I stared at her in disbelief. “But they said both K’leven and its moon have been dead a thousand years!”
She shrugged. “Hey, every military wants its weapons built to last longer than the targets they’re used on. It looks like our lobster people got their money’s worth. According to what the Gibbon’s guts can predict, the area where the expedition is working is going to get hammered with half a dozen chunks of rock weighing a few hundred tons each less than four hours from now.”
I don’t know which I found scarier; what she had just said, or the matter-of-fact way she said it. “So what do we do, ma’am?” I stammered.
She squinted up at me. “First quit ma’aming me every vulking time I turn around!”
I went to parade rest, head bowed meekly. “Yes’m.”
“As for what we do about it, I plan to stay right here, monitor the situation, and have the Gibbon somewhere other than geosynched between the moon and ground zero when the rocks start to fly.”
She stood, looked me up and down. The expression on her face said she wasn’t too excited by what she was seeing. “And you,” she said, “Are going down to get our passengers the hell out of there.”
Shortly afterward I was sitting in the cockpit and at the controls of the Gibbon’s shuttle, rerunning the preflight checks as I waited for Captain Chandaveda to return.
Saying that I was a bit nervous would be placidifying my mental state by a twitch or twice. In the five minutes since the captain had left me there to wait while she went to get something, I’d made two dry and fruitless trips to the head.
When I first learned that I’d been sentenced to a Prezzie ship, and that while I would technically be first officer—the entire crew consisted of myself and the captain—I’d envisioned endless scutwork as my inglorious and undeserved fate.
There had been scutwork, of course, but not quite as much as I’d expected. Spit and polish wasn’t Sara fina Chandaveda’s style. Her attitude seemed to be that if something worked more or less properly, leave it the hell alone.
One thing I hadn’t expected was this sort of sudden serious responsibility. JO’s were supposed to watch and learn and leave the critical work to more experienced hands.
“I can do this,” I kept muttering. I was the one who had taken the Prezzies and their equipment down in the first place, so piloting the shuttle was nothing new The only difference this time was that their lives depended on me getting them back off again. I repeated my mantra and began another check.
“OK, Ornish,” Captain Chandaveda said, nearly making me jump out of my skin. Those bare feet had let her sneak up on me like a ninja. “Here’s one last piece of equipment for you.”
I stood up and faced her, almost falling back into my chair when I saw that she had a gun. It was old and big and chemo-mechanical, and it appeared extremely deadly.
“Ma’am?” I asked, my voice an octave or two higher than normal.
“Just take it,” she said tartly as she offered it to me butt-first. She scowled. “They still give weapons training at the Academy, don’t they?”
“Yes’m,” I answered, taking it and wondering if this was the time to mention that I had only passed the course because my instructor had taken pity on me. I was an ace at weapons safety and maintenance. The problem came when I actually tried to hit something. I checked the safety, then looked around for a safe place to put it.
“I want you to carry it, Ornish,” she said, sounding more than a little exasperated. “Put it in your waistband under your jacket. Keep it hidden and on you at all times. It might just come in handy if they try to pull an Alexandrian Librarian on you.”
“A what? I don’t—”
She sighed. “Just do it, Ornish. Now get your ass in gear and get the job done. I’m counting on you.” She turned on her bare heel and headed for the airlock, glancing back over her shoulder just as she went through. She gave me an odd look, then said, “Be sure and bring them back alive!”
“What?” I called, but the lock door was closing between us.
All I could do was jam the gun into my waistband as ordered, sit back down in the pilot’s seat and initiate separation. The clamps released, there was a slight lurch, and my rescue mission began.
The shuttle’s under-juiced and over-aged gravitic propulsion systems gave it a fairly limited payload capacity and speed; like everything else they owned, it seemed to be a fifth generation hand-me-down. Ferrying the Prezzies and all their gear down to K’leven had taken three trips, and given me plenty of time for sightseeing.
But this trip I was seeing the planet’s battered surface with new eyes. The closer I got, the more chilling the picture became.
When Captain Chandaveda had said that the war which had been fought between the inhabitants of the planet and its major satellite had been their own personal apocalypse, she hadn’t been hyping the scale and scope of destruction below me. Deep craters pocked K’leven’s surface, some of them still fuming sullenly these thousand years later, the wounds deep enough to have created volcanic vents. There were fissures and chasms large enough to swallow the Gibbon whole, the skeletal remains of rivers boiled dry and seas turned to ashy mud. Of cities, or roads, or other fingerprints of civilization there was not the faintest trace. It had been a living world, and now it was not. The difference, and just how awful the changeover had been, was finally coming clear to me.
