The Dying Light (9 page)

“Seen anything yet?” Roche asked.

“Not much,” Kajic replied. “The other moons appear to be untouched. The change in Hintubet’s radiation has raised a few storms in Voloras’s outer atmosphere, and there’s a little more rubble in closer than the records say there should be. But apart from that, the planet is as expected.”

“Still no signals?”

“All quiet,” said Haid. “I can try provoking something, if you like.”

“Best not to at this stage.”

“I’ve no problem with that.” Haid absently tapped the console as he talked. “Nothing’s obstructed the probes so far, but that’s not to say it won’t happen. They’re not exactly subtle, the way they accelerate.”

“As long as no one traces the tightbeams back to us, we’ll be okay.” Roche gestured at the screen. “How long until the moon comes into view?”

“A few seconds,” said Kajic, his image facing the screen from the center of the bridge. “When it does, I’ve programmed the probe to begin its survey automatically. There’s enough of a delay to make direct control tricky.”

“So it might already be seeing the moon?” asked Roche.

“Or even have been destroyed,” said Kajic. “Although I...”

He stopped before he could finish the sentence. “Wait. Here it comes. I’ll enhance the image as much as I can for the screen, but it might be better through your implants.”

Roche put her hand back onto the link and slaved her vision to the probe’s data, at the same time shutting her right eye to prevent overlap. Instantly she found herself hanging over the surface of the gas giant, spearing through space with a magnetic storm roiling around her. Ahead and just over the bulge of the horizon, a reddish dot had appeared.

“That’s it,” said Kajic. “We’re lucky it’s not eclipsed by the planet; the image would have been much weaker.”

“Can you make anything out yet?” Roche asked.

“Nothing definite. The albedo matches, except for a dark patch on the southern hemisphere. You’ll see it as the probe gets closer. It doesn’t appear on the maps, so it probably isn’t a surface feature.”

“It isn’t the base itself?” asked Haid.

“Refueling bases are always around the equator,” Roche answered. “Orbital tethers won’t work anywhere else.”

“Of course.” Haid’s tone was apologetic. “It’s been a while since I last saw one.”

The image sharpened as the moon came closer, becoming a gibbous disc. Its surface was smooth and gray, like its parent, covered with a thick layer of ice. The unusual patch Kajic had pointed out dominated the bottom left quarter: a drop of ink on a circular bloodstain.

“It looks like a shadow,” said Roche.

“I think it might be,” Kajic agreed. “A shadow at the bottom of a crater.”

Roche took a deep breath at the implications of that thought. As the probe swooped closer for its first pass, the details became clear all too quickly. Something had struck the moon’s southern hemisphere with the force of a large asteroid. The resulting impact had torn a sizable chunk out of the moon and rung its cold core like a bell. Deep fault lines ran from pole to pole, where the brittle, icy crust had fractured. In infrared, the heat at the shadowy bottom of the crater was obvious, glowing like a red pupil in a dead, gray eye.

“Whatever it was,” said Haid, “it hit hard.”

“Is there any way to tell how long ago it happened?” asked Cane.

“My guess would be sometime in the last six weeks,” said Kajic. “But probably no earlier than a month.”

“Agreed,” added the Box. “The rubble the probe encountered in the orbit of the moon is clearly ejecta from the impact that has not had time to disperse; that makes the impact fairly recent. But the crater floor is no longer molten, indicating that some time has passed. Between four and five weeks ago is my estimate.”

“Any idea what it might have been?” asked Haid.

“At this point, no,” the Box said. “But my intuition tells me it was most likely a ship of some description. It would have been much easier to cause a ship to crash than to give an asteroid the vector required to make it impact in such a way.”

“Is it worth looking for survivors?” asked Roche.

“No.” The Box sent an icon darting into the view, pointing out details Roche had missed. “Here you can see the fallen cable of the orbital docking facility; this fragment here corresponds to part of the base itself. You can also see how a major fracture line runs directly through the site of the main installation. This last detail must surely have been fortuitous—no one could have predicted exactly how the moon would fault—but I doubt that anyone would have survived the impact alone, anyway. The seismic energy released must have been tremendous.” The icon disappeared. “It would have been over in seconds. A very effective blow against the Armada presence in this system—both in terms of resources and morale.”

