Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour (3 page)

‘You heard something?’ Indaia asked.

‘My hearing has a broader range than normal.’

‘Yes, I’m just surprised that there was enough leakage on the surface for you to hear it. I shall have to work on that. It is an… inefficiency. Everything appears to be working. You may return to your well-deserved rest.’

‘That we will do. Jansen out.’ She looked around at Monkey and Delta. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll offline now and you two can sleep when I get up.’

Monkey gave a shrug. ‘You’re not only the boss, but you’re also the one working her ass off here. We can work with that.’

7.9.528 FSC.

The mining town of Farrington’s Drift had once been the home of around forty thousand colonists, mostly miners, but also farmers, housewives, shopkeepers, and children. It had been established in 152 FSC and, for nine years, it had worked to establish itself. Mining there had just started to get to the point where they could start paying back the loans that had been used to build the place, and then it had gone dark.

‘Back in those days,’ Grumand said as Aneka swung the shuttle in a circle around the town, ‘colonies would fail and no one really worried too much. The banks had insurance against that kind of thing. Mounting an operation to check for survivors was considered pointless, especially since the planet was known to be volcanically active.’

It did look a lot like a volcanic event had eliminated the town, but it was something of a weird one. On the north side was a crater, maybe twenty metres in diameter, now cold and black. Another crater, slightly smaller, could be seen on the east, and there was a wide crack between the two which, from the looks of the lava flows, had actually been a vent fissure.

‘Two craters and a vent?’ Aneka said. She glanced at Primly, sitting at the sensor station on her right. ‘Isn’t that a bit unusual?’

Primly was staring at the monitors, but he apparently recognised that the question was addressed to him. ‘You’re assuming that those were all one event… Though I admit that the flow patterns suggest they were. It’s unusual, but not impossible, and I am here to study the rather peculiar tectonic activity this planet exhibits.’

‘Good point. Do you have what you need?’

‘Yes, I can’t get better data without samples.’

‘All right.’ Aneka picked a flat spot near the largest structure and shifted the shuttle toward it. ‘Delta, you’re with Mark. Lidia, you want to wander around with them or come in with me and Nate?’

Rice stepped into the cockpit, already in her heat suit, which had the prerequisite of all good Jenlay garments: it was tight. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘There’s no life on any of the other lava fields on this cinder, maybe there’s something in the buildings.’

‘Cockroaches,’ Aneka suggested.

‘Those things are everywhere. If there aren’t any I’ll be surprised.’

‘Huh. Everyone remember your masks,’ Aneka reminded them. ‘You probably won’t notice anything more than a bad smell at first, but the atmosphere here
will
eat your lungs if you breathe it for too long.’ She put the shuttle down smoothly, checked it seemed stable, and then shut down the antigravity system.

The ground floor levels of the buildings had been entirely submerged by the lava flows. On the sides facing the craters the flow had banked up, covering the second floor windows, but some were still visible on the other sides, all of them covered over by heavy metal shields.

Aneka examined one of these, grunted, and dug around in her pack for a plasma torch. ‘Should be able to cut our way in,’ she said. ‘I go first once we’re through. I know you’re a Scout, Nate, but on this mission you’re my responsibility.’ She activated the torch and a white hot ‘flame’ of plasma began playing over the metal. It was bubbling in under a second.

‘I am not going to argue with a woman holding a plasma jet,’ Grumand replied. ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing goggles for that?’

‘My eyes have glare protection built in. Delta, you okay out there?’

‘Sure,’ Delta replied over the suit radios. ‘I’m thinking of bringing David back here on vacation next year. Long days, warm weather, lots of black lava ropes all over the ground.’

‘It’s typical of young basaltic lava flows,’ Primly stated. ‘It would have been hot when it hit the town, upwards of fifteen-hundred Kelvin. Very fluid. That’s why there are splashes high on the walls.’

‘The Plascrete held up well,’ Aneka commented. There was a clang as the window shield dropped away. ‘Okay, we’re in. Delta, keep in touch.’

The Polyglass inside the shield had cracked and fallen in, probably due to the heat, but there was no sign of any lava inside the room. There was also no light. Aneka took a box from the back of her belt, opened it, and sent a cloud of tiny glowing robots in through the window before drawing one of her two pistols and following them.

