Numina code, p.16
Numina Code, page 16
“We may not be able to take you two girls in too deep with us,” Argo said, looking over at Emily.
Or rather, where Emily had just been.
“What in—” he began, but then stopped. Threw a hand over his nose and mouth.
Daelia gagged.
A horrible stench had just filled the air.
“Found crew,” Emily called.
Adjacent to station control was a small set of rooms. Storage, toilets, briefing. It was this last door that Emily had opened.
Inside were bodies. Over a dozen of them. Floating like rag dolls, blood and bone fragments splattered on the walls; it looked as if several of them had been hurtled in at some speed, enough for every station out in the control room, with a few more to spare. Decomposition, even in this environment, was well underway.
Mags took one look and zoomed back out.
Emily, on the other hand, reached out for one. “This strange,” she said.
Argo caught her arm. Pulled her back. “Don’t touch,” he said.
Out in the hallway, Skoro was retching, and Daelia didn’t feel much better.
“Can we close the door?” she asked weakly.
Argo did. They retreated back to the control floor. It didn’t improve the smell much.
“We have to go back to Aethera,” Skoro said, gray-faced, shaky. “Report this.”
“What, you guys have policies in place for this sort of thing?” Daelia asked sarcastically. “A checklist or something to run?”
“What? No. Shit, there’s never been a murder up here, and now we have, what, fourteen dead people?”
“How many people are supposed to be on this station?” Argo asked.
Thirty-eight crew, two hundred forty-seven boarders, Mags said. She was hovering above the rearmost station, one little arm poking away at the keyboard. According to last system backup.
“Fourteen dead, two hundred seventy-one to go,” Skoro said grimly. “We can’t do this on our own. This needs official attention, a full team of—”
“Team of what, Skoro?” Argo asked. “Space cops?”
The other pilot scowled at him. “Fourteen dead is a hell of a lot of bodies to stack on your own. This was a coordinated effort. Whoever did it could still be here.”
“I’m not leaving until I find my brother,” Argo said.
The two of them stared at each other for a moment. Then Skoro shook his head. “I’m going back to my bird.”
“You’d just leave us here?” Argo asked.
“Leaving to go get help, yeah,” Skoro said. “If nothing’s wrong, you two will be fine here for a day or two. Right?”
“Guy I remember wasn’t a coward,” Argo snapped.
Skoro’s face didn’t twitch, but he did clench a fist, and Daelia got between them. “Hey, hey, Argo, who said I was staying with you?”
“We have Emily,” Argo pointed out. “We’ll be fine.”
“Be better with combat plug-in,” Emily grumped.
“Skoro, please. We’ve come all this way.” Argo looked at Daelia. “Don’t you want to find out why the Envoy lied to us about this place?”
Daelia started to protest but the words died in her throat. Of course she did. Of course she was curious. And she could tell from the look on Argo’s face that he knew he had just scored a winning goal.
“Asshole,” she grumbled.
Skoro huffed, shaking his head. “Okay, okay, fine. I’ll give you four hours. Be back in the air lock. I’m going to try to contact Aethera, see if we can get anybody out here. But if that doesn’t work, at the four-hour mark, if I don’t see you, I am leaving and getting help the old-fashioned way.”
“How do we know you’re not just going to take off, huh?” Daelia asked. “Just leave now?”
Now Skoro just looked pained. “I’m not going to do that. I’ll give you your time. I’ll even take Emily with me.”
“I don’t like that at all,” Argo said.
“You can’t take her further in anyway.”
Emily cocked her head. “What mean?”
“All internal comms are down,” Daelia said, “including whatever wireless system they’ve got, and the antennas are smashed. Girl, there’s nothing to boost your SATCOM signal, and I’m guessing the rock will obscure it pretty quickly.”
“Ach, yes.” Emily nodded. “Will watch Mags’s human for you.”
Skoro eyed her. “I’ll stay. I give you my word.”
