Erebus (31 page)

“Zulu is down. Snapdragon is still active and has gone to blind fire mode. It’s tagging us but not maintaining lock. We’ll be under it in ten seconds…Mark.”

From what I could translate from the military jargon, the pilot was saying we had knocked out the laser’s eyes and it was randomly shooting at us, hoping to get in a lucky hit. The asteroid-moon ballooned in my view, the Hawk streaking toward it at a ridiculous velocity. At the last possible moment, the pilot fired retro-rockets, leveling us out, and began threading us through a valley on the surface.

“We’re below the Snapdragon engagement floor. Thirty seconds to landing. Positions.”

“Everyone get ready. Quick and smooth,” Phillips called. The lights in the cabin switched to a hellish red.

The Hawk was racing over the surface now. The rocky mountains on either side were little more than a blur. Ahead, the dome rose up from the horizon of Iwa.

“Retros. Brace.”

I was flung forward against my harness as the Hawk fired her breaking rockets again, slowing us savagely. We landed so hard that for a moment I thought we’d crashed. These military types didn’t mess about when it came to hard and fast landings. The ramp dropped silently, raising a cloud of dust and exposing us to the vacuum of space on the tiny rock.

“Ramp down. Go, go, go,” Phillips called, and the troops shot out of the shuttle, the thrusters on their suits squirting jets of gas. As they left the confines of the passenger bay, their figures shimmered and disappeared from view as the camouflage of their armor kicked in. After a couple of seconds, my implants, using an encryption key Phillips gave me, interfaced with the troops’ tactical network. The soldiers reappeared on my HUD, and I was once again able to see them. Being invisible to the enemy was good; being invisible to friends was very bad.

Following them at a far slower pace with Frampton in tow, I touched down on the surface of Iwa, the sound of my breathing loud in my ears. The gravity was so low that my landing and the movement of the people around me created clouds of dust. Moving was so effortless that I felt as if I could jump off into space. Thankfully, the antinausea tablets I’d taken were keeping my formerly rogue stomach in check. Or I was getting used to being in zero-g. Either way, I was relieved; I didn’t fancy puking in the suit.

The skyline was dominated by a rising Akarga, looming vast on the mountainous horizon, its rings at a slight angle. I paused, looking at the vista. Everything seemed so much crisper than on Earth. I realized that was because Iwa had no atmosphere. I shook my head to myself; my days of feeling collars on the streets of London seemed a lifetime ago.

“Get that breach lock established.” Phillips’s voice refocused my attention, and I zoomed my HUD onto where the assault team was working against the base of the grey dome.

In seconds, they erected a flimsy-looking frame against the dome. The dark fabric inside inflated suddenly. The shaped charges inside of the frame had blown out a chunk of the dome wall, and the atmosphere within had rushed out, filling the makeshift airlock.

“One and Two, on me,” Phillips called.

Three armored figures moved inside the inflated airlock and sealed it up. After a few moments, they signaled that they were inside.

By the time Frampton and I reached the breach lock, everyone else was in, and it was our turn. I pulled the flaps open, and we stepped inside. When I tugged them shut, the strip on the inner side of the airtight fabric turned from red to green to show that we had an adequate seal. It was pretty simple. On the small console within the breach lock were two buttons. I pressed the one labeled
pressurize
. The fabric went taut, and we opened the second flap, moving through to the next chamber, where the surface of the dome was visible. I stepped through the hole the shaped explosive charge had made in it, careful to avoid the jagged edges, and finally entered the inside of the facility.

Inside, a corridor followed the curve of the dome. Flashing red lights washed over soldiers standing watch to either side, sighting their lethal-looking SAR60 assault rifles down the passage.

“No welcome party so far,” Phillips linked over to me. “Atmosphere is good. The breach lock is holding.”

I wasn’t about to pop my visor just yet with the only thing between me and a total vacuum being the rather delicate-looking boarding contraption.

“Let’s move,” she said. “Clockwise. Call it if you see a direction marker or functional console.”

