Prodigal (2 page)

“What’s the matter, Straka?” the captain asked, needling him amicably over the comm link. “Cat got your tongue?”

“More like my balls,” Nathan said, watching the numbers pile up on his display. Interplanetary space was cold, but it was noisy as hell. Radiation signatures were off the scale, overwhelming the delicate traces of man-made activity he sifted for. “I might have to take some systems down to modulate the bridge. You got anything you can give me?”

“You can have navigation after we assume orbit.”

“How long?”

“T–minus two minutes, twenty seconds. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

Nathan released a thin, misty breath into the rarefied atmosphere of the core. Nobody liked it in here because it was so damned icy. Nobody but Nathan. With the cold came needed clarity.

He patched the navigation stream from the bridge into his virtual display and ticked off the seconds as
Almacantar
lumbered into orbit, swinging his chair around to face the core’s memory wall: a dazzling series of silicon relays that popped into life and just as quickly faded back into darkness. This was the crawler at work, scratching against the confines of its primitive body like a prisoner beating against the bars of his cell. Nathan wasn’t concerned; the module was programmed to act this way. A crawler was designed to attack and destroy foreign data, making it a natural predator. Only the constant challenge of running the ship’s systems kept the beast in its cage, when all it really wanted was to roam the wilds of the Axis.

Careful, Straka. You could be describing yourself.

Right. Or he could just be projecting—that curious trait of human beings, morphing everything into their own image. In this case, it was an overly romantic thought. Nathan was good, but he was no outlaw. His instincts were sharp, but he had never made an illegal run in the Axis. He possessed that rarest of combinations: ability and conscience. The counterculture labeled him as a ticket-puncher. Nathan just thought he was practical.

The crawler seemed to sense the change in his mood, responding with a red-shift data flow so gentle it took Nathan a few moments to realize it was there. Slowly, he saw the object of his longing: pattern recognition. The firefly flashes of the silicon relays, chaos theory in action, gradually assumed a rational bent. The bridging was stable. The crawler was at his command.

“Bridge, core,” Nathan signaled. “I got the tiger by the tail.”

“Bring me some good news,” the captain answered, “and I might break out a bottle of the real stuff tonight.”

Nathan heard the cheers of the bridge crew in the background. Whether this haul was worth everybody’s while now depended on what he had to say.

He rolled back over to the virtual display and checked the numerics again. As
Almacantar
swung around the dark side of her planetary objective, radiation signatures fell off dramatically. Now that Nathan had a clean slate, the real work began. He released an algorithm he had programmed earlier into the core, where the crawler absorbed it and started processing its complex instructions. That was the magic of this union: the ability to feed conventional logic into a storm of chaotic impulses, then render a finite series of results from an almost infinite series of variables. The result was an extrapolation, but a damned fine one—as close to reality as you could get from a construct. Soon, that image began to part the mists of the display, presenting Nathan with a complete representation of an entire planet down to the last conceivable detail.

The planet Mars.

“Unbelievable,” Nathan whispered into the comm link. He had had every confidence that his scheme would work, but had never imagined it would be so perfect, so complete. “Bridge, core. Are you getting this?”

“Affirmative,” the captain replied. “It’s overloading the monitors, but we’re getting it.”

Nathan reduced the throughput to the bridge nodes, buffering the overflow of data through the crawler, which had more than enough muscle to handle it. At the same time, he examined the construct for the ebb and flow of energies that would lead him to sites of potential importance. Martian topography had been painstakingly documented by previous expeditions, but
Almacantar
was not here on a voyage of discovery. The Directorate expected a handsome return on its investment, and that meant zeroing in on everything the last visitors here had left behind.
Everything.

Deep-Spacers were superstitious by nature, but even agnostics like Nathan couldn’t deny the potency of the stories about this place. Mars was more than a red dot in the middle of a black sky; it was a graveyard, a haunted palace. Hunting treasure here was like raiding a necropolis.

“Core, bridge,” the captain said. “We’re coming up on the Tharsis dome now.”

“Got it,” Nathan replied. He narrowed the construct to the northwest quadrant of the dome, a bulge in the Martian surface over four thousand kilometers across and nearly ten kilometers high. This had once been an area of incredible seismic activity millions of years ago, where lava had flowed freely across a low-gravity plain, allowing the slow buildup of the largest volcanoes in the solar system. Nathan leveled a hard stare at the display as they lumbered into view: Pavonis, Ascraeus, and Arsia Mons, mountains taller than anything on Earth, yet rising at a gentle slope because of their incredible width. As much as he had studied the topography in preparation for this mission, the sight of it still transfixed him. He could only imagine how the terraformers had seen it, sun slipping behind these flattened peaks each night, dormant monsters still capable of devouring—as the people here had discovered only when it was too late.

Olympus, the greatest of these, stood in mute testimony to that torment.

The massive volcano lay just past the Tharsis ridge, across what became known as Settler’s Plain. Its breadth filled the construct, breaking the display into static until Nathan attenuated the image and allowed the crawler to catch up with the numbers. The semi-intelligent module reacted much as Nathan had, overloaded by the sheer volume of information it took to process such a thing—mass beyond imagination, form beyond reasoning. Olympus Mons, meanwhile, stared back at him like a vast, unblinking eye: its caldera a collapsed dome of frozen lava, eons old and concealing secrets within secrets.

Until one of them sparked into life before him.