Argo held out a hand. “Four hours. Shake on it.”
“Four hours,” Skoro confirmed.
Mags was able to download the most current map of the station’s inhabitable space. She sent that over before she and Skoro headed out, Emily bringing up the rear.
They no leave you here, Emily told Daelia privately.
She still felt a squeezing sensation in her chest as she watched them leave.
“Everything’s fine,” Argo said, not really looking at her, fingers flicking lightly and monocle glowing. Probably had the map pulled up himself.
“Are you kidding me? We’re on a station with too much oxygen, where the command crew has been murdered, and you think we’re fine?”
“At least the lights are on,” Argo replied, and sent her a view-sharing invite. “Come on, pull up the map. Let’s look at this thing together.”
The view-share synched their monocles, although it meant Daelia had to get fairly close to him in order for hand gestures to properly translate. In the AR field, the full extent of Numina Station was laid out in perfect detail.
A majority of the station was clustered around the central shaft. It wasn’t a perfect cylinder, the interior rings with those balconies and the rooms that branched off all different sizes and shapes. The closer those spaces were to the central core, the more squared-off they were.
Daelia pulled up the metadata. The closer rooms were prefab. They were modules that had been constructed while Numina was in transit, then push-fitted into the less dense areas of the asteroid. But further out, away from those easy pockets, rooms became more organic, less regular. These were areas of denser rock, carved out of the asteroid’s interior and epoxied over.
In a few places, corridors flowed out, deep into the asteroid’s body. And that was where things got weird.
The place had clearly been hollowed out. Great chambers were connected by small tunnels, seemingly without rhyme or reason. It looked very much like the inside of the yellowjacket nests that Dad knocked out of the Scrap House rafters.
“Almost thirty miles of tunnel,” Daelia said, checking the figures at the bottom of the projection field. “And that’s without accounting for how much space there is in these mining caverns.”
“This place is big,” he said.
“Argo, I don’t think we can search this in four hours,” Daelia said honestly.
His jaw was set. “We’re going to have to prioritize.” Argo spun the map around, searching for something. “Here,” he said, tapping one of the outmost rooms in the main complex. “The oxygen garden. Water, light, air. I bet they ran here.”
“Yeah, but ran from what?”
Argo gave her a look. “What do you think? Something’s already tried to kill us before.”
“Those Unity kugus?” Daelia suppressed a shiver. “Maybe. Maybe it’s something else. We don’t know anything yet.”
“We can make some assumptions,” Argo replied. “But lingering isn’t going to help. Come on. Let’s get going.”
“I don’t like this,” she said.
“Me neither,” he told her.
She swallowed down her nerves and moved out, into the dark.
19
“Cactus is not going to like this.”
Blanket had a penchant for understatements, Marathon thought, staring south down the runway from the air traffic control tower. He grunted, not wanting to offer anything yet.
In truth, he wasn’t sure what he could say.
Ellington had undergone quite a bit of development in the time that Marathon had served here. As a first lieutenant, fresh out of flight school, the place had been sleepy, empty. Now there was an entire little city of tilt-wall office buildings and fabrication facilities serving the spaceport and the maintenance-heavy lifter fleet.
But even with that, a lot of the land to the south and east of the main runway had yet to be plowed up and covered in concrete. Beyond the spaceport itself and its small parking garage, it was all empty field.
Usually.
This morning, a huge encampment had sprung up. Campers, cars, tents, fifth wheels, even a few RVs, were all vying for space in the dew-wet grass.
The whole place would probably turn into a mud pit in a day or two, if it wasn’t already. Houston soil was like gumbo.
“They started showing up yesterday morning of course, but it’s gotten really bad in the last twenty-four hours,” the Security Forces commander said. Major Deirdre Twohy. “One of my guys sent up a dummy drone this morning since Emily’s unavailable. Looks like we’ve got at least two hundred people out there already, and more keep arriving.”
