Echoes of Starlight Read online

  Her eyes flashed for an instant before she visibly bit down on whatever had sparked her. Instead she just nodded.

  “If it was a flare, they’d all be in the shelters anyway,” Elias said. He reached out and squeezed her hand. She jerked her arm free and glared. She didn’t appear to be in the mood for his reassurance.

  “Shelters?” Nuko asked, making sure that Ethan registered that she’d noticed the strange interaction too.

  “There are shelters under the community center buildings and all the major outlying facilities,” Kaycee said. “When they planned out the colony, the designers accounted for space weather possibilities.”

  “Would these shelters be shielded?” Marti asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, glancing at Elias.

  “I am sure they would be,” Rene confirmed, although his voice sounded less than confident. “A few meters of soil would be enough for all but the most intense issues.” He drummed his fingers on the edge of his control station for several seconds while he chewed over the possibilities. “If the shelters did have any extra heavy shielding, that could explain the lack of RF and EM.”

  “So they might just be hiding out.” Kaycee nodded.

  “Don’t you think they’d have stuck their heads up to look around and turn the lights back on by now?” the captain said. “If this happened long enough ago that the stellar background levels have returned to normal, they’ve been holed-up for a while.”

  “How long could it have been?” Nuko asked.

  “When was the last time either of you had any comm with the colony?” Ethan asked.

  “I received a message from my family the day before I boarded,” Elias said.

  “And I sent one from Armstrong Station, the day we got the cargo loaded,” the doctor said.

  “I don’t remember linking one back to you after we made way,” Nuko said.

  Kaycee shook her head.

  “It’s more than a six day transmission delay from Zone One to here,” Ethan said. “If we assume the reason you never got a reply was because they were already hiding in the shelters, then the window of this happening is no less than seventeen days ago.”

  “And based on my message it can’t be more than thirty days ago,” Elias said. He unfolded from his chair and paced along the upper platform of the ConDeck.

  “I don’t know how long they’d have supplies in the shelters,” Kaycee said. “Probably not much longer than a month, best case.”

  “That would be my thinking too,” Elias said, nodding.

  “We need to get down there,” she said.

  “Before I can possibly say yes to that, we need to know what’s going on,” the captain said, shaking his head. “What other explanations could knock the entire colony offline?”

  “And the beacon,” Nuko added.

  He nodded. “And the beacon.”

  “Wager would be it has to be massive hardware failure, and not something biological,” Rene said. “Equipment keeps working even without people to notice.”

  “If a robot works in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it …” Ethan said.

  “It still keeps making noise,” the engineer finished. “That leans me into the idea that somebody shut it all down.”

  “But why?” Elias asked, stopping at the end of one of his orbits and glaring at the room in general.

  “That brings us back to going down there,” Kaycee said, standing up like she meant to leave immediately. “How soon can we—”

  “We can’t,” the captain said. “I would be willing to go down and take a look around, but you are paying passengers and that means I’m responsible to keep you safe until we officially arrive at our destination.”

  “You are fragging joking, aren’t you?” she asked, glancing at Nuko and Rene as if to make sure he wasn’t serious. “We’re here. This is the destination we contracted.”

  “No,” he said, watching Elias focus his glare in his direction. “Until my Triple-C declares the contract complete, I can’t let you go down there even if I wanted to.”

  “That’s absurd,” she said.

  “I’m sure it feels that way to you,” he said, shrugging. “Leigh has to make the call and I’m certain she will not waive the liability clause in your transport contracts until we’re sure there’s nothing dangerous happening on the surface.”

  “Captain Walker, you cannot be saying you will hold us here against our will,” Elias said, enunciating every word making him sound more menacing than he already was. “This is our home. We have rights under Coalition law and you really don’t want to be crossing that line, considering how that would go for you.”

  “If you want to take this up with Leigh Salazar, I am sure she’ll explain the legality, and my rights to make this call,” he said.

  “I will do that,” he said, his voice descending toward a growl. Pivoting, he disappeared through the door.

  “Ethan, please,” Kaycee said. “He’s right, this is our home. We’ve both got family in the colony.”

  “I understand that, but I just can’t,” he said. “I know that’s frakked, but I have to put your safety first.”

  She shook her head. “My whole life is down there. It’s everything I’ve spent my life working on. You can’t seriously expect me to sit here and wait.”

  “I’m sorry Doctor, but that is exactly what I expect you to do,” he said, trying to sound firm. “You’re welcome to stay here on the ConDeck and monitor the situation as long as you don’t do anything to countermand my instructions to Nuko.”

  “But—”

  “Or you can go talk to my Triple-C and see how truly inflexible she can be,” he said. “The choice is yours.”

  Turning his back on her he stepped over to Nuko. “Let Leigh know Pruitt’s on his way to twist her arm, and that I already explained the answer to him.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “The ship is yours. Under no circumstances are you to let either of them push you into anything, nor are you to let them distract you. I don’t know what we’re going to find down there but it stinks hard. I want the best possible assessment of what I’m up against once we land.”

