Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour (4 page)

‘Yes, which is worrying.’

Ella frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because those areas are all well away from the Herosian border. Goodnight, Ella.’

The brunette picked up her pace and Ella let her pull away, watching Winter’s back as she left.

Farrington’s World, 8.9.528 FSC.

Aneka watched her diagnostics scroll past in-vision, mostly because she always did, but also because it gave her longer before she opened her eyes and discovered that Ella was not in bed with her.

Not that there was any room for the little redhead in the cot. Not that the lack of space would have stopped them from being in bed together anyway. Aneka smiled. Ella could always make her smile, even at a distance of ninety-six parsecs. Opening her eyes, Aneka slipped out of bed and reached for her clothes.

Monkey was sitting in the mess with his feet on the table. Aneka grinned at him. ‘You can go to bed now if you want,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’ He lifted his feet down and turned off the tablet he was reading. ‘I sent Delta to bed an hour ago. Her yawning was getting to me.’

‘Huh. Anyone else up?’

‘Primly. He never went to bed. He’s in the ops room working on the data from the seismometers.’

‘Probably fallen asleep at the console. I’ll go check on him.’

‘Great.’ Monkey got to his feet and started past Aneka. ‘Coffee’s fresh.’

Aneka poured herself a mug of coffee and took a pull on it, and then headed through into the operations room. Primly was bent over one of the tables, just as Aneka had predicted, but she frowned as soon as she saw him. His infrared signature was too low.

‘Al…?’

‘Interfacing to his bio-monitor… He’s dead. Termination of vital functions occurred twelve hundred and sixteen seconds ago. There is no possibility of recovery.’

‘Shit.’ Stepping forward, Aneka lifted Primly up to check his pulse out of habit. There was foam around his mouth. ‘Al, check the atmospheric processor records for this room for the last hour.’ She turned the chair and checked over the rest of him. That was when she found the burns on his hands. Third degree, deep tissue burns with bone showing through in places.

‘There was a rise in hydrogen sulphide levels around the time of his death,’ Al announced. ‘The detected concentration was only fifty-two parts per million over a one-minute interval. Nowhere near a lethal dose. There was also a one-degree rise in room temperature.’

Frowning, Aneka looked around. The aluminium decking they had put in to keep people’s feet off the more delicate surface below was distorted in a couple of places, as though by extreme heat, and she followed the trail under the table. There was a hole drilled through the base of the cabin and the metal, near the wall.

‘Does the shape of that remind you of anything?’

A schematic image of the hole Aneka had found while placing the seismometers overlaid the view she was looking at. It was different, but very similar. ‘I would not classify it as a one hundred per cent match,’ Al said, ‘but the coincidence is rather more extreme than I would like.’

‘Damn. Aneka to David.’

There was a pause and then, ‘Aneka? I was just about to get into bed.’

