Pelquin's Comet (32 page)

She shook her head. “Not even an automated response. It’s as if they just popped out, intending to be back in a minute or two.”

He grunted; that probably wasn’t far from the truth.

“When we land,” Nate murmured, “I want to scoot over and take a look at that thing.”

“No,” Pelquin said. “We need you here. You’re the only one who’s been inside the cache chamber.”

“Well someone ought to go across and check it out.”

“I’ll go, if anyone does,” Bren said immediately.

Pelquin didn’t reply. His attention shifted from the Xter ship to the gaping maw of the cache chamber’s tunnel. It beckoned like the open trap it was, as Nate and his mining buddies had found to their cost.

Quite what they’d been doing in this sector of space was another matter entirely. “Exploring new opportunities away from the clutches of the big corporates,” had been Nate’s explanation when asked. Pelquin wanted to accept that, wanted to trust his old buddy without reservation, and yet…

As if on cue, Bren said, “Remind me, how the hell did you find this place again?”

“A little out-of-bounds prospecting,” Nate admitted. “You know how it is: the big cartels like Jossyren have all the rich pickings sewn up, leaving us independents to feed on scraps, scratching around the fringes of the asteroid belts hoping to strike it lucky.”

“So you came all the way out
here
? There must have been easier options, surely; safer ones at least.” Good old Bren; where Pelquin might ponder a question, she just came right out and asked.

“We were desperate. We’d had a run of bad luck; one trip after another which yielded sod all. Debts were mounting and morale was lower than Monkey’s IQ… We knew the next one had to produce, big time, and the chances of finding anything rich enough in human space was pretty close to zero, so…”

“Yeah, but
Xter space
?”

“Yeah, Xter space. Live with it,” Nate said, evidently tiring of the questions.

“It’s not as outrageous as it sounds,” Drake said. “It’s a big frontier out here. Slipping across unnoticed would be a lot easier than you might think, especially since RzSpace doesn’t recognise the arbitrary boundaries we’ve created.”

What, the banker coming to Nate’s defence?

“Right,” Nate said, clearly as surprised at this unexpected support as Pelquin was. “It was an all or nothing gamble, but we didn’t go in blind, we’d done our homework. Human-friendly worlds, just inside Xter space, uncolonised and with no record of mining or other activity; that’s what we were looking for. This one came out top of the list.”

“Still sounds like a hell of a risk to me.”

“Which is why we’ve taken a few more precautions than Nate’s crew did this time around,” Pelquin felt obliged to point out.

“And when you arrived at this world, you just happened to stumble on the cache?” Bren prompted.

“Pretty much. We were carrying out preliminary remote scans – surveying a number of potential sites for minerals etc – when we came across an anomaly, buried just beneath the surface, at the foot of a hill.”

“The Elder cache.”

“Lucky bastard.”

“You think? Nate said. “I’m the only one left alive from that whole crew… You call that lucky?

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

“Yeah… There is that.”

Bren looked as if she were about to add something but evidently thought better of it. Instead she looked at Pelquin and said, “So what do we do now, skip, with another ship in situ and all? Tip-toe meekly away and give up on this whole thing?”

“Like hell,” Pelquin said. “We wait.”

“For what? More Xters to show up?”

“No, to see if these ones do. If they
are
inside the chamber collecting artefacts and somehow our sensors have missed them, they’ll have to come out eventually. And don’t forget that if that
is
what they’re doing, the chances are they’re just as illegal as we are. The Xter authorities prefer to leave elder caches undisturbed from what I hear. And this lot have brought just one small ship with them. Does that sound like an official operation to you? Where’s all the support staff, the bureaucracy, the warnings for us to stay away as soon as we came anywhere close to Eden’s atmosphere? No, these are privateers like us. If they’re bringing stuff up then they’re doing so to sell. So, we’re much the same, them and us, and we’re the ones with the tactical advantage; our ship’s in the air while theirs is a sitting duck on the ground.”

“Why, Captain, you’re not seriously suggesting we rob them, are you?” Bren asked, feigning shock.

“No, actually I’m not.”
Not yet, at any rate.
“We’re not pirates.” At least they weren’t when they had a representative from First Solar Bank on board. “I’m just saying that tactically we’ve got the higher ground so to speak; we’re mobile while they’re just squatting there, which puts us in a strong bargaining position, that’s all.”

