Burnt Ice (7 page)

Marko could see teams of recovery
troops slashing open the alien bodies, searching for the Soul Savers that every
one of them had in an almost indestructible ceramic disc embedded in the backs
of their skulls. It was one of the better parts of being in the military or
being a military contractor. One of the terms of employment was that they all
had Soul Savers fitted and maintained for the rest of their lives, at the
expense of the Administration. Most of the civilian population couldn’t afford
the very expensive molecular chain-linked hardware and backup systems
supporting their use. Lotteries to win Soul Savers went on every week and some
people went to great lengths to get them. This bothered the more socially
conscious among the military.

Looking around as they jogged
across to the waiting Sunfish, the crew could see that the aliens and the
actions to battle them had seriously pasted the place. Everything was damaged
and would take enormous effort to fix. The beautiful beaches were strewn with
many hundreds of alien bodies, together with the wreckage of walkers and
aircraft. Great lumps of the native coral-like creatures from the sea had been
thrown up on the beaches by the Orbital bombardments and were lying in the
sunlight, slowly dying. The kiosks where Marko had enjoyed lunch were smashed
and strewn about the beach. Looking further he saw that the vegetation had been
trashed. Most of the trees, native and introduced, were looking very much the
worse for it. Native scavengers — most of which Marko had not seen before —
were starting to arrive by air and sea for the free feast. From the Games Board’s
news bulletins he had learnt that only about half of the three hundred and
ninety-seven confirmed dead had so far had their Soul Savers recovered;
anything that came within two clicks of the combat area that was not human was
getting killed as well, so that any local scavengers would not ingest the
missing Soul Savers.

Marko could see whole sections of
semi-intelligent hover drone Segers being deployed offshore, firing munitions
into the sea to kill the native predators. Waxeye drones orbited overhead,
shooting the larger local birds and flying reptiles. This continuing carnage of
the native wildlife left Marko feeling sick. He shook his head and caught Jan’s
eye as she also watched, saddened as another beautiful raptor-like creature was
blown to pieces above them. One of its wings landed beside her. She scooped it
up, looking back at Marko with raised eyebrows. He smiled quickly and gave her
a thumbs up as they climbed on board the Sunfish.

She passed the piece to Marko as
she brushed past him, heading forwards to the flight deck. He quickly dropped
it into a small chiller, along with his drinks, next to his engineering control
board. Then he concentrated on fully powering up the ship. Preflights had been
completed by the ground crew and the captain had been given the supposed
emergence point of the aliens. Jan lifted the ship. As they flew due east, a
formation of six Hawk combat aircraft slid in position as escort. After looking
at his tactical screen he saw that eighteen Marlin one-man combat subs were
loaded on launch rails under the three lifters following behind them.

The news feeds on Marko’s
faceplate were faster now and kept coming in via the Games Board monitors,
which had purchased combat unit data feeds. Marko’s section became the centre
of attention. Each of them, and the eighteen Marlin pilots, had their profiles
on the AV feeds, although Jan’s did not seem correct at all. Marko was about to
query this when Harry arrived at his station with a handwritten note informing
him not to mention a thing about Jan. He showed Fritz as well and they turned
to each other and shrugged as Harry left.

Fritz scribbled across the note: ‘We
need our own comms system. I have some ideas. How about it?’

Marko nodded. He looked at the
elapsed time — over an hour at high speed. He figured it was time to establish
comms with the Marlins, as the emergence point was coming up fast. He sent an
instruction across to Fritz and linked them into the captain’s comms board.

‘Jan, orbit us at five hundred
metres. Marko, deploy the mapping buoys.’

‘Surface buoys away boss. Data
coming through. Series of seamounts similar to the one surveyed by us to the
southeast, depth to seamount peak one hundred fifty metres, optimum insertion
point seven hundred metres at our twelve o’clock.’

The captain nodded, saying, ‘Roger.
Take us in, Jan. What the hell are those things following us?’

‘New type of Games Board monitor,
by the look of them. All kitted out in black, and a lot sleeker than any I’ve
seen before. Shit, I wonder if these are the new-generation Expeditors they’ve
been talking about? They appear to be armed too. I haven’t seen that before.’

‘Great. Just what we need, Harry.
I hate being the centre of attention.’

Everyone agreed.

There was none of the finesse of
the other times when they had used the sub. Jan just aimed the Sunfish at the
ocean’s surface and they dived in. The transition was brutal — harsh on the
machine and its occupants. She powered up the propulsion systems and they dived
towards the seafloor under full power with the Marlins slicing down through the
surface to spread around them, now slaved to Jan’s every action. Wherever she
pointed the Sunfish they followed in an optimum escort pattern.

‘Nil target biologicals in the
vicinity,’ Marko reported.

‘OK. Commence sweeps, Jan.’

They spiralled around each of the
four seamounts over the next five hours, logging the layouts, farms, buildings
and structures, this time all still showing signs of habitation. It had all
obviously been built by an intelligent species.

Harry barked out, ‘Boss, how the
hell did everyone miss this? OK, we are six hundred clicks from base, but all
the same ... Nova Hawaii has been established for, what, three years now? The
mining operation, from start-up, for the last eight years? This is nuts. An
intelligent species that we thought was long gone. Marko, Fritz, start
overlaying everything we have on the old stuff on this lot. See what you can
come up with. And I think that we can talk freely, people, as I see that we
have no outgoing transmissions. What’s the bet that the boys and girls of
Admin, with the GB in full agreement, are creating an alternative of what we
are doing for public consumption?’