The room looked like it had been an office. There was a desk and chair, a work console sitting on the desk. Everything seemed intact. No real sign of heat or fire damage marked the furniture, though the interior paint on the outer wall had bubbled at the bottom.

The office door opened with a squeal; the hinges rusted by a few centuries of exposure to the acidic atmosphere. Outside the corridor was dark, but even less damaged than the office.

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, ‘so the lava flows in and engulfs the town.’

‘That seems to be what happened,’ Grumand agreed.

‘But they had to have had some warning, and even if they didn’t, the interior of this place seems fine. People could have survived inside the buildings. All the shutters were closed. There was no evidence of anyone leaving after the event.’

Grumand was quiet for a second as he checked another room. ‘I admit that does seem strange. I suggest we check the ground floor. The few files we have on this place suggest the main mining office was down there. There could still be records, maybe some intact computer equipment.’

Aneka nodded. ‘Lidia? Any sign of life?’

‘Webbing,’ Rice replied. ‘Structure and composition is identical to the silk made by Earth spiders. Imports, and I’m not seeing anything that originated the webs.’

‘No cockroaches?’

Rice barked a laugh. ‘Not yet. Give them time.’

They found a stairwell toward the end of the corridor and Aneka sent the firefly bots ahead of them to check the way. The stairs looked solid, but then Plascrete could handle centuries without decaying. There were examples of it on Old Earth going back to before the Xinti War which still had structural integrity. There was still no sign of lava, so they headed down. Aneka was just about to go through the doorway at the bottom when Rice stopped her.

‘Wait…’ The biologist had swung her torch into a corner under the stairs. There was a blackened patch of Plascrete there, along with a few scattered pieces of something that looked like shell. Rice dropped to one knee and took a sample container and tweezers from her belt. ‘Looks like we found the ’roaches, or what’s left of them.’ She held up a partial wing case, which looked like it had come from a big cockroach. The rear end of it looked as though it had been seared away. There were a couple of oddly shaped rocks among the shells; almost like fossilised dung, or worms, they were elongated and twisted, almost extruded, and shiny black in colour.

‘It looks like someone set a ’roach bonfire,’ Aneka commented. ‘Is that a laser burn, or…?’

‘Looks more like it came into contact with a very hot surface,’ Rice replied, dropping the shell into her container.

‘There was a really old movie about cockroaches that could start fires by rubbing their legs together.’ Aneka looked down at the blackened patch of Plascrete. ‘I don’t think they roasted themselves doing it.’

‘Does make me think,’ Grumand said. ‘Some of the old Plascrete mixes, when they got really hot, they would outgas toxic fumes. The polymers used were a little unstable. Modern ones don’t do it, but when this place was built… It’s a possibility.’

Aneka turned back to the door. ‘Trapped in here and poisoned, wonderful.’ She stopped, frowning at the door. The bottom few centimetres of it had been eaten away by something. As the fireflies dropped down to that level for her, she could see scorch marks on the paint. ‘Something weird happened here,’ she said, and then pushed through the door.

The mining office was two doors down. Grumand wandered among the computers, grunting and frowning as he went. The room was fairly large with an office at one end, presumably for the manager, and a number of workstations around the walls. The middle of the room was taken up with a large, apparently scale, model of the area as it had been when the town had been alive. Each building had a piece of plastic tape with letters embossed into it naming the structure. Four mines were visible to the east and west of the town.

‘Al, can you give me a projection of the current mapping data from the Hyde over that model?’ Aneka asked silently.

‘We only have low-resolution topographic data.’

‘That should be good enough.’

‘Processing…’ An image appeared, overlaying the model and slightly above it, shifting to stay in place as she walked around the table.

‘Useless,’ Grumand said. ‘Every single machine has been burned out. Like someone set a fire in them. I mean, it almost looks deliberate.’

‘Odd. Want some more odd?’

‘Hit me.’

‘There are two buildings in this model which aren’t in our current topographic map. The tape says they were smelting plants.’

