Previous Chapter

“What’s the situation, Sargent?” Captain Yang returned his salute as she crouched down with him behind the embankment.

“Enemy’s point defenses are still active at all points on the building previously reported, ma’am,” Lang said, sending her AI a ping to dump the relevant files. “We scouted around most of the old parking area and we think we can secure the plasma guns there.”

“Will that give us a good angle to take out their mag field generators?” Yang asked as she started scrolling through the data he’d just given her.

“Not unless these guns can arc plasma like kinetic shells,” Lang said. “But we can hit the main building from here.”

She paused mid scroll. “What does that accomplish? I’m not looking to cause a catastrophic containment breach of an active fusion reactor, Langley. That doesn’t help anyone.”

“Technically it does short out their planetary defense network in this region but I see you point, ma’am.” Lang twitched a few commands and sent his proposed plan to her tablet. “What’s interesting about the Earthling’s chosen weapons in this situation is how incredibly clunky they are. Nanotech, by nature, is about doing small things. Blowing them up to a large scale is very inefficient and the fact that they seriously took this approach to warfare shows how unaccustomed UNIGOV is to the whole process…”

“You’re not filing a flight plan, Sargent,” Yang said. “You don’t need to give me the specs and background on all the tech involved. Just give me the highlights.”

“You can’t use disassembler fields indoors, ma’am. They’ll just disassemble the building and you’ll be outdoors again, which isn’t ideal for a bunch of reasons, thus you don’t deploy any of the fields indoors. So if we want to avoid the plant’s defenses…”

“Blow open a wall in the main building and run inside.” Yang smiled. “Simple and direct, just like all the best plans. Have you determined the best places to breach the walls?”

“I wasn’t sure what your operational goals were so we made our best guess at the spots we thought would be near an emergency shutdown of some sort.” With a flick of the fingers Lang highlighted those spots on her map. “Unfortunately the plans for this kind of plant aren’t on hand and it didn’t exist before the Departure so all we’ve got are assumptions to go on.”

“Not much but it’s a start.” Yang looked the map over and added a few notes to it. “I’m going to check in with the other groups and see if we can get an angle on any other potential points to breach. Impressive work, Sargent. The Remote Operations Group think they’ve located the plant’s command room based on infrastructure on site. I’m adding that to the list of potential sites to breach and I want you to take point on that team.”

“Me, ma’am?”

“You’re the Earthling expert, remember?” Yang gave him a wry smile. “I know making peace isn’t exactly your specialty but you’re pretty good at thinking around their plans and you’ve got a handle on their temperament. Find and neuteralize their leadership. Offer them unconditional surrendure before you slag them, and let me know if they make any counter offers I’m not looking to wipe them out, but don’t be afraid to force the issue if they’re recalcitrant. I’ll send Priss along to keep you in touch, okay?”

“If you insist ma’am.” He pulled up the map on his own tablet. “Where are we making our entrance at?”

“You’ll be staging from upsilon-2, moving out in ten minutes. Stay on your toes, Sargent.”

Upsilon-2 was just behind a large cherry tree. Unlike most of the plant’s overgrown garden beds this tree stood on it’s own with no other obvious landscaping around it. Lang wondered if it was originally intended for that spot or if it had sprouted on its own. He’d hunkered down there with Priss and his picked up team of ground pounders just in time to see the opening salvo come from Fresh Face and his gun team.

In his long career with the Spacer Corps Lang had seen a lot of plasma bombardments. He’d seen the utter devastation left by the Minervans on Newton, the chilling spectacle of atmosphere venting from Minervan domes over Galileo and the heart stopping shock of the orbit ship Great Red Spot breaking apart under focused fire from the Dianan fleet. Each and every kind of bombardment was horrible in its own way. But after watching the Second Galilean War from the cockpits of landers and rescue craft in space Lang had figured he was used to the sight of plasma guns at work.

He’d forgotten that in atmosphere they also made noise.

When the guns blew up the first section of the plant’s outer walls there was just a brief flash of light from their emplacement in the parking lot, followed but a brighter, sharper flash and a huge plume of smoke from the building. Then a massive clap as super heated air rapidly cooled. Finally a bone shaking boom and a pressure wave that hit like a slap in the face. Lang sucked in a breath and shook himself once. That hadn’t even been a big strike, nothing compared to the kinds of shipboard plasma weapons and missiles the Tranquility could bring to bear.

Harry laughed. “I take it you’ve only done space work until now, Sarge?”

“If you don’t count escaping after being grounded in hostile territory twice, yeah.”

“Nothing like the first time you see a big heat gun in atmo,” Keys said. “Hopefully we won’t be down here long enough to get used to it.”

Priss crossed herself and said, “Amen to that.”

“Check you’re gear,” Lang said. “There’s one more team going then it’s our turn. I don’t think we’re going to get ripped up by nanotech once we’re inside but someone on team Earth has gotten creative and nasty so keep your eyes peeled and call out anything that looks off. If they surrender to you give them full privileges under the Borealis Convention.”

