Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWO

In Safdaghar’s prime, the main entrances had been five diamond-roofed passages extending the length of the docking bay, with extensible passage tubes every few meters. They were spaced at the points of a hexagon, with the sixth point occupied by Safdaghar’s magnetic launcher. All the docking tubes were safely retracted, and the pressure membranes had been sealed off by solid doors when disaster struck. So when Solana, Atmin, Utsuro, and Pera passed through Yanai’s membrane, they dropped down to the deck of the docking bay and had to walk to an emergency airlock outlined in glowing green on the rear wall of the bay.

Solana made her shoes sticky, as the spin gravity was just a twentieth of a gee. Utsuro did the same, and Atmin maneuvered his diamond ball with little thruster jets. Pera showed off her combat boarding expertise by jumping to the wall beside the airlock directly from Yanai’s hatch.

The bay was completely empty, without even the normal clutter of an active facility. No work pods, no cargo movers, no tool kits stuck to the floor, no coils of cable or hose. The sole rescue expedition, shortly after the disaster, had confirmed that no spacecraft were docked at Safdaghar. Over the years the increasing wobble of the hab’s axis had thrown anything left in the bay out into space.

“I volunteered to go first,” Utsuro reminded the others via radio link, and opened the airlock. It was a big one, a cube three meters on a side, with doors that could accommodate a cargo container or a small vehicle. The cyborg went in alone and cycled through.

“No air inside, at least not up here,” he told them when he opened the inner door. “Everything is dark. No power, either.”

The other three squeezed into the lock together. Solana set her goggles to light amplification and infrared. Pera turned on her helmet lamps and Atmin turned on the spotlights at the front of his spacesuit ball.

The inner door opened, revealing a short passage leading straight ahead. It was decorated in the bland cheeriness of transport terminals everywhere. The walls were etched with images of Safdaghar’s habitat ring and events from its history. A small heap of broken furniture and smashed planters had piled up around the airlock door.

Utsuro was already at the far end, beckoning impatiently. They followed the passage into an open concourse some ten meters wide, open above so that one could see the floor curve around overhead.

The only light came from windows looking out into the docking bay, and Yanai’s bulk blocked most of it. The rest was dim shapes and deep shadows. On infrared it was only marginally better. “It’s all cold,” Solana announced. “Everything’s a uniform one hundred sixty kelvins. I don’t see any active power.”

The rear wall of the concourse had broad passages lined with what had once been shops and offices. Above them was a huge shattered window looking into what looked like a zero-gravity sports and performance arena at the axis of the hab. Even with her feet made sticky, Solana had to move with great caution. The floor was littered with debris, including sharp diamond bits from the shattered window.

Safdaghar wasn’t like any of Solana’s other salvage jobs. The other habs had all been deliberately abandoned. The inhabitants had taken everything they wanted, and what was left had been sad and empty but not frightening. This hab was a snapshot of destruction.

She could see big uba vines growing on the walls, dead and desiccated from years in vacuum. A snack vendor’s cart stood anchored near the exit from one of the docking access passages, and under its transparent dome Solana could see a heap of dehydrated dumplings in all colors. Above it a fabric sculpture made to float on air currents hung limp and still.

The launch tube facility was fifty meters to spinward, a big open space with cargo elevators in the floor and airlocks to the docking bay. The launcher itself was a diamond tube as wide as Solana’s outstretched arms, girdled with magnetic accelerator rings. A row of superconducting energy storage banks flanked the tube where it passed through the hab’s hull.

Solana could see that one of the magnetic power-storage loops was leaking a little heat. When she adjusted her goggles to show magnetic fields she was startled to see that it was still charged. About half the energy in it had dissipated over the course of sixteen years, but it still had about five gigajoules available. It was an inconvenient amount—enough to make it dangerous to try to take the thing apart, but not enough energy to be worth keeping.

“Shall I drain it?” she asked Atmin.

“No need to take that risk right now. Yanai can send a bot while we descend in search of beauty lost.”

“Short it!” Pera suggested. “That’s always fun to see.”

“I don’t think vaporizing wire is a safe pastime,” said Utsuro.

Atmin’s sphere maneuvered over to the launcher’s loading door, a four-meter section of the tube’s top half raised on telescoping pistons. “I see a payload set to launch. Solana, come and help me see what lies within,” he called.

She could see a centimeter gap at the edge of the cargo pod’s hatch. “This has been opened,” she said.

“Careful!” Pera called. “Don’t use your hands. Someone might have left a surprise behind.”

