Splinter Faction, page 24
We landed the Frankie on one of the exterior pads excavated into the surface of Orcus, a jumbled amalgam of ice and rock. A pressurized airlock similar to the jetways of Earthly airports snuggled up to the Frankie and locked in place, allowing us to disembark and descend into the mostly subterranean world of Fort Cantullin.
The commander of the Fort, a Conoku named Huddill, greeted us. He was another veteran, one of Linulla’s kids from the generation immediately following that of the original Iowa’s crew. Huddill had been with us during the final battle against Calamity and distinguished himself when the Conoku commanding his ship fell as a casualty and he took over. He went on to deftly command his ship through the rest of the clash, taking out two of Calamity’s ships in the process.
“Cap’n Van, good to see you,” Huddill said. “I’m sorry we don’t have a proper honor guard or anything. But our people are all buried in other tasks and—”
I waved a hand. “I’m perfectly fine with it. Believe me, I apologize for interrupting your work flow.” We started walking along a brightly lit corridor of annealed rock festooned with pipes and cable-runs. I automatically adopted the “Cantullin shuffle,” the name given to the combined sliding-shuffling-hopping gait appropriate to the low gravity of Orcus. A few sections of the Fort had artificial gravity, but most didn’t. Once you got the hang of it, you could manage a pretty good clip, basically bouncing off the floor, then pushing off down and forward from the ceiling, then bouncing off the floor again. “I appreciate that the pomp and ceremony has its place, its role to play in things, but not at the expense of more important—OOF.”
We’d turned a corner, and I’d collided with, and then bounced off something massive. And hairy.
And smelling vaguely of… spaghetti.
“Sorry, boss!” Icky said, stifling a belch. Apparently, she’d just finished Third Lunch, which is completely separate from First and Second Lunch.
I stopped myself from sailing into a wall, regained my composure, and gave Icky a puzzled frown. “What are you doing here?”
“Helping those Canada guys with their ship. They specifically asked Torina for someone to give them a hand, so we hitched a ride out here on the Nykulta, and here we are. And don’t worry, if the balloon goes up while we’re out here, the Fafnir’s gonna come by and pick us up on her way to the war.”
I frowned harder. “We?”
A head poked around the corridor-filling bulk of Icky. “Hello, Van,” Funboy said.
“Holy shit, is anyone left to crew the Fafnir except Torina?”
Icky nodded. “Uh, yeah, of course. There’s Rab, and Netty-P, and Gabby, and—” She paused. “And I guess that’s it. Still, it’s enough to get her underway.”
“And you’re here helping Icky?” I asked Funboy. We’d sorted ourselves out by now, and all started walking along the corridor toward the Fort’s Command Center.
“To an extent, yes. However, I am also here to assist the Canadians with the medical supplies and equipment that have been loaded aboard their ship. To be flight-certified under interstellar regulations, they must have a minimum amount of medical resources aboard—”
“Right, yeah, I’m familiar with them,” I said. “Okay, well, good to see you guys.” Then I went on to ask Icky and Funboy about the Canadians’ progress. In the midst of that, Huddill received a call on his comm. He stopped just short of the last turn in the corridor before the Command Center.
“Cap’n Van, I’m afraid the briefing I intend to give you will have to be delayed,” he said. “We have a bit of a problem. A missing person, actually.”
“A missing person?” It was a testament to my mindset that I immediately thought spy or saboteur. “Who?”
“And how the hell does someone go missing here?” Icky wondered. “It’s not like they can just wander off.”
“Well, they can, but only if they’re going somewhere on Orcus,” Perry said. “Oh, wait, there is nowhere else on Orcus.”
“Huddill, if there’s a security issue here, then we’d better raise the alert level,” I said. “We can’t afford to have someone running loose in the Fort. This place is too strategically important—”
Huddill raised a claw. “Sorry, Cap’n Van, I should explain. The person missing is a young human girl who’s here with her parents. Both are techs working on the Northwest Passage. They requested permission to bring their child along with them, which I approved, though only after Cap’n Torina had already signed off.”