“Although be aware that they probably won’t reciprocate,” Priss added. “Most of them don’t know the Convention exists.”

“What if they want to negotiate terms?” Keys asked.

“Then I talk to them,” Lang said. “But Priss is right, they don’t have much cultural or structural support for these kinds of situations so you’re going to have to treat them a little differently.”

“How so?”

“It’s likely they haven’t disciplined themselves against violent impulses ever in their lives. If it looks like they’re about to hit you or shoot you with a weapon they’ve recovered or dump a load of nuclear waste on your head that’s probably exactly what’s about to happen.” Lang made sure to make direct eye contact with Keys as he spoke. “If you believe they’re about to attack you, shoot them. UNIGOV discourages all communication with us martians anyways, so negotiations are unlikely.”

Keys looked uncomfortable at that but he nodded. “Understood.”

A second blast shook the air and Fresh Face’s voice came over the comms. “Stand by, group Langley. We’re making your entrance now.”

“Final check in now,” Lang said.

“Keys here, exo is green, all gear checks out.”

“Yancey, EMGs are running, all other gear…”

The six of them piled over the super heated hole in the plant’s concrete wall and into another world. If the streets of Los Angeles were deserted and overgrown the halls of the plant were chaotic and full of death. Yang had picked a spot she thought was near the plant’s command center. They’d found the building’s cafeteria. The wall had blown in and thrown slagged concrete and burning insulation across tables and diners who had probably been enjoying breakfast moments before.

Or maybe they’d just been trying to choke down a few bites while wondering what all the alarms were about. Either way, they’d died just the same. Bits of people poked out from some of the rubble and dead or unconscious bodies were strewn against the far wall like leaves. His AI datafeed, projected on the inside of his helmet, estimated there had been two dozen people in the area. It marked three as still conscious and moving. None of them were carrying weapons.

Harry and Keys had already flagged them as low priority threats and were moving towards a stairway leading up over the dining area. Most of the stairs were intact although some rubble smashed a few steps. At the top a balcony overlooked the cafeteria and a sign hanging there announced that medical and reactor access were to the left, administration and reactor control to the right and personal lockers straight ahead. He took off after Keys.

The stairway proved sturdy enough to hold their weight in spite of the damage and, with assistance from the exoskeletons, they were able to jump the damaged sections without trouble. At the top Harry hesitated. “Do we trust this sign?”

“Why would they put up a sign with the wrong directions on it?” Yancey demanded.

“I dunno, maybe they expected they’d be invaded?”

Lang pushed past them and took point as he turned to the right. “In that case we’ll just double back the other way. But I doubt they’d just change the signs to confuse us, UNIGOV only reactivated this facility recently and their own people are just as likely to get confused by it.”

“If you say so, Sarge.”

Truthfully it wouldn’t have taken long to confirm the sign. Not more than ten or fifteen feet down the hallway a bank of windows looked out over a wide room full of tihn dividing walls, creating a grid of small, eight foot rooms with desks covered in dust. Lang guessed it was the administration room, now out of use. Another twenty feet on the hall ended. Just before the end there was a glass door into the administration room on the right and the hall itself ended in a metal door.

Harry slipped forward and tried the metal door, finding it unlocked. Yancey gave a thumbs up after checking his EMG scanner and then the two of them slipped into the room, guns up and moving in the arcane patterns of the trained infantryman. Lang followed along behind them when they gave the all clear. They found a locker room.

The locker room had achieved it’s final form long before space colonization efforts began so it was a pretty familiar place. Banks of lockers, banks of toilet stalls, individual shower cubbies and textured ceramic floors. The rubber soles on Lang’s boots gripped it well enough but those who’d stuck with mag boots slipped a bit as the smooth, metal soles slipped on the slick surface.

Progress slowed until they reached the end of the locker room and arrived at the next door. Once again Harry and Yancey went through first. This time the door swung shut behind them on its own and before anyone could grab the handle and pull it back open a deep thunk sounded as the door locked itself behind them.

Previous Chapter

The tower was both less impressive and less coherent up close. Less impressive because it became clear it’s red color was not a uniform coat of paint and rather an mix of rust and red leaves on vines that seemed locked in perpetual autumn. The leaves were particularly strange as Brian couldn’t recall seeing any other signs of the season in the city. Then again, the air could be quite chilly and he wouldn’t notice. The fugue state didn’t provide the clearest sense of temperature, just one of many sensations that the technology didn’t really communicate well.

Of the dozen or so towers he’d seen on arrival the closest was squatter than most, a wide structure with a number of arching balconies and smaller spires giving it the appearance of a fan or brush reaching towards the sky. The base of the tower wasn’t really any different from the other, shorter buildings around him. A low, arched stone door frame jutted a foot or two forward from the side of the building leading into a dimly lit lobby with plush benches running around the outside walls. There was a counter for a concierge but it wasn’t manned.

