Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour Read online

  The mining office was two doors down. Grumand wandered among the computers, grunting and frowning as he went. The room was fairly large with an office at one end, presumably for the manager, and a number of workstations around the walls. The middle of the room was taken up with a large, apparently scale, model of the area as it had been when the town had been alive. Each building had a piece of plastic tape with letters embossed into it naming the structure. Four mines were visible to the east and west of the town.

  ‘Al, can you give me a projection of the current mapping data from the Hyde over that model?’ Aneka asked silently.

  ‘We only have low-resolution topographic data.’

  ‘That should be good enough.’

  ‘Processing…’ An image appeared, overlaying the model and slightly above it, shifting to stay in place as she walked around the table.

  ‘Useless,’ Grumand said. ‘Every single machine has been burned out. Like someone set a fire in them. I mean, it almost looks deliberate.’

  ‘Odd. Want some more odd?’

  ‘Hit me.’

  ‘There are two buildings in this model which aren’t in our current topographic map. The tape says they were smelting plants.’

  ‘The colony was making do shipping ore out to planets that could smelt it. Aluminium and gold primarily. They were due to start smelting their own ores around the time they went dark. That was going to make the difference on their economic viability. Maybe the plants exploded.’

  ‘No, the craters are where the two plants were.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Grumand sounded justifiably disbelieving. Aneka nodded. ‘Two plants blowing up, some sort of weird accident or even sabotage, I could almost buy. Two volcanos opening up right under both buildings…’

  His speculation was brought to a halt by the sound of Rice’s shriek. Kicking herself for not keeping a closer eye on the biologist, Aneka bolted for the door. Grumand followed when his brain and body had caught up with Aneka’s, but he was still a couple of seconds behind her when she reached Rice, who was standing with her back against the corridor wall, her eyes on something in the room opposite.

  ‘What is it?’ Aneka snapped. The woman did not look harmed, but her face was pale in the light from the microbots. Turning her head, Aneka followed her gaze and saw the bodies.

  There were three of them, huddled into a corner of what looked like a storeroom. Aneka could see another leg, probably from someone lying on the floor. They were skeletons now, after several centuries in a slightly acidic atmosphere, skeletons still dressed in woven bioplastic clothing. She moved into the room as the firefly swarm caught up with her and found half a dozen more bodies dotted around the room. Aside from the one on the floor, all of them had died with their backs pressed to the walls and there was one other odd thing.

  ‘It looks like a little volcano,’ Grumand commented, squatting beside the black basaltic plug that bulged a couple of centimetres out of the floor in the middle of the room. ‘They came in here to hide from the lava, and it burst through inside. The heat, and the fumes… They were poisoned, but not by the Plascrete.’

  ‘The, uh, chemsniffer,’ Rice said, looking down at a gadget she was holding to avoid looking at the skeletons. ‘The chemsniffer is showing higher than normal levels of sulphur compounds in here. The walls are coated in the stuff.’

  ‘Mystery solved, I guess,’ Aneka said, frowning. Somehow it did not feel right.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Grumand agreed. ‘I can write this up. If we have time, I’ll come back and do a more detailed survey of the area, for completeness.’

  ‘Can we leave?’ Rice asked. ‘There’s nothing living here for me to look at.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, we can go.’

  Aneka let them go ahead of her, and pulled the door closed behind her. It seemed right, but as she did so she noticed that the bottom of the door had been burned away in the same way as the one in the stairwell had been, almost as though some lava had crawled across the floor to do it.

  Yorkbridge Mid-town, New Earth.

  Ella was out at a club, but she was not out clubbing. Her mode of dress, translucent halter top and micro-skirt, suggested she was there for a good time, and she smiled brightly as she moved through the crowd, but actually she was just looking for someone.

  Toward the back she spotted a bright patch of red, and moved closer. Sure enough a tall, lithe woman with an expansive chest and long, scarlet hair was moving between the tables with a tray. Ella spotted an empty table, caught the woman’s eye in passing, and went over to sit down.

  Smiling very brightly, the waitress strutted across to Ella’s table a moment later. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘Something warming,’ Ella replied, ‘it’s cold out.’ Which was a dumb signal in a way; it was hardly ever cold on New Earth at this latitude.

  ‘Okay, I’ll be right with you.’

  Ella waited quietly for just over a minute, and then got up to slip back out of the bar. She was around a hundred metres away when a tall, buxom, brunette woman fell into step beside her.

  ‘We got a message through from New Earth a couple of days ago,’ Ella said. ‘They’ve had attacks on ships moving between Old Earth and Titan, and they haven’t been able to identify the attackers.’

  ‘That sounds familiar,’ the brunette replied.

  ‘We need to let them know about that theory, but…’

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right, your messages are monitored. I can arrange something.’

  Ella nodded. ‘I was hoping you could.’

  ‘How are things? We haven’t talked in a while.’

  ‘Well, Aneka’s off world. Aside from that it’s business as usual. The education programmes on Old Earth seem to be going well. How about here?’

  ‘The mole is doing a good job of keeping awareness of the problem down, but the Navy is still pushing for greater activity in the areas being attacked.’

  ‘Are they going to get it?’

  ‘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 fo
r 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.’