Zero Flux, page 3
Even if he’d been willing to satisfy their curiosity, he wouldn’t have known quite how to answer. He’d rarely talked to Mairwen about their relationship, partly because he didn’t like labeling things, and partly because he was afraid of what she might say. He loved her immensely. She soothed his jagged, brittle edges and filled the empty spots. She was his passionate lover, his clever muse, his unwaveringly loyal friend. He knew she loved him and considered him hers to protect, but she had resolutely insisted that he lead Foxe Investigations, even though she’d put up half the funds. Despite the intertwining of their public and private lives, she was still a very solitary person.
Now that they had an empty room to themselves for a few minutes, he grabbed her gloved hands with his. “Do you need more water or a protein bar?” They all had to stay hydrated to offset the heat loss caused by the extreme cold, and he suspected she’d used at least partial tracker mode to dodge the falling ice, which burned energy like a star going nova. He tried to keep her well fed, so she’d have reserves when she needed them, but they’d used the urgency of Einar’s invitation as an excuse to meet up with him for the flitter trip to the crime scene instead of going to a dinner with even more of his family. He shuddered at the thought.
“Not yet, but thank you.” Her expression softened, and her eyes were bright. He wanted to kiss her, but it was too damned cold to take off their face protection.
She squeezed his hands, then let go. “The Jumper’s cybernetics have a sound.”
He tilted his head. She was usually more precise than that. “What kind of sound?”
She thinned her lips briefly and shifted her weight a little, her version of fidgeting. “It’s a faint pattern, and high, at the top of my range.” Her range rivaled that of most dogs, thanks to an illegal DNA-level alteration by a very secret, high-casualty program of the Citizen Protection Service. She started to turn, then stopped. “Oh, and her right elbow has a passive tracer, like I had.” She pointed to the spots on her shoulders and hips, some of the locations from where she’d removed tracers with her own knife when she’d escaped the CPS.
“Theories?” He had too many loose threads, and not enough data.
She frowned slightly. “Not exactly.”
“Try me,” he said. Her unconventional ideas helped knock his thoughts out of predictable orbits. It was one of the many things he loved about her.
“Zero flux.”
He blinked. “What?” Zero flux was the elusive holy grail of energy physicists, like cold fusion or transit space had been in their day. “Oh, you mean for the cybernetics.”
He considered her skills. She could not only hear what she called “phantom sonics” from an interstellar faster-than-light drive, she could tell from the sound if something was off. “Do the cybernetic nodes sound like a flux drive?”
She looked up to her left. “Possibly.”
He started walking again. “I wonder…” He’d been thinking the corpse’s cybernetic design was worth hiding, and possibly worth killing for, but what if the real prize was whatever was still providing the power? Even if it wasn’t zero flux itself, the power source had lasted twenty years, even once it was put in the extreme temperature of the cold unit. It would be just the kind of risky, secret project worth hiding deep in an uncharted mountain on an inhospitable planet.
If he recalled correctly, injured Jumper body parts that couldn’t be repaired weren’t cloned, which took weeks or months, they were replaced with cybernetics, which could have the Jumper functional again within hours. If the facility was a CPS dark project, or contract researchers with CPS funding, it would explain the CPS-style tracers, especially if the woman had been an unwilling test subject. But if she’d been caught in an avalanche, the passive tracers would have been useless; they’d only activate if the detector was close enough. When the CPS abandoned the facility, the only reason they would have left her body behind was because they couldn’t find it.
Obviously, someone else had come upon the corpse by chance and recognized her value. It might even have been his father. Rye Foxe had always looked for the sly profit, the secret advantage, the slick score. He wouldn’t have had the resources or contacts to exploit the find himself, so he’d have tried to sell his hvalreki, his lucky find, to someone with deep pockets, which on Lumi Silta meant one of the associated founding families. If the sealed lab entrance had been more obvious fifteen years ago, Rye would have included that tidbit to sweeten the deal. Luka carefully visualized the crime scene again. One of the side effects of his forensic talent was vivid, acid-etched memories of scenes with violence, and he had to handle them with caution or become overwhelmed. The woman’s death in the ice cave was angry and personal, but Rye’s could have been an execution or an accident. Either way, he was still dead. Luka didn’t know how he felt about that, so ignored it for now.
Continuing the scenario, someone had preserved the bodies of Rye and the unknown woman instead of disposing of them, so they must have value, too. Maybe blackmail, meaning a new player. Destroying the faces post-mortem would make it harder to identify the bodies quickly if they were discovered, perhaps as a way to give the new player time to escape. The new player had imported the cold unit to preserve the Jumper’s body, and had been patiently, diligently studying it ever since, hence the disassembled elbow. The player wasn’t a primary founding family member, or the hvalreki that was the cybernetic corpse would have been moved and exploited long ago. Luka’s intuition said it was a solo operation. It would have taken extraordinary self-control and determination to keep the secret for fifteen years. He froze as an epiphany struck.
The blue light. The gray tape. A whale of a treasure.