The doors to the lobby weren’t locked either. Brian let himself in, cautiously looking around the lobby, wonder and anxiety warring in the pit of his stomach. He was expecting an elevator or another antechamber leading into the bottom floor of the tower. Instead the only exit from the lobby was a set of double doors on the far side of the room. None of the fugue’s faceless people were present so the building had a very lonely, desolate vibe to it.

“Baker? Any new information on the towers?”

“Not yet. We don’t have any information in our archives on plans to construct anything like what you’re seeing but that doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. We’ve messaged the Sarajevo Vault but no response yet.” Baker’s voice went a little distant. “We’re going to try and show a concept sketch to one of the Light of Mars people we woke up.”

Brian paused, his hand hovering over the handle to the double doors. “Why would you do that?”

“We’re hoping it will do something to jog their memories or at least stabilize their minds so they can tell us something about what happened in there.”

“Not a bad idea. Let me know if you find anything important but if you don’t turn up anything or it doesn’t seem important wait until I check in. I need to focus.” He grabbed the handle on the door and pulled it open. The door swung open and for a brief moment Brian caught a glimpse of the shadow that had haunted him through the city in the reflection on the door’s metal face. He ignored it. So far the night terror hadn’t lived up to its name, just crept into the corner of his vision from time to time so he was training himself to ignore it.

Then the door opened fully and ignoring it became a lot more difficult.

The inside of the massive tower was a ten story tall glass tank full of shifting shadows contained by a heavily reinforced set of bronze or brass bands. The whole scene reminded him of something he’d seen on the cover a book from the 1920s when he was perusing the Vaults during his training. Unlike the shadow person that had stalked him through the streets there was no clear figure in the tank. But he caught glimpses of other things.

Most of them were structures. Tall spires, forests of antenna and weblike networks of cables peeked through the darkness for a second or two then vanished again. Occasionally a ten foot long hand might appear for a moment. Once Brian thought he saw an eye peering out of the tank although it didn’t seem to be focused on anything in the tower in particular. For a moment it felt like the eye focused on him. For the first time he could remember, Director Brian O’Sullivan felt like he was completely out of control of his circumstances. Then the eye continued on its way, vanishing into the shadows after another few seconds.

When he got his breath back he whispered, “Baker, stand by for an emergency shutdown.”

“Are you okay, Director?” She asked, her voice laced with concern.

“The entire fugue, Baker, don’t just shut down my pod turn the whole server off and wake up everyone else still stored here. Find the people as soon as they wake up and keep them under strict observation.” Brian forced his feet to take a tentative step forward.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Director.”

“Begin the procedure if you hear me say ‘bucolic’ regardless of what else happens. Don’t wait for confirmation, just shut it down. Do you understand?”

“Director-”

“Stop talking, Baker. Let me concentrate.”

She made a very annoyed sound but stopped talking.

The hundred foot tall tank dominated the room for obvious reasons but it wasn’t the only thing there worthy of note. A ring of computer monitors ringed the outside of the room. They showed pictures and diagrams that meant nothing to Brian and the text they displayed had that strange, gibberish quality you’d expect in a dream. That set off a silent alarm in the back of his brain, since he’d read everything else he’d seen in the fugue without trouble.

Well, everything written in English.

The mystery of why the text on the monitors was unreadable wasn’t the most important thing in the tank room, however. The most important thing was the man in front of the tank.

Brian had gone through the list of people Shutdown from the Light of Mars project. Most of them were accounted for already. A few were left in Shutdown because they filled supplementary logistical roles in the original project, roles that UNIGOV already had well covered in the present and who would thus be redundant. Only five people in the R&D arm of the Light of Mars had gone unaccounted for. One lead scientist turned up dead of heart failure during the initial Shutdown, a fact that got noted in the Sarajevo Vault but never forwarded to Bakersfield when the project was revived. A second lead scientist had been removed from Shutdown and assigned to a large scale construction project in Asia forty years ago and died a natural death twelve years later. Three assistants had simply never come out of the fugue.

In profile the man in front of the tank bore a striking resemblance to the man who had died of heart failure. His name was Georgi Jaksic and one of the missing assistants was his son. Brian wasn’t sure if he was the elder or younger Jaksic. People from within the fugue stated that they thought of themselves as aging but the algorithms had a hard time generating an idea of what that looked like. It was possible the program gave Georgi’s son, Lazar Georgi Jaksic, his father’s face as a shortcut.

Brian approached Jaksic and a slow and careful pace, alert for any change in the man’s attitude. There was no sign the other man even realized Brian was there until, without even looking up from his work station, Jaksic said, “I was starting to wonder where everyone went. You don’t look familiar. Did they send you from one of the other towers?”

“Not exactly.” Brian wavered for a moment then decided he was as close as he wanted to get at the moment. “I’m here on behalf of Doctor Vincent Vesper, he’d like you to join him on his current project.”

