Exodus, page 50
When they were three hundred kilometers up, the display showed her that sensor pulses were starting to sweep across the fuselage. They came from nine separate sites nestled in the rugged ground below.
“So those are the Celestial compounds?” Ellie asked.
“Yes. See, they’re all in areas away from the lava. They’ll leave us alone as long as we stay on a course that doesn’t bring us down close to them.”
“Define ‘close.’ ”
“A hundred kilometers is generally safe enough. That includes flying directly overhead, which is why they’re tracking us—in case we start to drift in their direction.”
Ellie realized she was gripping the seat’s armrests and made an effort to let go. They continued their descent in free fall until they were thirty kilometers above the grim terrain. The pilot powered up the ion thrusters again.
Ellie finally saw the travel town they were heading for. A wide splash of white light was shining out across the ground from its huge headlights. She could see that it was just moving. Smaller lights circled around it at a distance.
A kilometer up, and falling too fast for comfort, the Heads Up started to decelerate sharply. Ellie was pushed down hard into the seat as the gee force mounted fast. Then it ended in a final bump, and they were down.
“End of the line,” Gyvoy announced happily. “Let’s go, people.”
Ellie walked beside Finn as they went down the ramp. And yes, the ground was—once again—like nothing she’d seen before. It was relatively flat: soil that had once been a fertile loam, but now felt like tight-packed grit underfoot after being exposed to the vacuum for six thousand years. The grass and shrubs that covered it had darkened to a deep umber, as if exposure to the airless centuries was a process to turn them to charcoal. Everywhere she looked she could see gray pocked stones, ranging from pebble-sized up to lumps as big as her head, scattered at random. They sat in shallow indentations, with the grass around them pummeled to flakes.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Volcano ejecta,” Gyvoy said. “Without air resistance, the pumice can fly for a hundred kilometers, especially if it’s a violent eruption.”
That made her glance nervously up at the star-filled sky.
“Dark place,” a Dave said. They were bringing up the rear of the column, while five andys carried the squad’s equipment cases on either side.
The travel town they were walking toward had an inelegance that immediately defined it as human-made: three basic metal cubes stacked one on top of the other, with dozens of windows set in the walls. Pipes and ladders formed a chaotic lattice around it, looking brutally functional. Above the highest cube was a raised shield of some thick jet-black material that curved over the edges to protect it from ejecta. A broad bank of spotlights mounted high on the front wall scoured the ground ahead as it crawled forward on four sets of huge caterpillar tracks, three times her height. Ellie thought the town might be going about three kilometers an hour—slow enough for them to catch up with it just by walking.
More headlights were bobbing away in the distance. She remembered the travel town was surrounded by them. “What are the vehicles out there?” she asked.
“Scouts,” Gyvoy said. “It’s not just Travelers that break into Celestial compounds; the volcanoes and quakes have demolished thousands of them. If any of the Ghosts defending them survive, they roam the surface operating on full aggression mode. They fight with the defenders of intact compounds they come across, and any human they encounter.”
“I’m launching,” the pilot announced.
Ellie turned to watch the Heads Up lift off. When it was a hundred meters up, it tipped vertical and accelerated hard.
Maybe I should have stayed in orbit, she thought. Kajval’s eerie landscape of heat and death was spooking her.
There were several ramps along the side of the travel town, reaching almost to the ground. When they reached one, Ellie ran for a few steps and hopped up.
The airlock was large enough to take the whole squad. When it was pressurized, a tall man with several cymech exomuscles on his arms and legs came in. “Welcome y’all to Noveck Active Travel Town. My name’s Binopal. I’m chief assistant to the mayor, and the Natt’s best Celestial archivist. It’s my sweet job to help you get what you want.”
“Nothing more frightening,” Ellie whispered to Finn.
“Huh?”
“Grandfather’s joke. Something about how help is not good when it comes from government.”
“Oh. Right.”
