Trident's Forge (23 page)

More likely, they knew of the expedition and had begun to head for Kexx's village even before the shuttle touched down. Maybe as soon as planning for the expedition began several days before. That meant someone, either in Shambhala or on the Ark, was in contact with the Dwellers and interfering in Atlantian affairs.

And that Benson wasn't going to stand for.

The caravan came to a small bridge crossing over a shallow washout, no more than a couple of meters at its deepest point. Only a tiny trickle of water flowed down the center of the dried-out riverbed toward the ocean several kilometers to the east. Rounded stones and sun-bleached branches hinted that the trickle turned into a raging current during the wet season.

One stone in particular caught Benson's eye. Not for its size or shape, both of which were utterly unremarkable, but for its color and the way it caught the light. Benson stepped off the road and tottered down into the small gully, upsetting a small burrowing creature in the process which was only too eager to express its displeasure through chirps and kicking sand.

“What do you see?” Mei called down to him.

“Just a second,” Benson said as he reached down to grab the rock. It was round and pitted, worn smooth by water, then sand. It was heavy for a small rock.

And it was yellow.

“Oh, shit,” Benson said under his breath.

Mei appeared at his side and leaned in to get a better look at the precious nugget sitting in his palm.

“Oh,” Mei said. “Shit.”

“Kexx!” they called up to the road in unison.

Kexx walked gracefully down the steep riverbank and joined the growing huddle.

“What is it, Benson?”

Benson held the nugget of gold up to the truth-digger and handed it to zer. “Do you recognize this?”

Kexx hefted it in zer hand once, then ran the tips of zer fingers over it. “Of course. It's jie.”

“And it's just
lying around
?” Benson said incredulously.

Kexx shrugged. “Why wouldn't it be? There's no reason to collect it. It doesn't take an edge and it's too soft to hold its shape.”

Benson and Mei looked at each other with disbelief. Gaia orbited an older, metal-poor star. The system wasn't supposed to have much in the way of heavy metals, especially not nuggets of gold just lying around in dry riverbeds.

“I seem to be missing something,” Kexx said. “Is this rock important to your people?”

Benson cleared his throat. “That's an understatement.”

“How important?”

“Important enough to kill for,” Mei answered.

“Oh.” Kexx looked down at the nugget in zer palm. “Shit.”

T
heresa forced herself to blink
. Her eyes were dry, tired, and probably bloodshot. It felt like she'd been staring at the tablet for her entire adult life, filling out and updating arrest reports. Flying in the face of Acting Administrator Merick's predictions, the protests had not abated. Indeed, they'd grown and morphed from peaceful picketing into acts of civil disobedience, vandalism, and even a pair of assaults during the night.

Shambhala, it seemed, was spoiling for a fight. Or at least an angry, vocal minority of it was. One of her third-shift constables had been called in on a domestic and caught Yvonne Hallstead roughing up her girlfriend for not showing enough enthusiasm for violent reprisals against the Atlantians. Whether or not that was the ultimate outcome, Hallstead would be sitting out the final round in the town jail.

Theresa quite liked finally having a purpose-built jail for the town's drunks and hotheads to cool their heels in. It was handy for those middle-ground situations where the extremes of community service or execution weren't entirely appropriate punishments. It only had eight cells, which for a population of twenty-five thousand and growing struck Theresa as optimistic bordering on naive, but it was still a big step up from just throwing them in an emptied-out equipment locker as they'd done back home on the Ark.

Home. Theresa put down her tablet and mulled the word over in her mind as she looked around the house she and her husband had built. Well, the house a multi-axis concrete extruder and finishing crew had built, but they'd picked the layout and furnishings. It felt like a home in a way the Ark never had.

And now it was all in danger. The city was simmering just below a boil while her stupid, glory-seeking husband was gallivanting around the Atlantian outback, one misstep away from death by tooth or spear. Theresa swore, if something big and nasty didn't kill him out there, she would be waiting by his return shuttle with a baseball bat. Nothing lethal, maybe just a shattered femur to keep him from wandering off like a rebellious teenager for a few months. He could still coach his football team on crutches. She'd even help nurse the idiot back to health to show him how much she loved him.

The incoming call icon blinked at the edge of Theresa's vision. An avatar of her husband's face materialized.

“Speak of the devil and he will appear,” she said, parroting her sanctimonious aunt, one of a very few Roman Catholics left who managed to believe Revelations hadn't already played out back on Earth two centuries ago, and that she wasn't living some cursed existence outside of God's protection. Theresa envied Buddhists; their faith made room for existence after Armageddon without the need for complicated theological gymnastics. She connected the call and projected it onto the nearest wall.

