A jolt ran through Jian’s body at the piercing sound of the proximity alarm. His muscles stiff even in the micrograv of the Buran’s flight deck, Jian cast about in confused near-panic trying to identify the screeching wail.
It took a full three seconds before his sleep-paralyzed brain rebooted fully and he realized the alarm was nothing more than the alert he’d set for himself once the shuttle was a thousand klicks out from its turnover point for insertion into Varr orbit. He checked his plant’s clock. Sure enough, he’d been dead asleep for almost thirteen hours. Apparently, he really wasn’t built to stay awake for the better part of two days after all.
In his defense, it had been an unusually stressful couple of days. There was stealing a shuttle with a nuclear bomb in the trunk, committing treason and mutiny against his own father, detonating said nuclear bomb, and then two straight hours strapped into his command chair while his stolen shuttle bucked and jerked like a dux’ah trying to throw a novice rider to keep his former colleagues from scoring a lucky hit. Even with their sensors temporarily blinded by the electromagnetic pulse of his nuke and the expanding cloud of radioactive fallout behind him, they could still map his trajectory towards Varr and take potshots.
Lasers being what they were, Jian didn’t know if the Ark had tried to turn him into a debris cloud or not, because there wasn’t anything around him to reflect their light. It wasn’t like Star Trek phaser beams that glowed helpfully to let you know they’d gone by. He liked to believe that Captain Chao had stayed the order to fricassee his only son, but there was no way to be sure.
Jian realized something was missing. His head swiveled around in his seat searching for his little compatriot. “Polly?” he called. “Polly? We have to secure for burn.” Jian didn’t know how much English the little AI actually understood, but he suspected it was more than he let on. Wasn’t that always the problem with ancient, self-assembling, nanite intelligences?
A metallic clicking from above his head betrayed Polly’s existence. Jian looked up to see the little insectoid automaton peering down at him from the side of the flight deck’s air exchanger.
“There you are.” Jian reached up and held out his hand. Polly pushed off and gently grabbed Jian’s fingers with his pincers, then crawled down the fabric of his flightsuit’s forearm. Jian reached down and opened the flap on a spacious pouch pocket on his suit’s leg. “Better get stowed away, little buddy. I’m about to hit the brakes something fierce.”
An invisible line in space rapidly approached. On one side of the line there was a safe and orderly insertion into Varr orbit. On the other side there was overshooting his window and burning so much fuel to compensate that he wouldn’t have enough left for the burn back to the Ark. Not that he was super-eager to return, but even jail would beat a race between asphyxiation or dehydration ending him onboard this shuttle.
The mains had been cold since the daring escape from the shuttle’s cradle on the Ark’s outer hull. Ideally, Jian should’ve woken up an hour before to run them through a proper pre-flight checklist, but that wasn’t in the cards. Which was OK with him; most of the pre-flight was supercilious bullshit anyway.
Only around a dozen items on the checklist were actually necessary to get the engines lit, the rest were meant to double-check the maintenance monkeys to make sure they’d dotted all of their i’s and crossed their t’s. Jian went through the important parts of the list and felt the turbo pumps spooling up, ready to dump thousands of liters of raw hydrogen and oxygen into the bells the moment he throttled up.
But first, he had to flip the ship ass over teakettle. Jian looked up at the flight clock, seconds ticking away as the invisible line in space drew closer. He’d never done any of this alone, not in something as big as a shuttle, not even in simulations. He’d always had a backup in his copilot double-checking his numbers, making sure he remembered to flip all the right switches, disengage the right safeties. Most of the time, that person had been Kirkland. Xis, he missed her sharp tongue now.
Jian nudged down the nose and warmed up the aft ventral thruster packs. Gently, slowly, not wanting to expel too much reactant mass. He was going to need as much of it as he could get for terminal maneuvers on the surface. There was no gliding in for a gentle landing on an airless moon.
The Buran slowly crept into position while Jian watched the artificial horizon with laser focus. With three degrees left, he hit the thruster packs again, and the giant bird slowed to a stop exactly one hundred and eighty degrees along the z axis away, relative to its starting point. Then, Jian goosed the throttles, more tentatively than he had during the escape, letting the engines warm up and take the heat and pressure in stride instead of all at once and risking a flameout or worse. Soon though, they were up to one hundred percent, Jian was pressed into his chair like he was being squeezed in a vice, and the imaginary line in space passed by without comment or notice.