‘Sorry. Wake Delta and get your clothes back on. We have a problem.’

~~~

‘I-I’m not a pathologist,’ Rice said, ‘but I’m p-pretty sure. Pulmonary oedema combined with shock from the burns. It…’ She paused to swallow hard. ‘It’s consistent with inhalation of a massive amount of hydrogen sulphide.’

‘But there
was
no massive dose!’ Adams roared. He had been growing increasingly red in the face as the discussion went on. Aneka was starting to lose patience with him. ‘We found evidence of a fire in one of the computers. He saw it, panicked, got burned, and died. An accident. We
cannot
pull out because of an accident.’

Strike the ‘losing.’ Reaching out, Aneka grabbed the front of Adams’ jacket with one hand, yanked him toward her, and then lifted him off the ground. ‘A man is dead,’ she said. Grumand grimaced at the level tone of her voice; he had heard that kind of tone used right before someone got their head smashed open. ‘The evidence suggests that he died of hydrogen sulphide poisoning, but you’re right, there does not seem to be evidence of enough of it to kill him. That is an anomaly, a very dangerous one. The fact that his death shows alarming similarity to what killed a lot of the colonists makes it more alarming. I am declaring this area unsafe until I can be assured of everyone’s safety, and if you don’t shut your damn mouth I will put you through a wall. Are we quite clear, Doctor Adams?’ Her hand opened before he could answer and a second later Adams was sprawling on the decking, eyes wide.

‘She assaulted me!’ he shrieked. ‘You all saw it. I’m the leader of this expedition and…’

‘No,’ Grumand snapped. Adams looked at him, his head snapping around as though he had heard a gunshot. ‘You are the lead scientist here. When it comes to expedition safety, there’s Aneka, and then there’s Vashma, and you don’t even rate a vote. Especially when I agree with her.’

There was a second of silence and then Adams’ face darkened and he opened his mouth. Indaia got in first. ‘Excuse me, but there is something else I think you should see.’ Everyone turned to look at her. Throughout the examination of Primly’s body and the argument, she had been quietly examining the functioning computers. ‘My sensor equipment appears to be non-functional,’ she went on when she had everyone’s attention. ‘However, prior to the shutdown, which occurred just before Mister Primly’s death, the system was detecting subsonic activity.’

‘It’s supposed to detect subsonic activity,’ Adams snapped. Aneka suppressed the urge to hit him.

‘Not when it does not generate the pulse. Your seismometers were also detecting slight tremors, and they continue to do so. These disturbances are not the normal shifting of the nearby faults. There is too much regularity, and there are no points of focus.’ She paused; if Aneka did not think Torem were capable of it, she would have thought it was for dramatic effect. ‘It is rather as if the entire area beneath us is coming alive.’

‘Perhaps it
was
for dramatic effect,’ Al suggested.

Adams’ response was immediate, and predictable. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘It is not impossible,’ Indaia replied calmly, ‘because it is happening.’ She turned her attention to Aneka. ‘I believe it would be in our best interests to examine my equipment prior to leaving the area in as expedient a manner as possible.’

Aneka pulled one of her pistols and made a show of checking the magazine. It was entirely unnecessary, but it stopped anything Adams might have said. ‘David, Delta, everyone has ten minutes to get their stuff together, then you take them to the shuttle. If Doctor Adams resists, stun him. Lieutenant Grumand, would you please arm yourself and come with Indaia and me?’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

‘But…’ Adams began.

Aneka slammed her pistol back into its holster. ‘We can monitor the instruments from orbit, Doctor, but I’m not endangering more people unnecessarily. End of discussion.’

~~~

They could see smoke rising before they got to the site where Indaia’s machine had been set up. It was thin, but it was still there, which seemed to indicate that something bad had happened.

‘The underground subsonic activity appears to have reduced in intensity,’ Al said as they moved closer. ‘It has not, however, stopped. The pattern corresponds to no known faults, and the form is extremely unusual for an earthquake swarm.’

‘Yeah… Jansen to Rice. Are you there, Lidia?’

‘Uh, yeah. We’re on our way to the shuttle now.’

‘Good. Is it possible for something to be living in the magma under the ground?’

‘No, of course not. You’re talking about something that could survive in temperatures of over a thousand Kelvin! Not even… Oh.’

Aneka frowned. ‘Lidia?’

‘Well, it’s theory, no one’s ever discovered an actual example, but silicon has some of the same chemical properties as carbon. Polymerised with oxygen or carbon it can form long chains that
could
be a basis for a living organism. But it’s highly unlikely that such a creature could exist for long outside a very high-temperature environment.’

They could see the large drum of the emitter now. Smoke was rising from holes in the sides, but Aneka was more concerned about the lumps of rock that were scattered around the area, all of them around ten centimetres in length and shaped like worms. They had not been there when they had set up the equipment, but they looked like the rocks Aneka had seen in the stairwell and her thermal overlay was reading them as hot.

‘Stop,’ she said aloud. Indaia and Grumand came to an immediate halt. Indaia looked toward Aneka questioningly, but Grumand lifted his carbine, scanning around for a threat. Aneka lifted one of her own pistols, using the sighting system to zoom in on the area around the emitter. There were dozens of holes in the ground, all of them punched up from below like the one in the lava and the base of their shelter.

‘Aneka?’ Lidia’s voice sounded concerned over the radio.

‘We’re on our way back,’ Aneka replied, and then she added, ‘I’ve seen enough, we’re leaving,’ out loud.

‘I do not understand,’ Indaia said. She actually managed to look a little perplexed.

