Erebus (17 page)

I gave a self-satisfied grin as I watched Frampton put up the data from Cheyenne on the wall screen. I knew the place was one of the hubs for the various radar and sensor systems that helped keep a grip on all the traffic floating around Sol. As for Frampton, I swear, the guy had a talent for the dramatic. The image first showed the sun before it started to zoom out. Quickly, the orbits of the inner planets, Venus, Mars, and Earth, appeared and shrank down. Then the outer planets, even Pluto’s massive orbit reduced in size to a small circle. Finally a blinking dot appeared, far beyond even that distant world.

“Wow…that looks a long way away.”

“Oh yeah, it is. Other than the Oort cloud prospectors and gateships heading out-system, there’s no reason for anyone or anything to be out that far. The timing’s about right, and so is the course.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” I asked.

“Sihota has already requested that the
Gagarin
go take a look for us and see if they can pull anything off the ship’s command and control systems. They will be leaving within the hour.”

“Good,” I said.

***

I went back to doing what I was doing, watching the show.

“We know about the Eston Mons facility,” Vance told Drayton. “We even know it’s a Red Star operation. What we want to know is, why would someone want to blow up a whole moon to take it out?”

Drayton was at the table, her elbows on the desk, looking as composed as could be. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cheng walked around and squatted down next to her, his eyes locked on hers. “Sonia, we have a survivor. He’s talking. He knows that someone from Red Star has been assigned to make sure this mess is cleaned up. That someone is you.”

She turned to face Cheng and simply shrugged. “Get me back to Montreal. I want my lawyer.”

“You know what I can do to you, Sonia. Don’t you?”

“I said I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Drayton was becoming more irritable than composed now.

Cheng nodded and stood up. “Like that, is it? No problems. Share this link with me, and then if you still decide you don’t want to tell me after I’ve asked so nicely, so be it.”

I saw Drayton and Cheng look at each other, and both of them seemed to lose focus, taking on the demeanor of someone who was watching a full VR on their HUD. I saw Drayton give a start. She shuddered, even let out a horrified-sounding yelp. This seemed to go on forever, but when I checked the time, only a couple of minutes had gone by.

They snapped back, focusing on each other again. Drayton’s demeanor had changed again. She looked scared and defeated.

“I feel personally insulted, Sonia. You infiltrated us, pretended to be one of us. That upsets me, and I would enjoy the opportunity to…vent my frustrations,” Cheng said in a voice terrifying in its calmness. “So, Sonia, you can go back to Montreal—if you help us…Or you can come with
me
.”

“Okay.” She spoke quietly, her voice tremulous. She was clearly horrified by what she had seen. “I’ll give you a HUD file.”

The file appeared immediately on the holodisplay in front of me. From the movement of his eyes, Cheng was already looking at it. I glanced back at Drayton. She sat in the chair, hunched and pale, her eyes lowered. I dreaded to think whatever the hell it was Cheng had shown her. I resolved to find out just what the hell he was up to. His interrogation style was starting to worry me.

But first…the HUD file.

“Standby for hard drop. Ten seconds,” the authoritative, disembodied voice called. Sonia Drayton sat with four men and one other woman locked into harnesses in the cramped covert-drop pod. From the outside, it looked like little more than a regular cargo pallet, dozens of which had been offloaded from the A-drive liner and put aboard the cargo tender.

Drayton stared vacantly at the man opposite her, a Joshua Rosenberg, some kind of programming technician. They had become very familiar with each other over the last few days, having spent the majority of that time forced to look at each other.

The countdown reached zero, and a loud
bang
reverberated through the pod as the explosive bolts released the pod from the tender. Its solid booster fired, jarring the occupants and setting them on a course for Eston Mons.