‘Don’t think that anyone is going
to take you up on any wager over that, Harry.’

Looking across at his crewmate,
Marko could see Harry was pissed off. He didn’t blame him — he felt very much
the same. Humankind had been searching for intelligent alien species for such a
long time. There had been rumours of contact for as long as any of them could
remember, but no one, as far as the published news was concerned, had ever laid
eyes on a intelligent, actual alien yet. Plenty of human types who came close,
but nothing truly alien. The evidence from a few of the planets that humankind
had been on was that intelligent life had once been present, but there had also
been a series of gamma ray bursts from exploding stars which had wiped out
great chunks of life inside the area that was called the Sphere of Humankind.
At fifty light years, the sphere was pretty big, but only the tiniest fraction,
when it came to the overall size of the Milky Way.

Fritz said, ‘Um, guys, this is
new. The basic shape of everything is very similar. It’s like two different
civilisations based on the same theme, but thousands of years apart. The probes
are saying that this area has only been under development for hundreds of the
local years. Maximum. They are either fanatical about cleaning, which is
possible, or they have not been here all that long. Look at the margins around
the sea farms. The regrowth is the key. I’m sending a drone to have a closer
look. Can I go ahead and start sending drones into some of the interiors?’

‘Go ahead, Fritz.’

There was silence until the
drones began sending back images of the interior. ‘Tech everywhere, boss,’
Fritz reported. ‘There’s going to be hell to pay over this. No one gets away
with wiping out a whole species that looks like it was here a very long time
ago.’

‘Don’t count on it, Fritz. Money
is more important and that Helium 3 is worth a hell of a lot of money.
Actually, Fritz, set up a small breaker. See if you can hack the monitor’s
outgoing signal. That’ll show us soon enough how they are going to play this.’

‘Drones entering the main
portals. Martial society. Lots of sculptures and murals in the classic hero
stance, no matter what the species. Yeah, a whole city-state in there. Also
goes a long way down. Heaps of tech. Check out the water scrubbers. Shit, we
wiped everything, didn’t we? Just a helluva lot of dead critters of all ages.
Fact is, there’s a helluva lot of dead everything. Low radiation residual. The
big boys and girls hit this with a new toy, Harry?’

‘No comment, Fritz,’ said Harry. ‘These
things attacked us, remember. No attempt at discussions or anything. They would
have known that we were here. See that? A water-to-air craft. They knew about
flight and they knew about the stars as well. Wow, look at that ceiling. Where
the hell is that? Fritz, get some scanning high-res shots of that. My guess is
that it’s what the night sky looks like somewhere else. I can’t see any
similarities to the one above us. No moon featured, either.’

‘OK, people,’ said the captain. ‘Minds
on the job. Is this lot still a threat? Answer: no. Does their remaining tech
still pose a threat? That’s what we need to start finding out.’

Over the next twenty-four hours
they searched everything they could for recognisable weapons, ramping up their
bioware so they did not get overly fatigued. The captain kept seconding Marlins
as couriers to send large amounts of tech and equipment to the surface. The
little subs would take items as directed, grasp them in their deployable waldo
arms and mechanical hands and then pass the items up to the waiting lifters
orbiting above them.

‘Chalk one up to the species
killers. Every one of the octopoids is dead,’ said Harry, shaking his head.

The size of the alien city
steadily grew as they mapped the whole area and, looking at what had been left
behind, the crew estimated that the attacking force would have had some
thirty-two hundred individual soldier types. They found references to them in a
nursery with what looked like heroic soldier images on the walls, arguing among
themselves if this was a classic intelligent colony mapped on a type of marine
termite. They kept looking for the class structure and it eluded them. There
seemed to be different types, but how they bred was a mystery, as all the
samples they took from the bodies seemed to be the same.

‘So how come the different types,
if their DNA was the same?’ said Marko.

‘Oh shit!’ Fritz exclaimed.

‘What’s up, Fritz?’ said Harry.

‘It’s armour.’

‘What?’

‘The soldier types have a
different type of body covering. Look around. They have different garments but
not what we would see as normal clothing. Could it denote their class or
position? Look at the nurseries. The adult ones have the same style of outer
covering. Look at what we presumed to be the administration types. Different
again. The ones that we saw in what is the hospital — three different types.
And they’re all dead anyway. No obvious aural capability or speech organs. They
communicate through light. Think about the surface troops as they were
fighting. The skin colours were changing, which begs the question of how would
a language evolve.’

‘Focus, Fritz.’

‘Yeah, sorry, boss. We have been
sampling the bodies all through the eyes, right? Immediate point of entry for a
sampler. They are all the same. We need to find a retirement home to compare
the residents with the little ones in the nursery. That’s the real shape of
them.’

The captain jumped as if he had
been hit.

‘Bloody hell! In that case the
soldiers are carrying a lot of tech that is thought to be flesh? Oh crap!’ He
opened up the comms link and hailed the
Gamma
Orbital.
‘Gamma
AI.
Code 9, code 9! The prisoner aliens you have — they have roughly twice their
body mass in tech. Isolate them immediately!’

‘This is
Gamma.
I’ll patch
you directly to the MP frigate.’