So Vile a Sin (11 page)

Chris hovered, but the Ogrons paid him no attention, shovelling mutton into their mouths, occasionally taking a pinch of one of the flavourings between thick fingers.

‘Well,’ he said after a bit, ‘I guess I should leave you to it.’

‘Good food,’ said the Ogron. He scooped up a handful of meat, took Chris’s hand, and plopped the raw mutton into the human’s palm. ‘Try some of this.’

Chris looked at the meat, the juices starting to leak on to his fingers. ‘Er,’ he said.

The silverware on the tray rattled. Chris glanced at it. The Ogrons were looking at one another, chunky teeth showing in their leathery faces.

Chris started to laugh. He put the handful of flesh back down on the tray. ‘Thanks, but I already ate.’

The Ogrons laughed louder, the cutlery rattling harder with the force of it. Chris hoped they weren’t trading rude comments about him in those deep rumbles.

‘I am Son of My Father,’ said the Ogron. He picked up the stray handful of meat and gulped it down.

‘I am his Sister’s Son,’ said the other.

‘Great, hi,’ said Chris. ‘Listen, how much did Professor Martinique tell you guys about this expedition?’

‘He did not tell us much,’ said the Ogron. ‘He told us to lift and carry his boxes and things.’

‘Did he tell you about the crater? The base hidden under the rock?’

‘He did not tell us,’ said Son of My Father. ‘But we heard him talking to Zatopek about the crater. He does not know very much about it.’

Chris nodded. ‘Never mind. I figured you guys might know something he wasn’t telling us… like what’s really hidden inside that mountain.’

The Ogron hesitated, glancing at his nephew. He raised a dark hand, gesturing Chris closer.

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He put his mouth close to Chris’s ear and whispered, ‘I don’t know.’

The cutlery started rattling again.

Later, Chris took the tray back to the galley. Iaomnet and Zatopek stopped talking the instant they saw him, and glared at the table. ‘Good night,’ he said, quickly stacking the tray in the cleaner.

‘See you in the morning,’ said Iaomnet as he retreated.

Chris really wanted to stretch his legs, but the Hopper didn’t even have a gym. He could run in circles around the cargo bay, but it just seemed pointless. He went back down the corridor to the bridge.

The Doctor was sitting in one of the chairs, his face lit in slow-moving patterns by the telltales. The view through the front window was blackness marked with rainbow streaks. Chris tried to ignore it – hyperspace did strange things to your eyes as they tried to focus, and it always made his head ache. The Doctor was watching it as though it was a particularly interesting television programme.

‘I think there’s a lover’s tiff going on in the galley,’ murmured Chris, turning one of the chairs backward and sitting in it. He leant over the back of the seat. ‘Iaomnet and Zatopek.’

‘Or a professional disagreement, perhaps?’ The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘The geologists appear to have neglected to fill their assistant in on all the details of the mission.’

‘I was right, wasn’t I? Those images were military. Probably classified.’

‘Of course. Most likely, they’re from Mei Feng’s original expedition.’

‘I can’t believe the military would miss the significance of that line down the mountain.’

‘Maybe they didn’t bother to examine it,’ said the Doctor.

‘Then why take the picture in the first place?’ Chris said.

‘Besides, after what happened to the first expedition, you think they’d be looking for an explanation.’

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‘Good point.’ The Doctor drummed his fingers on his mouth, thinking. ‘I wonder if someone pulled a few strings, and this is the first expedition to get permission…’

Chris insisted, ‘Even if it was low-level security info, there’s no way that a couple of university geologists could have gotten their hands on it. Who are these people?’

‘Good question,’ said the Doctor. ‘Though at this point I think we’d be a little hypocritical to complain that they weren’t who they say they are.’

Chris spent the next morning helping Zatopek work on the sensor array. The young academic monitored the links from a palmtop while Chris and the Ogrons unpacked huge antennae and scanner dishes from their plastic crates.

After lunch, Chris crawled out through the airlock and spent an hour welding things together on the hull. Zatopek watched through Chris’s suit camera, giving him terse instructions.