That made me do a double-take. A young human girl. Okay, forget spies and saboteurs, and instead shift gear to fatherly concern. “Are you saying there’s a child missing somewhere in this base?”
“That’s right. We’ve got a search underway—”
“A search that we are now officially part of, as in all of us,” I said, gesturing to include Perry, Icky, and Funboy. While a child might not pose security issues around things like sabotage, there was an even more viscerally unsettling vibe around a little girl, lost, wandering these corridors that could lead her to so many places she could get hurt.
At least she couldn’t end up accidentally exiting the base. None of the airlocks would open for her. Or, at least, I hoped they wouldn’t. I turned to Huddill. “Make sure all of the airlocks are down tight.”
“Already done, Cap’n Van.”
“Good. Okay, Huddill, just point us at where we should be searching, and we’ll get right on it.”
We walked the last few steps to the Command Center, where Huddill called up a map of Fort Cantullin. Sections already being searched were highlighted in yellow. Ones yet to be searched were highlighted in red. There were a lot of both. Damn, I still tended to think of Fort Cantullin the way it was in the early days, a handful of interconnected domes with a smattering of excavations beneath them. But the Fort had steadily grown over the years, so now it was really a small town, one consisting largely of a warren of tunnels, compartments, and other excavated openings under the surface of Orcus. The Fort had gone past outpost status into something permanent, and in its own way, homey.
I pointed at two adjoining red sections. “Okay, Icky, Funboy, you guys go search here, Section Niner-Alpha. Perry and I will take Niner-Bravo. Once we’re done with those, we’ll start working our way clockwise, though these sections here. Go slow, eyes open. Kids are clever. Kids get scared. Those things can make for mysteries we don’t need.”
Everyone acknowledged, and we set off. The section Perry and I were searching was mostly stores, secure compartments containing everything from food, to medical kit, to spare parts for consoles and cookstoves. It didn’t take us long. There was no way for a wandering little girl to open any of the secure rooms, since the doors were sealed with security passcodes. I was about to tell Icky and Funboy on the comm that we were moving on to the next section, Niner-Charlie, but Icky beat me to it.
“Hey, Van! We found her.”
“Is she alright—wait. Icky, is that music?”
“Yeah, it is! Come to compartment Niner-Alpha-Two-One and—well, just come and see for yourself.”
I started Cantullin-shuffling that way, Perry sailing along the corridor beside me, an easy feat for him in Orcus’s low gravity. We arrived at compartment Niner-Alpha-Two-One, which was a recreation room and common area surrounded by crew quarters, and found a party underway.
Perry and I just stopped and stood in the entrance to the compartment, gaping. A dozen young Conoku, recent arrivals as new crew on Fort Cantullin, twisted, cavorted, and shook their crustacean booties to a bouncy, effervescent dance rhythm. Smack in the middle of the capering, chitinous crowd towered Icky, also dancing, all four arms pumping, flailing about with the music, fingers snapping. And dancing away happily with her and the crablets was a human girl, maybe six or seven years old. She had the widest, brightest grin on her young face, an expression so purely, blissfully happy that I couldn’t help smiling right back at it.
I glanced at Perry. “Can you ensure that Huddill knows that we’ve found our missing young lady?”
“Already done, boss. Her parents are on their way.” He cocked his head. “Okay, I’m just going to come out and say it. This is adorable.”
It was. The bouncy music, the joyfully unrestrained delight of everyone involved, it was… adorable. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
“Hey, Van!” Icky called. “Come on over and meet the star of the show!”
I nodded and started threading my way through the gyrating Conoku. They were adorable, too, although that was tempered by the fact that they were armored and sprouted all sorts of hard, pointy, and in some cases snappy appendages. And I’d hate to be invalided out of the Guild by a tragic Conoku party accident. I made it to the relatively clear spot in the middle but still kept an eye on the nearest crablets and waving pincers.
“Van, this is Unicorn Girl!” Icky announced.