“It was deliberate, then,” Haid said. “It couldn’t have been an accident—a coincidence?”

“Possible,” said the Box. “But unlikely.”

Roche listened to the Box with a growing sense of unreality. The destruction of an entire Armada refueling base was still something she could hardly believe possible—even though the scant reports COE Intelligence had received from the system had intimated far worse. And now she was seeing it.

The destruction of Palasian System was no longer a morsel of information to gain leverage with COE Intelligence; it had actually happened.

asked Maii, her voice relayed by Roche’s implants and broadcast over the bridge speakers.

“We don’t have any other suspects,” said Haid.

“Three hundred,” Roche replied. “Plus whoever was on the ship when it crashed—if it was a ship, of course.”

“Either way, that’s a lot of dead people,” said Haid grimly.

“Whether there was one person or a thousand, the actual number is irrelevant,” said Cane. “The only thing of importance to the clone warrior was to ensure that no one was left alive.” He glanced over at Roche. “Assuming, of course, we have correctly interpreted my sibling’s motives.”

Roche studied Cane through the ghost image of the planet in her artificial eye. “Even more important than the base’s strategic value?”

He paused before answering, his features contorted as though he was fighting conflicting emotions.

“Yes,” he said finally, then turned from Roche back to the screen. “The primary objective would have been to destroy as many people as possible as efficiently as possible. The drive for efficiency would have necessitated an early strike against this base, yes, but if it had been automated, that need would have been reduced. Where there are no people to command them, machines can be inefficient in battle.”

“So he would have attacked Aro Spaceport first?” Roche asked.

“Yes, had the refueling base been uninhabited.” Another pause. “I’m sorry,” he said, again facing her. “I do not like thinking this way. It is too easy for me.”

Roche nodded, even though she didn’t truly understand how his mind worked and therefore could not empathize with his feelings. When he used his genetically modified abilities, he was terrifying to watch. That he had not used them against
her
was something for which she’d be forever grateful—and therein, she thought, lay the paradox. Of the two Sol clone warriors at large in the Commonwealth, only one was obeying its natural instincts. Cane was not. But why?

Because he doesn’t want to.
That was the only answer she could supply. He had said as much himself. And if the part of him that wanted to kill indiscriminately had been subsumed by the part of him that didn’t—which perhaps not even the Sol geneticists could have suppressed entirely—then she hoped it stayed that way. Especially now that she had seen what he
could
have done.

She rubbed her eyes, breaking the link and killing the image of the planet in her left eye. Fatigue, which she had successfully kept at bay since her abrupt awakening, was numbing her limbs and pressing at the backs of her eyes.

She was sufficiently aware of her inner feelings, however, to suspect that something more than fatigue was at work.

“The base is dead,” she said, letting the issue slip for the moment. “The how and the why can wait until later. Uri, set course for the Voloras flyby and get us on the way to Jagabis. I want to see what’s left of Aro Spaceport before we start making any decisions.”

“The probe will be there in approximately ten hours,” said Kajic. “We’ll be past Voloras in four, and well on our way by the time data arrives.”

“Good. I’ll leave that side of things to you and the Box. As long as I’m kept informed, the two of you can run the ship for a while.”

“Where will you be?” asked Kajic.

“In my room, catching up on some sleep.” To the others on the bridge, she added, “ I suggest you do the same. In thirteen hours we’ll have much more data on our hands than we have now, and we’ll need to be alert to deal with it.”

said Maii,

“Make sure she does, Cane,” said Roche. “I know you probably won’t need to rest, but she does.”

Cane nodded.

“That goes for you too, Ameidio.”

“I’ll do so as soon as I’ve finished here,” said Haid, his hands busy over a console.

“Okay,” Roche said. “Unless something happens, we’ll meet back here in twelve hours.”

