Erebus (26 page)

As I did, the shuttle started to shake. I looked over at Sihota. “Don’t worry about the yaw; I’ll take care of it. You just leave the peddles beneath your feet alone.”

I nodded and pushed the stick forward and felt my stomach begin to rise into my chest. I felt that sickening feeling I got on a roller coaster or in free fall. For some reason, it was easier when you controlled it yourself. We started to race toward the ground, and I hauled back on the stick in a reflex response. I could feel myself being pressed back into my seat, and the dark, starry sky filled the view in front of me.

“Easy does it. We don’t want to go back into orbit. Start taking us in lower again. Let’s head toward that ice sheet over there.” Sihota pointed at a white expanse to our right.

Nosing us over toward the sparkling sheet, I pushed the throttle wide open and raced toward it.

“That’s it. Take us lower. I’ve set a minimum safe altitude, so don’t worry; you can’t crash us. The lander will automatically level out when it gets to five hundred meters and not let you go below that.”

I took us lower and lower, the grey rock turning to blue-tinged ice sheets below us. I could see why Twilight Garden was considered one of the beauty spots in explored space. The crystalline mountains and valleys were pure ice rather than the snowy expanses of the Earth’s poles. Some of the glaciers were even somewhat transparent, revealing dark masses of mountains beneath them.

“You know, once this might have been habitable for humans with a little terraforming,” Sihota said quietly as we swept into a valley. I pulled back on the throttle, slowing us down so we could take in the vista. I was getting into it now. We weaved through a valley, sparkling mountains passing us on both sides. “But it was never meant to be. Sirius B was doomed from the moment it was born. In its death throes, it swelled up into a red giant and melted all the ice here into huge seas that refroze when the sun shrank. This is what we’re left with.”

“So”—I gestured out of the cockpit at the mountains before quickly gripping the stick again. I was still nervous about crashing us, despite the fact that it was apparently impossible—“how did the seas become mountains?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing they are subject to the same geological process as simple rock. Remember, all this happened a hundred million years ago,” he said before sighing. “The greatest regret of my life is not qualifying to crew on an explorer ship. To see these sorts of things for the first time…I find it sad that my first journey out of Sol is hunting down a fugitive.”

“You and me both, but hey, at least we get to see it.”

Sihota smiled. “That we did.” He gave a wistful sigh as he looked across Twilight Garden, then said, “I suppose we had best get back to it. I have control.” He didn’t bother with the controls, just sat back and let his implants do the work. “Twilight Garden, we are coming in for our approach. ETA: fifteen minutes.”

He put the lander into a hard turn and opened the throttle. We raced over the glittering landscape, glaciers and mountains flashing by. Before long, a bright beam of light was visible lancing into the sky in the far distance.

Twilight City’s landing beacon.

Twilight City was a misnomer. It would have barely qualified as a town on Earth; in fact,
village
would have been more appropriate. It was nestled under a large inflatable dome. It wasn’t a rigid one like on Calisto, but rather made of clear plastic that showed off the glittering stars beyond. Small buildings filled it, many of them prefabs, but they had been here long enough that the occupants had placed brick facades over them, making them look like cottages and houses, not just the temporary accommodations they originally were.

While it wasn’t a capital as such (Sirius had no central government in the system to speak of), this was where the scientists who worked in the system kept their families and came for R&R. Twilight City was an oasis of humanity and normality far from home. What Sirius did have in lieu of a capital was a central administrator, and right now, the look on her face showed that she was not happy with us at all.

“Yes, I know we are all sponsored by the corporations here, but rest assured, we are all our own women and men; we have to be out here. We will not see Sirius turned into a playground for industrial espionage, corporate machinations, or national fallouts.” Lynn Langdon thumped her metal desk to emphasize her points as she made them. “And the sheer discourtesy you have shown since arriving is unforgivable—hanging in orbit, not deigning to tell us the full story. Completely unacceptable!”

“Ms. Langdon—” I tried to say.

“
Mrs.
Langdon! And I have heard something very disturbing from the ship that’s assigned to watch over the gates. Apparently you have dispatched a warship to hover there.”

