Stolen Earth, page 24
True to One’s statement, Lynch called for a rest a minute or so later. They were trying to keep as quiet as possible, so no one bothered with extraneous chatter. Hayer shrugged off her pack and used it as a seat, leaning back against the wall of the gulley, chest heaving as she drew deep lungsful of air. Despite the Old Earth nanites that protected them from whatever might be floating about in the air, they all wore their ship suits with helmets up, partly for the protection they offered, but mostly for the communications and temperature control. Even so, now that she had a chance to look at her, Laurel could see that Hayer was sweating.
Most of the sweat had dried when Lynch waved them into motion once more, this time moving at a pace that seemed almost glacial to Laurel. It was, however, a pace that Hayer was able to keep. Which left Laurel free to do her actual job and keep an eye out for trouble. The terrain through which they moved consisted of grassy plains and low rolling hills and she could already tell that it was playing tricks on her mind. Wide-open spaces weren’t something she had much experience of, and the gentle roll of the land sent a tingle of unease running up and down her spine. What was hiding out there? At least the moonlight was surprisingly bright, giving better visibility than she would have imagined, but it also created strange pools of shadowy darkness that were all but impenetrable to the naked eye.
Fortunately, she wasn’t limited to the naked eye. With a toss of the head she activated the image intensifiers embedded into her ship suit visor. The world around her changed, going from shadowy grays and deep blacks to a panorama painted in shades of green. She scanned the hills again, conscious of the fact that any enemy observing them would likely be keeping beneath the crest of the hill and using some manner of offset optics for direct observation. It made the task all but impossible, but she kept looking anyway.
Back in the city ruins, she had felt the remains of Old Earth’s civilization closing around her like walls. They’d been set upon by agents of Two or Six, and whatever One or Margaret and Oliver might say about the rarity of such encounters, she didn’t buy it. They hadn’t been down an hour before the friggin’ metal bugs attacked. Not to mention the nanites that had damn near killed her. No, based on those experiences, she couldn’t help but feel that interdiction of the planet remained necessary.
But amid the unspoiled beauty of these verdant lands, that confidence was shaken. They had seen no dangers here and while it was possible that the air itself was toxic to those without the proper protections, humanity had managed to persevere. If the true danger of the AIs really was in the fact that they had been unable to stop their centuries of war, could Old Earth be made safe once more? She wanted to believe it, and that was part of the problem.
The notion was so seductive: the idea that they could all one day return “home” like the evacuation had never happened; they could breathe free air and have space to stretch and grow. Food could be grown in abundance and animal proteins could be raised naturally rather than farmed in a lab. It was the kind of talk that was relegated to pure fantasy in SolComm.
One thing was certain: if she went back and reported that Old Earth might be habitable, they’d lock her up. No matter what faith she had in her superiors, she knew instinctively that they wouldn’t let someone with a gram of authority profess such a thing. It was too dangerous, not just to the people who would inevitably try to break through the IZ, but to the underlying structure of the Commonwealth itself.
And that, Laurel thought, was the real problem.
“Down!”
Federov’s hiss cut through her reverie as it hissed over the comm. Her body was already moving, dropping to the soft grass of the ravine while pushing her rifle out in front of her. The weapon was still set in its long-range configuration and would be relatively useless in the ditch, but she didn’t want to drop down on top of it with her full body weight either; doing so might push the optic out of zero rendering the weapon useless for its intended purpose.
She did her best to scan for trouble but lying flat on her stomach with Hayer in front of her and the gully walls on either side, there was little to see. After a few long minutes, the captain’s voice rang in her suit helmet. “Morales to the front.”
She grunted, leaned to one side, and slipped free of her rifle harness. She quickly slid into it once more, this time looping the straps so the weapon crossed her back. Then she began the tedious process of low-crawling through the ravine. It was all knees and toes and elbows as she pushed her way forward, moving with no more than few inches of space between her body and the ground at any time. It brought back flashes of her training, as anachronistic as it had seemed at the time. Now, as she physically crawled over Hayer to remain below the line of the ravine, she couldn’t help but be thankful for what she had, until that moment, considered a certain stodginess in her instructors. She made it past Hayer and pushed on over Bishop, both of whom managed to stay relatively quiet as she was forced to press them deeper into the vegetation with the combined weight of her body and gear.
Once she’d cleared that obstacle, she could see that Federov and Lynch had made their way up the side of the narrow ditch and were peering south. She crawled up beside them and turning to face whatever was capturing their attention.
It took a moment for her image intensifiers to adjust to the new source of light. But once they did, and her vision cleared, she saw it: the off-worlder settlement.
The dome was a clear composite and stretched more than a kilometer in diameter. It was less than a third of that in height, but it still represented an absolutely staggering amount of infrastructure for a planet that was supposed to be interdicted. Her image intensifiers had flared because the place was lit up like a hydroponics bay during a grow cycle. She brought her rifle to her shoulder and flipped open the covers on the optic, settling the weapon in place so she could get a better view. As she panned the crosshairs over the dome, she felt like she could have been looking at any colony installed by the Sol Commonwealth on any airless moon or rock anywhere in the solar system. The lights came from the prefabricated housing units, each four stories tall. Her surveillance counted a dozen of those, and if they were operating to spec, that could mean hundreds of people. Perhaps One had underestimated the numbers they would face, or perhaps the off-worlders hadn’t built up to their intended contingent yet. There was a smattering of other buildings, those that on a colony would provide for administrative offices, food storage and services, commercial enterprise, and so forth.
