Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame (25 page)

Truelove nodded acceptance of the plan. ‘Admiral Part, do you know what happened to him?’

Five looked at one of the nearby screens and it switched to showing a news report dated the day before. The CFM reporter was putting on an unhappy expression, which was a bad sign.

‘Admiral Gareth Part was found dead in a park near his home this morning, apparently the victim of a mugging gone horribly wrong,’ the presenter announced. ‘His severely beaten body was found by an early morning jogger. Peacekeepers are currently investigating the possibility that this was an assassination of the man who recently took over as commander of the Core Fleet.’

The replay stopped and Five said, ‘I got my hands on the autopsy report. He was tortured. My analysis suggests that he was secured in a seated position while someone beat him until his body gave out. They could have saved him, but they let him bleed internally.’

Truelove gritted her teeth. ‘Can’t we just kill Pierce and have done with it?’

‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ Three said, ‘but the others want him alive so he can be tried, convicted, and executed for treason.’

‘Besides,’ Five went on, ‘we don’t know that killing Pierce would stop anything. We need to find out what’s happening on Eshebbon and end it
before
we eliminate ex-Admiral Pierce from the equation.’

Wormhole Junction, 23.2.531 FSC.

It was not exactly the official name of the system, but Shannon had started calling it ‘Wormhole Junction’ and no one had been able to come up with anything better. The AIs had said they could give it a Xinti name, but actually they rather liked Shannon’s choice. It was, Speaker had said, descriptive and amusing.

It was a binary star system. Two M-class stars orbiting at an average of just over a tenth of an AU, and there had been six gas giants and a couple of asteroid belts around them. Now, five AUs out, there was a single, huge, station.

There was a hangar bay for two hundred thousand tonnes of shipping, external bridge clamps for larger vessels, a factory system of enormous proportions, cargo space, room for over eight thousand guests in transit and facilities to entertain them, and a two-hundred-bed hospital, but the entire mid-section of the elongated, smoothly curved facility was taken up by the wormhole generators.

Power came from a total conversion reactor supplemented by a system which beamed power out of the centre of the solar system, deriving energy from the huge gravitational forces between the two stars
and
all the solar energy they could collect. Put together, the station could generate a bridge between two points in space which would allow all but the largest of starships to travel more or less instantly across vast distances.

‘Of course,’ Abraham Wallace said as they looked out upon the vast station, ‘there are some limitations. The greater the distance, the more inaccurate the exit point will be and the longer the subjective transit time.’

‘Subjective?’ Drake asked.

‘Yes. It takes no time to make the trip in this reality, but there is a delay between entry and exit for someone passing through the bridge. For the short trip we have planned you’ll barely notice it. It’ll be… ten seconds, give or take. The gravitational stresses inside the wormhole are also considerable. An unshielded vessel might survive a short hop. A force screen such as the one the Hyde has for protection will give some support, but we have the special shield to make sure we get through intact.’

‘All right… When do we go?’

‘The generator is charged, Captain,’ Reality’s voice said from the speakers of the flight deck. ‘We will initiate the wormhole when you are ready.’

‘Better get to your sensors then, Abraham,’ Drake said, settling into his chair and reaching for the optical cable to plug in.

Five minutes later everyone was ready. Drake sat in his virtual chair with Shannon standing nearby and Abraham watching an array of screens he had configured off to one side.

‘Initiating wormhole shielding,’ Drake said as he tapped buttons on the panel before him.

‘Shields up and stable,’ Aggy announced. ‘I must say, this is very exciting. My last trip through a wormhole was rather abrupt and I had no chance to examine it.’

‘Let’s hope this one goes more smoothly,’ Drake replied.

‘We have a stable screen,’ Abraham said. ‘Let’s fire up the generators, Reality.’

There was a pause and then space split open in front of them. It was a little like watching a flower open on a time-lapse film, if the flower was several hundred metres across and composed of multi-dimensional space invisible to the unaided eye. On the virtual displays ahead of them it was a multi-coloured blossom of twisting light.

‘Wormhole established and stable,’ Reality said. ‘We are receiving telemetry from the other side. The exit point is right on target. You will be arriving one AU retrograde of Shadataga.’