“Allow me, then,” said Atmin, extending one of his travel sphere’s spindly mechanical arms. “I fear good Pera fears too much.”

He flipped the hatch open and the two of them just stared for a moment.

Within the cargo pod were half a dozen suited humans, with an emergency life-support pack linked to their helmets by taped-together hoses. All of them were long dead and vacuum-mummified, with neat holes in their skulls.

“Why discard the dead?” Atmin wondered aloud. “I do not think that Safdaghar was big or rich enough to waste the mass of corpses.”

“Biohazard, maybe?” asked Pera. “Maybe they had some bug too dangerous to keep aboard.”

“I do not see the need to furnish oxygen to those who do not breathe,” said Atmin.

Solana looked at the bodies. Their suits were brightly colored, and a couple had patterns of kittens or chicks. They were all smaller than she was. “These are children,” she said.

“How awful,” said Utsuro. “Who would do such a thing?”

“Such things are not unknown,” said Atmin. “In habs where food or air runs short. Or civil strife unleashing deadly hate.”

“Leave them,” said Yanai. “According to the plans, power control and the backup generators are all three levels down. Main processors and data storage is one level below that.”

“Stairs over here,” said Pera, using her laser to light up an inconspicuous doorway between two elevators.

The stairway was small, just a little local access route between the levels of the hub—not the main spokes connecting to the habitat rim. The emergency doors had slid shut at each level, so there was just a flight of steps down ten meters and then a floor sealing off the next flight. In the feeble spin gravity near the hub none of them bothered actually climbing down the steps when it was easier to jump down.

The door on the first level was not sealed shut, but bulged out. “That’s bad,” said Pera. “It should open inward.”

Utsuro got one hand into a gap between the door and the frame, braced himself against the wall, and wrenched it open. He looked inside. “Oh, dear,” he said.

“What does that mean?” asked Pera.

“I see a great deal of damage on this level. I think something must have exploded. Perhaps a capacitor failed, or a flywheel.”

Solana followed Pera through the door while Atmin brought up the rear. According to the plans this level had no windows, so it should have been utterly dark. But she could see perfectly well by daylight coming in through holes in the outer hull. Many, many holes—ranging from millimeters to meters across. The spin of the hab meant that the beams of light streaming in through the holes constantly moved, creating endless shifting shadows.

“Move carefully. There is debris,” said Utsuro.

Solana was glad of the carbon-fiber coverall she was wearing over her suit, because there was indeed debris. Debris everywhere. Graphene wall panels shattered into paper-thin daggers, sheets of aluminum wrapped around structural beams like flags in a strong wind, hanks of optical fiber and structural cable tangled around broken metal struts, and a layer of gritty shards and gravel on the floor.

Pera looked very tense and alert, and held her engineer’s laser ready and powered up. She kept still, and watched the moving shadows.

Solana switched her goggles to spectrographic vision and looked at the patches lit by the moving beams of light as they swept around. “There’s a thin layer of metal on all the exposed surfaces,” she said. “Looks like a mix of silicon, copper, and tungsten.”

“Antimatter containment,” said Pera. “Something failed and the cells turned to plasma. Chain reaction. Must have been a couple of micrograms. Probably an emergency power supply. The decks held but all the interior walls blew out.”

“That raises in my mind a question which I put to those of you with knowledge of such things,” said Atmin. “Did this explosion cause the wreck of Safdaghar, or did it happen after?”

“I think it was after,” said Solana.

“Why?” asked Utsuro.

She tried to keep her voice professional and clinical. “No bodies. Not even traces of hemoglobin. I don’t know how many people worked in this part of the hab, but I don’t think anybody died here.”

“No broken mech parts, either,” said Utsuro.

“I’ve seen habs survive much worse damage than this,” Pera added. The dino’s stance relaxed a tiny bit, though she still watched the moving shadows.

“Try to make contact with the main mind, or find a backup device,” said Yanai over the link. “It would know what happened.”

“And if we save a mind of level three from Safdaghar that means a rescue bounty for us all,” said Atmin.

“It would be the right thing to do in any case,” said Utsuro.

“The main processor assembly should be two levels down and about ninety degrees to spinward of your current location,” said Yanai.

The four of them returned to the stairs and Solana got out her tool kit. The emergency doors were level with the deck, covering the stairs down and the open shaft in the center. A two-meter square over the stairs down glowed faintly green, indicating an access hatch.

