The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (65 page)

But the Watchtower had finally presented him with the opportunity to enhance his profile. Physically placing him on the ultimate human frontier would make it
his
flight. He, Dudley Bose, was due to become the human interface with the mystery of the Dyson Pair.

Then McClain Gilbert announced the team schedule, and Dudley had to wait for yet another day. Until it became his turn he was once again reduced to a secondary role, watching through the shuttle’s camera as Gilbert jetted himself over to the large alien structures on the Watchtower, and spouting banalities like: “This is it. Any moment now. Yes! Contact. How much this differs from our usual first encounter with an alien environment. CSI contact personnel normally walk through a wormhole and step firmly on the ground. Here, you can see my friend Mac actually having to cling onto the edge of a hole with his hand. Now, wait, he’s shining his lights through into the structure. You’re seeing the first glimpse of a whole new alien universe.”

In truth, Mac’s careful drift through the structure was tedium itself. It was quite obvious the station had been deserted for a long time. The polytanium hull was still mildly radioactive, its decay rate allowing an accurate dating on the explosion of two hundred eleven years. “So there can be nothing left alive in there. Or if there is, it’s a life-form very different from anything we know.”

The compartments weren’t particularly strange. Engineering principles were reasonably universal. The hull material was made up from sandwiched layers; the pressure wall, thermal insulation, structural reinforcement, cable ducts. First indications were that the cube Mac entered was a habitation section. Several internal walls had rectangular hatchways. “They are two meters across, larger than human ones, which indicate the Dysons might be bigger than us.”
In case you couldn’t work that out for yourselves.
There were times Dudley hated himself for what he had to do.

Almost every compartment had an opening into the broad tunnellike corridors that curved and twisted through the interior. Mac’s suit lights found octagonal mounting blocks in the compartments, jutting out of the walls at the apex of structural ribs. At one time they’d held large units of machinery. Now, there were just empty brackets and load pins. “It’s been stripped clean. Whoever won the battle must have taken their booty with them.”

Mac’s whole EVA was a record of empty chambers and long dark tunnels. The Watchtower had a sense of rejection about it rather than abandonment. Cold, dark, feebly radioactive, it was simply of no consequence anymore; both purpose and meaning had ceased when the lethal radiation pierced every corner.

It was an impression that was now strengthening in Dudley’s mind as he watched the horn of rock expanding across the starfield. Everything out here was gray, leaving very little difference between the rock and the alien station perched on it. He could just make out the other shuttle hovering above the cube, a silver and gold speck with green and scarlet navigation strobes flashing incessantly. Their light shimmered across the scuff marks on the perspex of the little port he was pressed against.

“Helmet.”

“Huh?” Dudley turned around to see Emmanuelle Verbeke on the other side of the aisle. She was putting her own helmet on.

“Time to put your helmet on,” she said.

“Right. Sure.” He gave her a thank-you smile, and retrieved his helmet from the fuseto patch on the side of the chair. He had gotten on quite well with Emmanuelle since leaving Anshun. Thankfully, since they were partnered up together in team A. Not that he got to socialize with her much outside duty shifts and training sessions. He was still somewhat conscious about his physical shape. Everyone else on board had been through a full rejuvenation, at most ten years ago. He was the starship’s official geriatric. Any early hope that would give him an air of distinction had quickly faded.

The shuttle’s small thrusters were firing almost continually as it maneuvered in for rendezvous, sounding as if someone with a hammer was knocking on the fuselage. Dudley accommodated the slight swaying motion it set up as he lowered the tough transparent bubble over his head. The liplike seals gripped tight, and he fastened the secondary mechanical seal. His e-butler immediately ran final integration checks, confirming the suit was fully functional.

He activated his suit’s force field as he went into the airlock. Team C and three of team A were already waiting on the fuselage grid that skirted the outer lock. Dudley took care to anchor himself before pulling his maneuvering pack out of its storage bin. It was McClain Gilbert himself who held the pack steady while Dudley pushed his arms through the straps. The unit stuck itself to his space suit, plyplastic straps contracting around him.

