Erebus (8 page)

“I suspect it’s all about power generation,” he said finally. Frampton squinted out of the window. “Hey, watch.”

“Watch wh—” I started to say, following his line of sight. I saw a star streaking over the horizon. It bloomed suddenly into a huge shape, which I more sensed as an afterimage than actually saw. I instinctively grabbed the table, thinking whatever it was would strike us. “What the hell was that?”

“One of the space cities,” Frampton grinned.

“Seriously?” I manipulated my HUD, playing back the last few seconds on slow motion. I watched as the star slowly expanded, taking on the form of a vast cylinder city. It was at least five miles long and seemed to thunder silently by us.

“Jesus, that was close,” I breathed.

“Yeah, they normally time the ascents to avoid those kinds of close passes. It’s a little disconcerting. But because they sped us up…” Frampton shrugged.

“You don’t say it’s disconcerting.” I shook my head, wondering at the apparent near miss.

“Anyway…” Frampton was incredibly blasé about what seemed to be a near-death experience to me. Even though the rational side of me knew that we were safe, it still had been too close for comfort. “…Io lies well within the flux lines of Jupiter. It’s well known that lots of people were playing around with laying superconducting cable on the surface, trying to tap into it. If anyone could be successful, they would have access to the biggest generator in the solar system.”

“Maybe so, but surely the powersats are far easier. I hear Io is a right hellhole. Chances are the cable would be constantly wrecked by all the earthquakes—I mean moonquakes—and volcanoes.”

“Yeah, but a powersat would get the tiniest fraction of the sunlight out in Jupiter space as compared with the inner system. Most power in the outer system is generated by either fusion or the new antimatter reactors, which are pretty dangerous things. If they’d got the Io reactors working properly, the Jupiter Alliance would have safe, cheap, limitless energy for, well, forever.”

“So how close were people to managing it?” I leaned forward.

“Oh, years, decades probably. Even with nanotechnology, the engineering problems are—were—massive.” Frampton resumed chewing.

Years or decades? If that were the case, why attack Io now? Something about that being the motive didn’t quite ring true.

***

I retreated to my cabin for some privacy and opened a link to Giselle to check in with her. “Hey, how are things going?”

“We’re getting there,” Giselle said, a sad look on her face. “Just so you know, the coroner’s finished with Dev this evening. They’re looking at releasing his body back to his family in the next couple of days.”

“That was…quick,” I said with surprise.

“Yeah. But at least his family can lay him to rest.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I looked out of the window at the horizon, lost in thought for a moment. Post-mortems didn’t take long these days, especially when there was no particular mystery involved about the cause of death. Apparently in the twenty-first century, a body could stay on ice for months while test after test was performed. “And the funeral?” I finally asked.

“That’s up to the family. Probably sooner rather than later, though.”

“And I’m up here. Great.” I gave a bitter response.

“Layton, everyone knows you’d be there if you could,” Giselle said quietly. “But you’re doing something positive. You’re helping to find the reason we’re burying Dev. We all know if his enhancements had been online, Kumba would never have got the drop on him.”

“On us, Giselle. Kumba got the drop on us,” I corrected her, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“Did I make a mistake sending you, Layton? Are you ready for this?”

“Yes, of course I’m ready. Dev would be the first one up here if it was the other way around.”

“Okay.” The dubious tone in Giselle’s voice was still there, but it seemed like she was working through it.

“So,” I forced a smile onto my face, and changed the subject. “What do those office imps you have slaving away in The Hague dungeon have lined up for me?”

Giselle seemed to accept me at my word and pushed on. “I’ve got a big to-do list that you need to sign off on. I’ve boiled it down for you and am sending it across now.”

A HUDmail icon appeared in my vision, and I opened it.

“Any of those bastards actually confessed yet to being at the Karen Cole Hospital?” I asked as I scanned through the headers on the file.

“Yeah, a few of them have. Most have just refused to answer any questions when they’ve been interviewed, though. Becky is fairly happy we have enough evidence to sink them, whether they squeal or not.”

“Good.” I dropped the file into a folder to work on later. “I’ll get this back to you in a few hours.”