‘Instant comms across almost four parsecs,’ Shannon said. ‘That’s going to be useful.’

‘Yes,’ Drake said, ‘it will. All right, take us in, Shannon.’

‘Just push us into the event horizon,’ Abraham said. ‘Once we go past that the wormhole will do the rest.’

‘Okay,’ the blonde pilot said, taking a deep breath, ‘here we go…’

There was a moment when the hyper-spectral blossom of the bridge’s event horizon filled their view, and then the world vanished, replaced by a rushing torrent, a kaleidoscope of colour as random fluctuations in the quantum field around them produced multiple wavelengths of light. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over and they could see the planet they had left the day before ahead of them.

‘A day to get out there, ten seconds back,’ Shannon said. ‘That is what I call progress.’

Abraham was grinning like a maniac. ‘Indeed. Let’s get back to the university. I have a lot of data to analyse. This is going to be
fascinating
.’

It was when they were dropping in toward the station that Winter changed their plans for them.

‘Don’t get comfortable. We got a message through from New Earth while you were going out. We need to get there as soon as possible, so I’m glad that thing worked. It’s a little earlier than we would have liked for long-distance trials, but we
have
to go back to New Earth.’

Gwy, 24.2.531 FSC.

The scans of the planet had proven both encouraging and depressing. There were relatively few badly infected areas of Arbonatura. It seemed as though only the larger towns had suffered any major harm. The people on Sapphira Vista, mostly out of the core or nearby Rim worlds, had always been a bit superior and they had left supplying the natives until last, as was often the case. This time it had most definitely worked
for
the indigenous population.

On the other hand, it looked like Sapphira Vista was a total write-off. The scans had shown no evidence of any survivors. Of the people she had met there, Aneka could not think of many she would worry excessively over losing, but there had been the Scouts, and Peters the FSA agent. She wondered whether they had, by some chance, been off-world when the plague had hit. Maybe they had survived somehow. It just seemed unlikely.

The orbital station did not seem like much of a hope either. It hung in space, barely registering any power output and dead to hails on the radio. The chances that anyone was alive inside seemed slim, but they had to check.

‘There’s an airlock on the upper deck which we should be able to manually operate,’ Ella said, going over schematics of the class. ‘Between you and Al it shouldn’t be too much effort, but it’ll mean going over in suits.’

‘Atmosphere?’ Aneka asked, looking out at the dark station.

‘Sensors say it’s still got one. Breathable. There could be trace toxins we can’t pick up, but nothing deadly.’

‘I can’t persuade you to stay here, I assume?’

‘Not unless you want to tie me to the flight chair.’

Aneka managed a grin. ‘You stay in breather gear the whole time.’

‘Of course. There is some evidence of movement in there. Not rapid, but some. Could be survivors or chucks. I think our best bet is engineering. We can check for areas of heavier power drain or resource utilisation which may indicate living people. And if there’s none of that… we can probably force a decompression of the whole station.’