It was hard to believe that anything could have survived intact through such a deadly barrage. But something had. Buried deep under the splintered stump of what had once been a mountain there was a thick-walled vault containing objects which the K’leven had felt worthy of such a calculated attempt at preservation. The Spyter which had first scouted out this system discovered this hidden repository on its half light-speed scan-run through. When it had come back Sol at the end of its two year mission and disgorged the information gathered on its travels through uncharted systems, evidence of this vault had come to light. The Prezzies had immediately mounted an expedition to investigate. That’s what Prezzies do.
I had eagerly awaited the first images of what was inside, imagining gold and jewels and priceless works of art, or strangely beautiful alien machinery which might give us whole new technologies. When Dr. Xan and his colleagues had begun proudly showing off what looked like halfmelted bars of rock, piles of dirty plastic-plate-looking things, and heaps of what appeared to be blobs of either brown gravel or fossil turds, I lost interest pretty quickly.
Not my captain, though. She pored over anything they transmitted like it was the latest episode of some sizzy new vidrama. Too long hanging around dead planets with a bunch of yawners like the Prezzies, I figured. That was one more reason to get replaced as soon as I could. I didn’t want the same sort of brain damage to happen to me.
The shuttle bucked slightly as it entered the edges of what remained of the planet’s tainted atmosphere, steadied, continued its slow descent. On one hand I wanted it to go taster, on the other I was dreading the moment when I had to step out onto the bull’s-eye below This didn’t do much to help me relax.
After what seemed like an interminable trip I finally landed at the Prezzies’s base camp, a flat area near the foot of the mountain. Since they were on what had become the most dangerous spot in the whole system, and these were supposedly rational people, I had expected to find them standing by and impatient to climb aboard.
There were several tarp-covered piles of extra equipment and who knew what else off to one side of the ellzee, but the only member of the expedition in sight was Shelby, the big, old-style all-metal free aidroid who was part of their team.
“What is it with these crazy vulk ers?” I grumbled angrily as I rechecked my envirosafe generator and waited for the lock to cycle through. First Captain Chandaveda acts more like she’s in the middle of a tax audit than an emergency, and now the over-educated yozos I’m supposed to rescue don’t even bother to show up. Was it something wrong with the Gibbon’s air?
“Good afternoon, First Officer Ornish,” Shelby greeted me when the lock finally opened and I stepped out onto K’leven’s cold, inhospitable surface. “It is indeed a pleasure to see you again.”
I wasn’t in the mood to swap pleasantries. “Where the hell is everybody?” I demanded.
The aidroid smiled, impervious to my obvious pique. “Why, they’re inside the vault, of course.”
I bit back the urge to yell that I wasn’t an idiot and knew there wasn’t anywhere else for them to be in this godforsaken place! “Why aren’t they ready to go?” I asked, trying for brusque but sounding more like my shorts were in a swiftly tightening slipknot.
“Let me assure you that preparations are well under way.” Shelby gestured toward the tunnel mouth with a blue-steel hand. “If you would accompany me, I’ll take you to Dr. Xan.”
I nervously looked up at the ghostly disc of K’leven’s moon, back inside the shuttle airlock, then at the aidroid. “Isn’t he coming out?”
“Please,” he said, starting toward the tunnel mouth. “He is expecting you.”
I followed after, grinding my teeth together and thinking that at least somebody would get what they expected.
“Nice tunnel, Shelby,” I said to break the uneasy silence of the last few minutes, my voice echoing eerily along the rock-walled tube. The grade was gentle, but there was no mistaking that we were going down—and still farther away from the shuttle. If it hadn’t been for Shelby’s taglite the darkness would have been absolute.
“Why thank you,” the aidroid replied, sounding pleased. “The newest generation of matter compactors are said to be faster, but I find that the old Mark Threes do just as good a job with considerably more modest power requirements. Now the Mark Fours draw—”
“How much farther is it?” I asked to keep him from going on to tell me everything I ever wanted to know about matter compactors but was afraid to ask for fear of a lecture just like the one he was more than willing to give me.
“Not far. Just a bit over 221 meters.”
“They are getting ready to evacuate, aren’t they?”
“Rest assured, preparations are well under way.”
We were just passing through the templock set up between the tunnel and the vault when I got this nagging feeling that he hadn’t quite answered the question I’d asked. But I passed it off as just nerves.
Dr. Xan looked up from the thinga-magrubby he was examining, chubby cheeks dimpling as he smiled. “Ah, there you are, Ornish! So glad you’re getting a chance to see our little treasure trove.” He surveyed his subterranean kingdom proudly. “Isn’t it remarkable?”