Nathan experienced it only as a vague sensation, a point of light that disappeared when he looked directly at it. From the periphery of his vision, he saw that it was on the move—a discrete but powerful surge, crisscrossing his virtual display and running along the rocky flows that rimmed the caldera. Then it stopped, and hovered, just long enough for Nathan to understand that this was
not
a hallucination.

It dropped into the crater and disappeared.

What the hell?

Nathan jumped on the display, fingers scrambling to augment the image so he could get a closer look. It quickly dissolved into a blur, his eyes straining not to blink lest he miss any hint of movement. The pit, however, remained dark. He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was experiencing some kind of withdrawal. It could happen when you spent too much time jockeying a console. You could start seeing things that you never—

There it is again!

Not one signature, but
six.
They appeared one at a time at random intervals—independent, but connected somehow. Like a flock of birds, they darted up and out of the caldera, following one another as they glided down toward Settler’s Plain, in the shadow of Olympus, where the terraformers had set up their base. They danced about for a short time, tracing the contours of odd shapes that formed engineering patterns—buildings, vehicles, a biodome long since abandoned.

And Nathan thought:
I don’t belong here.

The pulses rejoined one another, darting back up the slope of Olympus. Then they were gone inside the mountain, leaving an energy trail that blurred into a dull afterimage.

Nathan shook it off, clearing his head of the whole event.
Data inclusions,
he thought.
You get those kinds of anomalies with a crawler.
Still, he couldn’t dismiss the notion that there was
purpose
in those movements.

“Straka, I think we might have a situation here.”

It was the captain, her voice mixed with a dozen others on the bridge. Nathan heard them running back and forth between their stations, calling out status reports while riding on a nervous edge.
Almacantar
was now on full alert, and as his own display lit up he saw the reason for it. The crawler had already classified the signals he intercepted, their probable source flashing in bright red letters over and over:

BIOLOGICAL

“I’m seeing it, bridge,” Nathan said. “Gotta be a malfunction.”

“I sure as hell hope so,” the captain shot back. “We weren’t supposed to find
anything
like this.” The tension in her voice penetrated all the way down to the frigid air of the computer core. Nathan, more than anyone, understood why—and what it could mean to the mission.

“Locking things down,” he said, already weary of Mars. “I’m on my way up.”

Almacantar
was a variable-profile vessel, a propulsion hull with a crew compartment that could be mated to a wide array of modules depending on her specific mission. Originally constructed as a joint venture between the United States of America and the Reformed Republic of China, she launched a mere seven years after the Chinese cast off the last vestiges of their experiment with socialism—and only two years before they formed a corporate alliance with the Japanese that would later develop into the Collective. Her designers had intended her for scientific exploration of Jupiter and its moons, a mission that brought both stunning success and unintended consequences. While sampling the upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere,
Almacantar
had proved the viability of long-range gas mining—effectively turning Jupiter into a way station with enough fuel to power every human endeavor across the solar system.

From that point,
Almacantar
’s fate was sealed. She was retooled for commercial service, and spent most of the next decade making runs between Jupiter and the scattered outposts she serviced. Along the way, Directorate engineers modified her spaceframe to accommodate the latest technological upgrades and mission requirements—all of which eventually twisted her sleek form into a crude chaos of jutting shapes and improvised lines. She sported obvious welding scars from where her conventional engines had been replaced with pulse-fusion hybrid reactors and a spatial jump drive, plus all the dents and carbon scalding that resulted from so much time in spacedock. In short,
Almacantar
was an ugly beast—a sad shell of her former self, a relic from a time when space travel was new and mankind’s aspirations less vulgar. But to those who knew her, she was better than a good-luck charm. In
Almacantar
’s entire period of service, she had never lost one member of her crew. There had been a thousand close calls and near misses, critical injuries that should have taken dozens of lives—but the ship had never returned home with fewer souls than when she departed. And for that, her officers and crew loved her.

This was the fourth time Captain Lauren Farina had taken her out, and each time the mission had gone by the numbers; but good luck carried with it a curse, the fear that she would be the one to break
Almacantar
’s winning streak. So far, Farina had stayed ahead of the game—and when she saw Mars for the first time on the main viewer, she had felt a momentary elation. They had beaten the odds once more. Now, Farina was cursing herself. She should have known better.

The captain did her best to maintain an outward calm, projecting a casual confidence from the center seat. It was, like many facets of command, an illusion. Inside, she felt exactly the same thing as the crew—a slow dread, pulsing through her veins and making the subtle suggestion:
I knew it couldn’t be this simple.

Farina didn’t have the luxury of letting it show. That was the prerogative of the six mates and officers with her on the bridge, who eyed her apprehensively from their stations. Such was life aboard a commercial vessel: a constant state of emotional combat, played out in a tin can arena among fifty souls chasing after a paycheck. Fifty lives, all Farina’s responsibility, who expected fat compensation for assuming the rigors of this mission. That bottom line was one of only two things that held everything together. The other was the captain. Good ones learned to master all that conflict, to use it to their advantage. For now, though, Farina had to begin by keeping things under control.

That meant working the bridge crew hard. She had ordered a lockdown of all stations, isolating chatter with the rest of the ship to prevent rumors from spreading. In the meantime,
Almacantar
’s sensor arrays operated in full diagnostic mode—checking and rechecking all the data coming from the Martian surface, looking for any indication that the core construct was flawed. With the crew busy, they had less time to ask questions she couldn’t answer.

“Try bleeding some power from the pulse jets into the array,” Farina ordered the engineering duty officer. “Maybe we just need to punch through some interference.”

“I’ll need to program a flow containment subroutine to make sure I don’t overload the sensors,” the officer replied. “That could take some time.”