The buildings took up about half of the available space.
The rest… well, “park” wasn’t a word that got applied in the Sol Commonwealth. Space was at far too much of a premium for anything like the parks she had seen in old vids to exist. The larger colonies had green areas—plant life was important to any attempt at creating a contained biome—but everything had to serve a function related to survival. The green spaces in even the largest domed colonies—those on Luna and Mars—were dedicated to food production and were far too valuable to let the public go traipsing through. She had heard that the ultra-rich had “solariums” filled with all kinds of flora where they could simply sit and enjoy the sights and sounds, but Laurel had never bought into those rumors. Working-class people always came up with the wildest speculation about how the glitterati lived and, most of the time, it was just jealousy-fueled wishful thinking.
But Laurel couldn’t think of any other word for what she was looking at. She hadn’t exactly grown used to the omnipresent vegetation of Old Earth in the couple of days they’d been on the surface, but it was everywhere. It had sort of faded into the background at any point when she wasn’t actively thinking about it. But that wilderness was different than what was contained within the dome. The grasses weren’t grasses… they were… lawns, she thought the word was. Manicured, cultured, and cultivated for no other reason than to look and feel nice. The trees and bushes had a sculpted look about them. A trio of burbling fountains formed the points of an equilateral triangle, spraying water into the atmosphere with wanton abandon.
Anywhere in SolComm, that park would be a display of wealth so lavish that it might bring the wrath of the disgruntled workers down upon the colony. In the midst of the vastness of the grassy plains around them it just seemed… odd. Then again, the off-worlders—and whoever had built the dome had to be from SolComm—had gone to the trouble of building the dome in the first place, which meant they weren’t exactly going for strolls. She panned the scope across the base of the dome, scanning.
There. The entry points into the structure were also SolComm standard. Pressurized air locks that, from what she could tell through her optic, included some additions that likely provided for decontamination procedures. She could see two such entry points, which, given her field of vision, meant there were likely four or five total around the base of the dome. As she zoomed out, the fields around the dome came into relief. They weren’t as brightly lit, but there was enough bleed through the transparent composites that she could see the neat rows of crops with minimal enhancement. There were a few scattered buildings, but they were all small and looked to be built of local materials rather than the advanced composites of the dome. They lacked windows and didn’t seem sturdy enough to Laurel’s eye to serve as brigs. She mentally classified them as storage.
There were a half-dozen other structures outside of the dome as well. They had an industrial look and feel about them, despite their comparatively compact size. Each was roughly cylindrical, standing ten meters high with a similar diameter and they appeared to be spaced evenly around the structure with fifty meters of clearance between dome and building. In the poor lighting outside the dome, she could make out a number of pipes, panels, and valves but without better visibility and context, she had no idea what she was looking at. They appeared to be constructed of the same off-world composites as the buildings within the dome and there was something about them that made Laurel think of them as machinery rather than some kind of storage like the outbuildings.
There was a tap on her shoulder and she pulled off the optic to glance over at Lynch. He gestured back down toward the gulley where Bishop and Hayer were waiting for them. The three of them half-slid, half-scooted down the incline until they were sitting on the floor of the ditch, backs against the wall, grouped together. The tactical part of her balked at that—one well-placed shell could spell the end of them all. This close to the enemy, though, it might be better to risk verbal communication than have any kind of radio noise. That seemed to be Lynch’s intent as he depressed the stud on his ship suit so that the helmet rolled back down into the suit proper. The others followed his lead and Laurel felt, for the first time, the humid heat of the night air undisturbed by even the slightest of breezes.
Laurel had been porting the video from her optic to the team the entire time, so they had all seen what she had seen.
“No sign of the abductees,” the captain said.
“What about in those buildings outside the dome?” Bishop asked.
“The smaller ones aren’t secure enough,” Laurel said. “No guards. I didn’t see any sign of locking mechanisms more advanced than a deadbolt. They obviously have access to better materials, so I doubt they’d risk keeping their prisoners in something a good strong kick might bring down. As for the bigger ones, the cylinders…” She trailed off, gathering her thoughts. “I don’t know. Something about them doesn’t seem right. I don’t know what they are, but I don’t think they’re quarters, or prisons, or anything like that.”
“Yeah,” Bishop said. “I was watching your feed. They seem… mechanical to me.”
“Then we have problem,” Federov grunted. “If prisoners are kept inside dome, our task is much harder. We cannot assume they let everyone out at once to work.”