The shuttle’s bottom settled onto Varr’s dusty regolith an hour later. This time, Jian managed to set down in an LZ on the nearer side of the fissure that had nearly swallowed technician Madeja. Knowing what he did now about the little traitor’s plans, he wished he’d let her fall. It certainly would’ve saved everyone a module’s full of trouble to have just let her tumble down the crevasse to die of a suit tear or a shattered visor. She was dead either way, and a lot of good people would still be alive in her place.
Jian locked down the shuttle’s command console in preparation to leave. He was confident none of the shuttles he sabotaged back on the Ark could’ve made their launch window. There was one on the surface on Gaia, but it was too far out of range even with a full tank of fuel to both escape the planet’s gravity well and still catch up with the rapidly receding moon. They could stop at the Ark itself and tank up, of course, but by the time they’d finished, the launch window would be closed.
However, there remained a remote chance that part or all of the team working on the Early Warning radio telescope on Varr’s far side could come calling. It would be a long hike and it would require some substantial modifications to boost their little rock hopper’s range, but they were technicians and mechanics, after all. Jian didn’t want to risk it.
With the shuttle secure, Jian moved on to the suit prep station at the back of the flight deck. He spent the next half hour struggling to fit himself into one of the extended expeditionary suits. Technically, they were designed for a single person to be able to don in an emergency by themselves. In practice, they were an enormous pain in the ass to wriggle into without someone to help you. It was one of the reasons even their flight suits had a limited vac rating. Jian hadn’t put on one of the rigs by himself in years, and his rustiness showed. Polly looked on curiously, yet unhelpfully throughout the entire process.
Panting, Jian finally pulled down the visor of his helmet and ran the suit through an integrity check. Green board, he was ready to go to work. The expeditionary suits had enough air for the better part of a day without any replenishment. Jian expected he’d need considerably more time than that. His plan was dependent on the facility to provide the heat and air, just as it had begun to do during his first visit. He’d been hesitant to take his helmet off back then for all the reasons Rakunas had listed at the time, but he didn’t want to have to constantly cycle back to the Buran to recharge the suit. Instead, he slung a duffle over his shoulder filled with twenty liters of water, five days of food rations including a few extra apple cobblers, and a sleeping roll.
Jian was going camping. It seemed appropriate, considering the last time he’d camped was alongside the very friend he was here to locate. Polly took a position on his shoulder pad and settled in for whatever adventure awaited. Once the airlock cycled, Jian climbed down the short ramp to the surface and was met with a shock.
There, on the starboard underside of the wing, something had gouged out a three-meter long and almost meter wide section of ablative heat tiles. He moved to inspect the damage, perplexed as to why the shuttle itself hadn’t registered the impact. The edges of the furrow were charred into ivory-white flakes. At the center, opaque rivulets of melted ceramic glass had formed. That explained it. Nothing had struck the wing. Nothing except photons.
“Son of a bitch,” Jian muttered. Well, that answered the question of whether his father had shot at him with the Ark’s nav lasers. From the looks of it, the laser had only caught the Buran with a glancing blow, probably making contact for no more than a few hundredths of a second before the shuttle’s evasive maneuvers took it out of contact again. A direct hit would’ve sheared the wing completely off.
The tiles were shot, and even some of the wing’s internal structural members had been exposed. The shuttle wouldn’t be making any trips down to Shambhala until the entire section was replaced. That complicated matters. There was only one way for him to get to the surface now in one piece, and he really dreaded the prospect, but it would have to wait.
Jian shuffled his feet until he was clear of the shuttle’s wing, then took long, arching hops in the three percent gravity. The Helium-3 harvester had moved on long ago, but he could still see the hole where the ceiling leading to the facility had caved in.
It wasn’t nearly as far of a trip as the last time. For all her bravado, Kirkland had always been the cautious, by-the-book sort. She’d suggested the further LZ the first time around because it was as far away from the cave-in and fissure as she could reasonably get before everyone started complaining about the schlep.
In fact, Jian’s LZ was so much closer to the cave-in that he misjudged the distance of his last hop. With only a few meters to spare, he recognized that he was about to overshoot his landing spot at the lip of the crater and was instead about to add the rest of the sinkhole’s depth to his current fall.
