Stolen Earth, page 9
“We’re in the clear. Everyone okay?” he said into the comm.
“No, I’m not okay,” Hayer snapped back. “I damn near passed out. This whole thing was a stupid idea.”
That brought a few chuckles from the rest of the crew.
“Good here, Cap,” Bishop said. “Engines are hotter than a Mercury sunrise, but they’ll hold together. This old girl’s still got some kick in her.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“No structural issues to report,” Laurel said.
“In self or ship?” Federov responded over the comm. “I have minor structural damage, but will heal.”
Gray laughed, as much in relief as amusement. “Glad to hear everyone’s functional. The first danger is passed, but we’re not done yet. Hayer, I need you to get the sensors up and running again. We’re practically flying blind and we have no fucking idea what may be waiting for us. Bishop, assuming we’re getting all the power we need now, it’s time to look at bringing the shields back up.” If they had been able to use those on re-entry, heat creep would have been a non-issue. Of course, the shields wouldn’t have held against the power the IZ satellites could direct at them, nor would they have done much good if the Arcus had crashed into the planet. They’d needed every erg of power to the engines to avoid the latter.
“I’m on it, Captain,” Bishop said. “The generators are warming up now. And I’ve got life support going again. At least on the Arcus, we should be able to ditch the suits.”
“But only on the Arcus,” Gray reminded everyone. “We don’t know what’s out there.”
“Sensors are coming online,” Hayer said. “The computer should be up and running right behind them,” she added. “Okay… you should have eyes now.”
As if on cue, Gray’s displays began to light up, giving him far more information than the basic altitude, airspeed, and temperature he was focused on before. His eyes went immediately to the lidar and radar readings, confirming that he was, at least for the moment, alone in the skies. That was as he’d hoped. SolComm, trusting in the IZ, didn’t bother stationing cruisers this close to the planet. The Six, as far as that last mission had shown, appeared unconcerned or otherwise unwilling to interfere with landings.
Of course, there would always be conspiracy theories that the people left behind on Old Earth had survived, but the the nano-viruses and other contaminants made that unlikely—and anyone who’d found a way to scratch out a living on this devastated planet wouldn’t be focusing on flight capacity. SolComm had produced numerous studies over the years that indicated that the probability of any survivors was extremely low. His confidence and trust in the Commonwealth wasn’t exactly at an all-time high, but they hadn’t encountered any humans on his one SolComm-sponsored mission to Old Earth. But what else might be sharing the atmosphere with him? It wasn’t people that had driven humanity to the stars.
For the first time in a long time, Gray missed having the full resources of SolCommNav at his back.
“Computer is up,” Hayer said.
“Shields are go,” Bishop added on her heels.
“All right,” Gray replied. He drew a slow, deep breath. They were as ready as they were going to get. “Then I guess it’s time to put this bird on the ground and get this show started. Everyone, strap in again. I haven’t had to land in a gravity well in years, so things might get a little rough.”
The Arcus rocked and bucked as she descended through azure sky, passing the cloud cover, and revealing the brilliance of the land below. The turbulence thinned.
“Folks, you might want to come up here and see this.”
Old Earth may have suffered apocalyptic levels of destruction, but it was no wasteland. Everywhere Gray looked was a mix of greens and browns dotted with the decaying architecture of humanity.
“Jesus wept,” Bishop said a few moments later as he entered the bridge. “It’s beautiful.”
The others arrived on the engineer’s heels.
“Not the same as seeing it from Luna.” Laurel’s eyes were locked to the front viewscreen where a swath of blue and green was resolving into a defined coastline dotted with ruined mega cities in various stages of being reclaimed by the wilderness.
“I didn’t know there were so many shades of green,” Hayer said. “It’s even greener than infrared light passed through polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
That was enough to draw Gray’s eyes momentarily from the descent as he threw a confused look at the scientist.
“Is true,” Federov agreed. “Much greener than stinky polyacrylic hydrogen.”
That brought chuckles from the others as Gray turned his attention back to the task at hand. The Arcus didn’t have the best glide profile, but now that they were safely in atmo and not on course to turn into a pile of flaming ballistic rubble, the engines had plenty of power to compensate. The navigation data showed them on a rail to their destination—one of the larger ruined cities on the east coast of a continent in the northern hemisphere—and the atmospheric interference was minimal. As they descended, their destination began to resolve into the remains of a city dozens of times larger than anything SolComm had constructed.
“Anything on the sensors?” he asked. He had to repeat the question to get Hayer to tear her eyes away from the view.
“All clear,” she said. “Well, not clear. There’s a lot of metal down there. And a lot of vegetation. Both are playing merry hell with the sensors. But I’m not picking up much in the way of electromagnetic signals.”
“Good. In that case, sit back and enjoy the view. We’ll be on the ground in five minutes.”
As they closed on the coordinates—a clearing, if that was the right word, in the midst of the upthrust fingers of crumbling buildings—Gray couldn’t help but wonder how they had let it all slip away.
