooth, not worked stone, but something like a plasteel alloy in a pale camel-colour. I put a gloved hand against it, but couldn’t feel any particular heat or cold, at least through my glove. Apart from that, there was nothing remarkable to see, so we continued cautiously down its length.

“There
is
an atmosphere,” Yuskeya said, her head bent over her datapad. “The mix is similar enough to Earth’s to be breathable, and the pressure is within what we’d find comfortable.”

We’d advanced down the corridor perhaps ten meters when I heard something. It sounded like voices, further ahead.

“
Ha lo
!” I called through the suit’s external speaker, the sound echoing weirdly in the oddly-shaped corridor. “Do you need assistance?”

I knew they did, whether they knew it or not, but I always try to be polite when I’m rescuing folks. It was entirely possible they didn’t know yet what had happened to the
Domtaw
.

“Yes! We’re down here!” Even at a distance and through the suit’s microphone, I could hear a note of desperation in the voice.

“On our way!”

We followed the corridor perhaps another thirty meters before we found them. It continued to curve gradually, and slope further down toward the core of the moon. The corridor itself remained unremarkable, the smooth walls giving way occasionally to an alcove that served no apparent purpose.