‘Well it worked for Ripley,’ Aneka said. ‘Let’s do this.’

~~~

The only person who needed air was Ella. Cassandra and Al needed pressure suits: neither of their bodies had been designed to handle vacuum, but they did not breathe. Aneka was not having anyone going into the station without body armour anyway, so the lack of an atmosphere until they penetrated the airlock was not an issue. And no one was going in unarmed either: even Cassandra, who was on pack duty again, had a heavy pistol in her hands when the inner airlock door opened.

The station was silent and cold. The only light came from dim emergency panels mounted on the ceiling. The air temperature, according to Aneka’s skin sensors, was just above freezing. Not that that was going to bother the chucks who had wandered around the frozen surface of Eshebbon with impunity.

‘Okay,’ Ella said, ‘we want the lower section, of course. I doubt the lifts are working, but the shaft is about twenty metres over to the right. We should be able to use that to bypass most of the station itself.’

‘That sounds like a remarkably good idea,’ Aneka replied, starting out in the direction her own schematic map indicated.

They rounded a corner and found the first body. It was little more than a skeleton, stripped down to bones with a few scraps of flesh still attached.

‘Oh… gopi,’ Ella said, grimacing behind her faceplate.

‘Be thankful you can’t smell it,’ Aneka told her. ‘It has to be a couple of days old at least.’

‘And I think it was dead before that,’ Cassandra said, looking at a handheld scanner. ‘There’s evidence of the virus in the remaining tissue.’

‘So they’ve started eating each other. Well, it’ll cut the numbers.’

‘But it’s not a good sign for surviving Jenlay,’ Ella said. She raised her rifle as something caught her attention, a movement at the end of the corridor. She was just wondering whether she had spoken too soon when the shape bolted forward, grey skin becoming evident as it passed under a light. She squeezed the trigger and the creature was smashed into the nearby wall by a force pulse. It bounced, rag-dolled onto the deck, and then tried to crawl on shattered bones toward them. Ella fired again and this time its skull was pulverised.

‘You got hit by one of these things?’ Ella asked, looking at her rifle.

‘A couple of times. That was in the old body.’

‘An experience I would rather not repeat,’ Al commented.

‘Let’s get to the lifts,’ Aneka suggested. ‘I don’t know about you lot, but I want out of this mausoleum.’

The lift shaft had had three cars in it, but all of them had apparently fallen to the bottom when the power failed. That seemed odd.

‘Surely there would be safety systems?’ Aneka asked, frowning at the twisted metal boxes a hundred metres below them.

‘There should have been,’ Ella agreed.

‘So we’re talking about sabotage on top of the virus.’

‘The total loss of communications suggested that,’ Al pointed out. ‘Automated responses should have functioned even if there was no one here to make a proper reply.’

There was a ladder slung between the tracks the cars were meant to travel down. Getting to it was not a particularly easy trick given that the car was at the bottom, and Aneka suspected you were supposed to access the ladder via the roof of the lift, but they managed it. All of them were exceptionally nimble, even when they weighed twice what a Jenlay normally did. After that it was just a matter of climbing down, but Aneka paused halfway.

‘Do you hear that?’ she asked.

‘This helmet isn’t exactly great for hearing…’ Ella began and then stopped. ‘I hear… wailing.’

The sound was mournful, a long, high-pitched keening which you had trouble
not
hearing once you had noticed it. It was not something in pain, more like something desperately longing for something lost. There was no way it was made by anything living.

‘Keep going,’ Ella said. ‘Maybe we won’t be able to hear it at the bottom.’

The cars were crumpled by their sudden stops, but intact enough so that one of them could serve as an entrance to the floor once Aneka had ripped the hatch off the top.

‘I’ll pry the doors open,’ she said. ‘Keep your eyes open for anything moving on the other side. And if it moves and looks dead, shoot it.’

‘I’d got that part,’ Ella said, managing a grin.

‘I just wanted to be sure we were on the same page.’ Aneka jammed her fingers between the doors and pulled. Her muscles rippled and there was the sound of grinding metal, and then they were looking out onto the engineering deck.

‘It looks like a tornado went through here,’ Ella said.

There were wrecked consoles and racks of equipment which had been smashed in all over the room. Little of the apparatus looked like it was functional. Someone had systematically destroyed the equipment and chucks were not systematic creatures.

‘Do you think we can get into the computers?’ Aneka asked.

‘I’ll try,’ Cassandra said, taking her pack from her back. ‘We need to find a data port which appears undamaged and hope.’

They fanned out into the room, Cassandra sticking with Al, checking every corner for anything which might have been mobile, alive or not. Beyond the immediate area of the lifts, the equipment had not fared much better, and Aneka was beginning to give up hope when she discovered the primary computer core, and the three bodies lying beside it.

‘Asphyxia,’ Cassandra said after running a scanner over them.

‘They’re in vacuum suits,’ Ella pointed out, frowning.

‘Uh-huh,’ Aneka said. ‘They were worried about the pathogen being airborne, so they stayed in the suits until their oxygen ran out.’ She indicated an open panel nearby. ‘I think they were trying to get the station’s comms running.’

Cassandra pulled a tablet from her pack and plugged it into one of the ports on the rack. After a second or two she said, ‘They failed. The equipment is too badly damaged, but they got enough of the computer powered that I can determine the state of the station. The reactor went into emergency shutdown when the control systems were damaged. The auxiliary solar systems are keeping things ticking over… I’m running a check of the environmental systems…’