With Binopal leading them, they all trooped up five flights of stairs. The inside of the town was as bleak as Ellie had expected. Every wall was bare metal, and the pipes and cables strung along corridors demanded too much space. The chill, fetid air was filled with the constant clattering of machines. Doors were all oval pressure hatches, manually locked with big wheels. Overhead lights were either too green or veered close to ultraviolet. Both spectrums seemed to burn her eyes.
They wound up in a big compartment with rows of tables with chairs whose cushioning was worn away. Ellie only realized it was a canteen when she saw the food packet dispensers along one wall. A big screen at the far end was showing a match being played in some giant stadium. Ellie squinted at the players on a circular pitch of blue grass. The ball they were chasing and kicking looked like a pair of rugby balls in mid-flagrante. “Football’s changed in the last forty thousand years, then,” she mused.
A woman in dark blue overalls stood beside the screen, studying the arrivals. Her eyes were light gray cymech spheres, so Ellie couldn’t tell if she was looking directly at them or not. She certainly turned in the direction of the Daves when they came in, but her expression remained impassive.
“It’s my pleasure to introduce you folks to Elsbeth McQuillan,” Binopal said. “Just about the finest drive team boss we got.” He gave a rueful shrug. “And right now, the only team pitstopping in the old Natt.”
“Really?” Gyvoy said contemptuously. “The only team? You’re pulling that one on us?”
“We’re not pulling anything,” Elsbeth McQuillan said. “Take a tour down in the garages, see if you can find another team’s vehicles. I’m the one you’ll be talking to today. If that’s not good enough, you can wait until Euvan O’Calby gets back.”
“How long will that be?”
“They left two days ago,” McQuillan said. “Might be at their destination by now. Might even make it back sometime.”
“I appreciate you fellas are mighty riled that this here situation is not ideal for your negotiating talent,” Binopal said. “But why don’t you tell me what y’all are looking for, and then we can see if it’s worth you staying to talk to Elsbeth.”
For a moment Ellie thought Gyvoy might just call his bluff. But eventually he said: “We need a Celestial drop ship—five-ton cargo capacity, military grade, ten-gee thrust.”
Binopal waited a moment. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
Binopal and Elsbeth McQuillan shared a puzzled glance.
“Nothing else?” Elsbeth queried.
“Nope.”
“You fellas got yourself a very specific mission lined up, huh?” Binopal quizzed.
Gyvoy remained silent, staring at him.
“Okey-dokey, then,” Binopal said. “There might be a compound that has what you want in it. But y’all gotta understand something here; there ain’t no guarantees. All we know about active sites is from drive-bys and orbital scans from visiting starships.”
“I get it. Go on.”
“There’s a small Celestial spaceport seven hundred klicks southwest of here. I say spaceport, but it’s more like a hangar with a landing pad on top. You’ll find it in compound BK37. Never been breached, never had a quake. It’s your best bet, but getting up to the hangar will be a doozy.”
“It’s in the hoodoo garden?” McQuillan said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Shit. Okay, he’s not kidding. That won’t be easy.”
“Let me guess,” Gyvoy sneered. “More expensive?”
“No, sir,” she said coldly. “Because I just take you there. That’s the standard part. Getting into the compound and up to the hangar is all down to you and your team. There’s a couple of good locksmiths in the Natt—Mique Odox and Wyliam Sapri—who’ll happily contract out to you. They’ll advise you on the perimeter breach strategy and lead you through the defenses. But I gotta say right now, they’re good—I mean they really know their Celestial tech—but I doubt they can activate a Celestial drop ship in under a week. Those craft have some seriously complex systems. And even if you make it past the perimeter, the spaceport is at the top of the rock pillar, and that’s a big strategic pile of shit right there. One way up, and one way down. If you do make it into the hangar, you will not have a week. More like ten minutes before the Ghost pile-on chasing your asses overwhelms you.”