Back inside, he’d showered off the sweat, his elbows knocking against the walls of the tiny cubicle in his cabin. Feeling pleasantly scrubbed, he wandered up to the bridge. The smart systems were quite capable of handling the entire trip from one Clytemnestran moon to the other, assuming it was all routine; they needed a human pilot only to handle the last stages of the journey, where there’d be no automatic beacons to guide the ship in.

But it didn’t hurt to run your eyes over the controls every so often. Chris had heard of a ship on the Earth–Titan run which had got so nervous about one of its retros that it changed course for the nearest repair station, and the crew didn’t even realize until they were halfway to Mars.

The door behind him slid open and Iaomnet came on to the bridge. Maybe she’d heard the same story. ‘What is that noise?’

she asked, and sat down in the co-pilot’s position.

‘The Communards,’ said Chris.

‘Who are they when they’re not strangling cats?’

Chris passed her the cassette case. She turned it over in her hands. He noticed her frown when she pressed her thumb against the list of artists on the back and nothing happened.

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‘Old technology,’ he said. ‘There’s no display encoded into the plastic.’

‘Twenty-first century?’ she asked.

‘Close,’ said Chris. ‘Twentieth. I’m impressed.’

‘I know you’ve heard different,’ said Iaomnet. ‘But us students do occasionally learn things. Albeit during brief gaps between hangovers. I did pre-Diaspora history as an elective. It was that or Earth Reptile aesthetics.’ She looked around the cockpit. ‘So where have you hidden your “tape deck”?’

Chris showed her where he’d used a universal connector to plug his Walkman into the navigation console. She asked him if it was really safe to do that.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve done it thousands of times.’ He made sure he was looking straight into her eyes when he said it. She had deep black eyes.

She looked away first, glancing down at the artist list on the back of the cassette case.

‘You like this stuff?’ she asked.

‘It reminds me of someone I used to know,’ said Chris. ‘They used to play this at the clubs we went to.’

‘Way back when in your wild and frivolous youth, right?’

‘Right.’

‘How old are you?’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘Older than you look.’

Chris couldn’t help himself – he had to laugh. ‘You are absolutely the
first
person who has ever said that to me.’

‘There has to be a first time for everything,’ said Iaomnet.

‘Funny, that’s what he said.’

‘Your friend?’

‘Right,’ said Chris, remembering steamy windows.

‘Hey,’ she said, holding up the cassette case. ‘I know this one –

Sting. Didn’t he go on to found a religion?’

‘That was Prince,’ said Chris. ‘Sting went into politics. I think he was assassinated in the early twenty-first.’

An alarm sounded and every proximity alert on the navigation display lit up simultaneously. Chris checked: the sensors were registering two unidentified emission sources within forty 85

thousand kilometres on a possible interception vector. He tapped his throat mike. ‘Doctor, I think you’d better get in here.’

He flicked the navigation computer over to
anticipate
, relieved to see that it was at least smart enough to realize he meant the fast-moving bogies and not a moon or other fixed navigation point. The display showed the possible course of the bogies as a series of nested cones – a rough estimate of where they
could
be in the near future.

Chris wasn’t surprised to see that the Hopper was right on the centre line of the innermost cone – definitely an interception course. He glanced at Iaomnet, who was frowning at the screen.

When she realized he was looking she asked him what was going on.

‘I think we’re going to be buzzed,’ said Chris.

The Doctor arrived on the bridge with Martinique and Emil close behind. ‘What have you got?’ he asked.

‘Two unidentified bogies on an intercept course,’ said Chris.

‘They’re decelerating at irregular intervals, the maximum deceleration being thirty gees.’

‘What do you think they are?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Well,’ said Chris, ‘they’re small enough not to occlude any stars and they’ve got very shallow emission signatures. The random deceleration is a typical military-style approach. At a guess I’d say they were a pair of Whirlwinds.’

‘Fighters?’ asked Zatopek.

Chris punched up another tactical display. ‘From the
Victoria
,’

he said, ‘a carrier in orbit around Orestes.’

Emil said, ‘What do they want with us?’

‘Let’s hope it isn’t target practice,’ said the Doctor. ‘What kind of weapons package will they have?’

Chris tried to remember his model-building days. ‘Assuming they’re loaded for space intercept, four ASDAC missiles for high delta V, two Roscoes for low V and a proton cannon for knife work.’

