The Saga of Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances (10 page)
Read The Saga of Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances Online
Authors: Kevin J. Anderson
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
18
COREY KELLUM
Corey took charge of Daym Cloud Trawler Number Three, which was in far worse shape than the others, with the most leaks and the least-efficient ekti reactors. Time to fix it. “I feel obligated to take on the biggest challenge,” he explained. He gathered his closest advisers and handed out reports that listed page after page after page of everything wrong with the creaking old skymine.
“Lucky us,” said Sara Becker, whom he had brought over to Number Three as his main administrator. She knew how to be a boss without actually acting like one.
“It’s nothing that can’t be fixed.” Corey tried to pull them along with his optimism and excitement. “This is what we’re good at. We’ll have this trawler in perfect shape in no time—so long as nobody objects to working around the clock?”
His engineering teams finished installing the new ekti reactor controls a full day ahead of schedule. Even so, Corey was disappointed—he had wanted to beat his estimate by two days. In the long run, however, the dramatically increased efficiency would make up for the equipment investment in less than a month.
Cocky, optimistic, and ambitious, he had been happy to take on the challenge, although he had underestimated the magnitude of the job. Nevertheless, he had grown fond of the wreck and swore that one day he would make this into the best, most efficient skymine on Daym. Not content with the lack of Ildiran imagination, Corey had rechristened Number Three the “Redheaded Stepchild.”
He met Oliver Sung at the engineering station to the large pumping chamber that drove vast amounts of Daym’s hydrogen into the fuel-processing reactors. “Our teams did more than give this old skymine a facelift. She’s got a whole new heart. Ready for the full-power tests so we can get the reactors running again?”
“Well, we didn’t make all those changes for cosmetic reasons—let’s see if it works.”
Corey stepped back, put his hands on his hips, and looked at the jury-rigged controls. He could easily see which ones were old Ildiran systems and which ones incorporated human modifications. He glanced at Oliver. “Would you like to do the honors?”
His friend crossed his arms. “It’s your Redheaded Stepchild, Corey.”
He looked up at the pipes and girders that crisscrossed the ceiling of the pumping chamber. “Come on, show your stuff.” He touched the activation plate, and diagnostics illuminated, green lights rising and falling. He heard the thrum of reawakened engines, the whir of pumps, the new reactor chambers taking in gulps of atmosphere, compressing, heating, supercharging.
“Listen to that purr,” Corey said.
The levels increased, and the energy systems droned louder. Newly converted stardrive fuel began pumping into collection chambers, where it was further compressed. Both men could feel the smooth vibration through the deck.
Then the purr became a groan. Something snapped. A gasp of steam squealed out of a breached conduit pipe overhead. He and Oliver looked at each other and back at the panel, which suddenly glowed with red lights.
They both dove for the emergency monitors. An explosion erupted deep below in the reactor levels.
“Shizz, the reactor throughput was too much!” Oliver yelled, scrambling with the controls to shut everything down.
The entire cloud trawler lurched and tilted to one side. Alarms began to wail through the entire facility. Erupting stardrive fuel burst from holding tanks and vomited jets of orange flame out into the skies.
Corey ran an emergency shutdown panel. “It’s not just the ekti reactors—those were the levitation engines! Three of the four are shot to shizz, or at least offline. We’ve got to get them running again.”
Oliver’s eyes went wide. “Those engines were the only things keeping us afloat.” He called up the diagnostics, got a screen full of static, then hammered it with his fist; the new display showed blank sections on the cloud trawler structural diagram. “Four decks aren’t responding—a big chunk of the lower levels.”
At least fifty people had been down there.
His stomach lurched up to his throat, and he realized that the cloud trawler was in free fall, plunging down into the gas giant. “We’ve got a hell of a long way to go before we hit bottom.”
“Look on the bright side—we’ll be crushed long before that,” Oliver said.
Responding to the emergency, engineering teams scrambled to auxiliary stations. “Can we lock it down?” Corey yelled. “Get one of those levitation engines active again.”
“They’re offline, Corey,” shouted one of the techs. “We’re dead in the sky.”