Solana’s tool kit was her most expensive possession. The tough smart-matter bag held an omnitool, a laser, a bonder, a small printer, and a sensor. The bag itself doubled as an energy supply, and could live on sunlight, burn chemical fuel, suck up local power by induction, or actually plug into the local grid.

She chose the sensor and set it on the access hatch to see what was on the other side. The device linked to her goggles.

“No air,” she announced. “Temperature looks the same, too.”

“Want me to just cut it open?” asked Pera.

“I can get it,” Solana replied. She used the sensor to find the latches on the hatch, and cut each one out with the tool set to molecule thickness.

The level below had a ten-meter ceiling, and appeared mostly undamaged. Solana got the emergency doors open so they could peek inside at a seemingly endless maze of pipes and reactors for microgravity industry.

Atmin was pleased to see the machinery undamaged. “A trove of costly gear for us, convenient to the docking bay for hauling out! Solana, we must come back here when rescue work is done, so you can assay metal and determine what to take and what to leave for Kuiper scarabs decades hence.”

They cut their way down another level, to where Yanai said the main processor was—or at least where it had been when the plans were last updated. Getting to the right compartment wasn’t easy. From the stairway they followed an axial passage to one of the main circumferential streets running all the way around the level. At every major intersection the emergency doors were shut. Once Solana figured out where the latches were on the first one, they could open the others with a few shots from Pera’s laser.

The passages on this level were littered with debris, but it wasn’t the complete devastation of the blast damage upstairs. It was simply that anything which hadn’t been stuck to the floor had battered itself to bits against the walls during sixteen years of Safdaghar wobbling on its axis. At first the force must have been slight, but by the time Yanai stabilized the hab’s spin the passage had been lurching from side to side once a minute.

The result was that the lower meter of the walls on either side of the circumferential passage was completely stripped of paint. Where those walls met the floor a layer of fragments and debris had accumulated—fragments of plastic and graphene, shattered glass and diamond shards, and drifts of dust. Larger pieces were buried in the mess, but nothing looked worth stopping to pick up.

Safdaghar’s main processor sat in a heavily shielded section, protected by massive doors of five-centimeter titanium with an outer layer of heat-absorbing carbon. The scarab crew could clearly see the cross-section of the door because someone had blasted a meter-wide hole in the center of it.

“Shaped charge,” said Pera.

“I see a lot of nitrogen compounds on the walls,” said Solana. “Nitrogen polymer, maybe?”

“It pleases me to see you two are working closely as a team,” said Atmin. “Good Pera, have you thought at all of taking up a scarab’s life?”

“Not for me. I can earn gigajoules by sitting in a nice safe hab. If I’m going to take risks it has to be for something important.”

“If gigs aren’t important can I have your share?” asked Solana.

“Not as long as I’m breathing,” said Pera.

“You should not say such things,” said Atmin. “Press on and let us learn the fate of that great mind which once ran Safdaghar.”

Solana looked through the breach in the door. Beyond it she could see a sphere about fifteen centimeters across, suspended in the center of the protecting armored room. Coolant lines and power conduits connected it to the floor and ceiling, and a web of data lines ran from the sphere’s equator to the walls of the room.

It was all quite cold. She didn’t need to see the severed power and coolant feeds to tell that the main processor was dead.

But the dead brain wasn’t alone in the vault. The floor was covered by a half-meter layer of jellied blue coolant compound. Two yellow-suited human figures were embedded in the gel, surrounded by a stain of rusty purple. One lay facedown, with an engineering laser like Pera’s in one hand, but the other was looking up. Solana’s filter hid the mummified face, but she could clearly see the deep slash across its front, from collarbone to hip, almost deep enough to cut the body in half. She had seen dead people before, but this was still shocking.

Pera peered over Solana’s shoulder. “Looks like they blasted in here and then killed the brain. Who are they?”

“Their suits say Safdaghar Emergency Response,” said Solana.

“That raises in my mind a worrisome idea,” said Atmin. “Could Safdaghar have died of civil war? Some strife between the ruling mind and all the lesser folk?”

For a moment nobody said anything.

“It happens,” said Yanai over the comm link. “Though more often to ships than habs.”

“I hope we do not give you cause for murderous intent,” said Atmin.

“Not yet,” said Yanai.

“We ought to see if there is a backup device,” said Utsuro.

Solana moved cautiously through the hole in the door, being careful not to tear her suit. She looked down at the jellied coolant and then prodded it with one foot. It was soft, but not squishy. Very gingerly she put her weight on it. In one-tenth gee her forty-five kilograms weren’t quite heavy enough to break the rubbery surface layer.