LAUREL
Laurel had a pounding headache. In the moment that the Arcus stood on end, her whole world had gone black. It was enough to leave her with a throbbing pain just behind her eyes and little needles of agony running up and down her neck: she must have been flopping around like a ragdoll, despite her restraints. She couldn’t be certain, but she thought that there was a good chance that she, and the rest of the crew of the Arcus, had very nearly died. The thought was simultaneously terrifying… and, given her mission, oddly comforting.
Now, she stood in front of the mirror in the small compartment that served as her personal bunk. The face that stared back at her wasn’t her own.
The surgical alterations had been painful and had required nearly a month of recovery even with the best medical care available in the Commonwealth. That had given her time to truly inhabit her new identity. No expense had been spared; she had records going back before her birth, building not only her bona fides, but those of her imaginary parents and siblings. An entire ecosystem centered around Laurel Morales had been given life.
It had to be; Laurel had known that her identity would be checked and tested, but no one had expected her to fall in with a group that included someone as skilled as Dr. Rajani Hayer. A net search had returned dozens of results on Hayer, most from her time as a research scientist working with any number of prestigious universities on Mars. The average citizen would not recognize her by name or appearance, but within her own field, she was renowned. She could have walked into any university, any corporation in the entire solar system and had a job for the asking.
Instead, a few years back, Hayer had simply dropped off the map, and not a single person on the net seemed to know why. If the woman had dedicated every waking moment to scrubbing her presence, maybe she could have kept her profile as low as it had been. But from what Laurel could tell, she spent almost no time doing so. Which meant she had to be getting outside help. But from where?
It didn’t matter. It had come as a shock to Laurel to find someone like Hayer among the crew of the Arcus, but her cover had held, and that was all that was important. Her goals had nothing to do with the Arcus or her crew, or with any ship in particular.
Her goal was simple on its face: track down the space stories of people rumored to have crossed the Old Earth Interdiction Zone and garner every last piece of information possible from them using any means necessary. The odds were long; but sometimes the long shots paid off. And here she was, about to set foot on Old Earth itself.
She’d spent the better part of a year tracking down the more credible stories, only to find them fall apart one after the other. She was ready to call it quits when she received an anonymous message. It had held only two words: Grayson Lynch. She’d tried to back trace the communiqué and gotten nowhere. So, she’d set out to find Lynch and the Arcus.
Laurel had spent most of her years between the colony cities of Mars and the deep-space stations out near Neptune. She’d seen the worst of what humanity had to offer. She’d seen kids with abnormal physical development—stunted growth, misshapen skeletal structures, and heights well outside the norm on both ends of the scale—because the stations they grew up on couldn’t afford proper gravity-generator maintenance; she’d seen the memory and vision problems that came from those suffering from oxygen deprivation because the scrubbers they were supposed to install had been sold for ration credits; and she’d seen the death. Desperate times seemed a fertile ground for callousness and uncaring behavior, and she was certain that some of the murders, assaults, and rapes she had dealt with had been committed for the simple pleasure that the perpetrators took from them.
Was her presence even necessary? If a pilot of the caliber of Grayson Lynch could manage to infiltrate the Interdiction Zone only by the barest of margins, did Old Earth present any real threat? On the other hand, they had just made touchdown, so, dire or not, the problem was real. She shook her head. All this effort, all this risk, and for what? Lynch had outlined the mission—land the Arcus in the bones of some arcology or city or whatever they had back on Old Earth. Hit each of three separate targets. And what were they looking for? Trash. Or it might as well have been. They were looking for authentic “Old Earth” memorabilia. Some of it, she could understand, at least a little. Cultural works of art that told the tale of human history and were sought after even in a pre-End world. And there were some specific works like that on the list that Lynch had been given. But collectors were just as fervent to get their hands on things that would have been mundane a century ago, and in addition to the works of art, they were looking for items that were, to her, utterly useless. What was a subway sign, and why would anyone want one? Why were they looking for a particular brand of glass-bottled beverage? And what, in the name of all that was good and right, was a fire hydrant? The list went on, naming things that she had heard of in the histories or seen mockups of in re-enactments or vids, though never in person. If scarcity drove value, she could understand why anything of Old Earth might move on the black market, but why these things?
Of all the pointless things to risk life and limb and quite possibly the extinction of mankind on. Works of art had value far beyond anything she could understand. But if even the—in her honest opinion—worthless drivel that had come out of SolComm artists in the past century could be worth millions of credits, what would a “cultural artifact” from Old Earth itself go for, even if it was some mass-produced junk in its own heyday? More than she was likely to see in two or three lifetimes, she was certain. Those that owned such works passed them off as family heirlooms dating back to the End. Most of them probably were exactly that. It was one of the reasons Laurel had viewed the job before her as a wild quark chase. But by her estimation, the money the Arcus was being offered for the run was outstripped by the potential value of what they were retrieving. And there was also the clout that would come from owning such works to consider. The elite were driven more by prestige than credits, since they always seemed to have plenty of the latter.