She stood and led Maii over to Cane. The reave’s hands briefly linked Roche with Cane, and in that instant Roche received a mental flash of Cane’s mind. The impression was short-lived, and carried with it no actual thoughts, but it left her with the impression of rapid motion. Even after the contact had been broken, she couldn’t shake a mental image of a gyroscope spinning, perpetually on the verge of toppling over but never quite doing so.

“Wait,” said Kajic as she started to leave. “I’m picking up another transmission.”

Roche continued toward the exit. “I doubt we’ll learn anything new,” she said. “Unless we work out the language—”

“It’s not from Jagabis, this time,” Kajic said. Roche stopped and faced Kajic’s flickering image. “We’re picking up the fringes of a tightbeam, probably reflected off the source of the first transmission. Whoever’s sending this one must be doing the best they can with a fairly low-tech outfit. Hang on—we’ll see if we can decode it.”

“It’s not in cipher,” said the Box. “It is a standard text message. No voice, no images.”

“Display it,” said Roche, curious despite her exhaustion.

The view of Hintubet faded from the main screen. Now in its place were several lines of text:

I DO NOT RUN FROM YOU,

BUT NEITHER WILL I RUN TO YOU.

I DO NOT REQUIRE YOUR AID.

WHEN OR IF I DO NEED ANYTHING THAT YOU POSSESS,

I WILL TAKE IT.

YOU WILL NOT STOP ME.

I AM NOT YOURS TO COMMAND.

Roche read it once, then again. “That’s it?” she asked after a third and final reading.

“The same message is repeated twice,” said the Box.

“And it’s not encrypted?”

“No.”

“But it
was
sent on a tightbeam.”

“Yes.”

“Then that tells us something. I’ll bet the reason we’re picking up the fringes of the beam is because it’s been through a number of relays to prevent triangulation of the source. Whoever sent it was less concerned about the contents of the message than keeping their location a secret.”

Haid nodded. “That would make sense.”

“And judging by the content, I’d say there’s only one person who could’ve sent it.”

“My sibling,” said Cane, meeting her accusatory stare.

Roche nodded slowly. “He’s alive.”

“And kicking,” said Haid. “I’m glad I’m not in the shoes of whoever he’s talking to.”

“The fact that he’s talking at all is interesting,” Roche mused. “In fact, it sounds like he’s bluffing.”

“You think so?” said Haid.

She shrugged. “If he’s hiding, he’s vulnerable.”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.” Haid returned his attention to the console before him. “I’ll see if any of the probes picked up the signal and try to pin down a source.”

“Good. Any more, Box?”

“The transmission has now ceased,” said the AI.

She considered whether she should stay on the bridge to see if anything else came in, but decided against it. The communication from the Sol clone warrior was important enough to warrant further examination, but not informative.

Again, without further data, she would only be speculating wildly.

“The situation’s unchanged, then,” she said. “I’ll keep my implants open for any further developments. Don’t hesitate to call me.”

“I won’t,” said Kajic. His image dissolved at the same moment Roche stepped from the bridge.

* * *

Back in her cabin, Roche lay on her bunk, going over the data they had collected so far. Detailed images of the rained Guhr Outpost came as often as the probe—now orbiting the small moon—passed by. All that remained of the refueling base were fragments twisted beyond recognition. Sensors detected high levels of radiation in the heart of the crater, which supported the theory that a ship, not an asteroid, had crashed there, but no remains of the ship had been found. Given the force of the explosion, Roche didn’t expect any. The ship must have been fully fueled to have caused such a blast. Only time would tell how greatly the moon’s orbit around the gas giant had been disturbed.

The remainder of the probes, now on their way to every major body in the system, were still too far away from their destinations to provide any new perspectives. The earliest she could expect data would be from the probe heading to Gatamin, six hours away; the latest, from the probe aimed at Kukumat and Murukan, the jovian pair, at over twenty hours.

Determined not to let frustration get the better of her—there was, after all, nothing she could do to change the speed of light—she tried instead to focus her thoughts on what she
did
know about Palasian System.

First of all, the COE Intelligence data appeared to be accurate so far. There had been a battle of some sort that had cost the Armada at least a refueling base.