“Yeah…good luck with that,” Giselle replied with a tone that said the work might be a little more extensive than she was making out. “By the way, it took some digging, but I’ve got you dossiers on all the folks you’ve asked for. They’ve been pretty straight with you. Cheng is MSS. He’s done some time in the People’s Army, too. Don’t get into a fight with him whatever you do. Chances are he has every combat enhancement going. Vance and Agapov are career intelligence; you probably don’t want to brawl with them either. Sihota is IASF. Smart cookie. Done some test piloting and has a list of degrees as long as my arm. Drayton is Red Star on their corporate security division.”

“Thanks, Giselle. Just out of curiosity, does Cheng have a kid?”

Giselle consulted her notes. “Not that we have on file. Why?”

“Just an honesty check.” I gave a wry smile. “He failed.”

“These spooky types and their damn smoke and mirrors.” Giselle’s voice had a note of distaste.

“Yeah,” I replied before giving a shrug and sitting back against the headboard of my cabin bunk. “What about the other thing?”

“I’m sending it as we speak.”

With over four hundred active volcanoes constantly spewing out iron sulphide, the whole surface of Io was covered with deep drifts of yellow, orange, and black dust. The diseased color permeated the whole moon—it looked positively ill.

Gunter Henning was trudging through the deep dust, careful to poke with his stick ahead of him to find the firmest ground. More than one engineer had plunged into an exceptionally deep drift. Fortunately, everyone had been found safe and well, but it would be a long wait for rescue, not to mention more than a little embarrassing.

Pausing for a moment in his thick radiation/armored space suit, he looked up. Far away he could see Mount Woodgate, a massive volcano that was nearly one and a half times the height of Everest back on Earth. It was having a quiet day, just the lightest of ethereal plumes shooting upward out of it, giving the dark sky a yellow hue. Arching his head back, he could see the vast ball of Jupiter looming in the sky, the giant spot facing him. The whole thing looked like a red and white striped eye staring at him. When he’d first arrived on Io, he had found it completely overbearing. Now, the bloated gas giant was merely disconcerting.

“Gunter, do you see the junction box yet?”

Henning looked around. The transponder on the junction box had died, which meant he had to rely on the good ol’ eyeball Mark I method to find it. Magnometers and metal detectors didn’t work here, partly because of the Io flux lines and partly because the moon was effectively covered in rusty iron filings. Even his implant HUD was seriously limited. Because the small population didn’t warrant the expense of compensating, Io didn’t have much of the shared computing capability needed for the Hypernet to function optimally.

He finally spotted the box, half buried in a drift. Henning made his way over to it and dusted it off with his thick lead-lined gauntlet. He could immediately see what the problem was. The casing of the junction box has somehow sprung open in the last quake. The whole thing would likely be full of dust. Looking to the left and right, he could see the cable, or what bits of it weren’t sunk into the surface. He nodded in satisfaction; they looked intact. “I’m at the junction box; should be an easy job,” he called over his com to Bill Wiseman back in the habitat.

As he pulled the casing the rest of the way open, he felt a tremor. Clutching onto the side of the box, he waited for it to subside. It was probably an aftershock from the last big quake. Mount Woodgate gave a sudden belch, an orange cloud shooting out of it before it settled down. At least the quake hadn’t set the damn volcano off again.

He pulled a small brush off his utility belt and set to work on the box. He wouldn’t be able to see the full extent of the problem until he’d got most of the dust out, but chances were it would just be a breaker. The boxes were robust, designed to be able to cope with whatever punishment the harsh moon could give, but they still required some TLC every now and again. He began to whistle tunelessly to himself as he swept the dust out of the box.

“Hey, Henning,” Bill called, “an A-liner just dropped in. Apparently it’s having some kind of bother. It’s called a pan-pan.”

“Anything major?”

“Doubt it. Something to do with their attitude control. They’re not near anything they can collide with, so no great worries.”

“Ah, fair enough,” Henning said distractedly as he brushed the last of the dust out. He moved his helmeted head closer. The switches had tripped. He flicked them back into position—no easy task with his gauntleted hands, but he’d done it many times.