She was a backfill for Lieutenant Colonel Nyugen, who was deployed to Clark with most of the SF squadron, out of contact. Twohy was a bear of a woman, tall and broad. She’d been on the Academy’s track and field team, back in her college years. Shot put. She kept one side of her head shaved and the rest of her graying blonde hair tucked neatly into a bun. Marathon hadn’t dealt much with her.
But she’d shown up this morning at the EMC, saying she had a problem, so out Marathon had come. He’d called Scurvy, who mercifully lived ten minutes away from the base and agreed to come in on a Sunday to help figure this mess out.
“Have they breached the base boundary?”
“Fuck, no. This would be a different conversation if that was going on.” Twohy still looked concerned, though. “The Repose is over there though, and this thing has been creeping closer to it. I’ve got a squad posted just inside the fence now. When the air museum director gets in, we’ll have a chat, see what we can do about sealing the place up, but until then, I want those abiota left alone.” She paused. “Especially after what happened at the air show.”
Marathon wondered how she’d heard about that. Rover hadn’t been very forthcoming about it, even within Ops. Must have been one of the sergeants who was on scene. Could nobody keep a secret on this damn base?
“What are they doing?” Blanket asked.
“Not sure,” she replied.
There was something actionable.
Marathon put his binoculars down. “Let’s go have a chat,” he said.
Twohy raised an eyebrow. “Right now, like this? I don’t recommend it.”
“It doesn’t look like a protest,” Marathon said. They got those from time to time. They typically didn’t pitch tents or bring RVs, though. “It looks like something else. I mean, hell, Deirdre, they have camper vans.”
The Security Forces commander sighed and turned to head back to the elevator. The men from Ops went with her. “Yeah, exactly, we don’t know what they have in there. But if you’re going to go out, let me at least get in contact with the local cops.”
“And there’s another question,” Blanket said. “Why isn’t the sheriff’s department already clearing this out?”
The elevator doors dinged open. “I don’t know,” she said. “They haven’t been taking our calls this morning.”
Getting out of the Security Forces SUV, Marathon wasn’t expecting the encampment to be so noisy.
While it was still early in the morning, the sun barely up, a carnival atmosphere had already asserted itself. People were outside grilling sausages, making pancakes on portable stoves. One older couple was sitting outside an RV on ratty camp chairs, a pen of chickens clucking close by.
There were no kids, Marathon noticed. It was all adults. A few teenagers, but mostly adults. Singles and couples, although there did appear to be some campsites with three or more people huddled around a kettle grill or fire pit. And everyone, it seemed, had identical stainless steel travel mugs.
“You see that?” he murmured to Scurvy, pointing at one of the groups.
“Space Race Coffee. Seems a bit specific to see this much branding,” Scurvy agreed.
“Where’d those come from?” Marathon asked.
The pilot became acutely aware of the looks people were giving them. Him, Chief, Twohy, two of her sergeants. The Security Forces personnel were carrying standard-issue M-4s, wearing full tactical gear. Scurvy had a well-worn stab vest on, probably from his deployment gear, but otherwise seemed bemused by the entire situation. Marathon, in nothing but his flight suit, felt distinctly underdressed.
“Something up ahead, ma’am,” one of the sergeants said, nodding forward toward a large cluster of people.
“Yeah, I see it too,” Twohy said tightly.
Marathon kept his own guard up but tried not to let it show. He didn’t get any sense of malice from this crowd, but then, the mood in a crowd could change fast. What was that his dad had always told him?
Humans are the only life-form that gets stupider when gathered in large numbers. Something like that.
For anybody that knew what they were looking at, this little group of theirs would have been a laughable display. Texas Air Guard or not, they were still military and lacked the authority to arrest anyone out here. Hell, they didn’t have the authority to ask them to leave. Nicely.
Still, the civilians moved back. Worried. Evaluating. Nobody would talk to them, despite Twohy making several attempts.