‘The colony was making do shipping ore out to planets that could smelt it. Aluminium and gold primarily. They were due to start smelting their own ores around the time they went dark. That was going to make the difference on their economic viability. Maybe the plants exploded.’

‘No, the craters are where the two plants were.’

‘Seriously?’ Grumand sounded justifiably disbelieving. Aneka nodded. ‘Two plants blowing up, some sort of weird accident or even sabotage, I could almost buy. Two volcanos opening up right under both buildings…’

His speculation was brought to a halt by the sound of Rice’s shriek. Kicking herself for not keeping a closer eye on the biologist, Aneka bolted for the door. Grumand followed when his brain and body had caught up with Aneka’s, but he was still a couple of seconds behind her when she reached Rice, who was standing with her back against the corridor wall, her eyes on something in the room opposite.

‘What is it?’ Aneka snapped. The woman did not look harmed, but her face was pale in the light from the microbots. Turning her head, Aneka followed her gaze and saw the bodies.

There were three of them, huddled into a corner of what looked like a storeroom. Aneka could see another leg, probably from someone lying on the floor. They were skeletons now, after several centuries in a slightly acidic atmosphere, skeletons still dressed in woven bioplastic clothing. She moved into the room as the firefly swarm caught up with her and found half a dozen more bodies dotted around the room. Aside from the one on the floor, all of them had died with their backs pressed to the walls and there was one other odd thing.

‘It looks like a little volcano,’ Grumand commented, squatting beside the black basaltic plug that bulged a couple of centimetres out of the floor in the middle of the room. ‘They came in here to hide from the lava, and it burst through inside. The heat, and the fumes… They were poisoned, but not by the Plascrete.’

‘The, uh, chemsniffer,’ Rice said, looking down at a gadget she was holding to avoid looking at the skeletons. ‘The chemsniffer is showing higher than normal levels of sulphur compounds in here. The walls are coated in the stuff.’

‘Mystery solved, I guess,’ Aneka said, frowning. Somehow it did not feel right.

‘Looks like it,’ Grumand agreed. ‘I can write this up. If we have time, I’ll come back and do a more detailed survey of the area, for completeness.’

‘Can we leave?’ Rice asked. ‘There’s nothing living here for me to look at.’

‘Yeah, sure, we can go.’

Aneka let them go ahead of her, and pulled the door closed behind her. It seemed right, but as she did so she noticed that the bottom of the door had been burned away in the same way as the one in the stairwell had been, almost as though some lava had crawled across the floor to do it.

Yorkbridge Mid-town, New Earth.

Ella was out at a club, but she was not out clubbing. Her mode of dress, translucent halter top and micro-skirt, suggested she was there for a good time, and she smiled brightly as she moved through the crowd, but actually she was just looking for someone.

Toward the back she spotted a bright patch of red, and moved closer. Sure enough a tall, lithe woman with an expansive chest and long, scarlet hair was moving between the tables with a tray. Ella spotted an empty table, caught the woman’s eye in passing, and went over to sit down.

Smiling very brightly, the waitress strutted across to Ella’s table a moment later. ‘What can I get you?’

‘Something warming,’ Ella replied, ‘it’s cold out.’ Which was a dumb signal in a way; it was hardly ever cold on New Earth at this latitude.

‘Okay, I’ll be right with you.’

Ella waited quietly for just over a minute, and then got up to slip back out of the bar. She was around a hundred metres away when a tall, buxom, brunette woman fell into step beside her.

‘We got a message through from New Earth a couple of days ago,’ Ella said. ‘They’ve had attacks on ships moving between Old Earth and Titan, and they haven’t been able to identify the attackers.’

‘That sounds familiar,’ the brunette replied.

‘We need to let them know about that theory, but…’

‘Yes, you’re quite right, your messages are monitored. I can arrange something.’

Ella nodded. ‘I was hoping you could.’

‘How are things? We haven’t talked in a while.’

‘Well, Aneka’s off world. Aside from that it’s business as usual. The education programmes on Old Earth seem to be going well. How about here?’

‘The mole is doing a good job of keeping awareness of the problem down, but the Navy is still pushing for greater activity in the areas being attacked.’

‘Are they going to get it?’