Gyvoy’s grin was predatory. “Don’t worry, I came prepared for exactly that scenario. We have someone who can burn through any safeblocks on a Celestial control system and take charge of it. Isn’t that right, Finn?”
Like everyone else, Ellie turned to look at Finn. To his credit, he didn’t look as shit-scared as she knew he was.
“I will be with you when we raid the hangar, so yeah,” he said. “I’m putting my own life on the line so that I can get the drop ship active and out of there fast enough to stay ahead of the defenses. That’s my guarantee.”
“Asteria’s tits,” Elsbeth McQuillan muttered.
“So,” Gyvoy said. “Now that’s settled, what sort of fee are we talking about?”
* * *
—
Elsbeth McQuillan negotiated a couple of vanguard-class tanks, Eat This and Hard Yes, to accompany her command vehicle, Hell Welcomes Careful Drivers, which she claimed was one of the biggest tanks operating out of the Natt. Finn hadn’t questioned that out loud when he clambered inside, but its passenger cabin made the Heads Up luxuriously spacious by comparison.
The three tanks were complemented by five tracked trailblazer bikes, each of which had a separate posse of five millandys watching out for marauder Ghosts.
Finn shared the Hell Welcomes’s cabin with the seven members of Sergeant Bensath’s team. All of them were wearing combat armor, which meant they couldn’t even stand up straight. The whole seventeen-hour trip had to be spent sitting down. Finn had tried to sleep, but the noise and total lack of suspension made that impossible.
After eleven hours rocking and shaking over congealed lava fields and dead ground, they were seeing less tectonic desolation and more ordinary terrain, but that didn’t make the view any better. The loss of the planet’s atmosphere had left all its living organisms structurally intact as they died. Discoloration had set in almost immediately, but that was all. There was remarkably little decay. As Elsbeth had told them, all the bacteria had died at the same time as the host body, so there was nothing to cause biological degradation in any of the plants or animals. Still, vacuum ablation had slowly gnawed away at the surface molecules, smoothing them down so they now resembled timeworn statues.
Sometime after the thirteenth hour the convoy passed a big herd of bison lying where they’d fallen six thousand years ago. It took Finn a minute to recognize the lumpy shapes as carcasses. Many of them had tiny deposits of air crystals lodged along the folds in their stiff hides, twinkling in the morning sun.
“They’re like three-D shadows,” Ellie remarked sadly. “What did the Kajval Celestials do to deserve this?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to,” Finn admitted.
“Tell me again this is worth it.”
“It’s worth it. We need that drop ship to get down to the Archimedes Engine. It’s not just the high gravity on the iron exotic we have to contend with—maybe a human drop ship could reach escape velocity, maybe not—but we have no idea how deep into the atmosphere we’re going to have to go. Only the ultrabonded materials the Celestials have can survive the pressure down there.”
He could just visualize her head shaking in dismay inside the armor’s helmet.
“I guess we do need it, then,” she said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll reactivate it.”
“Did the Kajval Celestials have neural interfaces?”
“No. They were completely different from Imperial Celestials, but their CIs still have the same kind of routines. I can interface with the drop ship’s network.”
“I really hope so, Finn.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
An hour later the convoy arrived at the hoodoo garden. It was a region of stone pillars stretching for over eighty kilometers before broadening into a mountain range. The gaps between the hoodoos began to get narrower as the pillars grew taller and thicker. Soon they were several hundred meters wide at the base, with the taller ones reaching over a kilometer into the airless sky.
As they wound their way through the garden, Hell Welcomes had to start bulldozing trees aside. They were traversing a thick expanse of forest, with its trees going on to colonize every slight ledge or crevice in the hoodoos. Breaking the trees apart didn’t even slow the tank down; the trunks simply crumbled into mounds of dusty flakes as the forward edge punched into them. It began a domino effect as the upper boughs crashed into neighboring trees when they fell, creating a wide bow wave of destruction that only ended when it reached the rock walls of the confining hoodoos.