I smiled, giving her a once-over as I looked for a horn, but she was fully human and totally cute. “Unicorn Girl? That’s a lovely name. And a very unusual one. Do you have any other names that you use, you know, most of the time?”
“Nuh-uh. I’m Unicorn Girl most of the time! No, all of the time!” she replied, still bouncing along with Icky. But she abruptly turned and said, “Who are you?”
“That’s Cap’n Van!” a Conoku shouted in passing. “He’s the boss!”
“Oh, okay. Dance with me, Cap’n Van!” Unicorn Girl said, rotating a little so she faced me.
So I danced. And, you know what? I wasn’t the greatest dancer, but I didn’t care. I danced with Unicorn Girl, mirroring her bright grin, and for a few minutes forgot all about disappearing stars, Stillness fleets, political scheming in the League, all of it. I danced like nobody was watching except Unicorn Girl, and she threw herself around in the low gravity with the enthusiasm and purity of youth.
“Alright, young lady, I think you’ve done enough partying.”
I turned to the voice and saw a woman working her way through the crowd. A man stood with Perry. Unicorn Girl gave the woman a sour look. “Aw, I don’t wanna go!”
“These people are very busy—”
“No we’re not!” Icky declared, snapping fingers on all four hands. I gave her a headshake, and she gave me a puzzled look, then understanding dawned. “Oh, wait. Yeah, actually we are pretty busy. Sorry, Unicorn Girl, we have to go, and so do you.”
“Aw.” Unicorn Girl looked around, then her gaze landed on Funboy, who stood apart from the ongoing festivities with a slightly disapproving air. “Mr. Funboy hasn’t danced yet!” she said, then raced off toward him.
“My deepest apologies. My dancing shoes are several light-seconds distant, and I have delicate arches,” Funboy intoned, then added an apologetic bow.
“I’m sorry, Master Tudor,” the woman said. “We’d rather not have brought her along with us, but we really had no one to look after her while her father and I were—”
I raised a hand. “Please, no apologies necessary.”
“That’s very kind of you to say, but we know everyone’s extremely busy here.”
Icky shrugged. “These Conoku are all off-watch, so they wanted to blow off some steam. She wanted to join ’em, and they were happy to oblige. No harm done.”
I nodded, watching and smiling as Unicorn Girl led Funboy by his hand out into the middle of the room. He kept a look of resigned patience on his face, but I caught a glimmer of a smile in his eyes. “No harm indeed. Quite the opposite. I mean, if we’re not fighting so Unicorn Girl can dance with a pack of crablets, a light-footed Wut’zur, and a reluctant Surtsi, then why are we fighting?”
I meant it to be light-hearted, a joke, but by the time I finished saying it, I found myself really meaning it. This was exactly the sort of thing we were trying to preserve, wasn’t it? It was why the Fafnir mounted such a deadly array of potent weaponry. Not to be the biggest, baddest warship, dealing out the most destruction, but to preserve peace so that people could just live their lives how they wanted. To preserve joy, innocence, and fun.
Funboy stood in the middle of the scuttling, capering Conoku for a moment. Unicorn Girl tugged at him. “C’mon, Mr. Funboy, dance!”
“Yeah, Sourpuss,” Icky put in, now doing something that reminded me of “the Hustle.” “Get that booty of yours shakin’!”
Funboy sighed, looked at his feet, and murmured “Oh, dear.” And then he started dancing. He spun, whirled, dropped into a split, and performed an array of cultural dances that pulled my hamstrings just watching.
Perry stared in wonder. “Is that… a Russian Cossack dance?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Never met one.”
All along, Icky and Unicorn Girl laughed with glee, and the Conoku cheered in a bubbling rattle, claws waving like a forest of approval.
I leaned back and laughed. Sometimes, you gotta shake it, even in the depths of a battle station at the edge of the light.
