Burnt Ice (46 page)

‘Get there, check for those
bloody urchins, ascertain what we’re dealing with on the planet. Then effect a
rescue, if practical. If not, get any info about who they are and pass it on to
the relevant authorities.’

‘In other words, stay nice and
flexible?’

‘Yes, stay flexible if for no
other reason than Harry won’t tell me of your capabilities, Rick. Being one of
the Haulers’ scouts you must have some serious ones. Care to illuminate?’

Rick turned to look at Michael,
seated beside him in the orders room. The entire AV wall was covered in images
of stars, nebulas and what Rick called ‘interesting’ cosmological phenomena and
objects.

‘Nope. Let’s just say that if you
need assistance, I will provide it. I don’t see the point in showing you
everything at this stage of our relationship.’

~ * ~

‘All
crew.
Rick
has just advised that in three hours we will be in orbit
around the subject planet, Cobalt. We can all thank the Administration naming
board for that, as it is in acknowledgment of Marko’s arm! Check your stations
and all the auxiliary craft as seconded to you please. Will someone go drag
Fritz away from his dust? I need him at his board.’

‘
Basalt
, this is
Rick.
Stand by for deployment. I shall stand guard above you and assist as I see
necessary. I’m cooking tonight, by the way. A message has been sent to Stephine
requesting the necessary ingredients.’

‘Great. Thanks,
Rick.’

‘Umbilicals are released. All
locks are sealed. We do not have external visuals as yet.’

‘OK, Harry.’

Everyone was at their stations
and could feel the clamps disengaging and then the sensation of
Basalt
descending as the ship was placed outside
Rick.
The visuals came online,
with Marko trying to catch a glimpse of the interior of the bay that
Basalt
had just emerged from, but the huge doors had already sealed.

‘Don’t worry, Marko.
Rick
is very particular about anyone seeing what he has. One day you may get a
chance.’

‘Yeah, I know, Jan. Still freaks
me a little bit, that offer. Boss, we now have full control of all manoeuvring
and engines.’

‘Right. Let’s see where we are in
relation to the images stored by Sirius. Looks like the correct location will
be coming up over our horizon in forty-eight minutes. Launch countermeasure
systems, bring the main weapons online, send out astronomical drones and
everyone prep their craft. Stephine, you are free to deploy any time you wish.
Harry, hold us here. Patrick, start all sensing systems. Fritz, commence
transmitting our ID codes on that frequency. You know the drill, people.
Anything interesting, bring it to everyone’s attention.’

‘We are deploying now, Michael.
We will hold station two hundred kilometres from you, as planned. Patrick, we
are now slaved to your sensors.’

Harry watched as Veg and Stephine’s
sleek black-green craft slid out of the main hangar, then moved away.

‘Seeing lots of living creatures
in the upper ocean — nothing bigger than smallish fish. Nothing in the air or
on any of the islands. Shall I fire a drone down into the ocean, boss?’

‘No thanks, Jan. Hold those until
we get to the suspected wreck site. Now, the rescue group that recovered us
from here said that the Octopoid Library had de-orbited and was in a shallow
part of the sea. Fritz, dig up those images please. And are you hearing
anything yet?’

‘Nope! If I had I’d have told ya.
Images recovered. I’ll start to enhance them as well.’

The images that came up on
everyone’s screens showed the Octopoid Library jutting out of the water,
appearing mostly intact, with a few large fragments of its outer sheathing
lying on the bottom of the crystal-clear ocean. The library appeared to be
perched on the edge of a sheer drop into the darker depths.

‘Right, info coming in,’ Fritz
said. ‘We have a reasonable atmosphere. We can fly in it, but breathing would
be unpleasant. High oxygen, moderate nitrogen, methane and a high argon count.
Pressure is also one-point-five bar at sea level. The sea is basically neutral.
So if the skuas go down we are going to have to carefully watch the jet
temperatures, but the good thing is that they will be a better lifting body so
will fly nicer! Gravitation is one-point-one-two of Earth normal.’

‘
Basalt
, this is Veg. We
have visuals. The Octopoid Library is only a few hundred metres from the area
that Sirius recorded. Yeah, there is something on the bottom all right. We are
sending the codes towards it. Only reply I am getting is an ID code. But the
Octopoid Library is also sending signals. I have no records of that occurring
before. Unknown coding to us. Have patched it through to you, Fritz.’

‘Yeah, that is a new one. I’ll
run it through everything I have. Hey! I’m getting a signal from the launcher
drone we left behind when we were here! It’s on the Octopoid Library! Looking
at the sizes of the files — it’s at capacity, data-wise.’

‘Isolate all the info and put it
through every scrubber we have, Fritz.’

‘Of course! You think that I’m a
nut?’

‘Only sometimes, Fritz. Jan,
launch another set of intel drones and park them in geosynchronous orbit above
the area. We are coming up on it now.’

On the screens the Octopoid
Library could be seen towering hundreds of metres above the ocean surface,
still looking much as it had when they had seen it first but now missing many
more of the teardrop-shaped, leaf-like shields along its length. As they passed
overhead they could see the hulk of a Gjomvik starship lying on the bottom of
the sea in the shadow of the Octopoid Library, parts of it rising above the
water’s surface. The main engine modules lay crumpled over the edge of the
abyss, with the bulk of the iridescent blue, shark-shaped ship covered in sea
growth.

