Expendable Heroes, page 3
That was Steven’s crime.
Not seeing how companies like Merlin owned the system, until it was too late.
The room contained a shallow cupboard, but apart from the grey jumpsuit, underwear, socks which he had put there and a pair of heavy boots, it was as empty as the rest of the room.
Where was all his stuff?
He’d have to ask Jeremy.
He wanted to find his pictures of Lette and Sophia, or, failing that, a device that contained these pictures. But he found nothing.
Was he being watched? Probably, but he couldn’t find evidence for that either.
He wasn’t interested in agency or ship manifestos. In his experience, station or ship crew would joke that emergency manuals in space detailed how to die slowly instead of quickly, so he investigated the round viewport screen. A small control panel hung on the wall next to it, with one button that controlled the brightness and another to turn it off.
The room’s central air and light control system near the door also had a section that looked like it might get the main entertainment screen to display news and entertainment, but those options were greyed out and other than the emergency manual and company statement, the only option available to him was to change the image on the viewport from the starscape to a forest to an aerial view of islands in an azure ocean.
That was not much use.
He wanted to know more about this ship, who it belonged to, how big it was, how many crew it had and who they worked for. It was clear the owners of the ship didn’t want him to know.
But he was also tired and his brain still felt addled from stasis, so he’d better sleep in the time the authorities allocated for it.
He debated not using the light grey pyjamas that lay neatly folded on the bed, but he also didn’t want to give the impression that he was difficult. There was a place and time for being difficult, and he agreed with Luciane in that he didn’t think that this was it. Yet. He had to wait until he was in a position of power.
There was nothing he could do to get himself out of this situation. They might be angry, but they were powerless.
* * *
In the morning he woke up because the light level in the room increased and just before a young woman in a grey jumpsuit brought a couple of breakfast bars and a cup of tea on a tray.
“Get changed when you’ve finished,” she said. “Use the overalls and work boots you got yesterday. I’ll come back to collect the tray.”
Steven put on the grey overalls and the boots, which fitted him well, and then sat at the tiny table. While he ate the breakfast bars and drank the tea, he studied the settings on the round wall screen, which was again displaying the starscape.
There had to be a way to get the screen to display more useful information. But he couldn’t see it, and he didn’t want to be caught messing with the controls.
The young woman came back and asked Steven to follow.
In a room that looked like an on-board gym, waited a full mech suit with mechanical arms and legs and armour.
As biologist, Steven had seen these contraptions—they could also come with full support for breathing apparatus and hard shell body protection for maintenance on the outside of stations. He’d never used one on the surface of a planet.
“Steven Jameson?” a female worker said. She wore standard lab clothing. No logos.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“This is for you. We need to take your measurements to make sure it’s comfortable.”
She helped Steven into the bottom half of the suit, which included spring-bladed boots.
He wobbled up and down. “What do we need these for? Is the gravity that strong?”
“The jungle is very dense and you will need to jump and climb,” the assistant said.
Steven wasn’t sure if she was joking.
“This is a standard outfit for our colonists. The suit communicates and integrates with Xander.”
“Xander?”
“The project’s artificial assistant. You’ll learn about him. He tests vital statistics of the air and temperature and warns about dangers. He also warns you when the charge is low and when you're in or out of communication range.”
“Cool.”
He made a little hop, but oh, the suit was heavy and continued to hop sideways. It hit a table and made all the implements on the table rattle. Steven tried to stop the hopping, but his hand slid off the table and he half-fell against the wall, and still continued hopping.
“You need to learn to work with it,” the woman said, deadpan. “If you want to stop a movement, you need to engage your muscles against it.”
Steven crouched, trying to dampen the movement, and the hopping stopped straight away.
Yeah, right. He looked around. No damage?
At least nothing was hurt except his pride.
The top of the suit needed to be fitted to him, so she took measurements.
She then set him up with Xander, the artificial assistant that spoke to him with a friendly but emotionless male voice. He would be installed on all computers they were taking down with them, including the suit. For as long as one of the computers had a charge, Xander would guide and provide information to the team through a local network that allowed them to communicate over short distances.
His database included all available maps of the planet, a long list of contents that should be inside the base on the surface.
“The base on the surface is fully supplied, although it is likely that some of the food has expired,” she said.
“Can I ask how long ago these scientists disappeared?”
“Eight months.”
“That’s a fairly long time ago.” Also, he and his three fellows had already been in transit at that time, so potentially, their “community service” had also been “repurposed”.
Yet this also didn’t make sense, because if the team had travelled for four years, the ship would have asked for assistance more than four years ago, right?
Or did they order prisoners as a matter of routine and figure out what they needed to do when they got here?