“Vesper?” Jaksic finally glanced away from his work just long enough to give Brian an incredulous look. “Isn’t he working on field frequencies? What does he want me for? Field generation architecture is my field of expertise, much more hardware and much less software.”

“Of course.” Brian desperately hoped that wasn’t some kind of trap question. “I’m just the messenger here, I’m afraid, you’ll have to hammer out the details of all that with him.”

“Tell him I’ll be over to his tower in a couple of hours. I need to finish these simulations.” Jaksic gave him a thoughtful glance out of the corner of his eye. “Of course it would go faster if I could have the rest of my team back long enough to finish this round of testing. I’m guessing Vesper grabbed them all up for another one of his major infrastructure sims.”

“In a manner of speaking, although in this case it was more that he and his personnel were assigned to a new round of more practical tests.” Brian eyed the mystery Jaksic as he considered what he should tell him. He had clear brown eyes, heavy facial features and a scowling brow, not exactly what one thought of as a welcoming expression. But it was a face nonetheless. Whatever this person was he wasn’t one of the faceless projections or night terrors that populated so much of the other parts of the fugue. “What are you running, if I may ask?”

“Power use simulations. We’re going to need a huge amount of energy to get the Light of Mars working and my job is to simulate the changes in load on the grid as the project boots up. I’ve identified a number of places where Sarajevo’s grid will need major overhauls in order to make it work.”

“Interesting.” Brian peered over Jaksic’s shoulder at the meaningless squiggles on his monitors. “How would one go about helping you with this?”

For the first time Jaksic pulled his attention away from his work station and turned it Brian’s way. When they made eye contact a shiver went down Brian’s spine. They didn’t focus on him, in fact calling it eye contact would have been a terrible misstatement of what occurred. It would be more accurate to say Jaksic pointed his eyes in Brian’s direction. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

The question could have been addressed to the tower at large. Brian was only sure Jaksic was talking to him because there wasn’t anyone else around to talk to. “It’s my first day, believe it or not.” Brian found the dark mass in the tank distracting and tried to keep his attention focused on the other man. His subconscious kept telling him there were things watching him in it, which didn’t make that easy. “I don’t know much about large scale power grids, I’m afraid. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Of course.” Jaksic turned and pointed at the glass tank and, to Brian’s horror, something within pointed back at him. A hand the size of a normal man’s torso formed out of the black and pointed straight at Jaksic for the duration of the man’s following explanation. “We’re in the middle of the collective unconsciousness here, so we use our own subconscious mind as part of the logic system that drives forward the discovery process.”

“You what?”

“It might be faster to show you. Here.” Jaksic pressed a control on his panel and a small, hand sized tube emerged from the base of the tank. “Put your hand in this and you can join your mind to ours so we can get to work.”

“I don’t think-”

Without waiting for permission Jaksic grabbed Brian’s hand and shoved it into the tube. A small, rubbery sleeve wrapped around his wrist but gave before his hand, sending the appendage all the way into the tank where it touched the shadows within. Brian’s body became paralyzed again and he saw the shadow that had followed him from the beginning of his Shutdown slip past him, onto the glass of the tank, then through the glass to join the mass within.

Two eyes within opened, the depths of their pupils lit with a blindingly bright light that saw past the shadows, past the glass, past the limits of Brian’s very skull and into the depths of his mind. With his mouth hanging open but his body paralyzed Brian found himself unable to say or think anything. Not even the word he’d told Baker. Which was a shame because at that moment what Brian really wanted, more than anything else, was to scream…

Previous Chapter

Carrington stormed into the room and tossed a tablet down on the table in front of him, causing Mond to jump. “I’m a busy man,” the Admiral snapped, “so I really hope this isn’t a waste of my time, Director. In fact, let’s start by seeing if it’s worth my while. What were you people mining under the Antarctic ice caps? Based on the approximate mass and spectroscopic data we’re putting cobalt and nickle in the top spots but there’s a bunch of exotic stuff down in the lower spots and you could make a couple of gamblers very happy if you can clear it up for us.”

“Antarctica was well outside of my jurisdiction, Admiral,” Mond said, his typical neutral attitude struggling to reassert itself. “I’m not sure I ever saw anything detailing what we mine there. I presume it’s comparable to resources in Australia and the extremities of South America, I understand they’re very similar, geologically speaking.”

“I’ll pass that on.” Carrington took a seat and stared at the other two empty spots at the table. The room was empty save for himself, Mond and the Earthling’s two guards. “So why did you ask me here?”

“I wanted to talk to you and, if she agrees, the young lady from Mars.” Mond fidgeted for a second. “You see, I’ve been thinking for the past few days and there’s something I feel I should say.”

“Well, better late than never, I suppose.” Carrington eyed the other man, trying to figure him out. He’d spent more time with this man from Earth than anyone else, Sergeant Langley included, but getting any kind of a solid read on him had proven difficult. The admiral suspected Mond was reserved by nature and Earth culture, for all it supposedly fostered communication and understanding, only seemed to make people more withdrawn and less likely to explain themselves. Add the impenetrable jargon they couched everything in and Mond was a natural enigma. “Did someone let Miss Bertolini know?”