“You all right?” Mac asked. His helmet was very close to Dudley’s, allowing him to peer through the faint silvering.

“Sure.” However blasé he tried to sound, the reality of being out in open space within an alien star system was making his heart judder. The telemetry would be available to Mac. Dudley looked around to find the reassuring bright star that was
Second Chance
. Seeing it shining against the starfield made his breathing a little easier. He searched farther, trying to find familiar star patterns amid the strange constellations.

Team C began jetting over to the Watchtower a hundred meters away. Dudley held Emmanuelle’s maneuvering pack as she shrugged her way into it, receiving a thumbs-up in gratitude. He enjoyed that, it made him feel like a fully paid-up member of the team.

“Right, that’s everybody out,” said Francis Rawlins, the leader of team C. “Make sure you’ve secured your equipment bag before you leave the shuttle. You can freeflight in your own time. Head for the beacon they’ve put up on the alien station. We’ll regroup there, and move on in.”

Dudley made sure the cylindrical bag was fastened to his belt. The others were slowly lifting off the fuselage grid. Tiny squirts of white gas puffed out of their maneuvering pack nozzles, just visible in the dusky light of the distant star. His virtual hand gripped the pack’s joystick, and he tilted it forward. The gas produced a dull rushing sound, vibrating against his back. But his boots left the grid, and he was floating away from the shuttle. Once again his heart went yammering as adrenaline cut loose into his bloodstream. He couldn’t believe he was actually doing this. There was a holiday he’d taken in his first life when he’d signed up to go paragliding; trusting himself to a sheet of fabric and praying the straps held as he and the instructor jumped off the top of a mountain. The rush of tension and exhilaration that hit him simultaneously when he saw treetops below his feet was like nothing he’d ever known. Now here it was again, far more intense than the first time.

As before, he forced himself to relax into the inevitable. It just took a while to convince his body there was actually nothing wrong, that the suit and the maneuvering pack were working fine and taking care of him. Inside the helmet he was grinning like a madman. His free virtual hand tapped a microphone icon, then keyed in a privacy code.

“I’m approaching the strange alien station we’ve called the Watchtower. All of us agree now that it was misnamed. This is no guard outpost, simply the sad remnants of an industrial facility that was damaged during a conflict that went nuclear. I can’t help but feel regret that all the effort and cost which went into establishing such an enterprise should fall victim to this primitive lack of emotional control. Although the Dyson aliens have accomplished so much, and I concede some of their technological accomplishments exceed ours, I hope they can still learn from the way our society resolves conflicts and disagreements.” That would go down well back home. Always make the audience feel slightly superior.

The course graphic inside his virtual vision showed him heading off to one side of the beacon. He corrected. Overcorrected. Then had to tip the joystick firmly the other way. This was exactly what his skill training memory instinctively warned him against. He just couldn’t integrate that knowledge at an autonomic reflex level. So he wobbled his way forward, gas burping from every nozzle of his maneuvering pack in a seemingly random pattern, and keeping a cautious eye on his relative velocity.

Francis Rawlins was easing her way in through the gap beside the beacon as he finally came to rest just above her. The other members of team C followed. Dudley looked around eagerly once he was inside, but the compartment was something of an anticlimax: a simple box of blue-gray metal, flooded with vibrant pools of light by the suit beams. Nothing to hint at alien-ness.

“Now we’re inside I can’t emphasize enough to use caution,” Francis said. “The Ops office is watching out for us individually, but they can’t compensate for every mistake. The only solution is, don’t make any. We’re not in a race, we’ll keep searching around until we’ve acquired the data which the captain needs, so don’t rush anything. Now, teams B, D, and E have already explored down to level five, and radially they went as far as sections A3 and A8 on your charts. They’ve placed comrelays to cover that area, but when you go beyond them you need to set up your own, these walls are an effective block to our signals. Do not allow any communications dead zones, especially in the connecting tunnels. We stay in contact the whole time, understood? Okay, you’ve got your assignments. Move out.”