“If there’s anyone left alive to bargain with,” Nate said.

“Do Xters really go in for that sort of thing – robbing caches, I mean?” Bren said.

“Sure they do.”

“Since when did you become such an expert on alien behaviour, anyhow?”

“What if they don’t come up?” Anna asked.

“Sorry?”

“What if they never emerge from the chamber?”

“Then we can assume the cache defences got them, which means there’s one less source of competition for us to worry about.”

“Oh, right, of course. We just have to worry about whatever it was that killed them,” Bren said.

“That’s where we came in, boys and girls.” Pelquin pointed out. “So let’s just sit tight for the moment and see what happens, shall we?”

No one had anything more to add. They waited for a little over half an hour without any sign of activity, the
Comet
circling in as tight a holding pattern as she could manage in atmosphere.

At length, Anna said, “We’re burning up a lot of fuel, skip.”

Pelquin was aware of that.

“I don’t think there’s anyone left alive in there,” Bren opined.

“I reckon you’re right,” he agreed. “Anna, set us down close to the other ship, but keep the engines warm and be ready for a quick dust off.” He then turned to Bren, saying, “Let’s get one of those new probes programmed and set to fly, shall we?”

“Now we’re talking!”

New tech; always guaranteed to float Bren’s boat. She was on her way in an instant.

“I’ll give her a hand,” Nate said.

“Okay, but don’t use being down in the cargo hold as an excuse to slope off and take a peek at the Xter ship.” Nate had a stubborn streak; he’d always been a bit of a maverick, but in the past Pelquin had thought of him as
his
maverick; now he wasn’t so sure. “We’ll have a look at her
after
we’ve claimed the contents of the cache. Understood?”

“I hear you.”

The ground was uneven and dotted with sparse vegetation. Even so, Anna brought the
Comet
down with enough of a bump to jog the froth off a cappuccino but little more. Pelquin rated that as pretty impressive given the lack of a landing area.

“Are we still trying to contact the Xter ship, Anna?”

“Yup; I’m running standard greeting on a continuous loop. Reckon it’s a waste of time, though. Still no one over there who wants to talk to us.”

“The probe’s ready to go,” Bren reported within minutes of the ship having settled.

“Send it out, then,” he told her.

Considerably larger than the spyflies that had dogged his footsteps on New Sparta, the probes were still wonders of miniaturised tech. Torpedo-like and around the size of a chunky pen, they provided better images than a spyfly ever could and cost a good deal less – though that was purely relative. The damned things were still far from cheap.

With the probe’s systems slaved to the
Comet
’s control board, Anna was able to fly the tiny drone out of the ship’s hold. She and Pelquin had the best view – the triple screen in front of them showing a panoramic 3D representation of all that the probe encountered. Leesa, Drake and the doc were crowded in behind them, watching over their shoulders. They were soon joined by Nate and Bren.

The native terrain leapt into abrupt focus as the drone set out. This was the same rugged scrubland they’d witnessed on the ship’s monitor screen but it had now been brought vividly to life; the uneven ground, which was festooned with tussocks of grass and small spiky bushes, took on contour and gained substance as a result. A series of digits winked into being at the bottom left hand corner of the central image, detailing such things as temperature, barometric pressure, atmospheric composition – Pelquin barely noticed, his attention focused on the hole in the approaching cliff face. Seen from this perspective it didn’t resemble a cave at all; more a wound. The opening was too stark and too fresh to be mistaken for anything natural.

As the drone drew closer, the central image zoomed in, while the two side images remained at a more natural definition.

“Residual energy readings,” Bren murmured. She was evidently paying more attention to the numbers than he’d been. “A weapon’s been discharged here recently.” At times like this he was glad to have an ex-soldier on the team.

The first evidence of the party that had preceded them waited at the entrance. Leaning against the left hand wall, apparently abandoned, was a piece of equipment – small, light, and unfathomable.

“We ought to collect that on the way in,” Bren said. “Xter stuff can be valuable in its own right.”

He murmured acknowledgement.