Avoiding the corpses, she made her way to the central sphere. The outer surface was warped and cracked from overheating. Some of the data lines had melted and snapped.

“According to the design specs Safdaghar had a Juren Processor Designs type SCELSJ variant 66 main processor, rated at an intellect level of 3.2,” said Yanai. “The backup storage device should be at the bottom of the protective casing.”

Just below the sphere, where the severed coolant line hung empty, Solana saw a boxy fixture still faintly glowing green. The slot within was empty. “Someone took it,” she called out.

“One of those two, maybe?” asked Pera, shining her helmet lamp down on the corpses.

“I don’t see anything.” Solana scanned the entire floor once again, hoping to find it embedded in the blue jelly.

Atmin used the four arms attached to his life-support ball to crawl into the processor room. “Though well I know the thought is vile, we nonetheless must search the dead. This nasty work may save a mind far greater than our own.”

Solana suppressed a shudder and stepped across the jelly to join Atmin.

“We’ll just stay out here, then,” said Pera.

The hands on Atmin’s suit arms were smart matter, so the bird made two of them into cutting blades and deftly sliced away the jellied coolant covering the faceup corpse. He then proceeded to methodically search all the pockets and pouches on the outer coverall. As it was a rescue-service suit, there were a lot of them.

“The man who wore this suit went well-equipped to death,” said Atmin. “Each pocket holds exactly what its label says, and nothing more. I find no backup unit here.”

Solana grimaced and forced her hands into the goop, working them under the second body. She kept her back straight and lifted with her legs. At first nothing seemed to be happening, then all at once the jelly parted from the floor and the body flipped over. Solana lost her grip and shot upward, snapping hundreds of data channels as she bounced off the ceiling and fell back again.

She landed a couple of meters away and winced as she caught sight of the body, now faceup after sixteen years. This one had been protected by the coolant jelly—which meant that the corpse had rotted until it froze. The inside of the suit was a chunk of ice, colored a horrible swirl of red, yellow, and black. Two eyes, embedded in the ice, looked out at nothing.

Solana’s visual filter saw nothing it recognized as a face, so she got an unimpeded view. She had to turn her back on it for a minute, fighting nausea and fear. Nobody—not even Pera—said anything. Finally she turned around and knelt again next to the corpse. She forced herself to keep it technical. Focus on the job. Ignore the eyes.

Like the other body, this one had a single, brutal slash across the front of its chest, cutting right through the rib cage almost to the spine, passing directly through the heart. The right forearm was also severed, dangling by a few threads of the coverall. The enhanced senses in her goggles meant Solana didn’t need to open any of the dead woman’s pockets. She could look through the tough silicon-fiber cloth, and saw no data device at all.

“Excuse me,” said Utsuro. “But something just occurred to me. If these two individuals really did kill the main processor—who killed them?”

“Loyalists, maybe,” said Pera. “Couldn’t stop them in time but wanted revenge? They might have taken the backup.”

“But where did they go? There are no other processors aboard Safdaghar capable of running a Level 3.2 mind,” said Yanai.

“Evacuated?” asked Pera. “Took the backup and got to a shuttle in time?”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t make sense either,” said Utsuro. “We would not be here if the main mind had survived, as it would own the wreck.”

“Unless it had some reason to hide? Maybe Safdaghar screwed up, killed everyone, and then didn’t want anyone off-hab to know. A high-level bot could have gotten the backup out,” said Pera.

“Even a near-baseline bot couldn’t remain hidden once it reached some other hab or world,” said Utsuro.

“This chattering is wearisome,” said Atmin. “We do not even know what questions we should ask.”

“I know one,” said Solana. “What next?”


The four of them returned to Yanai. Along the way they picked up a few kilograms of metal in order to print out some simple bots to make a survey of the hab’s decks. Yanai had a standard hull-repair bot design on file, and she and Solana worked out some modifications before running off half a dozen.

Each bot resembled a horseshoe crab, with a domed outer shell of polymer and six legs with sticky feet on the underside. The edge of the shell could deform to make a seal with the hull surface, so that the bots could repair punctures without interference from rushing cabin air. The redesign replaced the repair tools with a simple drill, an atmosphere tester, and a probe with a low-light eye.

They sent the bots down the elevator shafts with instructions to stop at each level, drill a hole, check atmosphere and conditions on the level, then seal the hole and move on.

While the bots crept down toward the rim of the hab, the crew assembled in the observation bubble to make plans.