“We did, sir,” one of the guards said.

Mond reached out with one of his prosthetics and carefully, deliberately moved the tablet over so it was directly in front of him. “Why are you asking about the Antarctic mining operations?”

“We sank one of your freighters hauling goods back from there about an hour ago.”

“Sank?!” Mond looked horrified. “Why? They’re entirely automated at this point and those mines are hardly our largest suppliers.”

“Curiosity and general strategic doctrine.” Carrington touched his fingertips together as his hands rested on the table, studying Mond’s reaction. “We wanted to know what you were carrying. Disrupting the transportation of materials in enemy territory is a very basic strategy that has existed for at least seven hundred years. If I told you we were forming a superluminal corridor between Earth and Copernicus to flood your planet with troops how would you react?”

Mond considered it. “Honestly, Admiral, after all the things I’ve heard, seen and done in the last month I can’t say with certainty anymore. That’s… that’s part of why I’ve asked you here.”

Carrington’s AI pinged his tablet causing a small, pulsing green light to appear in one corner. He flicked a finger to answer the ping and room’s comm switched on. “Admiral?” Major Bennet’s voice rose from the tablet. “I’ve brought the Malacandrans, as requested.”

“Send them in, Major.”

A moment later Naomi and Teng were back, both looking a little flushed and windswept. Carrington wondered what they’d been doing. Hopefully nothing that would risk an interplanetary incident, otherwise he was going to have to make a note in Bennet’s official record. “I’m surprised,” Naomi said as she took her seat. “I hadn’t expected a sapiens to be interested in a second discussion with one of the dreaded martians.”

“A fair expectation,” Mond replied. In the last meeting between the two he’d been badly off balance, clearly unprepared to face the namesake of UNIGOV’s preferred boogeymen. Now he appeared more in control of himself. “Particularly given that when we last parted I never wanted to see you again.”

“But you asked me to come here.” Naomi leaned back in her chair, doing a terrible job of hiding the look of scorn on her face. “Why should I listen to you?”

Her derision wasn’t missed by the Earthling across from her. “We could start with fairness.”

“Fairness?” If that was meant to make Naomi more receptive to him it wasn’t working.

“Yes. You gave me a very clear idea of where you and the people of Mars stand, what you hope from us and why. I gave you a very poor response.” Mond leaned forward on his elbows, shining metal hands folded in front of him. “I’d like to try to correct that now.”

She studied him through narrowed eyes. “What brought about this change in heart?”

“Since our last meeting I’ve been trying to discern why you wanted to return to Earth beyond the obvious. It didn’t take long to work out.” Mond pointed one finger at Naomi. “You don’t have space for all the martians in Shutdown on Mars.”

This time Naomi did a better job of hiding any reaction she might have. “What if we don’t?”

“It was just the first step of logic that led me to ask you here. The second step came when I considered that you were the Eldest Malacandran. If Malacandrans only spend their first twenty years outside Shutdown it raises a question. How long was there between any two of you leaving for the vault? Five days? Ten? How long were you the Eldest, Miss Bertolini?”

“Twenty days,” she said. “Bottletown was maintained at a constant population of two thousand, one hundred and sixty people. A few dozen die a year of illness or in accidents, so there is a larger gap between changeovers than you might think.”

“But it removes most of the continuity in leadership that stable societies rely on.” Mond gestured towards himself. “For example, my tenure in the UNIGOV directorate lasted thirty years before I met Mr. Langley and was brought here. If that hadn’t happened I could easily have remained there another dozen years. On Earth, a leader can easily expect to lead his community for twice as long as you’ve been alive.”

“That’s very impressive, Director-”

“I’m not boasting, Miss Bertolini,” Mond said quickly, “although I understand it may seem that way to someone who hasn’t lived the life I have. I’m trying to impress on you the difference in our experience. As I said before, the sapiens life is dedicated to first understanding ourselves and one thing I realized as I struggled with that this week is that I have lived in a society far more used to stability than to change. That was probably true even before the final split between sapiens and martians.”

“You don’t know?” Carrington asked. “I thought the whole point of a Vault Director was to keep track of all those bits of information that were taken away from everyone else.”

“It is. But it’s difficult to do that without the necessary tools at hand and even if you let me use your computers I can’t access the Vaults from them so what am I to do?” Mond chuckled and shook his head. “Sadly, sociological history was not something that I specialized in so I’d have to do a lot of reference work to say anything about what things were like on that front two hundred years ago.”

“What is your specialty?” Naomi asked.

“Music history, believe it or not.” Mond whistled a bar or two of music that meant nothing to Carrington or anyone other than himself, from the looks of the others in the room. “I see you’re not versed in the classics yourself, Admiral. Jailhouse Rock, by Elvis Presley. A tune that has been on my mind for the last week for obvious reasons.”