Money. Prestige. Power. Add in some form of love gone bad and you had all the best motives for the most heinous crimes in history. Human nature seemed imbued with the inescapable ability to justify atrocity if only it advanced the perpetrators’ belief or personal standing.
Which explained why they had just landed on Old Earth. She was about to set foot on the planet that had birthed—and then tried to kill—humanity.
And she’d better be armed to the teeth when she did.
She had retracted her helmet once Bishop had confirmed that the environmental controls were back online. They were all going to be spending a lot of long hours suited and she always felt slightly claustrophobic sealed behind the composite faceshield. She had already added a few touches to her ship suit, including a ballistic vest. It was a civilian model, but still high quality. She’d also donned a tactical webbing system that gave her a fair amount of versatility when it came to attaching weapons, ammo, provisions, and whatever else she might need to carry with her to have the best chance of surviving this stupid operation.
Now, she stared into the arms locker in her quarters. There were no rules about weapons aboard the Arcus—each crew-member kept their own personal stash and carried whatever they felt was appropriate for the job at hand. She hadn’t brought much with her when she’d joined the Arcus, but she hadn’t come empty-handed either.
Her personal collection comprised only three firearms. All were chemical burners, harkening back to gunpowder weapons of old. One was her backup piece, a small semi-auto pistol chambered in a venerable nine-millimeter projectile. The second was a larger handgun, the service weapon she had carried for years. Well, not the actual firearm—her service weapon was registered in any number of SolComm databases and it wouldn’t do to leave evidence from it at a possible crime scene. But it was the same make and model, a somewhat bulkier pistol with sleek lines chambered in a 5.7 mm caliber.
That left her long gun, and she stood there for a moment debating whether or not she should bring it. It was built on a tactical battle rifle platform, but she’d set it up for long-range applications. It was all but useless in close combat; she could pull the optic off if she absolutely had to, but once she did, the rifle would be equally useless as a long-range platform until she had the chance to zero it again. The information they had on the terrain in which they’d be operating was laughable and they had even less to go on for mission parameters. With a shrug, she grabbed the rifle and, using the two-point sling, dropped it over her shoulder so the muzzle was pointing down and to the left. Maybe there wouldn’t be any use for it, but better to have it and not need it than the reverse.
She glanced at herself in the mirror, avoiding eye contact with the stranger. Her equipment looked good. She was ready. As ready as she’d ever be. Pre-op jitters were rattling around her stomach. It happened every single time… only this time, she was about to set foot on humanity’s birth world. It shouldn’t matter—the mission was the same, no matter where it was taking place, but somehow, that thought sent the jitters to a whole new level.
* * *
Three suited forms had gathered in the corridor outside the larger of the Arcus’s two airlocks. A quick glance told her that everyone save Lynch was present. Their matching environmental gear lending them an air of professionalism that their normal shipboard garb did not. Bishop had a semi-automatic shotgun hanging from a single-point sling and looked surprisingly comfortable with the weapon. A pistol rode at his hip and a heavy pack sat high on his back. Hayer looked uncomfortable, standing with her hip cocked at an odd angle and her shoulders pushed the other direction as if to physically thrust the gun holstered there as far from the rest of her body as possible. Hayer also had a messenger bag slung over her shoulder, containing her data screen and other hacking and intrusion tools.
Federov had donned a ballistic vest similar to her own, and a matching helmet—large enough to be worn over the suit hood—dangled from his web gear. A carbine hung from a single-point harness, muzzle pointing straight down at the deck. He had a pistol in a dropped thigh rig and a backup strapped high on his vest. His web gear also held several smaller pouches that Laurel recognized. Where in the hell had Federov gotten his hands on grenades? SolComm was pretty lax when it came to regulating weaponry, but military-grade explosives tended to be more closely monitored.
“Good,” Hayer said. “You’re here. Now we just need the captain. Then we can get this stupid mission over with.” She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot as if trying to get used to the feel of the weapon at her side.
“Captain will be here when he gets here,” Federov replied. Laurel saw the man eying her up and down. There was nothing sexual about it; his roving eyes were lingering not on her body, but on her kit. She’d gotten that same look from every instructor she’d ever crossed paths with. He gave her a curt nod of approval. She gave him a flat stare in return—it wasn’t his place to judge her. But the big man just grinned a crooked grin and dropped one eyelid in a lazy wink.
“It’ll be all right, Hayer,” Bishop said. “This isn’t our first rodeo. Besides, the captain’s been here before, remember?”
“Sure. Yeah. Right,” Hayer replied. “If you believe the stories. And even so, that was when he had the whole navy backing him up. But this will be just the same.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“All right, people.”
All eyes turned as Lynch strode into the hallway. He, too, was armed. He had a pistol on his hip and a boxy bullpup rifle dangling from a three-point sling. He didn’t wear any ballistic gear, but somewhere along the line he had acquired a military-grade ship suit. Probably, Laurel thought, part of his SolCommNav-issue uniform.