Without warning, an androgynous voice blasted loud in his earphones. “Jupiter Control, this vessel will strike Io. Begin your evacuation procedures. You have thirty minutes.”

“What the fuck?” Henning exclaimed. “Bill, repeat your last.”

Henning got no answer. “Bill!”

“Gunter, standby. We’re figuring out what’s going on,” Bill finally answered.

The German engineer stood up and looked back at the rover that suddenly seemed very far away.

“Come on, Bill. I need to know if I should be heading back,” he said.

“Standby. We’re linking with Jupiter Control.”

“Screw this,” Henning murmured to himself. “Bill, I’m going to head back to the hopper.”

“Yeah, you do that.” Bill’s voice had a distracted edge to it.

In a lumbering, loping run, Henning headed for the hopper, trying his best to re-tread his footsteps that had already faded in the vibrations of the last aftershock; he didn’t want to be stuck in some drift in an emergency.

“Henning, Jupiter Control has called for evacuation. We’re all going to be lifting.”

“Bill, I’m not even close to being near a shuttle in the thirty minutes that voice was talking about.”

“You’re going to have to do the best you can. We’re going to pack into one shuttle and leave you the other one.”

Henning tripped and fell, nearly burying himself in the dust, the sound of his breathing loud in the confines of the helmet. Starting with a crawl, he managed to pick himself up and carried on bounding toward the hopper. “Okay, just lift as soon as you’re onboard. I’ll be fine.”

“I hate to leave you, man…We can try a site-to-site bounce in the shuttle to get to you?”

“And risk landing in a drift and getting stuck? No, just go,” Henning called as he finally got to the hopper and, in a single leap, reached the cabin hatch of the spiderlike vehicle and opened it. He shortchanged the pressurization of the cabin and, moving as fast as he could in his bulky suit, entered the control blister. Climbing into the chair, Henning activated the hopper with his awkward, gauntleted fingers. By the chronometer on his HUD, he had less than fifteen minutes left before the strike.

The tiny, vulnerable hopper began its lumbering, bouncing motion that was the safest way of getting around on the surface of Io. Henning turned it toward the distant lights of the habitat that he had called home for the last year.

“Henning, we’re ready to go. Good luck, man.”

“You too. Get going.”

Through the hopper’s thick clear canopy, Henning watched as a column of fire began to lift straight up from the surface—his colleagues and friends striving to reach safety.

The hopper wasn’t particularly fast, and it was crystal clear that it would get nowhere near the base before the time elapsed. Henning kept glancing at the chronometer. It ticked down far faster than was right or fair. Well before he got anywhere near the base, it ticked down to zero.

To his left, a strange, bright illumination bloomed over the horizon, almost like an aurora. It faded quickly. Then he felt it. The whole surface shifted. It was small, a matter of a few feet, but still, he clutched onto the safety handles in the control blister.

Panicked, Henning glanced around, trying to see what was going on—then he saw it. Off the right side of the blister, a huge cloud of fire swelled from below the horizon, roiling, tumultuous. Mixed in the cloud, he could see vast chunks of crustal material. The whole surface of the moon was lifting off. Then the shaking started.

Moonquakes were one thing, this was another. The whole hopper felt like it was being shaken into little pieces by the sheer violence of it. Henning gripped the handles as tightly as he could. Huge chasms began to open. Massive rocks smashed their way up into the sky. All around him, vast mountain ranges were forming or being destroyed in seconds, and lava was shooting into the sky in geysers of fire.

With what must have been near superhuman effort, Henning manipulated his HUD, finding the controls to send a total dump from his sensory implants in a burst transmission, including the cache that automatically stored the last few minutes. Everything Henning saw and heard was packaged up and sent to the fleeing shuttle, including a live feed.

Crying out in pain from the sheer ferocity of the vibrations, the last thing Henning saw was a chasm opening beneath the hopper as it plummeted nose first toward an upward surge of lava.

***

I came out of the VR recording and pinched the bridge of my nose, giving myself a moment. It was never pleasant to replay someone’s last moments, especially when it was a full immersion of their final experiences. I was just thankful that Henning hadn’t set his HUD to record his impressions, something I did as a matter of course.