Drayton watched the limited feed from outside as the pallet fell toward Io, firing its engine in bursts. The sections of the pallet’s hull she could see had gone from a bright white to pitch black as the adaptive camouflage engaged. It would change as the craft got closer to Io, taking on the same dirty yellow color as that moon. She watched the extinct volcano (or as extinct as a volcano got on Io) grow larger and larger. The crater, at first a dark speck, grew to fill her view. They were on the bull’s-eye, perfectly placed to land where they wanted to inside the black hole atop the mountain. The pallet had passed the rim of the crater before Sonia felt the shudder of the landing engine firing, slowing them with horrendous force.

With a spine-jarring jolt, the pallet came to a halt. The door opened up, and a heavily armed guard entered the cabin. His gaze lingered on each of the six people, checking their faces. Finally, he said, “Welcome to Eston Mons. If you’d like to come with me, please.”

***

“This thing is truly unbelievable,” Drayton said. “The briefing packages I saw back in Montreal were threadbare to say the least.”

Drayton and the operations director, Al Delaney, sat in his office, which, like everything in the scratched-together base, was bare bones. The base itself wasn’t what she was fixated on, though, not by a long shot. No, her attention was riveted on the gently spinning hologram that projected from Delaney’s desk.

“Aye, that it is,” Delaney responded. “We have barely even scratched the surface, and already what we’ve found will—well, you’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

Drayton took a long sip on her coffee and placed it down gently on the desk. She had spent the last week harnessed into the cargo pallet and was still used to zero-g; her habits had not quite adapted yet.

“So it’s operational? It actually works? I read your report, the parts that weren’t redacted, anyway. That thing’s thousands of years old at least,” Drayton said, her eyes tracking over the hologrammatic image.

The
thing
wasn’t fully visible on the holo; it hadn’t been fully explored yet. It was just too large for the hundred or so personnel of the Eston Mons facility to investigate in its entirety. Even the drones and robots, of which scores had been deployed, had found no end to it. If the shape extended as it appeared to, its main core looked like a massive underground spike driving deep into the heart of Io. It was three miles across at its highest point, which itself was a mile below the base of the volcano. The cables that extended from the artifact were just as impressive. Once they had known what they were looking for, they had found them all over the planet, enveloping it like a vast net, buried beneath millennia of dust and sulphur that Io’s volcanoes constantly pumped out.

Just inside the top of the spike nestled the containers and umbilicals that made up the Eston Mons facility. Its spiderlike configuration was spread through what appeared to have been the original habitable sections of the artifact.

“Indeed it does work. In fact, it’s remarkably well preserved, even considering the environment. But then, you knew that from back home. After all, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To watch the big moment?”

Drayton leaned forward, the spinning hologram making her eyes gleam. “That’s exactly why I’m here.”

***

Together, they walked through the long, pressurized umbilical tubes, which connected the far-flung cargo pallets that made up the Eston Mons facility. The clear plastic allowed her to see the epic scale of the artifact. Its corridors, galleries, and rooms were massive. The maintenance crew had spent a long time putting up flood-lights, but still there were swathes of the sections humans hadn’t populated that were dark, such was the scale. It was obvious that the place hadn’t been constructed by human hands. The architecture was too strange. The corridors looked like they were ribbed and gothic, full of strange buttresses and alcoves.

Before long, they arrived at the forward operating cabin, nestled inside the part of the artifact that had really captured their interest.

“It took us a long time to learn the basics of the operating system,” Delaney said, his breath emerging as a cloud in the chill, dark room illuminated only by the instruments and computer displays. “The AI we brought for the task had a hard time interfacing with it, but once it did, it was remarkably easy to manipulate.”

“It surprises me that they didn’t have tighter software security, whoever they were,” Drayton murmured as she looked through the window at the towering machine hunkered at the center of a mile-wide chamber.

“We know nothing about them, full stop. Maybe security wasn’t an issue. Maybe they had a utopian vision. Maybe they were all insect-like drones. In fact, considering the architecture of the place, that’s the leading theory at the moment. This place bears more of a resemblance to an inverted termite mound than anything human. But still, we know nothing firm about them, not even what they looked like. There’s no personal information on the systems we’ve breached, no cultural artifacts at all throughout the explored sections—nothing. Either they simply didn’t have them or it’s all been cleared away.”