“I must confess I had not thought that years of Safdaghar’s precession would have shaken up the contents of the hab as much as we have seen. If even near the hub it was so bad, out near the rim I fear that all will be reduced to dust,” said Atmin.

“If anybody had a valuable collection of antique glassware we can scratch that off the list,” said Pera. “We should just focus on heavy elements. What’s our mass limit?”

“Ten percent of my full mass is a safe load for aerobraking,” said Yanai. “Call it forty tons. I’ve got two thousand cubic meters of empty tankage to stow cargo in, so that’s not a problem.”

“I would like to check the rim section, if it’s not too much trouble,” said Utsuro. “Just to see what’s down there.”

“I too believe that though it may be shaken up, we yet should spend our time in that part of the hab,” said Atmin. “The goods of all the citizens of Safdaghar must hold some value still.”

“Simplest and safest just to clear out the decks near the hub,” said Pera.

“I always like to maximize efficiency in time and energy,” said Yanai. “Solana, you have not said anything.”

She hadn’t spoken up because she didn’t know what she wanted to do. Yanai was probably right: maximize profit, minimize effort. They could stuff Yanai’s empty tanks with all the heavy elements and intact machinery they could find, and get out with time to spare. That was the logical course of action.

The problem was Atmin. She liked the bird, and she knew how much time and effort he had put into tracking down his dead Martian poet. He would be disappointed, especially if she went against him. And Solana didn’t want to risk losing his friendship. With other humans—and even some mechs—Solana always had the nagging suspicion that her conditioning affected how she felt about them. But a corvid? No doubt there. If she liked Atmin it was her own genuine emotion, and that was something to treasure.

“I guess it would be worth taking a look at the rim section, just to see what’s there. If it’s all too messed up we can pull back to the hub and concentrate on salvaging metals.”

Utsuro’s display screen showed a smiling icon, and Atmin fluttered his wings with delight. “Our councils then are at an end. We shall commence our salvage work by dropping to the farthest rim, then coming up one level at a time, until by systematic work the hab is stripped of all that we can take.”

“Still seems like extra work to me,” said Pera.

“Normally I would agree,” said Yanai. “I tend to think of everything in terms of mass and vectors. But a kilo of hydrogen and a kilo of phosphorus aren’t equal in value, even if they take the same amount of energy to accelerate. And a kilo of raw organics isn’t worth the same as a kilo of DNA samples from a high-end designer. I’m not qualified to judge what is and what isn’t likely to have value. I can appreciate an elegant maneuver, but I can’t judge between two crude attempts at rendering an image by hand, using pigments on cloth or paper. Just a moment—” Yanai’s voice didn’t change but everyone could tell something was wrong.

“Bot three just failed. It was descending the elevator shaft to the service level above the habitat ring. I have video.”

The image was a bot’s-eye view as the little machine crept down the side of the elevator shaft. At that level the local gravity was nearly a full gee, so it kept at least three of its feet touching the wall at all times. The low-light camera showed nothing but a long dark tube, curving away with distance. The bot stopped at the elevator doors and settled its carapace down against the surface before drilling. The final image was motion-blurred, then nothing.

“The poor thing,” said Utsuro. “I wonder what happened?”

“Something hit it,” said Pera.

“Perhaps a piece of debris fell down the shaft,” said Utsuro.

“An object of twenty kilograms or more dropping from the hub would have enough energy to damage the bot,” said Yanai.

“So would a bullet,” said Pera.

“Who would shoot a harmless bot?” asked Atmin.

“Something with a gun.”

“The choice between a random bit of junk dislodged by Yanai’s mighty push, or lurking snipers hiding out for sixteen years seems clear enough to me,” said Atmin.

“I think we’re all getting too excited about a printed bot failing,” said Solana. “It’s a big hab with plenty of loose junk in it. That’s why we sent bots instead of Pera.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“The rest of the bots should finish their initial survey in approximately ninety minutes,” said Yanai. “So far they have detected atmosphere on two of the seven levels of the hub section, three of the six spokes, and the entire rim habitat area. The air mix is breathable, but the bots have detected both chemical and biological contaminants: carbon and silicon dust, a variety of bacteria and fungal spores, complex hydrocarbons, ammonia, and some sulfur compounds. I recommend life-support gear even in areas with atmosphere.”

“A curse upon all foul reeks and filthy dust,” said Atmin. “Must I work inside a ball and never stretch my wings?”

“Indeed you must, unless you wish to sleep inside an isolation bubble in the hold,” said Yanai. “For I will not have pristine decks and walls begrimed with living filth.”