‘That’s not good. We are getting
nothing from the wreck, boss.’

‘Yeah.
Rick.
You seeing
this?’

‘Yes, Michael. May I have the
files from your launcher drone? With all due respect to Fritz and Patrick, I
can probably search them for nasties and then process them considerably faster.’

‘I have no objection. Part of our
agreement anyway.’

‘Basalt,
this is Stephine. We are
reconfiguring for atmospheric ability. Propose to fly down to one thousand
metres above the wreck and drop a reconnaissance drone.’

‘Very well. How long will it take
for you to reconfigure?’

‘We will be ready two orbits
after this one.’

‘OK. The intel drones will be in
geosynchronous orbit by then. I also suggest that you come in behind us so we
can observe your transit. I’m assuming that you will do a fly by and then climb
back out?’

‘Correct. We will need to dock
for refuelling anyway.’

‘OK, go for it.’

~ * ~

Stephine
and Veg sat side by side in the roomy cockpit of their craft. She spoke a few
words into her helmet and the ship, being mostly organic in nature, started to
reconfigure itself. Over the next few hours it became longer and narrower, with
small wings slowly extending from its side until it became a long, sleek,
dart-like vessel. A transparent canopy slowly formed over their heads, and the
floor below their acceleration chairs became see-through too. The seats
re-formed themselves around their occupants, to seal them in transparent
armoured emergency units. The final part of the process was for the engine
intakes to elongate themselves, as Veg selected the optimum fuel mixtures for
the dive into, then out of, the atmosphere. While the changes had been taking
place,
Basalt
had sped past them and was now thousands of kilometres
ahead.

‘Final checks, husband?’

‘We will be on the mark in ten
seconds, darling. We are good to howl!’

Stephine looked across at the man
she had known and loved for so very long, smiled, blew him a kiss and initiated
the dive. The plunge into the atmosphere was clean, with all the generated heat
being shrugged off by the craft until they came down through fifteen thousand
metres, where the turbulence was more severe. Then, as they dropped below the
five-thousand-metre mark, still travelling at fifteen thousand kilometres per
hour, the ride became smoother.

‘We are eight hundred kilometres
out. Drone being deployed. High-speed cameras online.’

At the rear of the craft a small
door irised open as the streamlined intel drone was ejected, then deployed on a
carbon nanotube wire until it was a kilometre behind the ship.

‘Two minutes from target. Drone
deployment mark coming up. Gone!’

A tiny high-speed winch began
gathering back the nanotube line the instant after the drone cut away, its
streamlining popping open to form a very slowly opening parachute.

‘Cameras online. I have a visual
on the Octopoid Library.’

Veg gently eased the control
stick a fraction over to focus just to the side of the Octopoid Library. Behind
them the drone slowed and altered its trajectory, then reconfigured its
streamlining to form wings and control surfaces, making a slowly decreasing
circle around the Octopoid Library, recording and transmitting everything it
could see. Already far away, Stephine and Veg had opened the air intakes and
were feeding full power to the ramjets, accelerating up through the atmosphere
before switching to their fusion rocket, zooming back into orbit. Three orbits
later they matched their speed with
Basalt’s,
then docked on the
exterior with the umbilicals automatically locking on to replenish their fuel
tanks. Stephine’s craft slowly started to revert to its normal shape.

‘Damn, but that looked
outstanding, Stephine! That is one hell of a craft you have there. Very classy!’

‘Thanks, Harry. Brew me a nice
drop of your best five-malt beer and I shall take you for a ride!’

‘Now that thought could give me a
bar-on, Veg!’

Knowing how conservative Harry
normally was, there were a few seconds of silence before everyone laughed.

~ * ~

‘Boss,
just had a message from
Rick.
He will be alongside in a shuttle in ten
minutes. Do we dock him on one of the skua berths or shall I bring him inside?’

‘Wait, I’ll ask Harry.’ There was
a brief silence, then the major spoke again: ‘Yeah, bring him inside please,
Fritz. Harry says his shuttle of choice is a sphere about the same size as a
skua. Send him the docking base specs so he can configure his lockdowns. Tell
him also that Stephine has all the dinner ingredients he requested. Marko has a
message for him as well.’

‘Yeah, tell him the pita breads
are all done,’ Marko said.

‘Relayed. He passes his thanks.’

The evening meal was a cheerful
one. Rick cooked a traditional Bedouin type of meal, and Jan had warned the
crew to eat only with their right hand. She went so far as to wrap a piece of
tape around Fritz’s left hand as a reminder, an action Rick appreciated and was
quietly amused by. After the meal they all went to the orders room to learn of
what had been discovered during the day.

Nothing had been heard from the
crew in the Gjomvik ship, so it was assumed that they were all in cryo sleep. The
design of the vessel was not entirely familiar to Patrick, so Rick supplied a
layout he considered likely to be close to that of the crashed ship. Close-up
images from the drone, perched on top of the Octopoid Library, showed great
tear marks in the hull of the wreck, They matched urchin damage.

Patrick stated that his
reconstruction of the crash suggested the ship had come down vertically on its
main drive through the atmosphere, probably heading for a large, barren island
some three kilometres away from the site, when it lost power, then crashed
engines first into the sea before toppling over. Mapping Rick’s data above the
wreck indicated that the cryo units were under the water line towards the
centre of the ship. Data also showed that power was still being fed to the area
as the whole deck was well below zero degrees.