His eyes found Mairwen, who was standing near the door of the exercise room, watching him. Her body language said she was in guard mode. Luka realized he must have been unconsciously pacing as he’d been lost in thought. Thank the universe she was a patient woman.
“The blue light in the cold unit was an alarm. I’ll tell you why I think so on the way back to get Einar, but we all need to get out of here.”
CHAPTER 4
* Planet: Lumi Silta * GDAT 3240.350 *
Mairwen was liking this whole visit less and less.
When she and Luka got back to the front of the facility, the door that had closed behind them when they’d entered now gaped open, and a small blue light on wall panel that controlled it was blinking. The light had been made to look like a part of the original security system, but Mairwen knew it wasn’t. She tried to think like Luka and notice the details. Ice had melted and refrozen on the bitterly cold floor near the threshold, the result of meltwater from a newly carved tunnel that led into the cave. The icefall they’d escaped from had buried the facility’s entrance under several meters of fallen and re-solidifying ice, so excavating a new tunnel through it was their only way out. Einar, two of his floating lights, and his ice wand were gone.
Mairwen was irritated that she hadn’t heard anything, but the facility was bigger than she’d first thought, and the walls were thick. She was more perturbed by the open and disarrayed forensic kit that lay on the ground. Luka was inventorying the samples.
“Do you trust Einar?” She put a slight emphasis on the word “trust,” asking Luka if he’d used his other minder talent on his friend, the talent that told him the essence of a person. He still wasn’t comfortable with using it often, and not just because it sapped his body heat. He said it felt like cheating.
“It’s never worked on him,” replied Luka. “And no, he’s not a top-level shielder. As far as I know, he’s not a minder at all. Of course, CPS testing doesn’t catch everything.” It certainly hadn’t detected either of Luka’s talents, which hadn’t registered on any of the mandatory CPS tests for all citizens.
He closed and carefully sealed the forensic kit. “The samples are all there, but I can’t check for contamination or corruption without a lab. A water pouch and a couple of the personal heaters are missing.” He nodded toward the open door and touched his nose. “Anything new over there?”
“No.” She’d have told him immediately if she’d scented someone new. “The ice is too noisy to hear anything else.”
His eyes widened. “Ice is noisy?”
She nodded, keeping her face straight. “It sounds like you when you have to drive in Etonver.” He had no patience with the notoriously bad traffic of their home city, and complained a lot.
He laughed. “No wonder you can’t hear anything.”
She grinned, because he’d gotten her joke. Most people thought she had no sense of humor, but Luka both saw and encouraged it.
He sobered as he eyed the open door and tunnel. He shoved his gloved hands in his midsection pockets. “Best case, Einar is making a tunnel to get us out. Worst case, someone tunneled in and took him, or he’s meeting them.” He looked at her. “Wait, or go?”
Mairwen had seen more than a few CPS facilities across the galaxy. After a moment, she said, “Official installations like these always have another way out in case of emergencies. I could look while you go find Einar.” She’d rather go with Luka into the ice cave, but she was better suited for breaking in and out of challenging environments, and they needed options.
Luka sighed, clearly as conflicted as she was. “You still have Einar’s small ice knife?” She nodded. “Good. Take our tech scanner—that should pick up powered items if they’re close enough. And be careful, ljósið mitt.” He pulled his larger ice knife from its sheath and headed for the door, slowing only to grab the loop of the third floating light that had been left behind.
She wanted to tell him that he was her light, too, and she wanted him to be safe, but soft words had never come easily to her, and he was gone before she could unlock her tongue.
She opened Luka’s kit to get the scanner, then closed and locked the case. The lock was biometric-based, and better than nothing, but anyone with an ice knife and five minutes could breach the armored shell.
If Luka’s hypothesis was correct, the facility was a combination research station and prison. CPS-designed facilities were usually secure, but predictable, probably built to some set of bureaucratic specifications. It would be prudent to hide the facility’s environmental controls, in case a prisoner breached containment. Therefore, if both the emergency exit and the building comp with the environmental controls had to be hidden for security reasons, it would have been cheaper to put them in the same place.
The emergency exit would have to be accessible by the researchers, and protocol would have dictated a requirement that it would need two cooperating people to operate. The thick stone walls and harsh exterior environment would have given the researchers the illusion of security, and they would have been inconvenienced by needing two people every time they simply wanted to turn up the heat in someone’s living quarters.
She pictured the empty offices and labs she and Luka had visited. They all looked the same, except the lab marked “D,” where the wall panel sat somewhat askew and wasn’t flush like the others in the facility. It was also the only lab with an alcove in the back—all the other labs were simple rectangles.
Grabbing the tech scanner, she took off at a fast trot. She was tempted to use tracker mode, but she hadn’t slept in twenty-six hours or eaten anything substantial in the last nineteen. Even the few minutes of half-tracker mode she’d used when dodging killer icicles had her stomach gnawing at her spine. She’d grown soft and domestic living with Luka and benefiting from his culinary adventurousness, but she wouldn’t trade her normal life for the universe.