Ten minutes later bot number five failed. It had stopped at the main hab ring and drilled a hole for its probe. It sampled the air, then extended its eye. The screen showed a high-ceilinged area full of buildings, then suddenly the video cut off. A second later the bot itself, on the other side of the elevator door, went dark.

Solana sat in the observation bubble while she and Yanai went through the bot’s final instants millisecond by millisecond.

“The camera failed first. The bot showed no input on the video channel,” said Yanai.

“That sounds like something happened to the camera when it poked through the door,” said Solana. “Do the elevators on that level have some kind of outer emergency door? Maybe cutting the probe hole tripped a detector.”

“The plans don’t show anything like that. Point nine seconds after the probe retracted, the bot sensed a whole cascade of failures in very rapid succession before data transmission stopped—probably indicating main processor failure. The signal continued for another one point two seconds before cutting off.”

“Maybe something corrosive in the air?” Solana suggested.

“The atmosphere test revealed nothing dangerous,” said Yanai. “I think we need an expert.” Two seconds later Pera’s image popped up in Solana’s vision. “During the search for the main processor, Atmin raised the possibility of a conflict within Safdaghar. Could the damage to this bot be the result of some sort of trap?”

“Pretty simple and low-tech—exactly what you’d expect if two factions are fighting with just what’s available. Yes.”

“What other kinds of trap should we be watching out for?”

The dino bared all her big sharp teeth in a grin. “All of them. In a civil war nobody stockpiles standard weapons. They throw together whatever they can. Printing up crap from some template they found, and half the time it’s utter noise. Building things by hand. Primary risk is things like tripwires, spring-loaded stabby things, monofilament, maybe sabotage to stairs and walkways. Lasers, of course. We should all wear goggles, not just Solana. Won’t be a lot of explosives—no handy rock for mining here, so they wouldn’t keep it around, and it’s very energy-intensive to make. Guns? You could print up a mag rifle, or even build one. Maybe cobble together some kind of weapon using compressed gas in a tube.”

“I confess I don’t understand what there would be to fight over,” said Yanai.

“Maybe one group was doing something bad, and the other group wanted to stop them,” said Solana.

“Any reason will do,” said Pera.

Yanai called the other four bots back from the rim. Three made it home. Bot six failed in the spoke just two levels below the hub. This time there was no data to analyze at all. One millisecond it was crawling steadily up the wall of the shaft, the next millisecond all signal stopped. Pera and Utsuro went inside Safdaghar to the hub section again and opened up the shaft, but found nothing.

“Before we conjure phantom foes, or deadly relics of a war between the realms of might and could, we must remember clearly that these bots were printed out of powdered junk, from templates Yanai got for free, and therefore worth their price,” said Atmin when Pera and Utsuro reported in.

“I’ll go down,” said Utsuro before anybody had a chance to argue. “I’m tough and strong. Tougher than those bots, certainly. And if something down there is dangerous enough to destroy me, then the rest of you really should just leave.”

“Wait a second,” said Pera. “Yanai, do you have any cable? A kilometer or so?”

“I always carry ten kilometers of hundred-kilonewton braided carbon fiber, ready for use, and I can print out more given time.”

“One klick will do. I just want to be able to pull Utsuro out of trouble.”

Solana got three emergency pressure membranes out of Yanai’s ready-supply cabinet, then suited up and took the end of the cable from Yanai’s cargo bay. She pulled it to the emergency airlock, then paused to disable the automatic link on the airlock so that both doors could remain open. Then she sealed one pressure membrane over the inner door frame before pushing through it, pulling the cable after her. The membrane parted around solid objects but kept gases in.

She pulled the cable down the passage to where Pera and Utsuro waited. Pera bonded the cable to Utsuro’s back, just below the neck joint. “There. Now if something happens we can still sell your body for scrap.”

“As it happens, the mechs who built this body gave me a complete assessment of its value, so that I could pay it off by working for them. Excluding the cost of their labor, and shipping, my body is worth sixty thousand gigajoule equivalent credits. Yanai, how much would Pera’s elements fetch on the open market?”

“Her water and carbon are almost worthless. Two kilos of phosphorus is worth about a hundred gigajoule equivalent credits, and three kilos of calcium would fetch twenty. Call it a hundred and fifty to cover any price fluctuations. As salvage you are four hundred times more valuable than Pera.”

“Thank you. Here I go.”

Solana sealed the second pressure membrane over the elevator doors and gave the third to Utsuro. Then she stood next to Pera in the empty concourse as Utsuro descended.