Another explosion rocked the sinking cloud trawler, and chatter came from everywhere, through intercoms, shouted through maintenance shafts. Engineers were already tearing panels off, trying to realign the systems, snapping commands back and forth. “Major instabilities. We’ve shut everything down, but now there’s a chain reaction.”
“Which decks are destroyed?”
“How many people have we lost?”
“We’ll do a count later,” Corey interrupted. Most of the families were on the upper levels; the children on their school decks, the families setting up living quarters, the shop owners and restaurateurs on the market deck. But he was sure half of his teams had been lost on the primary industrial level. The ekti storage bay was completely gone.
A geyser of flames and smoke charged up a ventilation shaft, bursting out of filter plates. Workers ducked from the shower of sparks; one woman grabbed an armful of breathers from an emergency cabinet, passed them around.
“Stupid Ildiran technology!” one of the techs yelled. “Can’t figure out how to bring it under control!”
“They must have sabotaged it!”
“They didn’t need sabotage—this wreck was falling apart when we got here.”
Corey ran to another screen, saw the blip that showed their position in the atmosphere. “We’re dropping into uncharted layers. The atmospheric density is increasing by orders of magnitude.”
“In other words, we’re still falling,” Oliver said.
“Yeah, gravity will do that.”
No time to mull over a decision; he could see the extent of the destruction. Corey ran to the intercom, calling his operations chief in the armored control chamber in the top deck. “Sara, the damage is too great. Get everybody off this wreck. Evacuate the cloud trawler.”
Sara Becker answered immediately. “Plans already underway, Corey. I sure hope we have enough emergency ships to carry everybody. I sent a distress call to the other two cloud trawlers, but it’ll take them hours to get here. Daym is a big place.”
“Use any vessel—scout craft, cargo ships, shuttles. Get people off this wreck, and let’s hope rescue comes before their fuel and life support runs out.”
While the engineers and technicians ran with repair kits to any station where they could help, families from the upper decks rounded up anyone who needed assistance, then made their way to launching bays and scrambled aboard ships.
Sara Becker announced over the intercom. “Remain calm, but get your asses moving. The chiefs of the other two cloud trawlers are sending retrieval ships to snag our lifeboats. Do us all a favor and get yourselves to the top of the cloud layers. Once you launch, be sure to activate your ping signals and calculate how long you can last after you reach the open sky. The rescue craft are going to have to triage who needs to be picked up first. We need to know which ships can sit tight while the others are rescued.”
The people crowded aboard any escape craft they could find, whether or not there was enough room. They would have to survive until rescue could come—maybe a few hours, maybe a few days. The Redheaded Stepchild wouldn’t last that long.
Corey stayed down on the engineering deck. “We’ve got to get at least one of those levitation engines running again so we can stay afloat through the evacuation. Is that so much to ask?”
The outside temperature rose as they fell deeper. Even over the hubbub of explosions, alarms, and evacuation announcements, Corey could hear the outer walls creaking and groaning as the gas giant squeezed in on them. Sooner or later, the Redheaded Stepchild would reach an equilibrium point—but anyone aboard would be dead by then.
Grease-stained, sweating engineers hauled at valves to shut off unnecessary systems, scrambling to channel all available power to a single levitation engine. “Doesn’t anything work around here?” one of them yelled.
“Not anymore. Too much damage!”
Evacuation crafts launched out of the bays and shot up through the thick murk like emergency buoys, and still the Redheaded Stepchild kept sinking. Explosions continued to rock the decks from side to side. Steam blasted from burst pipes, and Corey knew in his heart there would be no salvaging the cloud trawler. “I’m heading to the control chamber to help Sara get everyone out of here.”
Oliver hunched over a groaning compressor. “I’ll keep working on the levitation engines, maybe squeeze a last gasp from one of them to buy us time.”
Oliver dropped down into the hot and smoky bottom decks, while Corey raced to the top of the industrial dome.
Upon reaching the control chamber, he could see the outside atmosphere through the thick viewing panes. This deep into the planet’s sky, far from Daym’s sun, layers of fumes and gases smothered the cloud trawler in darkness. Lightning skittered across the clouds; sooner or later a blast would strike the Redheaded Stepchild. As if they needed more problems.
The walls around them screeched and groaned. Sara said, “The hull’s starting to buckle.”
