The Rhine Page 7

  So, Weng got to indulge in her pastime of amateur dune-buggy racing— for almost three hours.

  The dome grew before them, the interior lights causing it to glow a soft golden in the night. By the time they reached the bedrock shelf they were all winded ... except, of course, for Jeffery who immediately pulled his grappling rifle from his shoulder and aimed at the lip of the shelf, fifteen meters up.

  Eric couldn't afford to be outdone, so with his throat burning a little and his chest heaving he unslung his own grappling rifle and followed suit. The others were only seconds behind, and five minutes thirty seconds later their weakest member made it over the lip and they were all standing on the shelf with the dome's curved wall rising up before them.

  "Check fifteen," Eric said.

  "Check sixteen," Weng corrected. "All quiet, no signals, no movement."

  Jeanne, the short woman standing to his right, and a chemistry major, snorted but didn't say anything.

  It was unnecessary to remind everyone of the plan, but Eric did anyway. "Alright, everyone get in place. When I give the all clear, you plant your charges and then break for the rover. Don't wait for anyone and maintain radio silence from here on out."

  Still breathing heavy he took off toward the dome and the others spread out, going to their assigned positions around the exterior. Eric himself was heading to a hatch on the northwest side. According to the schematics it was an emergency exit and the only thing that said it was still functional after so long was a year's worth of maintenance logs filed by a security guard whose job it was to check such things. Sol-X canceled their contract with the security company several weeks ago and the dome now had only an alarm system that would trigger cameras if set off. His was a business degree, but this was something that even his meager computer skills would be enough for. He had managed to disable the alarm in every practice for the last three days. The team needed someone with a solid engineering background, or a computer science major, but what they had was him. Again, an issue of not being able to get everyone in the right seat on the proverbial bus. Jeanne followed him to the hatch, then passed him as he stopped, pressing on to the dome's northern most point where she would wait with her explosives like the others.

  The hatch was old school— emergencies happened on the inside so you wanted out— meaning there was no control pad, but there was a fitted panel on the wall next to it. On the schematic it was labeled M65 and was used to allow access to the hatch's wiring when it was installed. The idea that someone would attempt to break into the dome from this point never occurred to the engineers of sixty years ago. The idea of someone breaking in period had probably never occurred to any of the boffins and dreamers that lived and worked here then.

  Eric wiped dust form the panel, finding the first bolt hole, a round indention filled with grit. He cleaned it out and then used a powerdriver from a toolkit that was strapped on the back of his oxygen pack to unscrew the fifteen centimeter long lag bolt. He did this nine times. The aluminum bolts held up well over the intervening decades since they were first installed, he only had to fight with three of them before they finally let go of the metal frame they were screwed into.

  The circuit board and wires were not exactly in the same position as the mockup that he practiced with but after some digging inside the wall he found them. He took the UNSEC MasterKey— a device that looked like a handcomm— and attached its leads to the wires that controlled the airlock just on the other side of the hatch. Even without human occupants the dome had a thin atmosphere, pressure, and the temperature would be above freezing. Either the merchandise needed it, or Sol-X had never bothered to depressurize the dome, he only knew to expect it. The MasterKey took twelve seconds to give him the access code he needed. Over the hatch was a vent and the light from his headlamp caught dust shoot from it and disappear into the darkness. With the airlock cycled he simply needed to trigger the hatch open. In all, the work took about seven minutes.

  He entered the airlock and tapped the control pad to close the hatch and begin cycling. Twenty seconds. The training they received was making him think in terms of tasks and time. Time wasn't a particular factor for this op, at least not until the very end, but he was starting to see glowing digits count down even in his sleep. Not for the first time Eric thought he might have been some sort of secret soldier in a previous life.

  When the airlock cycled he stepped out into a space that had been turned in to a small office. There was a desk and a chair, a small fridge, and an emergency locker against the wall. The whole area was surrounded by tall racks of high tensile plastic crates. In the dim lighting he could see the Sol-X labels and inventory pads on each one.