When she got to the “D” lab, she studied its protruding wall panel, then nudged it with a gloved finger. The inner bezel flipped off into her hand, and behind it was a crude fiber splice. As she’d hoped, the occupants had circumvented the requirement for one person to be at the panel while the other operated the exit door. She reset the bezel, then looked around for where they might have hidden the emergency exit and its control switch. The alcove drew her eye, but perhaps it was meant to. If she were placing a secret exit, she’d put it in the most innocuous place possible. Nevertheless, she powered the tech scanner and started with the alcove.
She quickly found the control switch hidden below one of the counter-height powerbars located near the alcove itself. It wasn’t locked, or perhaps the researchers had disabled that, too. When she flipped the switch, the whole six-meter rear wall slid aside, making only the faintest of friction sounds. The tunnel on the other side was helpfully bright with emergency lighting and veered off to the right.
Just inside the tunnel on the right-hand wall, she found the controls for the building comp and environment. The large environmental panel was next to the smaller wall panel that controlled the exit mechanism. Both had the same flawed security system and were easy to breach. She spent three minutes and thirty-two seconds looking over the systems and making sure the exit behind her would stay open. Both panels had the same blue-light alarm add-in like the front entrance had. She chose not to adjust the facility’s temperature, since their party would soon be leaving. She hoped.
She was interested to see that the map for the environmental systems suggested the controlled area extended well into the ice cave. Perhaps the inevitable heat from the lab, despite the extra-insulated walls, destabilized the ice cave, meaning they’d had to add cooling and heating systems to protect their entrance. Or perhaps they’d planned to enlarge the facility in the future.
The emergency tunnel narrowed to three meters, then to two as she walked briskly up its incline. It felt warmer than the lab, but was by no means balmy. There were no sounds beyond the movement of her clothes and the muffled echo of her boots, and only the faint scent of damp plascrete.
Either the builders liked curves, or the mountain’s geology necessitated it, because the tunnel was shaped like a wobbly sine wave. She’d have lost all sense of direction without the basic analog compass built into her Lumi Siltan gloves, but the geomarker coordinates weren’t consistent at all. A turn took her close to where the ice cave should be, and she was gratified to hear the faint sounds of gurgling water and groaning ice when she put her ear close to the wall.
The end of the tunnel had another easily breached door, which opened to a solid wall of densely packed snow. She powered Einar’s ice knife, then poked into the snow at the floor, noting the stone extended beyond for at least the first meter. She fumbled a bit with the power setting until she found one that let her slice blocks of snow, instead of melting everything into a slushy mess. The holovids she’d seen had made it look easy, but the small knife and her inexperience made the blocks sloppy and uneven. Nonetheless, they stacked well enough to keep them out of her way and not block the narrow passage. She felt time slipping by too fast as she carried each stack of blocks farther back into the tunnel. Finally, after burrowing out a small passage about five meters long, she broke through to the outside. The stone ledge had ended about a meter back.
A frigid gust of wind blew snow in her face, which the headgear mask absorbed quickly. The sky was still almost as gray as at dawn, ninety minutes ago, but she could see the hulking shapes of the neighboring mountains. Closer, the only features were occasional rocky outcrops and vast amounts of snow.
She wriggled herself back to the doorway, then carved away more blocks to give herself enough vertical clearance to stand on the ledge as far as it went, leaving the access point to the outside small and hopefully undetectable. Beyond the opening, the packed snow seemed solid enough, but she knew it could be as unstable as the ice cave. She slid into the passage, trying not to disturb the snow, and stuck her head and shoulders out again to get a look around. She carefully eased her way out a little further, but splayed her legs to give her an anchor in the sides of the walls.
The featureless snow made judging distances difficult, but she guessed the tunnel exit was at least fifty meters from the entrance to the cave, which was slightly lower down the mountain. Both their flitters were on an exposed rock surface, being scoured by the wind.
A stray sound caught her attention. She’d almost dismissed it as a trick of the capricious wind when she heard it again. Flitter engine, low frequency and powerful, getting closer. She quickly curled her body back into the snow passage. The luminescent blue of her outer shell might aid in finding lost trekkers, but it also made her as visible as a grand-opening sale beacon. The next sound she heard was the unmistakable multi-pitch whine of wide-array beamer fire. She chanced sticking her head out to see what the target was. A small explosion assaulted her ears, but the swirling snow kept her from seeing well. She winced at the sound of a second, louder explosion, and caught a glimpse of an orange-yellow fireball. Both their flitters were probably destroyed.
Suddenly, she felt a deep vibration in the snow that surrounded her. She scrambled backward fast, trying to get to the tunnel door, but it was too late. Snow collapsed around her, and took her down into white, tumbling chaos.
CHAPTER 5
* Planet: Lumi Silta * GDAT 3240.350 *
The collapse of the icy ceiling in the cave had left an astonishing amount of debris blocking the facility door, and it was a testament to Einar’s skill with an ice wand that he was making a stable, walkable tunnel as he went. From Luka's vantage point behind a curve, he watched the man he still wanted to believe was his friend. Einar made deft, silent strokes that cleared another meter, then stopped to check his glove compass. He swore with frustrated vehemence, then altered the angle and swung the ice wand again.