His arms pinwheeling impotently against inertia, Jian tried and failed to alter his course. The expedition suits actually had a limited micro-grav thruster capacity in their extremities… which was a fact Jian managed to forget in the moment of panic as he tumbled helplessly over the edge of the cave-in. His flailing managed only to spin his feet out from underneath him as the floor rose up to meet him in slow motion. Varr’s gravity was so weak, and his rate of acceleration under it so lethargic, Jian had time to calm himself and prepare for the inevitable impact. It wouldn’t be fast enough to be lethal, but neither would it be pleasant. The biggest danger would be a suit puncture against one of the jagged rocks in the pile at the middle of the cavern he was about to collide with. The pads on the outsides of his forearms and shins were even more reinforced against tears than the rest of the suit, so he stuck them out and balled up his fists to try and protect the delicate finger joints of his gloves.
Polly, for his part, had the good sense to move from Jian’s shoulder onto the life support pack on the back of his suit. Jian saw where he was going to “land,” and it wasn’t encouraging. A big slab of rock sitting on top of the pile at about forty-five degrees, its jagged edge pointed at him like the teeth of some long-extinct leviathan. Jian struck it unevenly, first with his left forearm, then his right, causing him to bounce off it and tumble down onto the rest of the pile. A sharp pain ran up his left arm, but he had no time to think about that before he landed again, first on his helmet, then his right shoulder, before finally coming to rest on his right side.
Inside his visor, a suit integrity alarm blared. A three-dimensional outline of his suit appeared in his plant’s field of view with a blinking red area showing where the sensor net woven into the fabric of the suit itself detected the tear, just below his right shoulder blade. The tear wasn’t very large, only point zero eight cubic meters per second. But without the rope ladder he’d planned on anchoring to the roof of the cave-in, he had no way to climb back out of the hole to return to the Buran to stitch it up.
Swallowing hard, Jian reached into a pouch on his thigh and pulled out an emergency patch to seal the rupture and stripped the plastic backing off it to expose the adhesive. But with the bulky material of his suit, he could only reach his hand around far enough to get a corner of the patch in place.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Jian strained against the hard plastic shell of the suit’s chest plate, trying to find the extra few centimeters of reach he needed to seal the tear as his air slowly leaked out into the vacuum. He tried to reach around with his other arm, but the shoulder joint limited his range of motion just enough to prevent it. Jian forced himself to measure his breathing. Passing out from hyperventilating wouldn’t do him a lick of good.
Think, think! Jian admonished himself. He cranked up the brightness and width angle of his suit’s built-in lights to get a better look at the walls of the cavern. In the super-low gravity, his vertical jump was super-human, but still shy of the lip of the hole above. But maybe if there were a ledge or other protrusion he could grab onto and push off from again.
Nothing. The walls were almost completely smooth, having been excavated or melted out in the first place. Maybe he could roll his back against one of the rocks enough… to…
Jian felt something skittering up his leg even through the material of the suit, like being poked with a dozen chopsticks. A very old, seldom-used corner of his brain reviled at the sensation. But before he slapped away the monster, Jian’s internal IFF kicked in and he realized it was just Polly. The little AI bug continued up the back of his leg, past his waist, and came to a stop just below where he’d been trying to affix the patch.
The chopsticks started hammering below his shoulder blade in rapid succession like a sewing machine, moving up and around in a rectangular pattern. Inside his plant display, the leak rate slowed, then trailed off until it reached zero. The suit was still registering the tear, but he wasn’t losing any more atmosphere.
Polly appeared on his right forearm, gazing at him expectantly with his three glowing green eyes.
“You sealed the patch?” Jian said incredulously, knowing full well that the automaton couldn’t hear him through the vacuum. Regardless, Polly winked at him.
Jian put his left hand over his heart and bowed, as his father would. “Thank you.”
Polly crossed his left front pincer over his… chest… and mimicked Jian’s bow. Full of surprises, the creepy little insect was.
“Well then,” Jian bent over and retrieved his duffle, “shall we go to work?”