  Their intel hadn't provided the details of this area, but according to the schematic this was a camera dead spot— provided that Sol-X hadn't changed something since they acquired space here. Eric thought it unlikely. Like any government organization the UN was stuck in its ways and probably wanted the electronics to stay the way they were. In any case Weng should be able to warn them if he tripped the camera system and it began transmitting to whomever was responsible for monitoring the dome. It was an acceptable risk.

  There was supposed to be a security monitoring terminal— now defunct— a few meters to the east, but the arrangement of racks and crates obstructed his vision in that direction. He moved around the desk ... a closed sketch pad with a graphite pen lay on it and a stained coffee cup sat on a coaster at one corner. Coming around the corner of the rack enclosing the mini-office on the east he saw a bank of dark screens and a terminal. He walked to it and moved the padded office chair out of the way so he could get to the terminals access panel.

  The panel popped off easily and after he located the main feed for the security system's sensors he pulled a small black box from his toolkit. He had no idea how the device worked and while he was sure it had an official name he knew it only as a signal scrambler. Another miracle device provided by Jung. He activated the device and set it inside among the wiring and circuit boards. His HUD went fuzzy and its various readouts blurred until he turned and moved a couple of meters away from the terminal.

  Alright, now time to investigate, he thought. He to turned the nearest crate and checked the inventory pad ... four thousand Mia the Martian's jewelry set. Checking a couple of more crates in the area he moved further out into the dome. The color of the dome and the maintenance lights cast everything in soft golden tones. Everything was still, the racks of crates looming in silence. He walked row upon row, randomly checking inventory pads— brand name perfume, musical instruments, clothes, and more clothes. All things the citizens of Mars would love to have, and many of them would denounce what they did here today ... but only because they couldn't see the big picture. They wouldn't understand the effect that hitting the big corporations back on Earth in their pockets would have, the pressure it would put on the UN. No, they would miss these things and Eric and his team would be unsung heroes until the UN finally let go of Mars, then they would be remembered as heralds of a new age.

  Eric was a visionary, he knew.

  The dome had nothing in it critical to Martian survival. It was all just useless junk to sell to the colonists ... a way to keep money flowing back to the Earth in the form of UN tariffs. If any of it had been made on Mars, in a Martian owned factory, Eric would never have considered this particular warehouse a target. It would have had some value then. He walked back through the rows of racks, passing the main entrance with its dock and yellow painted loaders sitting idle, and on to the little office.

  Cycling the airlock he opened the hatch and stepped back onto the endless sands. For a moment he stared out into the darkness ... this time the helmet's face shield and HUD was an interference, not a technical marvel. Something, some latent dream ... calling, maybe that was the word ... made him want to pull his helmet off, smell the air, and look out across the stark landscape unprotected. He shook off the nostalgia and opened the team's comm channel.

  "It's a go.
I say again, it's a go."

  He turned and started jogging back to the edge of the bedrock shelf. Fifteen minutes later he and the rest of his team were back inside the rover. Eric triggered the detonator and on his HUD through a link to a camera mounted on the rover's roof he watched as a sudden flash of white light lit up the night sky in the distance. Weng accelerated the rover like she was in a race against death.

  9 - Mat

  "Fifty-two-a ... fifty-two-a ..."

  Three hours after the tug lost its thrust and began dropping back toward Saturn, Mat sat in the crash chair beside the medbed in Medical. The hour that the woman was unconscious he and Haydon managed to clean her up and put her in a medical gown. The medbed reported that she was dehydrated and showing symptoms of exhaustion. Along with a dozen yellowing bruises and puffy burns there were strange cuts on her arms and legs that Mat didn't want to think about how she might have gotten. She was awake, but not talking ... or rather, not communicating. She stared at him, mumbling that phrase over and over again ... fifty-two-a. Like she was trying not to forget it ... or maybe the phrase was an anchor for her sanity ... deep down, locked away.