“You're late,” Theresa said in an even tone, conveying her frustration more effectively than yelling ever could.

“I'm sorry, Esa. We've been a little busy out here.”

“And I've been getting my nails done?” Theresa held up her tablet and shook it. “While you're out enjoying the scenery, this whole place is trying to fly apart. The Returners are threatening riots, the isolationists are running around screaming ‘I told you so,' and everyone else is itching for revenge.”

“I'm sorry, Esa. I was debriefing with the council for the last hour already. I don't know how much charge I've got left.”

“Well I'm flattered you got around to me, eventually.”

Her husband adjusted his grip on the handheld and brought his face closer to the camera. “Look, I didn't want to talk to those assholes any longer than I needed to, OK? But I'm here now, and I want to make the most of it.”

Theresa recognized the sultry undercurrent in Benson's voice. She'd heard it enough times after a couple of bottles of sake or apple wine back when they'd been dating in secret, sneaking off between shifts for a taboo interlude.

“Seriously?” was all she could muster today.

“C'mon, honey,” he purred. “It's sooo lonely out here.”

“You're surrounded by Atlantians.”

“Yeah, whose sex organs I don't understand or even recognize. I might be getting fluids on me whenever I shake hands.” Benson shuddered.

Theresa sighed. “That's really setting the mood, baby.”

“Please? It's important,” he pleaded. There was something about his expression. In all the years they'd been together, Bryan Benson had never been one to beg for sex. It wasn't necessary and he knew it. Partly because Theresa wasn't the withholding kind, and partly because his ego had been fed by years of female Zero fans catering to his every carnal whim. It was irritating, to say the least.

But now his face had an earnestness to it totally out of proportion to the situation. Maybe he was just really desperate, but Theresa knew her husband. If he said it was important, it was. She decided to play along.

“OK, you want a show big boy?” She ran her thumbs under the shoulder straps of her top.

“Yes please,” he said eagerly.

“I hope none of your new friends are watching.”

“I doubt they would know what they were seeing if they were.”

“Honey?” Theresa said.

“Yes?”

“We really have to work on your sexy time talk.” Theresa stood up and threw her top at the camera mounted to the wall.

“
U
m
, why exactly are we watching this?” Korolev's baby-smooth cheeks started to flush crimson.

“What you're looking for is at the very end,” Theresa said, advancing the video quickly enough to go through the more private bits in a blur. The projection on the wall shifted back to Benson's face.

“That was wonderful, baby,” Benson's recording said. “When I get back, I'm going to give you those new gold earrings you've been talking about.”

Theresa paused the video with a swipe of her hand.

“Notice anything?”

“Are you saying there's some sort of hidden message here?” Feng asked.

Theresa nodded. “Bryan knows these messages are probably being monitored. So he hid it where only I would see it.”

“OK, what are we looking for, then?” Korolev asked.

“Do you see anything missing from my face?”

Korolev studied her for a moment. “A mouth. A nose. Two nostrils. Two eyes. Two ears.” He shrugged. “Looks intact to me.”

Theresa signed. “You're bucking for detective, Pavel. Anything else? Anything about my ears?” She stuck two fingers behind them and wiggled her lobes. “Anything missing?”

Korolev leaned forward, taking in her ears in detail. Theresa was about to give up when she saw the dawning realization across her constable's face. “You don't have any piercing holes!”

“Correct.”

“So what earrings was he talking about?”

“That's the question,” Theresa confirmed.

“You don't wear clip-ons?” Feng asked.

“Exactly what kind of girl do you take me for?”

“Sorry. But you never got ear piercings? Never?”

“I don't like needles.”

“So,” Korolev continued. “We can assume the chief was trying to hide a message. And since you don't wear earrings, we can ignore that part of the message. What's left?”

“New gold,” Theresa said.

Feng's face changed from playful banter to deadly serious. “You aren't suggesting what I think you're suggesting.”

“Why not?” Theresa asked. “Bryan suspects a conspiracy. We've already uncovered some evidence for it. He's not going to speak openly because he knows all of his communications are being monitored.”

“Are we saying the chief found gold?” Korolev asked. “Just lying around? That's not possible. We already did spectrographic studies of the surface for precious metals and came up empty. Didn't we?”

Theresa turned to Feng. “That's an excellent question.”

Feng grimaced. “We did. However…”

“However?” Korolev said.

