Burnt Worlds (50 page)

“Aye sir.
 
Thank you, sir.”

“So,” said Dillon, looking at the wall next to the door.
 
“How do we get in?”

The marine held up his datapad in one hand, and pointed to a blue square on the wall panel.
 
“According to my pad, sir, that one says ‘open’.”

“Outstanding job,” said the Captain.
 
“Go ahead, give it a push.”

“Aye aye, sir.”
 
The marine leaned forward, his fingertip touching the blue button.

There was a massive thud that shook the floor, followed by a cloud of dust jumping off the door.
 
Perkins and Amba came jogging up just as the large metal door began to rotate clockwise, rolling itself into the wall and out of sight.

They ran into the small room, past the consoles to the inner door.
 
Dillon looked through the window, and could see the body on the floor in the far corner.
 
“Huh.
 
I can’t see his face very well.
 
Someone look at him through your scope, let us know for sure that he’s dead before we open the door.
 
For all we know, these people might live for centuries.”

“I’ve got it, sir,” said Perkins.
 
As the Captain stood aside, the marine stepped up to the door, pointing his weapon toward the glass while watching the carbine’s display screen.
 
“Sir, those statues upstairs — if that’s what these people look like when they’re alive, then this guy isn’t.
 
Skin’s pulled back, eyes are gone, bones are sticking out of his hands.
 
Some dried-up gunge on the floor around him that looks nasty, sir.
 
I think he’s long since kicked it.”

“Alright then.
 
Everyone with datapads, get ready to collect air samples.
 
This’ll be the last remaining pre-plague native air on this planet.
 
Might contain old organic stuff.
 
Probably all dead, but still, the science types back home will be cranky if we don’t bring them some.”

When Amoroso and the Tassali nodded their readiness, Dillon poked the blue button on the panel next to the door.
 
The big round door silently and smoothly rolled into the wall, as a puff of dust and a shimmer in the air rolled past them.

“Right now,” said Dillon, “I’m thrilled that we can’t smell anything.
 
I bet that air is pretty bad.”
 
He paused.
 
“We should be respectful.
 
This person died in here, probably very frightened and alone.”

Dillon stepped into the room.
 
It was small, three metres a side, with a large computer console and a chair, the one they had seen from the command room.
 
The walls and floor were completely covered in neat rows of careful handwriting.
 
A small corridor led off the back of the room; Dillon motioned for Perkins and Amoroso to check it out.

Amba had crossed the room and delicately knelt on the floor in front of the body.
 
“
An dalan
,” she said softly.
 
“I’m sorry.”

Amoroso’s voice burst through their helmets.
 
“There’s a small apartment back here, sir:
 
a bunk and some sort of crapper.
 
Also a fancy robotic lab, and a big storage room.
 
This guy was set up with a mountain of food rations, and he ate it all.
 
I guess he starved when it ran out, sir.”

“Writing on everything?” asked Dillon.

“Aye, sir.
 
Floors, walls and ceiling.
 
Everywhere, sir.”

“Understood.
 
Scan it.
 
Scan all of it.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Dillon looked down at the Tassali.
 
“Amba,” he said, “I’d like you to scan the writing in this room.
 
He wanted to leave a message for whoever came after him, and for his sake we’re going to make sure it gets read.”

She turned to look at him, rising to her feet.
 
“Yes, Captain.
 
That is a very decent thing to do.”

Dillon turned to look at the computer console.
 
“I’ll see if I can control their defences from here.”

Gently settling into the seat, he looked at the screens.
 
In the centre was a display with lines of text.
 
To the right, a view of the command centre, where they had just been.
 
The semicircle of chairs around the commander’s console was clearly visible.
 
Dillon shook his head, imagining the scientist, here in his safe room, watching as his entire civilisation was entrusted to his care — and then as the last people he would ever speak to died in front of him.

The small display to his left had sets of numbers on it.
 
He held up his datapad to scan it all in, tapping impatiently while waiting for the translation to finish.

“I have found where she started writing,” said Amba.

“She?”

“I have decided it is a she.”

“Oh,” said Dillon.

The Tassali looked down at her datapad.
 
“It begins, ‘My name is Furro.
 
I am the last of my people.
 
We are called the’... it is phonetic here… ‘Dal-tan-in, and soon we shall be extinct.’”

“One sec,” said Dillon, as his datapad chirped at him.
 
“Good, got it.
 
This screen over here,” he nodded to his left, “shows the population counts of their colonies.
 
The top row is their pre-plague population — nine hundred billion — and the lower number is obviously a ‘one’: this person.
 
The centre screen,” he leaned forward, holding the datapad higher, “is at a screen with video replay options.
 
The videos are titled ‘Last Day’ and ‘Last Words from the President’.
 
Good god.
 
Okay.
 
I want some sort of…”
 
he poked tentatively at the screen, and waited for the datapad to translate the new text that sprung up.

“She had a family,” said Amba.
 
“Two spouses and two children.
 
She was told they were all safe on a colony ship, but she knew they were dead.”

The Captain sighed.
 
“Yeah,” he said, looking back at the datapad.
 
He pushed another button on the console, and another, and the central display changed to show an image of the homeworld, surrounded by ships and stations.
 
“Ah,” he said, poking at part of the image.
 
A picture of a cylinder ship appeared, along with numbers and other text.
 
With a broad smile, he stabbed a button on the screen.