  She wasn't eating either. Mat held up the plastic spoon of what was supposed to be mashed potatoes mixed with meat gravy. "Come on, take a bite. This is good stuff."

  "Fifty-two-a," she replied. Those big, innocent doe eyes watching him from an oval face framed in black hair ... fearful, uncertain ...

  The hatch opened, and Haydon came in.

  "Hey, boss," Haydon said and held up a pair of folder coveralls. "Since she's awake, I thought she might want these."

  He stepped over to the medbed, his magboots clicking on the deck. The woman's eyes snapped to him, but they slowly rolled away to look at the bulkhead.

  "These belonged to Peterson," Haydon said, pointing to the stenciling on the front of the coveralls. Peterson was the pilot before Yuri. He was hired with Haydon on the day Mat purchased the Sadie. Three years ago Mat found him in his rack, dead. An asthma attack. The autopsy report said it could have been associated with his years of working in an ore processing plant, but nothing definitive. Those reports were seldom definitive, the mining companies liked them that way. So, Mat did the reasonable thing and replaced him with a drunk Russian he found in a bar two hatches down from the coroner’s office on Butte.

  "Peterson, was a small guy. These should fit you," Haydon went on to explain to the woman, smiling. "But I bet your name's not Peterson ..." The last was a prompt.

  They waited for her to reply, Haydon's odd smile reminding Mat of plastic molding. "So far she's sticking with fifty-two-a. Just leave them here."

  "Okay ..." Haydon stopped suddenly, looking at the mealbox Mat was holding in his lap. "That from the tug?"

  Mat nodded. "Got a bunch of them from the galley." He had shoved them hurriedly in the laundry bag, trying to think about what the pirates had cost them so he wouldn't feel like a thief. Haydon managed to bring back both the duffel and the laundry bag while Mat himself pushed the woman through the vestibule. "I thought she might be hungry, but she's not eating."

  He held out his hand, "Can I see ..."

  Mat raised an eyebrow but handed the box to him. Haydon looked at the side of the box, then said, "AgraSource. That's a UN chartered company on Mars. They're the major distributor for MREs on the planet."

  "So, what are you thinking? That maybe the rumors are true, the pirates are really Martian privateers stealing ore and bringing it back to Mars?"

  Haydon shrugged and replied, "I don't know, boss. But I will say this, a privateer is just a sanctioned pirate in my book. They act like them, anyway." He nodded to the woman for emphasis. "She had to come from somewhere, and I don't get the impression that she was crew. They probably took her from some gas miner like us."

  Mat sighed, took the mealbox back from Haydon and looked at the woman. "I guess we'll know when she decides to talk." Then he looked back to Haydon and said, "She can't live in Medical, we're going to ..."

  "Already moved my gear to Yuri's quarters," Haydon said.

  Mat gave a brief smile. "Thanks."

  "No problem. This way I can keep a closer eye on him and she has some privacy. Anyway, the reason I came down was because Yuri's getting antsy. He wants to hard burn out of here before anyone else shows up. And frankly, I want to leave too. We're just burning up that fuel we siphoned from the tug's tanks."

  "Alright, I got it," Mat said, putting the food in the disposal shoot and unstrapped from the chair. "I'll go up and officially give the word ..."

  The woman grabbed his arm. It was so unexpected that Mat almost jerked away. He looked at her, she was staring back wide-eyed. "Misaki," she said. "My name is Misaki."

  Her hand was like a vice on Mat's wrist.

  Mat looked back to Haydon. "Ahh, maybe I'll just give the word from here. You go on up."

  Nodding, Haydon turned and left, the hatch shutting behind him with a clank. Mat tried to stand but the woman— Misaki— wouldn't release him. He gave her a reassuring smile and pointed to the coveralls that Haydon left floating in the air.

  "I've got to get things secured, so we can leave."

  She frowned, but after a moment let go of his wrist, her eyes following him as he stood and grabbed the coveralls, stowing them in a cabinet.