“Which means we have to go in,” Captain Lynch said. “And try to get an unknown number of good guys out of the hands of an unknown number of bad guys.” He went silent, obviously working at the problem. Laurel did the same, but no matter how she turned it over in her head, she couldn’t see a solution. The tactical situation was shit. They had three shooters, four if you counted Bishop, who admittedly had handled himself well enough against the drobots. About the only thing they had going for them was surprise, since the enemy had to believe that no indigenous forces could reach them. Between the fields, the outbuildings and the cylinders they had plenty of cover to make their approach, but getting to the dome wasn’t the problem. It was getting out again with gods alone knew how many civilians in tow against an unknown opposition force. No matter which way she turned the problem in her head, she couldn’t see a solution.
Lynch sighed, and his tone suggested that he had come to the same conclusion. “I’m open to ideas, people. We obviously need a little more information, but as it stands, I’m not liking the options I’m seeing.”
“Blow the dome,” Federov said at once. “These people are scared of the air.” The mercenary offered a wolfish grin. “They will all lock down in their homes or get busy suiting up. Then they’ll be too worried about fixing hole and cleaning air to check prisoners.”
“Jesus, Federov,” Bishop muttered. “What if there are kids in there? The air might actually be dangerous to them, you know? I don’t want to risk killing a bunch of kids, man. That makes us just as bad as them.”
“If there are kids there, their parents are assholes. Hopefully they are assholes who care enough about their children to make sure they get suited first.”
“It has a certain directness to it,” Lynch acknowledged.
“Cap, you can’t be considering this!” Bishop exclaimed.
For her part, Laurel was on the fence. Bishop was right; if there were kids in there, and if they were susceptible to whatever pathogens or biomechanical agents might be in the atmosphere, then Federov’s idea was far too risky. Body weight and lung capacity played a big role in how quickly—and lethally—exposure could go. But Federov’s idea, however unconventional, was the only thing even close to a chance that she could see to get in and back out again without having to fight their way through what looked to be an entire colony.
Hayer let out a long-suffering sigh. “One, can you tell us if there’s anything in the atmosphere lethal to humans who haven’t been exposed to the preventative nanites we received? Also, can you tell us if there are any children present in the compound?” The others threw surprised looks at her, but the academic just shrugged. “We have access to the next best thing to an omnipotent observer. Maybe we should use it—if One is willing to cooperate.”
“I think I can provide that level of information without risking future diplomatic relations with the Sol Commonwealth,” One responded. His voice sounded slightly tinny to Laurel, since she had her helmet off and the words were coming from one of the speakers embedded in Dr. Hayer’s ship suit.
“If you would, One,” Hayer said, giving the rest of them a smug glance. The academic always looked a little smug, thought Laurel. Well, except for when One had revealed the fact that Hayer had previously freed another artificial intelligence, that was. In retrospect, the look on her face then had been sort of priceless.
“Of course,” the AI replied. “I have not taken samples recently, but the risk of exposure to latent pathogens is small, on the order of one percent. Precautionary measures by the dome inhabitants would decrease that significantly. I do not have precise data on the amount of risk reduction. None of my intelligence gathering apparatus has identified children present.”
“One,” Captain Lynch cut in before anyone else could speak, “what are those cylinders that Morales saw?”
“Unclear,” the AI responded. “I am confident that they are not weapons systems or storage facilities. I have not risked putting any drones into close reconnaissance positions, so most of my available information comes from limited sensor packages aboard airborne assets. I can tell you that they are consuming a good amount of power and are venting various gasses as measured by the pressure changes in the immediate area. The gasses themselves are not harmful, though they are being emitted at high rates. And apart from the installation, there has been no direct interaction with the cylinders, at least not at the surface. I cannot completely rule out the notion of underground access.”
“Scrubbers?” Bishop suggested.
The others looked at him, and he shrugged. “Every environmental system in SolComm uses some kind of scrubber. Something to take the CO2 and any contaminants out of the atmosphere. Maybe they’re trying to filter out the nearby nanites or pathogens or whatever.”
“It is possible,” One acknowledged. “Though in that case, I would expect the pressure values to remain constant.”
“There’s that,” Bishop agreed. “Scrubbers aren’t producing any new atmo—just filtering out the bad stuff.”
“Could it be some kind of terraforming effort?” Dr. Hayer asked, voice uncertain.
“Old Earth is already suitable for human habitation,” One replied. “Efforts at terraforming would be illogical.”
“Not that that ever stopped anyone,” Federov muttered.
“Maybe not terraforming in the traditional sense,” Bishop said, voice pensive. “But what if they’re trying to reclaim Old Earth? SolComm’s been researching terraforming since just after the End, and it hasn’t really gotten anywhere. We just don’t have the technological capability to deal with the pressure issue.”
“Pressure issue?” Laurel asked, getting caught up in the conversation despite herself. She had just about resolved herself to the idea that someone in SolComm was complicit in the colony before them. But if they were here for some kind of research effort to reopen Old Earth… well, that didn’t excuse kidnapping and forced labor, but people went astray all the time. The governing body of SolComm could have had the best of intentions that went awry because the people they put in place were fallible. If the intentions had been noble and the execution corrupted by human nature, that was something Laurel could understand—and something that could restore at least a little of her dwindling faith in the system that had sent her here in the first place.