“However. Anyone with enough network access and coding expertise to hack and repurpose two of our satellite constellation without our noticing is the sort of person who could also manipulate the spectrographic data coming from those same satellites, or replace it entirely.”

Theresa blew out through pursed lips, just below a whistle. “Well, there's a motive.”

“Over gold?” Korolev asked. “I mean, I know it was a big deal back on Earth, but here, now?”

“Think deeper, Pavel,” Theresa said. “Gold is pretty far down the periodic table. Gold means a whole bunch of precious and semiprecious elements must be lying around that we weren't expecting to find here. Silver, palladium, cadmium.”

“Iridium, osmium.” Feng counted off elements on his fingers. “Tungsten, platinum. They should all be present if gold is, at least to some degree.”

“Well that's good news, isn't it?” Korolev asked. “We need all of them to manufacture tech, and if we can get them here now instead of mining asteroids in another five years or whatever, that's a bonus.”

“You would think so. But then, why hide their existence?” Theresa asked.

“Because you're the sort of person who likes to keep good news to yourself until you can take maximum advantage of it,” Feng said. “Because if word gets out before you're in place to stake claims and start mining immediately, the news will just trigger a gold rush.”

“Anything else you'd like to share with the class, Constable Feng?” Theresa said.

The former first officer nodded. “I looked into our assets on the ground like you suggested. Rovers, aerial drones, looking for units that had dropped off the grid and may have been coopted in the same way our two sats were.”

“And?”

“And, two Pathfinder fliers and a rover have all the telltales of being hijacked.”

Theresa listed intently as the other shoe hit the floor. “So, not only did whoever this is have eyes in the sky, but they have voices on the ground.”

“I can't be sure of that,” Feng said. “It's solid conjecture, but that's all it is at the moment.”

“What will you need to be sure?”

“Without tripping off a million alarms a minimally competent hacker would've set up?” Feng asked. “Go to the source data. Any queries I send up through the beanstalk are going to be logged and recorded.”

“Laser com?” Korolev asked. “We used them between the Ark and her EVA pods for decades. You could sneak in that way.”

Feng shook his head. “They were designed for vacuum. Even if we had a laser powerful enough down here, which we don't, we never adapted the receivers to compensate for atmospheric disturbances. We just use the data trunks built into the beanstalk.”

“We use radio every day.”

“Which can be intercepted and decoded. If I'm going to do this without giving away the game,” Feng pointed up to the sky. “I have to go back up to the can.”

“When was the last time you were up there?”

“About three months ago.”

Theresa rubbed absently at her chin. “That's about normal, right? And you can make some excuse about going up to advise the crew about the current situation and unrest.”

“Sure, but it's still a four-day trip up the beanstalk.”

“No way you could commandeer a shuttle?” Korolev asked. “They can get there in under a day.”

Feng shook his head. “Not without one hell of a cover story, and even then, an unscheduled shuttle flight is going to raise all kinds of suspicions. Especially after we just burned up a bunch of fuel for the first contact expedition.”

He was right, of course. The shuttles ran on algae-derived biofuel which took time to grow and process. Theresa sighed. “Do you think you can pin our guy from the Ark?”

“A solid maybe. It'll all depend on how clever they were covering their tracks. But I know I can shut down, or even take over their hijacked assets before they know it's happening and have a chance to suicide them.”

“Nothing for it then. You'd better be on the next lift up.”

Feng glanced at his wristwatch, an ostentatious anachronism passed down his line for ten generations. Now awaiting his son's eighteenth birthday before changing caretakers once again. “Next lift is in three hours. I need to arrange a sitter and pack.”

“Hold on,” Theresa said, then disappeared into the bedroom to grab something. She returned and pressed a small metal cylinder into Feng's palm.

“Pack this,” she said.

“A stun-stick?” Feng asked, frankly stunned.

“Never know when it might come in handy.”

“But, I'm not cleared for one of these.”

“I deputized you, remember?” Theresa said. “I've already linked it to your plant. It's a simple point-and-click interface.”

“I remember,” Feng said sourly. He spun it around in his palm once like a slightly oversized stylus, then slipped it into a pants pocket. “Thank you.”

“Thank me by finding these jackasses so I can arrest them.”

Feng nodded, then hugged Theresa firmly before heading for the door.

Korolev watched the door close behind him. “Wouldn't have called that a couple years ago.”

Theresa shrugged. “Feng was never a bad guy. Selfish and shortsighted, sure, but he wouldn't be the only person to put that behind them after Shangri-La.”

“Amen.”

Theresa walked to the door and grabbed her jacket. “C'mon, Pavel. We have ‘football' practice to coach.”