Echoes of Starlight Page 3

  As Walker watched, the screen along the top of his visor rotated, slowly covering a complete 360 degree arc.

  “No life-signs detected in range, however the buildings appear to be metal-polymer alloy and will greatly reduce sensor efficiency.”

  “What about anything else? Audio? Motion? Anything?” he asked as he swung his own circle with his eyes.

  “Negative,” Marti said. “We appear to be alone.”

  “Captain Walker, the main passenger concourse is on the other side of the building in front of you,” Kaycee said. “The loop tube has a terminal inside there and if anyone is around, that’s where they’d be.”

  “You don’t think there’d be any in the tower?” he asked.

  “Probably not. I am pretty sure it was all run by AA systems,” she said. “They even piloted most of the ships. I don’t think there were a handful of qualified shuttle pilots in the whole colony.”

  “I guess that makes it a better place to start,” he said. “Rene, you stay with the shuttle and we’ll foot it over and do a looksee.”

  “I don’t like this,” the engineer said. “You might need me and if there’s nobody around, then there’s no reason to post a guard.”

  “Engineer Pascalle is correct, his skills may be essential in restoring power or other systems,” Marti said. “I can maintain a teleoperation link to the shuttle and prevent anyone from stealing it.”

  “I keep forgetting you can be a thousand places at once,” Walker said, nodding.

  “Actually, there is a finite number of tasks I can do simultaneously, but my current threshold is well above three,” Marti said as it retracted its neck and moved off toward the building. “I do not think protecting the shuttle is a matter that will exceed my capacity.”

  The far less heat tolerant humans stayed in the shadow of the loop tube as Marti shot across the open space in a strange loping gallop. A gentle breeze kicked up wisps of fine dust as they walked. It only took two minutes to cover the distance, but by the time they got to the ground level entrance they were all covered in sweat.

  “The door mechanism is inoperative,” Marti said as they approached. “I am detecting no power inside the wall.”

  “How do we get in then?” Preston said. “I think we need to get out of this heat soon or we’ll be in trouble.”

  “We could cut through the wall and see if we can manually power the door with Marti’s power supply,” Rene suggested.

  “I do have external power adaptors for peripheral systems, so that would be a better solution than breaking a window,” it said.

  Walker nodded and stepped back to let the automech move into position.

  The engineer pointed at where to make the incision while one of the industrial level arms selected a cutting laser from its tool holster. A shower of molten sparks erupted from the wall as it went to work on the outer skin of the building.

  “Holy frak, I grew up in Bountiful so I’ve never felt heat like this,” Preston said as he stepped farther away from the cutting work. “I hate to sound like a whiffer but this is brutal.”

  “I thought you were from Mars,” Rene said.

  “Bountiful is on Mars. It’s outside of Lehi City,” he said.

  “If you say so,” he said over his shoulder as he supervised Marti. “You’ve never been to Earth have you?”

  Preston shook his head.

  “There were places before they started the geo-engineering projects that were this hot. Probably hotter,” he said.

  “He’s right,” Walker said. “On one of my school breaks I got to tour the largest ghost town in North America. It was a in the Great Western Desert. They called the place Phoenix.”

  “I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it,” Rene said. “It was named after an ancient story of a bird that lit itself on fire in order to be reborn.”

  “The name fit,” the captain said. “In the daytime sun, it was probably over fifty centigrade by mid morning. What I just couldn’t believe was that at one point, over twelve million people lived there.”

  “Why would they build a city in a place like that?” Preston said.

  “It wasn’t always that bad, but when the environmental collapse started, they had to abandon the city,” he said. “Phoenix is now sitting in the middle of an immense wasteland covered in sand and waiting to be reborn.”

  “It’s just sitting empty?” Rene asked as Marti reached in with its second heavy arm and bent the plating off the side of the building so it could access the internal hardware.

  “That was what amazed me the most,” Walker said. “There were a few thousand people still living there. Apparently their families had stayed all the way through from before they declared it uninhabitable. They adapted to an almost impossible situation but humans do that. Even here, they will adapt. I might have chosen a more hospitable place to build a colony, but I have no doubt that they’ll endure and prosper. Even on the doorstep of hell.”

  A sudden explosion of sparks and smoke flashed out of the wall and Marti’s automech body reeled back teetering on stiff legs.

  “What the frag?” Rene barked as he slapped at small burning spots in his thin worksuit. A dozen holes had singed their way through to his skin and he was blinking his eyes furiously.

  “Marti, are you still with us?” Walker asked as he watched the robot body twitch and shudder.

  “I am, although until the servo interface reboots, I am not able to access my body,” the AA said over the comlink from the ship. “I believe the appropriate word is, ouch?”

  “What happened?” Rene asked. He’d pulled out a handheld multi scanner and was looking at the screen while he shook his head.

  “I attempted to access the primary feed to the door hardware, and there is apparently a dead-to-ground power sink connected to the circuit. When I made the connection, it shorted my limiter out and tried to pull my total power reserve through the connection.”