We started moving around the circumference corridor. The place looked old. The odd bits of equipment we passed were anachronistic. Hardly surprising if it had been built decades ago. Chances are even then they would have found it tough to ship in new gear without anyone noticing. Whoever had been here would have had to make do with what they could scrounge.

Coming to a ladder, one of the troops spotted a stenciled sign on the wall saying
OPS
with an arrow pointing upward. The troops ignored the ladder and jumped up easily between their enhanced suits and the low gravity to the next deck.

“Clear,” one of them said over the com.

“Push out,” Phillips called.

We followed after the troops, finding ourselves in another corridor. A door off of it led deeper inside the dome.

“Stack up. Dynamic entry. Quick and neat.” The well-drilled troops formed a queue on either side of the door. “Breach!”

One of the troops hit the hatch console, and they flowed in far more rapidly than seemed possible given their heavily armored forms.

“Clear. No contact. This is the ops center.”

“Roger. Coming in.”

Together, we moved inside the ops center, leaving a couple of the troops outside to cover the corridor. It was just as low tech as the rest of the base. Everything was worn and old: a couple of banks of consoles, an old-style holotank, and a picture window ahead. It overlooked a large central chamber, and in the middle, the base of the pagoda rested, driven through the floor, while the apex disappeared into the roof of the dome. It looked ancient, imposing. Lights blinked up and down the flowing lines of its length. It looked like nothing a human mind could conceive.

But down at the base was something that did look like it was built by humans—something that looked a hell of a lot like a bomb.

We elected to stay in the ops center viewing gallery overlooking the pagoda. One of the troops, who had apparently drawn a hell of a short straw in his career at some point and attended an EOD course for explosive ordnance disposal, went down to it, spooling a cable behind him. With the amount of EM that was flashing around the place, it was probably completely redundant, but Sergeant Jamal was taking no chances. All of our communications would go through that wire to prevent any chances of our coms setting off the device.

“Approaching device.” Jamal was keeping a commentary going the whole way down as we followed on our HUDs. On entering the central dome area, he walked up the metal grid pathway toward the pagoda, which towered above him, pulsing a sickly green light. Every few meters, he waved his sensor wand around, checking for any telltale signs of proximity triggers. I had seen that type of device used by EOD teams before. It could detect booby traps, proximity radars, sniffers, and that kind of thing. They had saved many a life.

“It’s definitely an IED. It’s fairly sophisticated but has clearly been put together with standard parts you’d find laying around a ship.” Sergeant Jamal edged in close to the large cylinder with a small boxy object attached to the side. “Looks to me like a plug-and-play drone communications module,” Jamal murmured, still calm. He waved his wand over the box. “Hell of a lot of current going through this thing. I would suggest it’s radio- or timer-controlled, from first glance. Moving to the main device now.”

The image swept to the main cylinder. It was completely featureless. It looked like an oxygen tank with glowing blue bands around it.

“Interesting. Lots of power pulsing through this thing as well.” The image panned around the device as Jamal circled it to where it abutted the base of the pagoda. Spotting some writing on the side, the image zoomed in on that section of the device. “I’ve got a serial number on this thing. Can one of you run it through the computers, see if it pops out with anything?”

“Go with the number,” Vance called. She’d stayed on the
Gagarin
and was communicating through a laser-coms array that one of the troops had set up on the surface and wired through to the base.

“Alpha, one, three, niner, Kilo, Kilo, four.”

“Checking.” After a short delay, Vance’s voice came back with something no one wanted to hear: “Oh, shit.”

We exchanged looks through our visors.

“What have you got?” Phillips said.

“It’s a magnetic containment bottle. It’s rated for antimatter, up to a gram’s worth.”

“That doesn’t sound like a lot,” one of the troops whispered.

“Yeah, well, I think you need to reconsider what you consider a lot,” Vance said irritably. “I was on a task force looking at what would happen if any antimatter fell into terrorist hands and they decided to weaponize it. One gram of antimatter annihilating one gram of normal matter would create a destructive force equal to a fifty-kiloton nuclear warhead. That’s around three times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.”

“Oh,” the troop muttered.