“I guess we should have used more duct tape.” More evacuation ships flew away, rising up. “Take one of the evac ships and get out of here. I’m recalling the engineering teams right now—no way we can fix this hunk of junk.”
“
I’m
the Ops Manager.” She wiped perspiration from her brow. “I stay until the last of the crew gets away.”
“The hell you are. I’m counting on you to organize the rescue and retrieval effort as soon as the emergency response ships get here from the other two cloud trawlers. Can you think of anyone better to do that?”
“No.”
“Then go! I’ll handle the last operations here.” He practically shoved her out of the control chamber. She kept her balance even on the uncertain, quaking decks, and bolted for the nearest launching bays four decks down.
He hit the intercom and called throughout the facility. “Oliver, time to surrender. Make sure everyone gets out of here. This skymine is going down and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
19
DEREK ROBINSON
After nearly seven weeks on Llaro, the excitement of exploring a strange, alien world had become mere drudgery, but Derek didn’t complain—at least, not openly. He was expected to be the mature one, the man of the family, with their father gone.
Following the accident, then the recriminations, and all the sudden dead-ends in his life, Derek had realized he was no longer a kid. A pile of new responsibilities weighed on his shoulders like a boulder on a high-gravity planet. It wasn’t fair that his life had changed so much; it wasn’t fair that he had to go on without a father; it wasn’t fair that so many people looked askance at the entire family because Duncan Robinson’s carelessness had killed a couple of innocent bystanders as well as himself. None of it was fair. But complaining about it and feeling miserable didn’t help.
His brother Jacob hadn’t figured that out yet.
Llaro was a fascinating and wild planet, unlike anything the Robinsons had ever seen. The Hansa had provided them with supplies and survey equipment, but not enough for them to do a thorough job. The Ildirans gave them everything else they needed.
Their mother had chosen to set up their base of operations near the alien ruins; no doubt the Hansa Colonization Office would find that site most interesting. They had expanded the camp with extra tarps, a supply tent, and a few comfortable portable chairs. TZ did his best to keep the camp neat and organized, but Derek and Jacob often thwarted his efforts.
Though their mother took regular long-range recon flights, mapping all the topography within range, seven weeks wasn’t enough to do more than the briefest survey of a planet. In fact, it wasn’t even enough time to get a good look at the ruined Klikiss city, but the boys knew how much was at stake for their family’s future, and they worked hard. The Ildiran ship would return soon to retrieve them.
Madeleine Robinson was constantly mapping out grid squares and writing survey reports, logging points of interest, using her best descriptive abilities in her journal. The compy catalogued geological samples, collected data, and wandered within a kilometer of the camp to gather native plants and preserve insect specimens.
They had discovered plenty of amazing things here. Llaro was not the garden spot of the Spiral Arm, but it wasn’t too bad. A human colony could certainly survive here, and the settlers would face no more difficulties than any other place on Earth.
The Hanseatic League was certainly getting their money’s worth from them, Derek thought. Maybe if the family got a bonus, they could stop hanging by a thread, stabilize their lives, and find a new home—preferably in a place where people didn’t remember the cargo loading accident, someplace where he and Jacob could make new friends. He could dream, couldn’t he?
The nights were warm and dry, but the nearby abandoned Klikiss city seemed so lonely and mysterious that they slept aboard their shuttle, rather than camping under the stars. The lumpy Klikiss spires seemed eerie and haunted, perforated with entry holes and a labyrinth of underground tunnels—empty, dusty, and dark tunnels.
It was hard to resist.
Their mother roused them at daybreak, and the family sat together for a quick breakfast prepared by TZ before she checked the fuel cells and packed up for the day’s recon flight. Sometimes she let Derek take the survey craft, but today was her turn. Only one person could ride in the small recon skimmer, and she used it to cover a lot of territory while she left the boys back at camp to organize samples and finish their chores.
Standing outside the main shuttle’s boarding ramp, Madeleine stretched and rolled her shoulders, since she’d be sitting inside the cramped skimmer for most of the day. “Be careful while I’m out on the scouting run, boys. I left a list of things for you to finish before I get back at nightfall.”
“You worry too much, Mom,” Derek said. “I’ll watch out for the troublemaker here while TZ goes out and gets more interesting rocks.” He tousled Jacob’s hair. Jacob responded with an annoyed scowl.