“Not surprising,” Carrington said, twitching a finger to flag that for later followup. He didn’t think listening to Mond’s favorite music choices would give him much insight into the man’s mind but you never knew. “Why do you think stability is such an important factor, Director?”

“I think the stability Earth has enjoyed has created a blind spot in us, Admiral. I never understood the need for uncertainty.” Mond flattened one hand on the table with a metallic clunk. “The purpose of a sapiens’ introspection is to create an unshakable foundation before action is taken. The care in understanding our surroundings allows us to avoid culpability in actions that harm others. However, all of this leaves us quite low to the ground.”

Naomi nodded. “Trapped in Vaults, in fact.”

“As you say.” Mond drummed his fingers once, then again, before lifting his hand to stare at its fingertips. “The last few days I’ve been thinking about unknowns.”

“How very martian of you,” Carrington said dryly.

“Indeed.” Mond pressed his fingertips together. “And yet, until I did so I didn’t know myself. I didn’t realize how important it was to face the unknown and make it known. UNIGOV exists to bring the stability and self actualization necessary to create a sapiens society. I wonder if our focus on that has been so myopic we’ve actually created our own instabilities. If we haven’t wronged others just by trying to prevent unforeseen wrongs.”

“That’s a very basic problem many philosophies grapple with,” Carrington admitted.

“Perhaps one we should not have forgotten so willfully,” Mond replied. “Regardless, I have reached a decision. I will try to serve as intermediary between UNIGOV and your fleet, Admiral. And your planet, Eldest.”

Carrington sighed. “That’s an encouraging step, Director, but one that I wish you’d made sooner. I’m afraid that history tells us once these conflicts escalate to this level they’re much less likely to be bottled away again. Besides, we still can’t talk to the rest of your Directorate, so there’s not much we can do to open negotiations right now.”

“Well, that depends.” Mond turned his full attention to Naomi. “I don’t have access to the Vault’s records anymore and I’m sure most of your records were taken when Borealis was put into Shutdown. However if you have a working Vault under the colony there are a few things that may open doors for us. Does it have a working crystal storage mainframe?”

Naomi tilted her head to one side, thinking. “Is that the large blue-green crystals in the electrified saline pool?”

“Exactly.

“Then yes, we do.”

Mond smiled. “Good. Here is what I need you to do…”

Previous Chapter

The ship’s hull ran aground with a spine shivering scrape that Lang felt from the pit of his stomach up into the base of his skull. Priss and Harrigan slammed forward against the straps of their chairs, bracing their hands against the panel. Lang stood at the pilot’s controls with no restraints, no seat and nothing but the front windscreen to stop him if he pitched forward off of the bridge. He grabbed the throttle in a death grip and threw his weight back.

For about three seconds this gambit worked and he leaned back over the deck at a sixty degree angle. Then the ship came to a stop and he flopped back onto his ass. “We’ve made landfall!” He called down to the main deck. He wasn’t sure what the appropriate nautical phrase for landfall was but hopefully Yang wouldn’t hold it against him. As he scrambled back to his feet he added, “Harry, Priss, head to your ground units.”

Priss, a veteran of many of the same rough landings he was, instantly hit her quick release and vacated the bridge. Harrigan was a little slower and less certain on his feet but he was gone fast enough. Lang scrabbled to his feet and hit the emergency shutdown command on his screen. Then he followed up by grabbing the physical shutdown lever and pulling it and set the ship’s computer to standby.

It was pretty doubtful the Fleet would want to recover the good yacht Armstrong but energy conservation discipline was a habit one could lose in a single moment of negligence so Lang waited just long enough to confirm the ship’s systems were, in fact, dormant before he left the bridge. The decks below were a mess.

Hard impacts were a part of space warfare just like any other kind of warfare but they were a lot rarer on a ship the size of the Sea of Tranquility. The spacers who’d come down in Lang’s group were mostly off of that ship and even those who had seen combat still weren’t used to the kind of shock that came with running aground. They lay scattered around the deck, struggling to get back to their feet and into fighting trim. Except for Captain Yang. She strode across the deck, bracing her armored exoskeleton and hauling other spacers to their feet like a Valkyrie rallying troops for Ragnarok. It would’ve been inspiring if they weren’t on the deck of the most luxurious ship Lang had ever seen.

Still, his evaluation of the captain went up a notch.

“Go, go, get to ground,” she snapped, pushing spacers towards the side of the ship. Inflatable slides, which were apparently some kind of emergency measure, were expanding off the decks towards the ground and a few adventurous souls had already slid down them and were securing the landing area around the ship.

Lang walked up to the captain and saluted. “Ma’am. The Armstrong is secure, or as secure as we can make it. Once engineering has the reactor shut down we’re ready to abandon ship.”

“Any chance we can reuse her?” Yang asked, doing a visual sweep of one of the yacht’s interior cabins.

“I have no idea without knowing how bad the hull damage was when we ran aground or how hard it will be to get her back into the water. This isn’t my area of expertise.”