  “Yah it looks like it,” Rene said. “It slagged the end of the connector as well as about twenty centimeters of the power conduit in the arm. It’s going to be down until we can get you a new piece manufactured.”

  “A dead-to-ground power sink? Like a short circuit?” the captain asked as he watched the automech body come back online in gradual increments. The legs extended and then flexed one at a time. When that finished, the arms gyrated through several cycles. All of them moved correctly, except the damaged one, and it stuck out like a dead stump.

  “I do not believe it was a short,” Marti said, its voice reappearing through the automech’s audio after the startup cycle had completed. “My connector is protected against that type of fault.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I do not know for sure,” it said. “The sensation was like my power core was being drained directly into a damping field of some type. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced.”

  “A damping field?” Rene asked.

  “Yes. The high and low sides of the circuits were held isolated so that the breakers would not engage, but an infinite load appeared at the connection. It was like being held open and forced to supply power without limit,” the AA said. “I lost fifty-five percent of my energy reserves before the connection failed. I was unable to affect any protection against this effect.”

  “What could cause that?” Ethan asked.

  “Unknown.”

  “Could it be a defensive system of some sort?” Rene asked. “Like a fail-safe locking mechanism.”

  “Also unknown.”

  “So how do we get inside?”

  “I no longer have a laser torch in my kit,” Marti said. “I could attempt to cut through the wall mechanically to get to the interior. I do have other tools that would be adequate for the task although they would be slower.”

  “Mechanically? You mean a saw?” Rene asked.

  “Essentially true.”

  “Then there’s a risk you would cut into a conduit that might be connected to this power sink,�
� the engineer said, shaking his head. “If the first short took you down by over half, I don’t want to be lugging your metal carcass back to the shuttle.”

  “Especially in this heat,” Preston said, nodding.

  “I agree,” Walker said. “I’d like to hold off on that idea until we know what we’re looking at. If this isn’t something that you recognize, then we might be looking at other surprises.”

  “That is a distinct possibility, Captain.”

  Chapter Four:

  The walk to town would have been unbearable except that Marti’s automech had four small platforms, complete with handrails, to stand on. The spider legs could carry them at almost ten kilometers an hour and the relative breeze as they passed through the air was surprisingly refreshing, if they overlooked the fact that the air felt like it was coming out of a smelter furnace. Fortunately, it didn’t smell like it.

  They followed the loop tube for all but the last kilometer where it disappeared into the ground at the edge of the colony. From there, they stayed as much as possible to the shadow of the low buildings. Unfortunately, the colonists had built the structures on the outskirts of town far apart, so there was little to do but to endure the baking between patches of shade.

  Most of the buildings on the edges of the colony were far less sophisticated than the landing center. That meant many of them had manual doors. Every time they approached one, they stopped to walk the perimeter and check for occupants. The first three were industrial warehouses where robotic additive printers stacked manufactured goods for automated pick-up and delivery. Silence echoed back at them when they entered and made it clear that if there had ever been humans who worked inside, they were nowhere to be found.

  The further they pressed toward the center of the colony the more certain they were that nobody was around. Nothing moved. Anywhere.

  “This is unnerving,” Ethan said as he hung on to Marti’s body with one arm and used a hand as a shade for his eyes so he could scan the distance.

  “This reminds me of the pics I’ve seen of the Burroughs Museum,” Rene said.

  “Yah, a bit,” Preston said, nodding and not looking up from the handhold in front of him. “Bountiful is in Chryse Planitia. We lived a few hundred klick from the Old Burroughs Dome so I went there a couple times as a kid.”

  “Really? That’s sweet beans. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit when I’m in Zone One,” Rene said.

  “After they invented Omnicyn, it would have been easy to reoccupy the colony. But it never happened,” he said, shrugging. “My father thought it was important to remember, but I think he actually did it to scare the jammies off us kids.”

  “Your dad sounds like a flatch,” Walker said.

  “I don’t think he understood how terrifying the echoes across the promenade were to us kids. My sisters used to have nightmares about it” he said. “I don’t know why people didn’t move back in, but some crazy old chancellor decided that as her last act in office she’d declare it a monument. They pumped it full of nitrogen and now you have to wear a breathing mask to go in.”

  “That might be a bit creepifying,” Rene said. “At least they cleaned it up before they sealed it.”

  “True, but what bothers me is that there are no bodies here either,” he said. “Who cleaned them up?”

  “Hopefully, they’re not dead,” the captain said, tapping his ear to remind the med-tech that the passengers aboard the Olympus Dawn were still listening.

  “You’re right,” the engineer said. “Maybe they’ve all holed up somewhere and they’ve managed to keep the power working. Or if they’re in an underground shelter that might be a lot cooler too.”

  “The only major shelters are under the buildings in the civic center,” Kaycee said, confirming his suspicion that they were still on the line. “And under the hospitals.”

  “Copy that,” Ethan said, shooting Preston a ‘told you so’ glare. “We haven’t gotten that far. At the rate we’re progressing if we don’t skip most of these smaller buildings, we won’t get there before it gets too hot to work outside. We’ll have to find shelter soon.”