His broad smile faded as a smaller display appeared.
 
He looked incredulously at the screen.
 
“Password?” he said.
 
“They need a password to control their defences.”
 
He looked around at the writing on the walls and ceiling, his stomach sinking.
 
“What the fuck would she use as a password?”

Behind the small password-entry display, the larger display shifted, to show a group of hundreds of cylinder ships pushing back a fleet of smaller vessels.
 
Dozens of wrecked cylinders, and dozens more smaller ships, filled the space between the two fleets.

Dillon swallowed.
 
“Oh, shit.
 
That’s us.
 
The combined Earth fleets are losing.”
 
He looked up at Amba.
 
“Do you have any idea what might be the password?”

The Tassali stepped over next to him, holding her datapad where he could see it.
 
She pointed at groups of characters the datapad had read off the wall.
 
“Those characters,” she said, “are the names of her spouses.
 
These down here are the names of her children.”

“Okay,” said Dillon.
 
He tapped at the display, entering the same series of characters as were on Amba’s datapad.
 
The display flashed blue, and the password-entry display reappeared.
 
“The other one, then,” he said.
 
Again, the blue screen.
 
“Now this one.”
 
Blue screen.
 
“That one.”
 
Blue screen again.

He leaned back in the chair, tilting his head back toward the ceiling.
 
“Perky, Amoroso, have you two seen anything that says what her password might have been?”

“No sir,” came Perkins’s voice.
 
“But we’re still scanning, sir.”

“You said there was a bunk.
 
Check the bed, the furniture, whatever, for mementoes or personal effects that might give us a clue.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Dillon watched the display, trying to make out the individual Earth ships involved in the battle.
 
He recognised a few; one of them burst into a cloud of wreckage while its squadron mates fell back.
 
He tapped his wrist console to create a private channel.
 
Amba turned to look at him.

“That was the
Bonaventure
, one of our biggest cruisers.
 
A crew of five hundred; I know a few of the officers.”
 
He looked up into her eyes.
 
“You know this is futile.”

“Probably,” she said.

“This is ridiculous,” he mumbled.
 
He looked at the population display on his left.
 
“All this to defend a population of one.”

He leaned forward and began entering the children’s names.
 
He tried different combinations of the spouses’ and children’s names.
 
Amba was reading further ahead in the text, looking for clues.
 
“They knew it was a genetically-designed virus,” she said.
 
“They knew that there were others fighting the Horlan — who they called the ‘Spawn’ — and wondered how to contact them.
 
It was a point of dark humour for them,” she said quietly, “that their unknown saviours, in the act of saving them from the Horlan, would kill them all.”

“Wait a minute,” said Dillon, his tapping at the console coming to a stop.
 
“They killed them all.”
 
He turned his head to look at the display on his left.
 
“That population counter says ‘one’.”

“Yes,” said Amba, a look of concern on her face.
 
“Her.”

Dillon shook his head.
 
“No, she’s dead.
 
The population isn’t ‘one’, it’s zero.”
 
He looked back at the console.
 
“So we need to figure out how to tell it.”

Holding his datapad up so it could translate the changing text on the smaller screen, he tapped at the display, working his way through the system’s different functions.

“Here,” he said.
 
“This has to do with checking the status of the empire, or civilisation, or whatever.”

He poked at the screen, and an image of a planet appeared in the display.
 
It paused a moment, then the character for ‘zero’ popped up, and the image of a different planet appeared.

“Is it going to go through all their worlds?” asked Amba.

Dillon made a face inside his mask.
 
“Yeah, probably.”

“What if they had thousands?”

“Then this might take too long.”

Atwell reached over her head, punching a button on the ceiling console.
 
“Bridge to Engineering, when do we get our starboard-side thrusters back?”

She held on to the top of the supervisory console with her other hand, as the view out the bridge windows slid madly past to the left.

“Anderson here.
 
As fast as we can, sir.
 
Under five minutes.”

“That’s going to be five long minutes.
 
Do your best.
 
Bridge out.”

Atwell looked down at the Chief, seated next to her at the console.
 
“You heard that, helm?” asked the Chief.
 
“Right turns only, for five more minutes.
 
Keep the turns as wide as you dare, so the four of them—”

“Five now, Chief,” said Atwell.

“—so the five of them don’t try to cut our corner.”

At the helm console, Pakinova was completely focused on her controls, and only barely nodded to the Chief’s advice.

“They’re firing!” called the sensor tech.
 

The cylinder homeworld slid to the left and downwards out of sight, as the ship banked upward to the right, its inertial compensators howling in protest.

“Two more coming to pursue, sir,” said the sensors tech.

“Damn it,” muttered Atwell.
 
“We can’t keep this up all day long.”

“We have to,” said the Chief.

“I don’t get it,” continued Atwell.
 
“The other ones we met were so slow they couldn’t keep up with us.
 
These ones don’t even break a sweat.
 
If they could turn or aim worth a damn, they’d have got us ages ago.”

“Aye to that,” said the Chief.
 
“And I don’t much care for them learning to work together and co-ordinating their fire.
 
Damned unreasonable, sir.”

The Lieutenant stepped over to stand behind the comms station.
 
“Anything more from the ground team?”

The tech shook his head.
 
“No, sir.
 
Nothing since the last tight-beam from the shuttle.
 
Lieutenant Cho’s team is back in the lobby, but there’s still no word from the Captain’s team in the basement.”