‘Which means?’ asked the Doctor patiently.

‘If they drop within a delta-V range of about twenty kps we’re probably all right.’

‘Unless they use their cannons,’ said Iaomnet.

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‘If they’re intercepting us,’ said Zatopek, ‘why are they slowing down?’

‘Space combat isn’t like dogfighting a flitter,’ said the Doctor.

‘There’s no point arriving at your target and then zipping past it.

You’ve got to be slow enough, relative to your target, for your weapons to hit it.’

It was more complicated than that, Chris knew. The high-V

weapons like the ASDACs traded off warhead for engine size. If you launched while on an intercept vector they could rip apart a ship just with the kinetic energy of their impact, much less effective at low or negative closure.

The low-V missiles like the Roscoes traded the other way: big warhead for a proximity hit, but the engine was smaller. Each weapon had its own effective envelope based on the absolute distance from launch to target and the relative velocity. The fighters were on a relatively simple intercept from behind and above, simple enough for even the Hopper’s navigation computer to make the necessary calculations.

The fighters were closing at less than seventy kilometres per second. Too late, Chris reckoned, for them to bother with their ASDACs. Once they were below twenty kilometres per second they would be at minimum effective V for the Roscoes. Which would mean that they were going for a visual inspection and a little bit of cursory intimidation.

Unless they used their proton cannons. In which case the Hopper didn’t stand a chance.

‘Chris,’ said the Doctor, ‘I think you should stop broadcasting Jimmy Somerville now – we don’t want to get them annoyed.’

Chris winced and unplugged the Walkman from the navigation console, which immediately began to bleep at him. He’d forgotten all about it.

Iaomnet turned to the Doctor. ‘If this is just an inspection, why haven’t they hailed us?’

‘They probably wondered who was strangling the cat,’ said the Doctor.

Chris flipped a switch and the bleeping stopped. ‘Hello, unidentified Hopper,’ said a speaker. ‘Do please reply. We’re becoming a little anxious.’

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Chris tapped a control. ‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, we had a minor communications glitch.’

‘Not a problem, unidentified Hopper, we were enjoying the music. This is the interceptor
Albert Edward
, out of the ISN

Victoria
. Could we please have your ident code?’

‘Yes, ma’am. We’re an intersystem Hopper out of Earth, bound for Iphigenia, Ident X181/481.’

‘And so you are. Many thanks for your assistance, and a safe journey.’

‘And you. Thanks.’ Chris closed the link.

Everyone in the cockpit let out the breath they’d been holding.

The Hopper slid into orbit around Iphigenia at 07.00 hours, ship’s time, a tiny dot swinging around Clytemnestra’s innermost moon. The gas giant was a massive, faintly glowing ball, cutting off the sunlight, filling the bridge with soft reddish shadows.

Chris and Iaomnet were sitting side by side. She was keeping an eye on navigation while he watched the sensor array. Zatopek had given him a series of diagnostics to run, comparing the close-range data with the long-range scans they’d done en route. Two days’ worth of recordings, all of the wrong side of the planetoid, Aulis Crater tantalizingly hidden on the other side.

It was all checking out perfectly, a detailed map of the surface slowly unscrolling in the computer’s memory. ‘Ten minutes to Aulis Crater,’ said Iaomnet.

‘So,’ said Chris, ‘what do you reckon we’re going to find down there?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought I was just here to make sure the academics didn’t fall out of an airlock or something. But an ancient, alien construct… There might be a whole city under there.’

Chris ran his eyes over the controls. Something was trying to get his attention. Had he missed a telltale? ‘Hidden under the mountain all this time,’ he said. ‘For millions of years, maybe.

And we’ll be the first people to visit it.’

‘Great,’ said Iaomnet. ‘I hate places with too many tourists. I just hope nobody’s home.’

‘Do you travel a lot?’

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‘Not much, no,’ she said. ‘The truth is, I –’ From somewhere aft there came shouts, followed by an appalling, high-pitched scream. ‘Shit!’

‘Stay here,’ said Chris, jumping up. He almost collided with the Doctor, who dashed in through the doorway.

‘It’s Zatopek,’ said the Time Lord. ‘Give me your personal stereo.’

‘What?’ said Iaomnet, unable to take her eyes off the controls.