  “Yah, boss. Cando,” she said. “Then you are going down?”

  He nodded.

  “Leigh’s not going to like that, either,” she said.

  “It’s a no risk excursion,” he said. “Not likely to be a biohazard, so she can’t get too bent.”

  “Hopefully.” She shrugged. “It’s your skin, but she is a Triple-C so it’s a fair odds guess how her brain works.”

  Squeezing her shoulder he winked. “Marti, saddle up one of your walkabouts with good eyes and load it into shuttle-one,” he said. “Rene, you’re with me.”

  “We ought to take Preston too,” the engineer suggested, getting up and heading toward the door. He paused to wait for an answer before leaving.

  “Your med-tech?” Kaycee said. “Take me. I’m a lot better qualified than Reed is, and I know the layout of the colony.”

  “That may be true on both counts, but we’ve already covered this and I won’t risk letting you go down there until we know what’s going on,” he said, turning toward her and crossing his arms as he studied her face. “You want to do something? Sit down at one of the consoles and help Nuko and Marti figure out what we might be looking at. It’s probably nothing, but I don’t want to have my eggs hanging in the wind.”

  “I’d be better with eyes on the ground beside you,” she said.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. She just wasn’t going to give it up. “We’ll maintain a constant optic channel on the comm and you’ll be able to watch every move we make. It’ll almost be as good as being there with us.”

  She sighed, but nodded and took the engineer’s vacant seat. “You’ll need to move fast once you get on the surface,” she said. “I’m not used to the view from orbit, but the sun looks to be close to coming up.”

  “Local sunrise is in thirteen minutes,” Marti confirm
ed. “Transit time to the landing center is fifty-seven minutes.”

  “It’s important for you to remember Starlight’s an extreme desert,” she explained. “It will be twenty to thirty centigrade as the sun comes up, but because the air is so dry, it heats fast. Within an hour of sunrise it will be forty-five. By morning dark, it will be over fifty. It’s a pity that you can’t make it down there before sunrise.”

  He whistled. “Morning dark?”

  “There’s almost an hour of eclipse every day-cycle as the colony passes through the shadow of Shadetree. It cools things off a little and you get some amazing views of the inner planets and the stars, but when the sun comes out from behind the other planet it gets hotter than frak before nightfall.”

  “‘Hotter than frak’ means what?” he asked.

  “Over sixty centigrade,” she said. “You can survive that outside for a short time, if you’re used to it. But you aren’t, and won’t. So honestly, don’t even plan to try. If the power really is down, there will be no climate control in any of the buildings, so you’re better off staying in the shade outside where the breeze will help. But you really need to be back aboard your shuttle before the eclipse ends if you can.”

  “Will the environmental controls in an EVA suit keep us from baking?” he asked, turning to Rene who was still standing by the door and looked like he’d already started sweating. For practice.

  He shook his head. “It might for a little while, but I don’t think so. The cooling in a standard suit isn’t designed to unload heat into an environment that hot.”

  “That means no on the EVA suits,” Walker said, frowning.

  “The air is ultra-dry, so evaporation is your friend,” Kaycee said. “If you get into a crisis, you can soak your clothes with water and that will cool you off some. It won’t be comfortable, but it will buy you some extra time if you need it.”

  “Is there anything else we need to worry about?” the captain asked. “Maybe giant worms that poop purple poison or something?”

  “You have to watch out for your eyes,” she said. “The light is only about ninety percent as bright as Earth’s sun, but it’s heavy on the low red end of the visible spectrum. It carries a lot more energy than it looks like it does, but what you have to realize is that when your eyes start hurting, you need to get into deep shade and give them a chance to rest. If you don’t, you will get what we call ocular migraines, and they can be crippling.”

  “How long does it take to get to that point?” Rene asked.

  “You’ll have at least a half day-cycle outside, give or take,” she said, shrugging. “Some people are more susceptible than others. A mild headache will be the first symptom that you’re getting into trouble. Your eyes aren’t designed to focus the red wavelength light so they have to strain to see clearly. You might not feel it coming on until you’ve reached the point of being in trouble, either. You’ll need to pay close attention.”

  “Will EVA suit visors help?” Rene asked. “I could jiffy-rig something.”

  “A bit,” she said. “They design most suit helmets to filter out the blue spectrum light since it damages the eyes faster, but it would be better than nothing. If you can get your hands on the local eyewear, it provides much better protection against chromatic aberration, and will keep you from going sky-blind right away.”

  “Starlight sounds like such a wonderful place,” Walker said. “Why the hell would anyone build a colony here?”

  Chapter Three:

  Slicing down through the atmosphere, Captain Walker manually piloted the shuttle. If this had been a routine landing, he’d have let Marti drive them to the landing center, but he wanted to make a fast pass over the colony on the way down and if he sat in the nose chair, he’d get the best view. Preston and Rene sat in the seats behind him and stared out the side windows looking for any signs of life.