Utsuro pivoted his arms and legs back so that he could walk on the side of the shaft with sticky feet. He trotted briskly down, about the same speed as the little bots. Since he didn’t have to stop for samples, it took Utsuro only twenty minutes to get from the hub down to the habitat ring.

He narrated over the link as he pried open the elevator doors, releasing a strong dusty wind. Utsuro pulled himself through the door and anchored his feet to the floor, then unrolled the spare pressure membrane to cover the doors.

“Well, I’m here,” he transmitted back to the hub. “I’m disconnecting the tether.”

“What do you see?” asked Solana.

“A mess. The structures all seem to be intact, but there must have been a lot of loose debris flying around. This elevator is in the middle of a plaza, and the pavement is covered by almost a centimeter of fragments. And—oh, dear. I see some bones. Humans. At least two dead people. No, there’s a couple more over there in suits.”

“What killed them?” asked Pera.

“Let me look.” After a pause Utsuro transmitted, “I can’t tell how the unsuited ones died, but both of the suited bodies were killed by hypervelocity needles to the head.”

“How do you know that?” asked Solana.

Utsuro didn’t answer for a couple of seconds. “I just recognize it somehow. Maybe I was a medic once.” Another pause. “I’m afraid I’m going to need a lot of decontamination before Yanai will let me back on board. There’s a lot of organic material here. Some kind of low-temperature mold growing on everything. We should probably get samples—it could be a new strain. That would be worth something.”

Atmin’s voice came over the link from inside the ship. “The plan of Safdaghar that good Yanai displays for me suggests you stand amid a place of shops and restaurants where once the people showed their wares and met to socialize. Look south and tell me what you see. Is there a shop that sold the work of cunning hands and clever minds?”

“The sign says Figments Design.”

“It was a group of artisans whose fame reached far beyond this little hab. Does anything remain intact within? A gleam of wealth amid the grim remains?”

“I think so, yes. There’s broken glass and pottery all over the floor, but the display cases must have sticky shelves. I can see things inside them that look just fine. Vases, bowls, some kind of sculptures. They are very pretty.”

“Rejoice!” said Atmin. “That means whatever doom befell unlucky Safdaghar did not destroy the things its people left behind. No pirates came to slay and loot, nor vandals in some civil strife did smash and burn in wanton rage. Those works of hand have value more than equal mass of iodine or platinum.”

Utsuro moved out from the plaza in a rough spiral, zigzagging among the triangular blocks of the shopping district. “The buildings are in good shape. A few have smashed windows. Everything inside looks all shaken around. I see some more bodies, half a dozen of them, all inside some kind of café. They aren’t too badly tossed around. All of them have needle wounds, and—oh! It looks as if some of the bodies were disturbed by scavengers.”

“Carrion birds?” asked Pera.

“Or stupid reptiles feeding on the helpless dead?” Atmin added over the link.

“I hope it was just animals,” said Solana. “What if there are survivors stuck in here?” She had a sudden mental image of bony, hungry humans crawling around in the cold and dark, and looked around the hub concourse carefully, trying not to shudder.

“We have not seen a single trace of anything alive,” said Atmin.

“I will turn on my spotlights and call out,” said Utsuro. Over the link they could hear him shout, muffled by the noise compensation. “Hello! We are here to help! We can give you food, medical aid, and protection! Come to the elevator plaza!”

Solana felt tears in her eyes behind the goggles. The skin pads efficiently wicked away all moisture. She remembered the Salibi soldiers blasting into Kumu hab all those years ago, the crimson shi signs glowing on their armor. They had said the same—that they came to help—but of course young Solana and her siblings had not believed them. Genetic and psychological conditioning made sure of that.

No time to dwell on that now. She concentrated on the feed from the rim. Utsuro completed a full circuit around the elevator plaza. “I don’t hear any answer to my calls,” he said. “It’s all very cold and still down here.”

“Now let us follow good Utsuro’s lead and travel down the elevator shaft. Our camp will be down at the rim, where we can search and gather loot efficiently—no time lost going up and down, no need to decontaminate our skin each day. Just one trip down, a few days’ search, then bring our finds back to Yanai,” said Atmin.

“That’s a clever idea,” said Utsuro via the link. “I think we should.”

Solana looked at Pera in the hub concourse. “Is it safe?” She was still thinking of pale cannibals hiding in the ruins.

Pera lashed her tail. “No, it’s not. I say clear out the hub levels and call it done.”