“Understood. Get in an exo and grab your gear, then. You can be my expert on UNIGOV. I’ll meet you at forward observation point theta once the boat’s empty.”

“Yes ma’am.” Another salute and Lang hopped down a slide and hustled over to the staging zone which was beneath the world’s most overgrown willow tree.

As expected, the decorative plants lining the river bank and grown wild for decades since their abandonment. Towering shrubs, thick stands of decorative grass and three disheveled willow trees hid the Los Angeles Nuclear Fusion reactor building from view. Most of the company’s gear was already there. His AI pinged the equipment that the quartermaster had earmarked for him and the lights on one of the self propelled cases there flashed blue.

Lang opened it and an exoskeleton driven armored suit immediately began unfolding out of it. Unlike the exo he’d used on his last trip to Earth, this was not a powered suit intended to boost his carrying capacity and ability to run without tiring. That suit had just been a collection of servos and load bearing metal bars. This suit included ablative ceramic plates covering his torso and upper limbs, heat dispersing plastic mesh gloves and heavy, rubberized magnetic boots. The heavier armor could withstand four direct hits from most plasma rifles in service through the Triad worlds. The boots and gloves were rated for two. There was also a small internal air tank and filtration system.

All in all, it was overkill for raiding a UNIGOV facility unless they had small scale versions of the disassembler field on hand. Then it was just inadequate.

As the exo stood up to full height Lang grabbed two grips on the inside of the breastplate and pushed them up. The suit unfolded even further and slipped the plate over his head. Then he pulled down and the whole mechanism began the process of automatically folding itself around his body. Other spacers, part of the Tranquility‘s boarding and security divisions, were doing the same around him. Lang saw they were moving slightly so that the exo’s mechanisms locked around them faster but he didn’t understand the process well enough to duplicate it so he just stood perfectly still and let the machine do it’s job.

Thirty seconds later he slipped his hands into the gloves and patted himself down. Everything felt like it was in place. The extra bulk from the armor was distracting but the suit’s servos were stronger to compensate for the weight so it didn’t feel any harder to move in than what he was used to. The biggest difference was the helmet, which included a heads up display that projected information from his AI when necessary. Lang found it distracting so he muted the function.

He’d just slung a plasma rifle over one shoulder when Priss and Harry turned up. He frowned, pretty sure they’d been assigned to a different ground unit and they were already in their suits. “What are you guys doing here?”

“The bridge over the secondary bypass sluice is out,” Harry said. “South group is now moving with center group and the major until we clear the building we think holds the seawater pumps.”

Lang had been so busy with the yacht and the landing that he hadn’t paid much attention to their plans for once they reached shore. He wasn’t entirely sure what buildings Harry was referring to so he just nodded. “What was wrong with the bridge?”

“Looked like they tried to drive something heavy over it recently,” Priss said. “The intact portion of the bridge was pretty overgrown but the place where it was broken looked fresh so we think it happened when UNIGOV tried to reactivate the plant.”

“Lovely.” Lang slotted his rifle’s spare power cells into his belt and closed up the equipment locker. “Guess their little accident buys them some time, at least.”

Harry was looking down at Lang’s feet. “Aren’t you going to wear your boots?”

“No point. UNIGOV facilities are, at base level, usually concrete walls and floors. There’s nothing metallic there for the magboots to grab onto so they’re not very useful for trick maneuvers and we’re planet side so there’s no chance the artificial gravity will go out.” Lang tapped the toes of his regular boots on the ground. “These babies are lighter and more comfortable than the magboots and the exo’s heels fit either one just fine.”

Harry nodded, his expression suggesting he understood Lang’s logic but didn’t approve of it. “Suit yourself, Sergeant.”

The use of the rank was a subtle acknowledgment that there wasn’t anything Harry could do about it and simultaneously a pushing of responsibility for anything bad that happened to Lang off of the poor, put upon enlisted man. It was the kind of thing Lang had done plenty of times himself. He also didn’t really care if Harry liked his approach or not. He didn’t plan to change it even if the Captain herself thought it was a bad idea.

“I’ll do just that, Private.” Lang gestured through the brush ahead of them. “I’m under orders to meet the Captain at point theta which is right along your new route. Get the rest of your detatchmet together and we’ll head that way.”

“You got it, Sergeant.”

Harry scampered off to do as instructed but Priss hung back to shuck her mag boots and put her normal footwear back on. Sitting on one of the equipment crates she asked, “You’re an S6 now, that means you rate an EMG scanner in your load out, right?”

“I… dunno.” He tapped his helmet and brought his HUD back then opened the crate’s inventory to look it over. “I guess so. That’s surprising. I didn’t think they’d issue that kind of equipment to grunts like us, especially since I’m supposed to fly landing craft not slog around in gravity.”

“Lucky for us. Bring it with you in case the Earthlings decide to boot up another disassembler field, that way you can pick it up ahead of time.” Priss wiggled her dainty feet back into her standard issue boots. “Something like that will get you half way towards another promotion and we can start calling you Master Sergeant.”