  He made a low approach and banked hard around a small ridge that protected the landing pads from what looked like an endless sea of sand. Without approach control markers to help him navigate, he almost overshot the terminal before he snapped into a stern flip and dropped down hard toward the landing apron.

  The sun was three hours above the horizon and shadows arced across the landscape. Even from a thousand meters, they could see heat waves shimmering off any surface exposed to the direct sunlight.

  Angling the shuttle toward the shadow of the loop tube, he remembered Kaycee’s warning. If he wanted to be able to touch the door mechanism to get back in, he’d need to park out of the sunlight if possible. She said the locals called it the art of shade conservation.

  “What do you notice?” Ethan asked as he extended the gear and made his final descent.

  “That it already looks hot?” Preston said.

  “Of course it looks hot. You’re from Mars. Everything looks hot to you,” Rene said.

  “No, look around,” the captain said. “What don’t you see that you should?”

  “People? But Kaycee said it’s hot, so they’d all be inside,” the med-tech said.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. Where are the landers?”

  “It’s hot,” he said again. “Maybe they keep them in hangars.

  Ethan rolled his eyes and sighed. “That’s possible, but do you see any hangar buildings?”

  “No, but it’s hot. Maybe they’re underground.”

  Walker glared hard enough it bounced off the forward window and almost flattened Preston in his seat. He heard him flinch, or maybe it was Rene trying not to laugh.

  “What about it Kaycee?” he asked as he cut power and let the shuttle settle on the tarmac. “Are there underground hangars?”

  “I’ve been studying at Armstrong for a while,” she said, coming back over the comm. “When I left I hadn’t heard anything about plans for underground hangers.”

  “Then where are all the ships?” he asked.

  “There should be at least a squadron of orbital transports,” Rene said.

  “Maybe a couple pleasure craft too,” Ethan said. You did say there were some affluent families here didn’t you?”

  “Yah,” she confirmed.

  “Is there somewhere else they’d have parked them?” he asked.

  “There are mining operations scattered all over the hemisphere, but most of them are small,” she said.

  “And no other cities?” Rene asked.

  “This is the only one with a landing center,” she said.

  “There’s been no comm from the tower either,” the captain said, swinging around and standing up in the small cabin.

  “You didn’t expect any did you?” Rene asked.

  “No, but I don’t like this. I didn’t see anything moving on the flyover, did you two?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “We’ve also got no one coming out to say hello,” Ethan said. “It’s not like they wouldn’t have seen us coming in.”

  When the outer door of the lock opened and the first blast of hot air washed over them even Walker gasped in shock. He glared at Preston before he had a chance to say it again.

  “Marti, are you ready to unpack your skin?”

  “Standing by for you to vacate the airlock, Captain,” it said. “Until you go outside, there isn’t room for me to join you.”

  Let’s do this,” Walker said, grabbing a visor out of the tool locker and slipping the band over his head. He jumped down to the surface and flipped the faceplate down. A small heads up linked him to one of the optics on Marti’s automech and he blinked in surprise. “Nice touch Rene.”

  “I grabbed the whole comm-kit when I jerked the visors out of the EVA suit helmets,” the engineer said. “I figured it would be nice to share integrated communications if things get sticky.”

  “You don’t mind us riding parasite on your eyes, do you Marti?”

  “Of course not, Captain,” Marti said over both the comm and through the audio on its body simultaneously.

  Walker spun around in time to watch th
e mechanical extension of the AA unlimber itself as it emerged through the airlock and onto the ground. Marti had a collection of bodies to choose from since it spent the majority of its share of their earnings on new personal hardware.

  As it unfolded its legs and stood up, it bore an uncanny resemblance to a spider fused with a vaguely human shaped torso. It had a teardrop shaped head, mounted on a giraffe neck with a sensor ring that made it look like it was wearing a sombrero.

  As far as the captain knew this was the first time this particular automech had seen use. In fact, since it had already been stored in its holding locker on the shuttle when they’d boarded, he’d not seen it before at all.

  “Is that a Gendyne 6000?” he asked as he watched the four arms rotate around on their control rings to what he assumed to be the front of the body. “When did you pick this one up?”

  “I acquired it during our last maintenance at Alpha Five,” it said. Marti’s usual female voice sounded more than a little disconcerting coming from this mechanical behemoth. “There was a robotics distributor there when we arrived and I got an exceptional deal. They included the two extra fine motor manipulators and the extended sensor kit in the base price, so I could not resist.”

  “Sweet beans,” Preston said. “But can we talk about your sexy hardware later? If you don’t mind, I’d like to get inside somewhere cool. I think my earwax is melting.”

  “Marti, let’s do a quick scan here first and then we’ll pick our target,” Walker said. “Do you have bio-sign gear on that fancy rig of yours?”

  “I do,” Marti said, extending its legs out to form a wide base and telescoping the neck up almost five meters.

  “That’s a trip,” Rene said as he stumbled backward. “Don’t watch the optic in full screen on your visor while the neck is doing that.”

  “My range on biological detection is less than 1,000 meters depending on environmental interference,” it said. “Inside a structure it might be substantially reduced.”