Less than five minutes later, Jian emerged on the other side of the gooey airlock. The corridor leading deeper into the facility’s interior was drastically changed from his last visit only a few days ago. Instead of the ramshackle mess of dents, ice incursions, and millennia of accumulated dust, the tunnel was immaculate, as if it had just been commissioned that morning.
Jian consulted his plant recording of the prior visit and found a section of wall he remembered being breached by an enormous dagger of water ice frozen hard as granite. The ice wedge was gone entirely, replaced by a nearly flawless section of tunnel wall. Jian leered at the section, and after considerable inspection he was just barely able to perceive the seams where the breech had been closed off and welded shut again.
“Your friends have been busy,” Jian said in the general direction of Polly, who’d wandered off further down the tunnel of his own volition. Jian followed after his diminutive companion, wondering where the rest of the drones, or whatever the best word to describe them might be, had gone. Perhaps they’d completed their repair work and had simply returned to hibernation until they were called upon again.
Curious, Jian pulled up a menu in his plant’s suit interface. The life support pack had a small suite of sensors that monitored atmospheric conditions. Being a space suit, these conditions usually registered a series of big fat goose eggs. But now, just as Jian had hoped, the atmosphere in the corridor sat at a breathable seventy-eight percent nitrogen, nineteen percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide, and another point of trace gasses. A little out of balance by Earth measure, but exactly on the nose by Gaia standards. Not only was it breathable, it sat at an ambient temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius. The exact average temperature across the surface of Gaia.
Someone or something had taken great pains to make the facility accommodating for a native of Gaia. Jian wasn’t of Gaia, exactly, but he’d spent most of his life there, and figured that was good enough. With no poisonous gasses in the air or other chemical hazards his suit’s sensor suite could detect, Jian’s only real concern was airborne microbes, which, given the circumstances and his desolate surroundings, seemed like a fairly remote risk.
“No time like the present,” Jian said as he amped himself up to crack the seals on his helmet. Hesitantly, he reached for the two paddles on either side that would release the visor. They had to be pushed down and pressed in simultaneously to prevent them from being unlocked accidentally. The locks clicked, and with a small hiss of pressure equalization, Jian slid the visor up and into the crow of the helmet, still holding his breath.
Just as his lungs started to burn for fresh oxygen, Jian exhaled fully, then took a shallow breath and held it for a second, his hands in place above his head to snap his visor shut again at the first signs of trouble. The air was surprisingly fresh on Jian’s tongue. He’d expected it to be stale and musty like a cave. Instead, it had the crisp, slightly metallic taste of mechanically processed air. Which it was, of course. Jian rather strongly doubted there was an aeroponics farm deeper down supplying the oxygen. More likely it had been freed up from the ice of Varr itself through electrolysis.
He stood there for a full minute, breathing deeply and monitoring himself for dizziness, tingling in his extremities, stars in his vision, or any other signs of trouble with the air, but none materialized.
“OK then.” Jian adjusted the strap of his duffle, shuffle-hopped his way down the tunnel, and took the fork to the right leading to the map room. Just as it had before, as soon as Jian sat down in the chair at the center of the spherical chamber, the walls came to life with a dance of light and color. Gaia stretched out all around him from its strange perspective from inside the globe, quickly joined by the spiraling symbols hovering over areas of interest on Atlantis and Shambhala.
Jian leaned over to retrieve a bottle of water to sooth his parched throat. The air in the facility was crisp, but bone dry. He’d have to keep an eye on his hydration as long as he was down here.
By the time he looked up again, the display had changed. The spiraling symbols had once again unrolled, slowed, and enlarged, exactly as it had been when Jian left. It was as if the room recognized its latest student and restarted the lesson. Not that it helped much; the iconography was just as indecipherable to Jian’s eyes as it had been the first time, and he didn’t have months to learn a new language from scratch. There had to be a way to speed things up, or at least pick up the basics.
Jian opened a menu on his plant and enabled his translation software, set its parameters for both audio and visual feed access, then opened a clean file for “New Language.” The translation matrix was good at cataloging symbols, pattern-recognition, and detecting syntax, but without either two way conversations to work from, and limited only to the processing power and data files held in his own unit, Jian didn’t expect it would be able to expedite things a great deal.
There was really nothing for it, Jian realized. He reached down into his pack again, retrieved an apple cobbler and a fork, and settled in for the lesson.