Or was perhaps this whole ship full of poor bastards like the four of them. He didn’t know anything about this ship other than the few rooms he’d seen. His cabin had no tech that allowed him to find out.
His head hurt from thinking about this and trying to get it to make sense.
Maybe it would become clearer once he didn’t feel so dulled and out of shape from being in stasis.
“Are we meant to grow our own food when we get down there?” After all, he was a biologist.
“You could, but not initially, no. We’ll provide you with fresh supplies if necessary, but we assume that won’t be the case. We only want you to locate the team and return to the ship.”
The maps also showed that there was an ascent vehicle and fuel available at the base, which they could use to return to the orbiting ship once the task was completed. Steven asked if they were meant to take the scientists off the surface back with them, but from her reaction, it was clear they didn’t expect there to be anyone to take. Which also explained why they’d waited so long to send a team.
“So they’re dead,” he said.
“That is highly likely. We just need to know what happened to them,” she said. “For the sake of future missions. Consider it an archaeological expedition.”
Perfect for prisoners to carry out, apparently.
In the afternoon, Steven gathered with Rollo, Luciane and Jack in a small meeting room where a woman talked to them about the conditions on the planet’s surface.
The air was safe and the climate was mild.
She showed them photographs taken by the colonists of the vegetation on the planet. Jungle was an understatement that didn’t do justice to the absolute riot of tangled green. After slashing through the vegetation, it grew back very quickly, too, as two photos on subsequent days showed.
Apparently, one used the mech suit to crash through or clamber over the vegetation, because the scientists’ reports said the plants were soft and broke easily.
“What were the researchers working on? What was their project?” Steven asked.
“They were making a catalogue of useful plants, testing them for harmful compounds, testing the air and the water and the presence of sentient life, pathogens and…” She shrugged. “The usual.”
“Exploration teams don’t find nice green planets every day.”
“No, indeed.”
Steven met the woman’s eyes for a moment, and the intensity in them suggested there was more to it. Something else the research team had been doing. But she wasn’t saying, because she wasn’t authorised to talk about it, likely for commercial reasons.
After dinner, the team had to perform a fitness test. Having spent four months in a small cell and four years in stasis had done little for Steven’s fitness. He didn’t think the others performed particularly well, either.
It was not terribly important, the far-too-young nurse said when Steven mentioned it. They conducted the test only so that they could calibrate the suit.
Steven fell into bed exhausted after all that.
And he found it hard to sleep.
His mind kept drifting in and out of slumber and conjured up endless strings of disturbing and jumbled thoughts.
He tried to picture Sophia’s face, and found he couldn’t. He tried to remember Lette, and couldn’t remember what she looked like either. She was one of these people whose hair went grey in her twenties and he only remembered that her hair was white.
Should he ask about them, and would Jeremy tell him he could go back when he’d finished his task, and travel four years back so that Sophia would be twelve when he saw her again, or—worse—would Jeremy tell him that he was dreaming and he had no wife and daughter?
And what if Jeremy was right?
He spent a good deal of the night tossing and turning.
Evidently, someone on board the ship had worked through the night because he received his adapted suit the next day, when they met for breakfast in a room that seemed to be used by no one else.
It was hard to figure out how big this ship was. Had they travelled here just to send a small rescue team of four out-of-shape prisoners?
That didn’t make a lot of sense.
Steven spent most of that day training with the suit, so that he understood all its functions, and could operate all the different modes.
Having travelled to space before, he had worn these types of suits, although the work he had performed on those missions was maintenance to the outside of ships or space stations, and he had been floating in space.
In addition to the super-powered jump function and saw blades on the arms, the suit contained enough water and nutrients for two days. The battery was charged through the base’s charging station and could be replaced, or could be charged with sunlight or chemically in the field.
Jeremy said that the scientists had established charging stations in the area, even if they would by now be covered under vegetation.
And why had they waited eight months before sending someone in?
Well, as Jeremy said in a slightly condescending tone, having travelled in space, Steven would be aware that nothing in space happened quickly or easily. Most projects took years to plan. There was an ascent vehicle big enough to carry twelve, but it, and its fuel, were already on the surface. The company didn’t have any additional craft that were capable of a quick trip down and up. That required a lot of resources and time for fuel to be sent down.
Steven didn’t believe that. This was exactly the function of an orbital station: to have such a vehicle. So clearly there was one, or there had been one and the company had withdrawn it, or had otherwise decided not to use it for some reason.
And while he was sure that they were travelling right into the space occupied by that reason, he was also not sure if he wanted to know. Because a devil you knew and one you didn’t were both still devils if you needed to fight them in a place and time of someone else’s choosing.