“Oh-in-fucking-deed,” Vance replied in her testy manner. “I doubt that what you have down there will vaporize Iwa, but it would leave nothing but a big crater on that entire hemisphere if it explodes.”

“Ma’am,” Jamal called up, “I’ve got an anti-tamper device here. It’s as simple as can be. If the drone control module is messed with, it’ll just cut power and this thing will pop. The auxiliary power feed on the antimatter bottle is wrecked, so we can’t just power it from an alternative source. I can’t see a work-around.”

“So if we try to defuse it, it’ll blow?” Phillips asked.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Solution?”
      

“Ordinarily I’d say a bomb box and controlled detonation, but…” Jamal’s voice trailed off. A bomb box wasn’t going to contain an antimatter explosion—not by a long shot. “We could try moving and spacing it.”

“No,” Sihota cut across the com. “That drone control module is likely to contain accelerometers. Frain would have thought of that and set it to cut power and blow if we move it from where he wants it.”

So we were stuck with the bomb.

“Frain’s got some serious balls if he’s drawn it from
Erebus’s
power plant,” Frampton said. “It’s not exactly the easiest stuff to work with.”

“Ladies and gents”—I was thinking the problem through as I was speaking—“the good sergeant down there has already said that this thing is wired up to a probe communications module. Would I be right in saying that you think that makes it link- or radio-controlled?”

“Yes. That’s right,” Frampton answered.

“And considering there is no crew here and
Erebus
has gone through the gate, then there doesn’t appear to be anyone left to activate the bomb.”

“Well…yes.”

“But the question remains; why would he have put it in place if he didn’t intend to activate it? I’m getting the impression taking a gram of antimatter is no simple task.”

“So what are you saying?” Vance asked.

“What I’m saying is that his original intention may have been to blow this rock out of the sky just after he slipped through the gate. But he changed his mind. Why?”

“Captain Vasily is still working up an analysis on
Erebus
after the battle. Maybe we managed to take out her transmitter. Maybe it’s still on a time delay and could blow at any moment.”

“Yeah, could be.” That was an uncomfortable thought. But surely he would have set it to explode seconds after he went through rather than leaving it as a booby trap. Everything so far told me that Frain was cold and calculating. He didn’t have a problem with killing anyone, but he didn’t go out of his way to do it. In fact, I would go so far as to say a few times on Concorde, it would have been easier for him if he had just killed some of the JAS officers. No, he hadn’t set this up as a trap. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think we’ve caught a break here. His original intention to blow this device has been scuttled. Let’s stick with plan A. Let’s power up this thing and follow him.”

Silence fell across the observation gallery and coms network.

“How much of a limb are you willing to go out on?” Vance finally said.

“You know,” Frampton mused, “it’s been bothering me since we got the Io disclosure that only half of the necessary hardware for a gateway is built into these pagoda things.”

“Dexter,” I said in exasperation, “now is not the time. I just want to know what button to press and bloody well press it.”

Things had moved fast during the last day. The troops had gone EVA and knocked out the Snapdragon laser. As was standard, the laser was hidden a mile away from its “eyes”—the radar station—which explained why the Hawk hadn’t disabled the laser itself with its Viper space-to-space missile. It had turned out to be an automated defense platform, or ADP, designed to knock out any approaching ship. Fortunately for us, Snapdragons were old technology, dating back decades before our leaving Sol. It had none of the self-defense capability of a modern ADP. A newer Spartan-class would have been equipped with all kinds of antipersonnel sentry devices. The troops thoroughly searched the base, and the food and recycling equipment suggested that the facility had only recently been abandoned.

Frampton and I were in the laboratory annex to the viewing gallery. It was full of work stations and digital whiteboards. The Post-it notes attached to every surface showed that it had been built in the pre-HUD days. To say it was quaint was an understatement. The problem was, as far as we could tell, every single damned console had been purged of all data. Reclaiming any of it would take a full IT forensic team days to sift through, and the chances of recovering much? Minimal. We didn’t have the expertise, the equipment, or the time. Every moment we delayed was a moment Frain could flee farther.