  "Alright, let's make sure you're in tight," he said, as gentle as he could make his voice sound. She smiled back at him. It was a pretty smile that reached her eyes. It was a compliant smile, and when he realized that he felt sick to his stomach. There was a single, loose restraint holding her at the waist, just to keep her from floating off the medbed. Now he tightened the restraint and pulled straps up to buckle over her shoulders. The spacer in her took over and she put her arms down on the medbed and straightened out her legs. It was an automatic response to what she understand was about to happen. Mat took that as a good sign. Her eyes followed him as he sat back down and strapped in the crash chair.

  He pulled his handcomm from his pocket and beeped Yuri's terminal.

  "Yes, kep," Yuri said out of the little screen.

  "Yuri, if Haydon's strapped in, aim us toward Butte. Let me know when the initial maneuvers are done."

  "Copy that, kep."

  The Sadie shuddered and rolled.

  * * *

  2K New Era Catalogue object #28 was a big rock floating south of the ecliptic between the orbit of Jupiter and the Belt. Officially, the name Butte applied to the burrow— the warren of tunnel like corridors cut out of the rock, along with a few old bubble domes on its surface, but everyone that didn't work behind a university desk in the astrophysics department just called the rock Butte.

  Apex Mining owned and operated Butte but leased space to several consortium partners, it served as an ore drop-off point for miners in the Belt as well as those mining the gases of Jupiter and Saturn. Company haulers would then take that ore, or gas, in-system to the processing plants on the Moon. There was a steady flow of miners in— full cans exchanged for empty ones— and haulers out.

  Butte was the closest of the drop-off stations scattered throughout the system, by Universal Time Coordinated a mere two weeks from their current position. Well, Yuri would have the exact figure but as Mat floated in through the Flight deck hatch he thought two weeks was about right.

  "All I'm saying is that studies have shown that criminal activity is induced by something external ..." Yuri was animated in the cockpit seat, explaining whatever it was to Haydon.

  Haydon was floating in the center of the deck by the plot terminal, his arms crossed over his chest. He was shaking his head. "Another useless study on why people do bad things. People do bad things because people are bad."

  "If you will just listen to Victor Leontiev's ..."

  "Oh hey, boss," Haydon said, looking at Mat as he floating the command station and strapped in. Mat could imagine he was tired of the argument. Yuri had a way of forcing people to talk unnecessarily. "How's our girl doing?"

 
Our girl. Like they were all part of the same soccer team. Like they were rooting for her. Mat guessed he was rooting for her. Anyway, he knew what Haydon meant.

  "I had the medbed give her a light sedative, to help with the burn," Mat replied.

  "Next hard burn is in eight minutes," Yuri confirmed, he paused and then continued. "She was banged up, I saw her on the Medical screen. I am glad we sacrificed the can to hit them."

  Banged up. Not from being thrown around when the tug hit the canister. He knew what Yuri meant. The abuse she suffered. The bruises that were yellow and the marks on her that were days old ... wounds healing and reopened.

  "Me too, Yuri," he said, then glanced at Haydon. "Now I've got to think of how I'm going to write this up for the UN rep. And Apex is going to want to know what happened to their canister. They'll think we sold it."

  Haydon nodded. "We've got camera footage ... records of their messages."

  "And our boarding them?" He didn't add, and shooting them.

  This time Haydon shrugged. "We went to look for salvage and possible survivors ... and we found one. UNSEC won't make a fuss over this, trust me."

  Legalities hadn't been something he considered when Haydon brought up the subject of salvage— raiding the damaged tug. Mat sat back in his seat and watched the counter for the next burn. Haydon took a seat about thirty seconds before Yuri announced it. Then four-gees fell on his already tortured chest.

  Forty minutes later the Sadie switched over to her ion drive and the pressure released.

  "Accelerating on ion drive. Current speed is eighteen thousand kpm," Yuri said. "Next burn is in five hours twelve minutes."