“It’s not a warship—” I tried to say.

“Does it not have guns? Does it not have missiles? In my book, that makes it a goddamn warship!”

“Mrs. Langdon, allow me to interject a moment and start from the start,” I finally managed to say.

Langdon carried on glaring at me with steely grey eyes and a hard line to her clenched jaw. Suddenly, she gave a sigh. It was like the anger was deflating out of her. She leaned back in her creaking faux-leather office chair and opened her hands. “Go on, then. Dazzle me.”

I paused for a moment, gazing out of the window at the tiny village square beyond. Talk about rustic; I could even see a damn goat chewing on the grass out there. “A lot of this you’re going to find out on the next scheduled update from Sol.” I leaned forward. “But not all. I am going to tell you things that haven’t even been released on the news nets back home yet—I mean by the time we left, that is.

“But first, Twilight Control showed
Erebus
in system, several AU out. She briefly dropped out of A-drive, and less than an hour later, about the shortest time her A-drive could cycle, she was gone again. Didn’t she speak to you at all? Launch any landers? Records show that she didn’t, but I want to be sure...”

“No, they did not,” Langdon said. “They were frankly even more discourteous than
Gagarin
has been. Not a single transmission nor a single lander launch.”

I exchange a glance with Sihota. “You’re right; that is rude.”

“Very,” Langdon glared at me.

“And no one tried to communicate with
Erebus
?”

“Of course we did. When an unscheduled starship appears in system, we aren’t going to just sit here and do nothing.”

“But no response?”

“Nothing. Now, I’ve answered enough of your questions. Are you going to tell me just what the hell is going on?”

I took a deep breath and told her the story, starting with
Magellan
through to Io and Concorde before finishing with Frain’s run through the gate. The only thing I left out was the alien artifact. Langdon’s face moved from anger to shock to fear in equal measures. She was still not a happy woman, but she was beginning to understand our reticence.

“So this Xander Frain or whoever he—”

“We don’t know who he actually is. As disrespectful as it is to the real Frain, we need to call him something, and that’s as good a name as any at the moment.”

“Regardless,” she waved dismissively before continuing, “this Frain and Sonia Drayton, why did they destroy Io? And more importantly to me, what do they want with us?”

“We don’t know,” Sihota said from where he was seated cross-legged, the picture of calm. Despite the fact we had kept the artifact on the down low, it was an honest answer. “Maybe they came here for someone or maybe something. Either way, it’s not a logical place for them to hide. There must be something that has brought them here.”

“No, it’s not.” Langdon stood up and walked to the window. She appeared to be regarding the village beyond before giving a deep sigh and turning back to us. “A logical place to hide, that is. There are five thousand people in this system, only two thousand of them involved with the actual research that goes on here. The rest are families and support services. Take me, for example. I’m just a former head teacher who found a job helping to run this village. My husband is the one who is actually the reason we’re here. Bottom line—we are a small community and not one overly given to conflict. Yes, we may all have been sponsored by various corporations, but their machinations are far from here.”

“Mrs. Langdon, I have access to the public records, but perhaps you can tell us what research actually goes on here?” I asked. The Hypernet connection here was slow. For someone who was used to Sol’s superfast universal link connections, it was like being hamstrung, and I was running out of patience running the kind of casual queries I could have done quickly at home.

“Stellar research,” she said. “There are two stars in this system: one is the picture of health, one is a corpse. There is a lot of science that can be done in relation to that, but nothing that can be weaponized or used to obtain any kind of financial advantage in the short term. Everything here is about deep-future research. That’s why there is so little investment in the place. No one wants to bother with that kind of thing beyond the absolute minimum.”

“Why did Sirius B die?” I asked, the word
weaponized
prompting a thought.

“The star was destined to upon formation. There is nothing nefarious in that, if that’s what you’re thinking. There are many examples out there of similar stars.” She gestured vaguely upward. “It will continue shining for a billion years yet. In fact, my husband is more interested in one of its other properties for his research: the fact that it’s one of the densest objects in local space. Originally it was around five times the mass of our sun. While it has shed a lot of that matter, it’s still managed to pack itself into an object the size of Earth. To say it’s massive is an understatement. He’s conducting research into this, something called gravitational red shift.”