“None of the reports mentioned bodies?” Drayton asked.

Delaney shook his head. “Again, no signs. There is some residual organic matter, but it could be their equivalent of black mold. As far as I’ve been informed, none of the bio-reformers at any of the research labs has had any luck at all with forensic reconstruction.”

“That’s what I hear, too.” Drayton was confident that was indeed the truth. Everything about this project was need to know, and she needed to know it all to give a full report to her employer…her true employer.

“Thank you for your candor, if indeed you are being candid.” The smile on Delaney’s face was wry. He walked over to the technicians, who sat chattering indecipherably to one another in their own technobabble.

“At least your guys have figured out the important stuff,” Drayton called over to him.

“Maybe, but without context—”

“Al, just switch the damn machine on.”

***

Hours dragged by before the techs were ready. Despite what she was about to witness, she had to admit, this part was pretty damn dull.

Finally one of the techs called out to Delaney, “Sir, we’re ready to go on your mark.”

Drayton started awake, the boredom and fatigue washing out of her system in an instant. She stood up and walked to the window to watch an epic moment on this epic machine. Through her feet, she felt a vibration. Here, the artifact was shaped like an old Chinese pagoda, right in the center of the room. Leading into the pagoda at its base was a gaping black hole that a skyliner could fly through. It could have hidden anything within.

“By all means.” Delaney waved his hand for them to proceed.

More chatter came from the techs. Drayton saw the probe ease forward on spiderlike legs. The ingenious device had an arachnid-like appearance. It could deploy small servitor drones and had a sample-return module situated at the rear like an arachnid’s abdomen. Because no one knew what to expect, the drone was engineered to cope with just about any environment imaginable.

The probe crawled up the ramp to the machine and into the gateway. Sickly green lights pulsed down rhythmically along the flank of the Pagoda, getting faster and faster until they blurred into a solid line. Then the pulses stopped.

The probe had disappeared.

“It worked.” Delaney looked at Drayton, jubilance on his face. “It fucking worked!”

The techs high-fived each other as giddy as school children. Drayton smiled. Her boss would be very interested in this. The alien artifact was, as they suspected, a gateway.

And it actually worked.

***

“Shit,” I said, rather unoriginally, as I came to the end of Dayton’s briefing package.

“Shit, indeed,” Vance agreed, a deeply contemplative look on her face.

When
Endeavour
had returned from Tau Ceti all those years ago, there had been a massive resurgence in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. That had inevitably faded when nothing had been found. But Red Star
had
found something—and in Earth’s own backyard.

“I’m not saying you don’t get fucking results,” I snarled, leaning over the table looking Cheng straight in his slightly glowing eyes. “What I’m questioning is your bloody methods. You may not have realized this, but it’s my job to stop that kind of shit from happening.”

“Last time I checked, The Hague had no authority over MSS methods, or me for that matter,” Cheng growled.

“Task force agreements state that if we managed to find someone, they are to be heard at The Hague tribunal. I don’t want to find myself next to them in the defendant’s dock for torturing information out of anyone,” I replied. I was fuming. Call me old-fashioned, but I had the firm opinion that torture was a no go, even the “soft kinds” Cheng had employed.

“Boys, calm down,” Vance interjected. I could tell she was forcing the soothing tone into her speech. “Look, both of you have a point. We need that information, but we can’t go unilaterally ripping it out of anyone, if for no other reason than it might invalidate any evidence we glean.”

I sat back in my chair at the campus HQ, trying my hardest not to look like a sullen teenager. Cheng regarded me coldly for a moment before letting his customary twinkle sneak back into his eyes. This was a man who would do what it took and be able to sleep soundly afterward.

“Guys,” Frampton nervously interjected, “we still have the small matter of an alien facility, which looks like it’s a damn gateway. Can you argue about methods later?”

Yes, we did have an alien facility, and I imagined we would indeed argue about it later. For the moment, I filed my anger.