  “It’s been hotter inside the buildings than outside,” Preston said.

  “That says the power has been down for a while,” Elias said. Apparently, he’d had his legal ass handed to him by Leigh. He sounded much less hostile than he had before they left the ship. “The buildings were all built with heavy passive solar resistance. It would take days for them to heat to a point where’re they’re hotter than the outside. Even with no power, for the heat to have penetrated to that point you’re talking at least a week.”

  “A residence, Captain,” Marti said, slowing down and indicating a building with its one remaining fine motor arm.

  “Let’s scan it,” he said. “With eyeballs.”

  “I’m detecting no life signs in the structure,” the AA said as it stopped at the end of a narrow walkway that ran up to the building.

  “I’m not surprised, but let’s look around anyway,” he said, jumping off the automech platform and kicking up a small cloud of dust as he hit the sidewalk. “There may be some clues as to where they went and why. “Rene, you and Marti see if you can work your way around in back and Preston and I will go up to the door.”

  The med-tech eased himself down to the ground and shook his head while Marti skittered off with the engineer. “Frak, I just can’t do this,” he groaned as he leaned forward to put his hands on his knees.

  “Are you alright?” Ethan asked, leaning down beside him.

  He shook his head, then flipped his visor up and squinted toward the building. His skin was dry and red.

  “Kaycee are you able to see my personal optic?” the captain asked.

  “Yah,” she said.

  “What am I looking at here?”

  “It looks like he’s going hyperthermic,” she said. His body’s not regulating his internal temperature by sweating.”

  “They don’t teach sweating on Mars,” Preston said. He tried to straighten up but pitched back. If Walker hadn’t been expecting it, he’d have dropped clear over.

  “What can I do?” he asked, grabbing the med-tech by his arm and stabilizing him on his feet.

  “Get him into shade somewhere and soak him down,” she said. “He’s got to get cooled off.”

  “How much time do we have?” he asked, looking around for a place he could get him out of the sun.

  “Not a lot,” she said, her voice made it clear she was serious.

  Looping an arm around Preston, he propped him up and dragged him toward the residence. His legs buckled several times, but they managed to get to the thin strip of shade along the west edge of the building. The wall was hot to the touch, but he leaned him back against it anyway and pulled out his waterbag.

  “Should I just pour this over him?” Walker asked.

  “Yah, try to make sure you soak as much of his torso and head as possible and then get air moving over him.

  Preston hissed as the water drenched him, blinking several times, and shaking his head like he was drunk. His slowly swinging eyes made it clear he was having trouble thinking, and he drooped back against the wall.

  Marti appeared around the corner of the building and skidded to a stop beside them. “I can take him back to the shuttle and then come back for you. With only one passenger I can get him there in eight minutes tops.”

  “You need to do that,” she said. “The shuttle’s cool. It will help bring his core temp down.”

  “I will come back for you as quickly as I can,” Marti said, picking the limp med-tech up by the front of the shirt with one of the heavy arms. It swung him into position and anchored him down with the other arm.

  “Where’s Rene?”

  “Waiting outside the back door.” The AA switched from audio to the comm link as it spun away at a much higher clip than they had used coming in. “The back door was standing open, and we were about to report to you when the priorities changed.”
>
  “Understood,” Walker said, glancing at his remaining water supply. Less than a liter left. “We’ll recon the house and wait for you to come back for us.”

  “Copy,” Marti said. It was already out of sight except for the cloud of dust that was billowing behind it as it scampered down the road toward the landing center.

  Skirting the edge of the building and pushing through a gate into a private yard, he found Rene squatting in the shade of a small bushy tree. It was the first plant they’d seen on Starlight and it was covered with large red brown fruit of some kind.

  “So will he be alright?” he asked as the captain came over and crawled into the shade beside him.

  “I don’t know. This is about as far from Mars as you can get. I should have thought about it, but his body isn’t going to do as well with the heat.”

  Rene nodded. He was holding one of the hard shelled fruit in his hand and rolling it over. “I wonder if this is edible?”

  “Yes, it is,” Kaycee said. “It’s called a pomegranate. The trees grew in arid places on Earth and we brought them here when we first set up the colony because we thought they might adapt well.”

  “Do you bite through the shell?” he asked.

  “No you break it open and eat the seeds inside. It is juicy and high in vitamin C, and a bunch of other stuff that’s good for you,” she said. “I haven’t had one in a couple years now. I love them.”

  “How do you know if it’s ripe?”

  “I always just cracked one open and tasted it. It’s tart and a little sweet if it’s ripe. Maybe like a cranberry.”

  “A what?” he asked.

  “Don’t be a coward, just crack it open and try it.”

  “I think I’ll pass for now,” the captain said, plucking two of them and tucking them into his belt pouch.

  Rene sighed heavily and made intentional eye contact before he tapped his collar mic to turn off the comlink. He waited for Ethan to follow suit before he said, “I think we might have a body in there.”

  “Why?”