“And what is…never mind.” I filed it away. I didn’t think I was onto any kind of winner with that line of questioning, and frankly, it would have probably given me a headache. “So have you found anything out here that’s out of the ordinary?”

“What do you mean by out of the ordinary, Mr. Trent? We are in a star system far from home; not much is ordinary here.”

“I mean anything not from Sol, if you follow.”

“Alien, you mean?” She laughed like she couldn’t believe I’d asked such a stupid question. At least she wasn’t hopping mad anymore. “Please tell me you’re not one of those damn Dogonites or whatever they call themselves.”

“I don’t think so,” I said hesitantly, glancing at Sihota, who just shrugged. “And just who, or what, is a Dogonite?”

“Some kind of cult. They’re mostly screened out prior to coming here, but the odd one slips through. And by odd, I mean very odd.” She pursed her lips in distaste. “They believe that aliens from Sirius C visited an African tribe, the Dogons, thousands of years ago and told them they had come from here.”

“I didn’t think there was a Sirius C.” All the Sirius stars were starting to get jumbled up for me. I was used to one star in the middle of a star system, where it damn well should be.

“No, there’s not. Don’t get me wrong; we don’t preclude the possibility there might be a brown dwarf out there somewhere that has somehow managed to escape detection. They’re still discovering Pluto-sized planetoids around Sol, after all. But nothing that would be or has ever been home to any of these Dogons. Anyway, when these cultists manage to sneak in, they want to start looking for it.”

“And I’m guessing they don’t exactly get a warm reception.”

“No, they don’t. Anyway, in relation to your question about anyone finding anything alien? No. There are always rumors, of course, but never anything substantiated.”

“Any particularly sticky rumors? Ones that just won’t go away?”

“Oh, please.” The feisty lady rolled her eyes. She was getting on my nerves now with her constant attitude. “What do you want to hear? People who go EVA claim to see strange lights every now and again. They probably messed up the air mixes for their spacesuits.

“A probe jockey claims to have come across a floating chunk of gold but could never find it again. Probably a spectrometer malfunction. One of our support pilots began harping on about some alien pagoda he’d found on an asteroid a few years ago. Probably dodgy hooch. None of it is particularly compelling or convincing stuff.”

“Yes, you’re right.” I managed not to change my facial expression. “Well, Mrs. Langdon, we need to report back to our ship. I can only apologize for our reticence in speaking to you frankly when we first arrived. As you can probably imagine, we were hoping to get this all done with the minimum of fuss, and we still hope to.”

“One thing we agree on, but I’m sure you will appreciate that we don’t do secrets here. Everything we’ve discussed, I will be putting into the public sphere.”

“Mrs. Langdon,” I stood and smiled at her, “I would expect nothing less.”

“I know you’re the police man here, but I just don’t see the value in not bringing her in on it,” Sihota said, sipping a pint of whatever the hell the bartender had given us.

“There are a couple of reasons. One: she would think we were just as mad as those Dogonites or whatever. Two: we gain nothing by doing that when she doesn’t even believe it.”

We were nestled into an alcove of the pub. It was quite fetchingly laid out. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to make it look like something you would find in any village in England. Even the gravity on Twilight Garden wasn’t too far off from Earth’s.

“It just strikes me that we could have cut through a lot of chaff.”

“Let’s see what we can open-source before we start giving the game away.” I took a pull of my own pint and then winced. I’d never liked real ales, and this one tasted like it had been fermented in a sewer. Still, needs must…

I brought up some old newsfeeds on my HUD, playing around with various search queries about pilots and pagodas. Twilight Garden’s Hypernet had more on it than I might have expected in such an isolated place, but the slow system meant I still had a lot of digging to do before I found an old forum dated nearly forty years ago. It seemed pilots on long-range missions, where they were subject to the limitations of light speed communication, had still preferred to use the old text format. So, like in Sol, a lot of rubbish filled the local Hypernet.