So in they walked. Unmolested.
Finally, the small group made it to the edge of the crowd. They were clustered in a space that was marked out by mobile spotlights, which were off now but had bases that were still enough to delineate an area. In the middle of that space was a small stage, the kind that would fold up into a semitrailer, used for concerts and things like that.
Right next to it was a food truck, one with a big fiberglass body around it, formed to look like some 1950s sci-fi rocket taking off.
Selling coffee.
“Oh, look who it is,” Marathon said lightly.
“That explains the cups,” Scurvy said.
“What do you think they’re doing here?”
“I have no fucking idea,” Twohy grumbled, and made a beeline for the place.
The line here was less willing to step aside, but a few harsh words from one of the sergeants and a space cleared. The girl behind the counter, box braids framing a frown, leaned over the counter to greet them.
“If you wanna talk to Serket,” she said, gesturing, “she’s around behind the stage. Working on the lottery.”
“Lottery?” Twohy asked, an expression on her face like she’d just eaten a lemon.
The barista shrugged. “Yeah, Tamm’s lottery, right? He hired us out for the next couple of weeks for this.”
“Weeks?” Twohy’s voice was sharper that time.
It didn’t seem to faze the barista at all. “I just make the coffee, ma’am. Do any of you want anything?”
“I’ll take a decaf drip, if you’ve got it,” Scurvy said, and when Twohy shot him a glare, he just smiled back. “You go talk to Serket. I’ll be right there. We’re old friends, aren’t we, Caitlin?”
“The way you tip, we are.” The barista flashed him a dazzling smile. “Gravity Assist Colombian Blend okay with you, Chief?”
“Now you’re speaking my language.”
Twohy asked Marathon about it as he pulled her away. “What is he doing?”
“Come on, Deirdre, he’s a chief. He’ll get more out of her in the next five minutes than anything that damn predictive is going to tell us,” Marathon told her, and they continued on through the morning-damp grass.
Serket was indeed around the back of the stage. As Tamm’s personal representative out here at Ellington, Marathon actually saw quite a bit of her. She was by the unit a few times a month, getting updates on local conditions and happenings, passing along what tidbits she could. Mostly, things had been focused on the spaceport for the past few years.
She was in one of her less ridiculous projections today, a muted pink sundress with big 1950s hair. Pearls the size of golf balls were strung in chromatic glory around her neck. The render was so good it was easy to forget it was just an AR form.
Or would have been, if her proportions had been more realistic.
Deep in conversation with one of the local cops, she nevertheless snapped her attention to them as they approached. “Ah, Ellington. I was wondering when you might turn up.” She held out a hand. “So nice to see you all again.”
“What is going on here?” Twohy asked, ignoring the pleasantries. “Why do I have a couple hundred civilians squatting near my airfield?”
“Technically, they aren’t squatting. And technically, it’s not your airfield,” Serket said. “They’re here on the invitation of Tamm Good Industries, which, may I remind you, owns this entire section of real estate.”
“You don’t own this.”
“Not me personally, of course.” A projection, a two-dimensional map, appeared in front of them in the AR. A projection on an invisible wall. “But as you can see from the county deed records, our organization does indeed now own all nonmilitary land here at Ellington. The deal was finalized a few weeks ago. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”
“Why would we have? The infrastructure meeting’s only held twice a year. Last time was in August. These purchases are supposed to be run by the board at that time.”
“You should have been notified out of cycle. I do apologize for the oversight.”
Marathon didn’t think Serket sounded particularly apologetic. In fact, he was almost certain that she would have already considered the timing of all of this. She was good with things like that.
“You said they’re here by invitation,” Marathon said, trying to get back to the main point here. “What’s that mean?”
“Why, Tamm invited them, of course,” Serket said. “You have heard about the lottery for tickets to the Galactic Expo?”
“Yeah, I seem to remember something about that.”