Lang grinned. “Not if I properly credit the forward thinking initiative of people like Corporal Hu. Maybe you can look forward to a promotion to Lance Corporal.”

Priss had her helmet on already but from the set of her shoulders she was cringing in distaste. “Okay, I earned that one. I yield, I yield.”

“It might be better if I recommended you to OTC,” Lang continued, assuming an exaggerated thinking pose. “Then you could earn your butter bars and-”

“No, no, no!” Priss threw her hands up over her face. “Please, anything but officer training! I want to stay an honest girl and work for my living!”

“Yeah, Sergeant,” Harry said, threading his way through the supplies with four other men in tow. “Don’t do your girl dirty like that!”

Lang gave Harry a blank look, wondering what he meant. With a helmet in the way it was lost on its intended recipient because Harry just came to a stop and introduced the rest of his team. “Sarge, these are the rest of my boys – Barton, Keys, Yancey and Ramone.”

Ramone was a corporal, like Priss, but the rest were Privates or PFCs. “Pleased to meet you gentlemen. Today we’re going on a quick stroll from here to point theta, where we’ll go on our separate ways. Corporal Ramone, I take it you’re in charge of south group?”

“You got it, Sergeant,” Ramone said. He was a hair shorter than Lang but incredibly stocky, like a brick wall got up to go for a walk. “You going center?”

“I’m going with the Captain wherever she chooses to wind up.”

Ramone nodded sagely. “OBS duty.”

“After the month I’ve had, officer babysitting will be a dream come true,” Lang said. Although he wasn’t sure that was true, given that the officer in question was Captain Yang and she didn’t seem the type to take things easy. He fished his EMG scanner out of his equipment crate and held it up. “Anyone here familiar with how to run one of these? I’m afraid I only use the kind built into landers.”

Yancey raised his hand. “EMG was my secondary specialty in advanced training, Sarge. We had to run a standard orienteering course with one of those as part of our final qualifications.”

Lang slapped the bulky sensor package into the PFC’s hands and said, “Congratulations, Yancey. You’re now in charge of watching out for the enemy’s primary weapon’s system.”

“Aye, sir,” Yancey said, securing the EMG scanner to his armor’s forward hard points across his chest. “I’ll let you know the moment I pick up any sign of an anomalous magnetic field. Just be aware that we may need to go slow. The fusion plant itself puts out a monstrous mag field. It’ll take a couple of seconds for the sensor to pick through that kind of background noise as we advance.”

“Speed is worth more than safety in this situation,” Lang said, “although I’ll take all I can of both. Just tell me if you see anything out of the ordinary. Let’s go boys.”

As it turned out they got around the brush patch and halfway to point theta before Yancey found anything. They were cresting a low hill that formed an artificial bowl around the reactor, probably intended to channel any major leaks from the reactor buildings out to sea and away from the city, when the private announced, “Magnetic spike, Sarge. Six and a half Teslas of force, originating from the direction of the reactor building.”

“It’s growing?” Lang asked.

“Not right now,” Yancey said, tapping on the EMG rig to make some kind of adjustment. “But it wasn’t there before. The signal just popped up out of nowhere, it’s not something the sensor sorted out of the background noise.”

“Maybe the hill was blocking it?” Keys suggested.

“No, if the hill was made out of something that could block a magnetic field the reactor’s signature would’ve lost strength as we got closer to it. This field wasn’t there a minute ago, so somebody just turned it on.”

“Got it.” Lang tapped Harry and Barton on their shoulders. “Head up and peak over the hill, bring me a report.”

Two minutes later Harry was back, leaving Barton to watch the reactor building as he withdrew. “Definitely a disassembler field, Sarge. We could pick up the glittery effect plain as day. It might have been different if the sun got up higher but since we hit them so early in the morning the sunlight is still at an angle to really refract off the nanotech.”

“So they’ve got some kind of defense for the reactor facilities,” Lang mused.

“But not comprehensive,” Harry said. “We only saw signs of the field around the freight entrance on the southern building. We can probably advance to point theta safely.”

“Unless they can expand the field,” Lang said.

“Yes. Unless that.”

Point theta was a large road structure which the AI identified as a ’roundabout,’ a circular patch of road with another ornamental garden bed in it, according to the map. If it held to pattern there would be another large patch of shrubs they could use for cover there. However cover was only meaningful if it kept them from view; if UNIGOV already knew they were present it wouldn’t mean anything in the face of an expanding disassembler field. Point theta wasn’t a good place for them to rally anymore. They’d be safer in among the buildings of the complex itself than they would along the roads connecting them.

“Priss. Call up the Captain and inform her that point theta is compromised and suggest a new meeting place.”

She started working her comms unit before Lang even finished working. “What should I suggest as our new rallying point?”

“That depends. Did Lieutenant Fresh Face pull the deck guns off the Armstrong yet?”