Dudley studied the topography of the 3D chart in his virtual vision, matching it to the big tunnel entrance on the compartment’s wall. An orange line snaked through it, detailing his route. He brought the inertial guidance on-line, aligning it with the beacon.

“You ready?” Emmanuelle asked.

“I think so.” He was staring at the black gulf that was the entrance to the tunnel they were going to have to use to get down to level five. It was nearly three meters in diameter.
Thus indicating the Dyson aliens may be bigger than us—idiot.
Not so small as to trigger claustrophobia. At least, not straightaway.

On the other side of the compartment, Francis was already hauling herself into a tunnel that snaked its way over to section A8. Dudley drifted over to the tunnel his chart indicated, and gripped the side of the entrance to steady himself. His suit lights cut straight through the gloom, revealing a tube whose carbon composite walls were mottled with hairline fractures and coarse blisters. It started to curve downward about five meters ahead, with a gentle twist to the left. He pushed his feet lightly off the compartment floor, allowing his legs and torso to slide up until he was level to the entrance, then pulled himself forward into the tunnel. “And into the unknown.”

“Sir, we’re being signaled,” Anna called out. “Sensors are showing both laser and microwave transmissions directed straight at us. Originating from Alpha Major orbit—the moonlets.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson grunted. “Are you sure? Could they just be aligned on something beyond us?”

“I don’t think so. There is nothing behind us. All three beams intersect here, and they’re holding constant. We’re definitely the target point.”

Wilson quickly called the signals up on his console screens. Even after the RI’s best filtering they came up as a jumble of sine waves and fractal patterns. “Is this the same stuff they transmit to each other?”

“Yes, sir. It looks like it.”

“So they might not realize we are aliens?”

“They must have a good idea we are not native to this star system,” Tunde said. “After all, now the barrier has come down, they’ll be expecting some kind of communication or contact from the species which put it up. They would be watching.”

One of the visual sensors was trained on a laser beam coming from a worldlet around Alpha Major. That single ruby dazzle-point obscured much of the planet’s delicate wrapping of fusion flame. Wilson stared at it with a growing concern that he might just have been underestimating the Dysons. “They’ve been looking for us, or at least an alien ship, since the barrier went down?”

“That would be the logical thing for them to do, yes.”

“So if they haven’t got hysradar, how the hell did they find us?”

“Our hyperdrive wormhole creates a great deal of gravitonic shock, and it also has a strong quantum signature. On top of that there will be neutrino emissions from our fusion reactors.”

“Small ones,” Antonia said immediately. “I’m keeping the fusion systems a couple of percent above breakeven. The niling d-sinks are our primary power source, but they’re very well shielded.”

“Captain, this entire planetary system is overflowing with advanced technology,” Tunde said. “And if they really are as conflict-driven as we suspect, they will have a great many sensor systems. I’m really not surprised they have detected us.”

Wilson was drawn back to the main portals, both of them showing an unaugmented visual image of the Watchtower. His initial concern was now turning to real worry. “Anna, give me a hysradar sweep. Is there anything out there?”

After a few initial scans of the Watchtower they’d switched off all of their active sensors, keeping all emissions to a minimum in a bid to achieve silent running. It was his choice again to remain inconspicuous; quietly gathering data until they were ready to make contact. A strategy that would allow them the upper hand.

“Oh, shit,” Anna exclaimed. “I make that eight ships heading straight at us.”

Dudley had followed the tunnel all the way down to level seven. He’d passed a lot of junctions where subsidiary tunnels branched off. The whole network was like some kind of root system twisted into a knotted corkscrew configuration. Winding his way down, he began to appreciate just how extensive the tunnels were in a way the virtual vision 3D chart never quite conveyed. As he progressed he became convinced they were pipes rather than corridors. There were simply too many of them to be used as passageways by the Dyson aliens. Not that he could visualize what kind of pipes they were. They had no valves or pumps, nor mounting pins where such units could have been. His best guess was that they used to be lined by a cellular sleeve, or a variant on electromuscle, which had subsequently been stripped out along with everything else. The contact teams had so far been singularly unsuccessful in recovering an artifact of any value.