Seventeen hours after leaving Natt, Hell Welcomes slowed down and stopped two kilometers from the wall surrounding BK37. Both the Eat This and Hard Yes stopped beside it.
Sensors on Hell Welcomes focused on their goal. The hoodoo had been carefully hollowed out to provide a natural skyscraper honeycombed with chambers and corridors. Its exterior was left almost untouched, with its loose shroud of trees and foliage encouraged to form verdant fringes around the excavated caverns and their balconies. At the top, its original apex had been sheared off to provide a wide landing pad, with the big hangar cavern directly underneath.
Sensors on Hell Welcomes revealed the wall protecting the compound was fifty meters high, with a diameter of three kilometers, its outer edge curving concavely around the seven adjacent hoodoos, excluding them. If there were any structures in the forest around the base of BK37, they weren’t visible in any of the orbital scans that’d been compiled by the locksmiths of the mobile towns. Instead, the inner edge of the wall encased a wide moat, which was now full of glittering air crystals that hadn’t been able to slither any further after they fell.
Gyvoy clambered down from the command cab into the passenger cabin.
“Twenty minutes,” he announced to Bensath’s team. “Let’s get into position. Mique, you’re taking point, yes?”
“Yeah,” the locksmith said. “Okay, people, the sensors on the wall know the tanks are here, of course, given we just trashed half the trees in the garden, so the compound’s CI alert status will be at maximum. Now, your suits should be able to move through the forest without being detected, so just keep in single file behind me, and tread where I tread; I don’t want a domino collapse giving us away. After the breach strikes, it really won’t matter. The electronic warfare millandys will be jamming their sensors, and the compound Ghosts will be deployed against the three gaps. Once we’re up on the wall, I’ll corrupt the compound’s network as much as possible. Do not get ahead of me. Until we reach the hoodoo itself, your job is suppression fire against any Ghosts that attack us. And trust me, you will be doing a lot of that. So…let’s get started.”
“Here we go, then,” Ellie said.
“Just be careful,” Finn told her. “Stick close to me.”
“Oh, I am going to be a human limpet.”
Finn stood up, remembering to bend so his armor’s helmet didn’t smack into the ceiling. The suit’s artificial muscle bands held the position easily.
“Decompressing the cabin,” Elsbeth announced. “We’ll hold position out here until you launch the drop ship, just in case you need a fast exit.”
Finn started to shuffle forward, with Ellie centimeters behind.
Gyvoy stepped in front of him. “Not you,” he said.
“What?”
“No, I’m talking to Ellie. You’re not coming on the raid.”
“Like fuck I’m not,” she snapped angrily.
“This isn’t multiple choice. I’m sorry; any other raid and I’d be happy to have you on the team. I realize I should have made this clear up on the Diligent, but I didn’t, so there we are. Our task today is absolutely critical for the overall mission, and you have no experience and no training.”
Finn winced, but it was exactly what he’d been thinking since the moment Ellie had announced she was coming down to Kajval with them. He just didn’t have the nerve to say it out loud.
“You can’t do this!” Ellie said.
“I’m going to be honest here,” Gyvoy said. “Call it blunt. Call it—and me—whatever names you want, actually, but you’d be a liability. You’ve never been in combat, and you have no understanding of Celestial defense mechanisms. Also, if you did come, Finn is going to be stupidly protective of you—and rightly so—but if this goes arse over tit, that will increase his exposure. And, Ellie, he’s the only one of us who has to make it to the hangar. That’s what this whole mission is geared up around. I just can’t take the risk. I know it’s hard to hear, but that’s the way it is.”
“Finn,” she said desperately.
“No!” Gyvoy retorted. “This is not down to him. I am in charge of this operation, and it ain’t a democracy. Finn, you either come with us while your girlfriend stays safe in the Hell Welcomes, or we abort everything right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Finn told her. “I have to go. You know that, right?”