‘You see those rocks on the ground around your equipment? The ones that look like worms? I think they
are
worms, of a sort. Some sort of silicon life form…’

‘The infrasound,’ Indaia said, her eyes widening. ‘Something like that would have no eyes, and infrared sensing would be out of the question, but magnetism and sound… My device attracted them.’

‘They’re obviously dangerous. They’re still hot and they must have been dead for an hour or more. We need to get back to the shuttle. Now.’

‘No argument here,’ Grumand stated, turning on his heel.

~~~

‘Okay,’ Aneka said, ‘so the lava plug in the mining office building starts to make some sense.’ They were back in the shuttle with the hatches sealed and she felt safe enough to take stock before lifting off.

Rice nodded. She was examining the video from Aneka’s memory showing the hot rocks that had once been searing hot worms able to melt through aluminium plate. ‘The ground would have been hotter with magma from the eruptions closer to the surface. The magma worms swarmed and burst through into the buildings. It’s quite possible that they live off sulphur compounds in the rocks, so they could use some sort of hydrogen sulphide jet as a defence mechanism. That’s what killed Mark.’

‘They couldn’t have
caused
the eruptions, could they?’ Bicks asked. ‘I mean, if they’re attracted to sound, maybe the smelting plants attracted a lot of them…’

‘Too small,’ Adams replied. ‘It would require millions of them. Billions! Shouldn’t we be leaving?’

‘You wanted to stay a quarter of an hour ago,’ Aneka reminded him, but she started toward the cockpit anyway.

‘That was
before
we had proof that this planet is infested with poisonous alien worms.’

‘Garnet Hyde to Ground Team. Come in, Ground Team.’ Drake’s voice over the speakers sounded urgent and Aneka grimaced.

What now?
‘Aneka here, Drake. What…?’

‘We have a vessel approaching. Military. We detected a drop ship leaving it about thirty seconds ago. Aneka, they’re…’ The connection dissolved into static and Aneka bolted toward the cockpit.

‘Everyone get strapped in,’ she yelled over her shoulder. ‘David, get on sensors and see if you can detect anything.’ She dropped into the pilot’s seat and began powering up the flight systems.

Grumand appeared behind her. ‘Pirates?’ he suggested.

‘What would pirates be doing out here?’

‘Looking for an easy meal ticket? Maybe they use this place as somewhere to hole up.’

‘Wouldn’t we have seen some sign of occupation? Doesn’t matter. I’m more worried about why the Hyde went silent.’

‘I’m picking up a lot of noise,’ Monkey said from the sensor console. ‘I think someone’s jamming the radio. So far no sign of anything dropping out of orbit.’

Aneka engaged the antigravity system and pushed the ship upward a few metres. A touch raised the landing gear and she fired up the main engines, blasting them forward at full throttle, though the inertial compensation took most of the bite out of it.

‘Aren’t you a little low?’ Grumand said.

‘There’s not much ground clutter to help, but if I stay low they may not detect us so easily. I have a few advantages when it comes to low-altitude flying.’ In-vision she could see the view from four forward-looking cameras, which gave her an unobstructed view of where the hull was in relation to the ground.

‘They’ll detect the exhaust from those engines quickly enough.’

‘Not where we’re going.’

‘And where are we going?’

Aneka grinned. ‘Somewhere hot.’

~~~

The only light came from the basic readouts on the consoles and the molten lava outside. They had crossed the terminator into night amid the low peaks of an active volcano arc and Aneka had set the shuttle down in one small area that seemed to be relatively safe, a small hill of old basalt surrounded on all sides by streams of molten rock.

‘I wasn’t picking up anything,’ Monkey said, his voice quiet. ‘Not a thing. Did they follow us?’

‘We don’t know that they had a fix before we left,’ Aneka replied. ‘Whatever it was, it must have had a stealth hull. Isn’t that a little high-tech for pirates?’

Grumand gave a slight shrug, his eyes fixed on the blackness outside. ‘Yes, but it’s not impossible. They usually scavenge whatever they can, refit with more weaponry. They could have got their hands on a military-grade drop ship. It just seems unlikely.’

‘Everything’s quiet back there,’ Delta said as she appeared from the back. ‘The outside temperature isn’t good though.’

‘We should be okay in here,’ Aneka replied. ‘Don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on going out.’

‘I hadn’t planned to.’ Her gaze swept out over the glowing landscape. ‘You think this’ll mask us from sensors?’