The survey skimmer lifted off the dusty ground, coughed out a few clouds of combusted chemical smoke, then soared off with a high-pitched whine. The boys stood, watching and waving, though Derek doubted their mother could see them as she gained altitude and set off on a new heading.
As soon as the engine whine faded into distance and the compy trudged off with his sample case, Derek looked at his brother. “Ready to go into the ruins?”
Without answering, Jacob sprinted toward the mysterious and compelling alien towers. For days now, they had ventured into the tunnels, poking around for any artifacts that the Klikiss had left behind. Derek secretly dreamed of making some discovery that could bring great wealth to the family, an alien treasure that museums and private collectors would fight over. He could imagine them bidding higher and higher.
Although if they found anything, Derek doubted they would be allowed to keep it. He suspected their survey team agreement contained a clause that any discoveries belonged to the Terran Hanseatic League, but that didn’t stop him from looking, and hoping.
The Klikiss didn’t use stairs or ramps in their city. The two brothers had to scramble up the lumpy surface of the towers, climbing the polymer concrete walls to reach the lowest openings to get inside. In their packs, they carried bright hand illuminators of Ildiran manufacture. The black silence of the deep tunnels could get oppressive and frightening.
As Jacob ran ahead, he marked their path with phosphorescent paint on the walls. At a large nexus of tunnels he chose a passage that sloped steeply downward into the underground catacombs. “Come on Derek. We’ve never looked in this section.”
Before they got too far from the sunlight outside, Derek lit his blazer and held it high; his brother did the same. As they ventured forward, the hand blazer cast looming shadows on the flowform walls. Exploring farther, they marked each intersection and kept going downhill.
“It’s like a haunted house in here.” Jacob moved his illuminator back and forth to make dramatic shadows on the tunnel walls.
Derek made a loud scary noise right next to his brother’s head, causing him to jump. Jacob slugged him. “Cut it out! That’s not funny.”
Laughing, Derek swung the beam of his blazer and spotted a gleaming black hook that protruded from one crumbling resinous wall. “Wait a second . . . what’s that buried in the wall?”
Jacob poked at the piece of uncharacteristic black metal. “Let’s dig it out and see.” He pulled a rock-sampling hammer from his pack and tapped the resinous concrete, breaking it away to expose a metal claw, a mechanical pincer, part of a larger object embedded inside the wall.
“Looks like some kind of machine,” Derek said. “Klikiss machinery—it could be valuable.”
The two of them chipped away and pulled chunks of Klikiss concrete aside to expose an articulated arm connected to the claw. When they dislodged a key piece of rubble, the rest of the wall crumbled inward, collapsing in a small rockfall to expose a sealed chamber. A large machine made out of black metal stood there, like an angular beetle more than three meters tall. Its head plate was shaped like a trapezoid, studded with round spheres, like eyes . . . far too many eyes.
“Whoa!” Jacob said. “Is it one of the Klikiss?”
“No, it’s a machine. Look at that thing!”
It looked back. The red spheres in its head plate began to glow like eyes awakening. Power thrummed from inside its abdomen, and the beetle-like machine began to vibrate. The pincer hand twitched, opening and closing. The black machine swiveled its head plate toward them.
Derek took two steps back into the main tunnel, grabbing his brother’s arm and pulling Jacob to a safer distance. The hulking robot twitched several other limbs that looked like the arms of an insect protruding from its main body core. It stirred, shifted, then lurched backward to free itself from the remaining concrete with such violence that it bumped into the fractured wall. The stones crashed down from the ceiling in a great shower of dust and rocks.
“Run! Cave in!” Derek yelled. The brothers retreated a dozen steps, then paused again as the debris stopped falling.
The reactivated black robot stirred once more, shrugging off the rubble that had buried it, standing tall. It made no move toward them. “Well . . . at least it’s not trying to kill us,” Jacob said.
“Yet,” Derek added.
Ignoring the intruders, the robot turned back to the exposed chamber; it used powerful mechanical claws to pull down huge chunks of the concrete resin, revealing more of the sealed vault. After the busy robot removed another section of wall, more of the fragile supporting rock collapsed.