22
Alas, all good things and endings, am I right? Unicorn Girl’s parents finally put their foot down, and the party broke up. Icky and Funboy left to return to the work with the Canadians, while Perry and I went back to the Fort Cantullin Command Center to finally receive that update briefing. I came away from that satisfied that Fort Cantullin was in fine form, ready for whatever we needed it to do, including defending itself against almost any conceivable attack. Unicorn Girl’s impromptu rave with the Conoku had already shifted my mood, pushing the brooding thoughts I’d been dwelling on since leaving Starsmith off to one side. The keen, professional readiness of Fort Cantullin sealed the deal. By the time we were ready to leave and head for Earth, I was entrenched in a damned good mood.
“We never did learn Unicorn Girl’s real name,” Perry said as I lifted the Frankie and set the flight controls for the return to Earth.
I shrugged. “She was Unicorn Girl. Enough said.”
“Alrighty, then.”
We flew on, Fort Cantullin dwindling in our wake. I checked the way ahead and noted the trajectory proposed by the nav had us passing close enough to Jupiter for a good view of the big planet. That was always a welcome distraction during an otherwise boring flight. Not that the interplanetary space of the Solar System was, from an aesthetic point of view, much different from space anywhere else, of course. But Earth was home, and as anyone who’s ever come home from a long road trip knows those last few hours on the highway are the most tedious.
Time slows when you know every curve in the road.
I seized the opportunity to dig into some of the paperwork I’d been avoiding, mainly because Perry goaded me into it. “I know this stuff ain’t much fun, boss,” he said. “But it’s all necessary.”
I looked at the list on my data pad. “This is all… necessary? Really.” I pointed at an item. “Waiver of Safety Protocols for Dart Tournament in The Black Hole,” I read aloud. “What’s so necessary about that that it needs my sign-off? And what the hell kind of tournament are they planning that they need to waive safety protocols? PvP darts?” I had visions of people crouching, dashing, and taking cover amid the chairs and tables in The Black Hole while whipping pointy little projectiles at one another. I gave Perry a suspicious look. “It’s not PvP darts, is it?”
“No, Van, that would be dumb. This is rocket darts.”
“Rocket darts.”
“Yeah. It’s a new thing from Unity.”
“It chills me to even ask this, but do you mean darts with, what, rocket motors in them?”
“Small ones.”
I blinked a couple of times. “Why? Is the objective to destroy the dart board—?”
“No, it’s just a much longer ranged version of the original game. You stand, like, fifteen meters away from the board.”
“Rocket-propelled darts flung around by people who’ve been drinking, and in a crowded bar at that? We’d be sweeping the eyeballs up with a broom.” I shook my head. “This one’s easy. Denied.”
“The nascent rocket-darts league is going to be pretty disappointed.”
“They’ll get over it. Okay, what insanity is next on the list. Billiards with grenades? Napalm shooters—?”
“Sorry to interrupt your brainstorming new bar games, Van, but we’re getting a comm from an outbound freighter,” Perry cut in. As he spoke, he highlighted an icon on the tactical overlay. She was the Starbeam Oracle, a class 15 hybrid hauler, a ship able to handle both regular and bulk cargoes. Registered in the Ceti League, no outstanding writs or complaints. She meant nothing to me, so I turned to Perry with a questioning glance.
“What do they want?”
“They say they detected what they’re pretty sure was a fragmented distress call from somewhere in the Jovian system. They reported it back to the Nexus, and, yeah, the Nexus is actually now reporting it to us as well,” Perry replied.
I saw where this was going and confirmed it with a few taps on the Frankie’s nav. We were the “closest” ship. Not the physically closest—that would be another freighter, deeper in the Solar System and currently nearer to Jupiter than we were. No, we were the closest in terms of time. Given the current velocities and potential acceleration of all the ships in question, none could reach the Jovian system more quickly than we could.
That said, the Frankie’s comm was notably silent on the whole matter of distress signals. “Probably just interference from Jupiter itself,” Perry said. “If a ship’s close enough to the big ol’ planet, then gravitational, magnetic, and radiation effects can badly degrade a comm signal.”
I nodded. “Sure. But a ship would have to be damned close. Probably too close for safety purposes.”
“Which probably explains the distress signal.”