He glanced at the wall screen that displayed the green planet from orbit. It had mountain ranges with snow and turquoise oceans that were, for the most part, pretty shallow. The base was not near any of them, because apparently, the water was very salty. There were some lakes, and the base was close to, but not on the shore of, one of them.
Eden indeed.
But clearly, something was very wrong down there.
CHAPTER 5
In the afternoon, Steven met Rollo, Jack and Luciane in the meeting room again, where another officer spoke to them about Xander, the computer systems of the base.
This man wore a shirt with the Space Settlement Authority’s logo on his chest.
He explained how the base’s system had been set up.
There was hope that the notes taken on local systems would offer some clues about what had led to the disappearance of the crew, and these were notes that they hadn’t been able to extract before the solar flare disrupted—and apparently destroyed—the communication with that system.
“Couldn’t you fix that remotely?” Luciane asked.
“We can’t if we can’t connect to the system.”
“Systems like that have an emergency backup for at least an hour’s worth of data transfer. You can break in remotely, even if it’s badly damaged.”
“We couldn’t,” the man said. Steven thought he was getting a bit annoyed.
Luciane snorted. “If the system misbehaves, you disable module 4 and 7 at startup with a search command for a directory that doesn’t exist. While that’s running, you execute the local command you want to use, so that by the time the system concludes the file doesn’t exist, it returns to the default and runs normally.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can.” She stuck her chin in the air. “I do it all the time. It’s a security flaw.”
“All the time?”
The man glared at her, and she glared back.
Well, crap, Steven didn’t know what she’d done that landed her in the women’s prison, but he was willing to bet that she was some kind of systems whizz having ended up on the wrong side of a political divide. Or a hacker, maybe, with the tattoos on her knuckles.
“Anyway,” the man said, sounding prim. “You’ll be on the ground and we’ll provide you with tools to return the system to full operation, so there is no need to break in. You’ll need it to control the temperature, the local computer systems and the air quality—”
“You said the air is safe to breathe,” Luciane said.
“It is. The system still needs to test the air because that’s how the fire warning system works.”
He brought up past automated communication with the base on the screen. The system had sent reports of their measurements—all this data would be passed onto the team. He pointed out exactly when they’d started having communication issues, about a month after they’d arrived. These issues got progressively worse until the solar flare when the scientists could no longer send reports but after the flare abated, the communication stopped altogether.
“What do you mean, it just stopped?” Jack said.
“Exactly as I said it: they stopped communicating and we couldn’t reconnect with the base’s systems. The scientists had already not been sending manual reports for weeks and as far as we know, they were investigating if the issues were related to their location, but we never got to hear the results of their investigation. Something must have broken so badly that they couldn’t send anything to us.”
“I find that very hard to understand,” Luciane said. “You said you have images from orbit. If they indeed couldn’t send anything electronically, there are known cases where people trapped on the surface wrote messages in the dirt to show they were still alive and to let the people in orbit know what they wanted them to do. You are not going to tell me that these people didn’t have the means to do that. They were scientists for fuck’s sake. They would have figured something out.”
“If they were healthy enough to do those things,” Rollo said.
They all looked at each other.
Yes. If.
And it looked like they might not have been.
Already the woman yesterday had told him that they didn’t expect to find anyone alive down there.
“Are we going to get any weapons?” Rollo asked.
“The base’s inventory includes two lasers that can be used as weapons against hostile life on the surface. Your suits will also have good defensive capabilities.”
“In other words: no,” Luciane said, giving him a hard look.
“You’re prisoners.”
In the uneasy silence that followed, he announced that his time was up and someone else would come to speak to the team now.
“Before you go and as aside, would it be possible to unlock the entertainment system in our rooms?” Steven asked.
“Is it turned off?”
“I can’t get in.”
“Me neither,” Rollo said.
“Well… I can ask. It’s not my decision, though.”
“You work for the Space Settlement Authority, and they are not the owners of this ship or the project, I’m guessing?”
The man got up from the table. “My time slot is up. The next teacher will tell you about the base’s logistics.”
He almost scurried from the room.
“Fuck, they’re going to send us down there without any means to defend ourselves,” Rollo said.
Luciane snorted. “What did you expect? They wouldn’t trust us enough to hand any of us a set of pliers, let alone any serious weapon.”
“There are plenty of enemies that you can’t fend off with a weapon,” Steven said.
Rollo snorted. “What do you mean?”
“Diseases, bacteria.”
“Oh, fuck. Just what I wanted,” Rollo said.
Steven met Luciane’s eyes.
Jack’s mouth twitched.
The next person to come into the room was a man speaking from the Space Settlement Authority, who spoke about the base’s resources.
Steven already knew most of the standard supply setup.