Inside the revealed chamber, Derek saw several more black robots. A group of them had been buried or cocooned there. He held his breath.
The robots’ scarlet eyes reactivated. Dozens of the robots had been trapped in the grotto, and now they were released.
“Maybe we’d better get out of here,” Derek told his brother. They backed away as the robots started moving, freeing themselves. All of the scarlet optical sensors turned toward the two boys, glowing brighter.
Derek and Jacob dashed uphill out of the underground tunnels, following the phosphorescent markings. They had been exploring inside the tunnels for hours, and Derek couldn’t believe how far they had come. Now, bursting out into the cooling air of sunset, they scrambled back to their camp.
By this time, the survey skimmer had returned and Madeleine Robinson was pacing the camp perimeter, calling for them, obviously worried.
“Mom! Mom!” Jacob cried, running pell-mell with Derek to the shuttle. “We were in the ruins. We found some robots!”
“Klikiss robots,” Derek added, not to be outdone by his brother. “And they’re still active.”
“They look like giant beetles. The first one we uncovered came alive, and it dug up even more robots.”
“And they were all moving, coming out after us.” Behind them in the gathering dusk, the Klikiss ruins looked shadowy and ominous.
Their mother knew the boys didn’t imagine things, and the panic must have been plain on their faces. She had her sidearm, a traditional protective weapon used for security on an empty and unexplored world. As night began to fall, she drew the weapon and turned to face the city, but no hordes of black robots emerged.
“It’s too dark to go investigate now,” she said. “We’ll have to be careful tonight and lock down the shuttle.”
Before daybreak, TZ marched into Madeleine’s sleeping quarters and spoke loudly enough to reuse Derek and his brother; they had slept only restlessly, tense with fear after their previous adventure. “Madeleine Robinson, please wake up,” the compy said. “It is urgent.”
She was up in a flash, rolling off her bunk and pulling on a crew jacket to cover her night clothes. “What is it, TZ? Are we in danger?
The compy’s optical sensors shone. “You should make your own assessment. The explanation may be complicated.” TZ strutted toward the shuttle’s main hatch, opened it and extended the ramp.
As dawn light diffused into the sky, they could all see that the camp was full of beetle-like robots, hundreds of them standing around the perimeter. Some had climbed up on the surrounding rocks to look down on the supply tent, the Ildiran shuttle, the sample crates they had stacked up to be reloaded for their departure from Llaro. The small recon skimmer had been entirely dismantled, the engines pulled out, large pieces of hull, wings, and cockpit strewn about on the ground.
Madeleine said, “I think we’ve got a problem.”
Derek said to his mother in a low voice, “We were scared yesterday, but the robots didn’t actually attack us.”
Jacob was pale, his eyes wide. “Look what they did to the skimmer! They could take us apart in a second.”
“If they’re remnants of the Klikiss race,” Madeleine said, sounding determined and calm, “then we’re obligated to try to communicate. This could be the most important find of any survey crew.” Her voice was strong, but Derek could tell that she was frightened. She took two steps down the ramp and spoke soothingly to the black machines, “We don’t mean any harm.”
The nearest black robot made a clicking, buzzing sound, and incomprehensible noises came out of the speaker patch. It raised its two forelimbs, but did not make a hostile move.
“We’re just here looking around,” Derek said, not at all sure the machine could understand. “We didn’t mean to intrude.”
The compy said, “I am receiving their signals, Madeleine Robinson. They are trying to communicate. They are curious . . . especially about me. They correlated part of my database, and I have granted them access to our records in the ship. I hope that was all right.”
Madeleine’s eyes widened in alarm. “Next time ask first, TZ.”
The foremost black robot spoke in a resonant, oily voice. “I have access to your files. Communication is now facilitated.”
“Who are you?” She said. “What do you want?”
“I am Exxos. We are robots created by the Klikiss race. This planet was our home . . . one of our homes. All the Klikiss worlds were our homes.”
Madeleine glanced at her sons, then back to the robot. “What happened to the Klikiss? Why is the planet deserted? Are they extinct? And why were you buried in the city?”
The robot head plates twitched, their red optical sensors glowed. Derek was sure they were communicating silently with one another. Finally, Exxos said, “We don’t remember.”