“Yanai, a squad of simple bots could cut and carry scrap to fill your empty tanks,” said Atmin. “You hired me to choose what art aboard this hab has value greater than its elemental mass. All that is at the rim. If fear will keep us at the hub then let me hibernate again and wake me when the job is done.”

“We still don’t even know what really happened here,” Utsuro added.

“I see your point, Atmin,” said Yanai. “I do want to maximize profit from this job, and creative works are worth more gigajoules per kilogram than scrap metal. We’ve got thirty days before it’s time to undock. You four can spend a week checking the town ring, but if you don’t find anything I’ll expect double shifts on scrap collection after that. Utsuro, find a place to camp—look for a structure with emergency power, if you can find one. I’ll print out some equipment and rations for the other three, and they can carry it down with them.”

Yanai’s four printers ran continuously for the next three hours, making the cabin air hot and dusty despite all the seals and cooling. The two in the galley created ten days’ worth of compact high-energy food for the three who needed to eat. For Pera, Yanai made slabs of liver pâté, sausages blending meat from a dozen species, and wagyu carpaccio. Atmin got hominy polenta, armadillo jerky, and some realistic-looking whole skinless rabbits. For Solana the ship made festively colored surimi, spicy peanut-butter dumplings, and peppers stuffed with a paste of olives and pistachios.

The materials printer made transport bags, sleep-sacks, more pressure membranes, extra coveralls, a hundred meters of cable, and two spare suit liners each for Pera and Solana. That machine finished first, but then Pera asked the ship for some extra items. “I need about a hundred square meters of isotropic cloth,” she said.

“What for?” asked Yanai.

“Snipers. I don’t want to wake up with a hole through my head.”

“What do you expect to be targeting you in a dead hab?”

“I don’t know, and that’s why I want to take precautions. You asked for my expertise? Here’s some expertise: hang isocloth around the camp. It won’t cloak us, but it does turn individual IR signatures into a big featureless rectangle. Also messes with lasers.”

The two equipment printers in Yanai’s repair bay made lights, heaters, cutting tools, pulleys, a jack, prybars, two little flying bots, and a fuel cell for power. “I’ll fill a tank of methane for the cell, and you can feed it feces and organic waste,” the ship told Solana.

Solana took a nap until the printers finished working, then she and Pera hauled all the gear into Safdaghar. They piled everything into the two largest transport bags, and then used the long cable to lower each one down the elevator shaft to Utsuro waiting at the bottom.

“I’ll go next. You two follow together,” said Pera. She held the cable with her gloved hands and feet, and let herself slide down. Solana watched as the lights from Pera’s helmet disappeared down the shaft.

She was still watching when Atmin’s travel sphere nudged her. “Enough delay. We should descend.”

Solana didn’t have much experience with rappelling, so she used her multipurpose tool to grip the cable and then had Yanai lower her down at a safe speed. Atmin’s travel sphere simply floated down next to her, and the two of them passed the fifteen-minute ride by speaking on a private channel.

“Do you think Pera’s right? Could something still be alive in here?” Solana asked the bird.

“Right now in Safdaghar the temperature is just above a hundred sixty kelvins, deadly cold to anything alive. The wobble of precession which our good Yanai did work so hard to fix would toss a hapless person here from side to side with bruising force. Could anyone, however tough or mad, survive for sixteen standard years of cold and dark and constant shaking back and forth? I scorn the thought.”

“A mech could do it.”

“But even mechs must have a source of power to survive. This hab has none. And if some unit with a long-term power source could stay within the wreck, the question one must ask is why? When rescue came, long years ago, why not then heed the call and leave the spinning tomb? Or in the cold years since that time, why fail to send a cry for help?”

“Pera’s worried, and that makes me worry, too.”

“Our fearsome raptor is not part of Yanai’s faithful team. She is not one of us and so she compensates by putting on a warlike mask. Like some old soldier on campaign, regaling new recruits with gory tales, she does it to impress us, and thereby conceal that she is ill at ease.”

“You sound very sure.”

“My ancestors, and yours, survived in social groups, so understanding other minds is built into our genes.”

“I think dino brains are based on corvid architecture—and some human, too.”

“No doubt. But none of you are quite as good as I. So have no fear, Solana. All the dangers in this hab are those of any wreck. Do not let foolish dread of phantoms cause distraction, as that is the greatest risk of all.”

Solana looked down the shaft, mostly so that Atmin couldn’t see her smile inside her helmet. “I’ll be careful.”


Back | Next
Framed