Under Anna’s expert guidance the probe slipped slowly inside the tunnel. Pelquin was pleased by the way its systems automatically compensated for the change in lighting conditions, ensuring that the quality of the images remained pretty much constant despite the drop in illumination. A little further in they came across what looked at first to be another piece of abandoned equipment, but this one proved to be different. Because of the way it rested, slumped against the wall, it took Pelquin a few seconds to realise that this was an Xter spacesuit, and it hadn’t been abandoned; except by life itself. The body of the suit’s occupant remained firmly in place.

“That’s one bulky suit for an Xter,” Drake commented.

“Yeah, I agree,” Bren replied. “Armoured, I reckon.”

Pelquin nodded. “Looks as if they went in there expecting trouble.”

“If so, I think they found it. See the wound where the suit’s been breached? And that has to be blood. Drying but not yet dried; so this is all very recent.” Bren leaned forward and pointed at a position towards the bottom of the left hand screen. “Anna, can you focus there for a sec.”

Their perspective pivoted as Anna complied, so that the indicated spot took centre stage, and then they zoomed in.

“Thought so,” Bren said. “See where the rock’s scorched? And it looks as if something’s melted there. The temperature readings are still high as well. Rock retains heat. This area’s taken some concentrated energy fire, and not too long ago.”

“Nate, what do you reckon?”

“Looks like the smashed remains of the laser trap we hit when I was here before, except that we took it out that time around.”

“Then someone rebuilt it.”

“Seems so.”

The probe continued and two more Xter corpses appeared. They were lying close to each other in the centre of the tunnel floor. Again Anna paused so that they could try to determine what had killed them.

“I don’t think it was lasers this time,” Bren remarked. “No sign of injuries or damage to the suits.”

“Could be sonics,” Drake said. “I’ve encountered that sort of defence before at Elder caches.”

“Whatever this was, it looks as if the Xters managed to neutralise it,” Anna said, highlighting four points on the tunnel walls where
something
had been destroyed, presumably by weapons’ fire.

“These Xters are doing our job for us,” the doc murmured. “Two of the cache defences destroyed already.”

“Yeah, but it looks as if the defences did for them in the end,” Bren reminded him.

“Bren’s right,” Pelquin said. “Let’s not get too smug just yet.”

Next they came to a part where the tunnel had partially collapsed – the left hand wall and ceiling having evidently come down.

“Will there be enough room to get the buggy through?” Pelquin wondered.

“I think so, hang on,” Anna replied. Some deft repositioning of the drone produced a further scroll of digits. “Just, if I drive carefully and pull the shielding in. We’ll have to move that Xter body out of the way first, though.”

Two more fallen Xter suits marked the spot; one of them half-buried beneath the rubble. The other was lying prone and blocking the still-open right hand side. A line of fused circuitry – resembling crystal more than anything else – was embedded in a vertical groove in the tunnel wall, exposed by the collapse.

“What do you reckon this was?”

Nate shook his head. “No idea. That wasn’t there last time.”

“Do you think this is the last of the defences?” Bren asked.

“Only one way to find out.” Pelquin signalled Anna to continue advancing the probe.

“We’re not that far from the cache chamber itself,” Anna murmured. “There can’t be too many more…”

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the screens abruptly went blank. There was a suggestion of rapid movement in the left hand screen and, before anyone could comment let alone react, all three winked out simultaneously.

“Whoa!” Anna said, giving a startled jump.

“One more defence at least, I’d say,” Bren quipped.

“Shit!” summed up Pelquin’s feelings on the matter. Scrub one expensive piece of kit. Fortunately, he had two equally costly replacements, but no point in committing either of those just yet.

Anna sat forward again, her fingers dancing frantically over the control board, but after a few seconds she shook her head. “Sorry Pel, it’s completely dead; nothing’s responding.”

“Can we replay the last few seconds?” Pelquin asked.

They did, first at normal speed, and then slowed down, and then a third time grossly slowed down. Even at that exaggerated pace, the speed with which the line of pointed metal bars shot out of the wall was frightening. One of them headed straight towards the watcher – the probe – far too swiftly to register let alone evade. Even so, it was pure luck that any of the spikes had caught the probe. They were at least three times its circumference and there was more than enough space for the tiny drone to pass between them. Had it been ten centimetres above or below its actual elevation the probe would likely have survived, disturbed only by the wind of the bars’ passage. As it was, one of the spikes had scored a direct hit.