Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (3 page)

It was not the first time she’d said something like that to him during the last few days, and Jermane nodded acceptance. He considered it very likely that Andi Berenard was actually a Fleet Intelligence officer working under cover, and it was possible that some if not all of her crew were Fleet Intel, too. They would not admit that to him, of course, and he knew better than to ask. They were chatty enough, generally – welcoming and easy to get along with, as he’d found most spacers to be. He had a sense, too, of being in good hands, here, calm and professional, people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Two weeks later, when they arrived at the system where they were to drop him, though, he had to admit to some qualms.

‘It’s so
wild
,’ he said, staring at it on scopes. It was a crowded system; fourteen planets, more than three hundred moons, two satellite belts and an unusually large number of objects on cross-system orbits. Scanners indicated more than six billion objects bigger than a metre across, moving chaotically, different directions, different speeds. Several thousand of them were lit up red on scopes, indicating that they were going to collide with other objects within the next year. Most of them would crash into one of the eight gas giants, or plunge into the sun.

‘Uh huh,’ Andi confirmed, with a look of mild interest at a meteor stream destined to career straight into a gas giant in a couple of months. ‘Don’t worry, though, we’ll get you in safely.’

‘And pick you somewhere with a pretty view,’ the first mate added.

Jermane didn’t understand what he meant until he saw them running scans to find somewhere suitable for the survival dome. The place they picked was one of the moons around the second largest of the gas giants.

‘Geologically stable, moderate temperature range, easy access for shuttles – ideal,’ Andi told him.

‘But…’ Jermane said, staring at the information she was showing him, ‘it doesn’t have an atmosphere.’

‘None of them do.’ Andi pointed out. ‘Not one you could breathe, anyway. Actually, it does have some atmosphere – just a bit of methane. Nothing to worry about, though, you’ll be fine in the dome.’

‘And I’ve found you a great place,’ said the first mate, eagerly. ‘Incredible views. You’ll love it.’

Four hours later, they had finished putting up the dome. It was a four-man survival dome; self-inflating, with a built-in life support system. There were air-tanks, and fifty litres of water in a recyc unit. It came with survival rations for four people for five months, but the Chanticleer also provided supplies from their own stores.

Andi showed him round, assuring him that he didn’t need to worry about life support.

‘This is one of the most reliable systems on the market,’ she said. ‘It’s got triple redundancy throughout, so it’s got backup
on
the backup. In the unlikely event that there is any kind of problem with any of the tech in the dome, the system will diagnose and talk you through what to do about it, but you needn’t worry about that either, it’s designed for civilians to be able to use, even without previous technical skills.’ She gave him a little grin. ‘They sell a smaller version of this for people to carry on starseekers, okay? And we’ve put it on the lowest tech-skill level for you, so you’ll find it all very easy to use.’

She was right, at least in the sense that the screen layout was familiar and the controls intuitive, very similar in style to the kind of environmental controls you might find in any modern house, with heating and air conditioning, water temperature and so on. There were lots of reassuring green lights, and a voice interface which Andi set to a calm female mode.

And with that, having checked that he had everything he needed, Andi shook hands with him, wished him the best of luck, and left him there.

When he tried to call the Chanticleer about ten minutes later, there was no reply. They had already gone.

Jermane took stock of his new environment. It was open plan, but arranged in three sections. The area with the table near the food store and flash-oven he thought of as the kitchen. The area with the inflated banquette and holoscreen would be the lounge, and the bunks, lockers and shower would be the bedroom. There were only two bunks - presumably if four people really were living in here they’d have to take turns using them. Once he’d unpacked and decided which bunk he was going to use, he was pretty much settled in.

It was at that point that the silence began to creep in on him. Even on the Chanticleer, there had been the ever-present background hum of engines and technology. Here, there was nothing. He had to go right up to the life support unit and put his ear against it to hear it making any hum at all. He tried turning the shower on and off, and discovered that the only sound with that was the running water, too. No whooshing tanks, here.

Feeling a little unnerved, Jermane went over to the window, hoping to distract himself with the promised incredible view.

The window wasn’t glass, of course, but it was a genuine transparency in the dome, intended to combat claustrophobia. It made Jermane feel cold. The ground outside was dark grey, a bleak rocky landscape with a ridge about half a kilometre away which had a slight, odd shimmer in the light from the dome. The horizon was brightly lit – there’d be planet-rise in about an hour, the first mate had told him, with obvious expectation that Jermane would enjoy that. If he craned right round he could just see the corner of one of the cargo crates, landed next to the dome. That was reassuring, illogically, since he felt that if they came for the cargo crates they would have to find him, too.

Chances were he’d only be here for a few days, a week or two at most.

A week or two was beginning to look like a very long time. The possibility of being stranded here alone for three months was just terrifying. And what if nobody ever
did
come back to check? If this was a four-man five-month dome, presumably, he could last for twenty months here on his own, perhaps longer.

He had a vision of himself as a haggard, bearded, long-haired castaway, starving to death. Perhaps, in another two hundred years or so, another ship would come here and find him, mummified, sitting right there on the couch.

Realising that he was giving himself the horrors, Jermane gave himself a little shake, turned away resolutely from the window and turned the holoscreen on, just to have some noise and the illusion of company.

He didn’t turn the holoscreen off again for the whole time he was there, keeping it on even when he went to bed. Sometimes he even put music on at the same time, the holovision playing in the lounge while he had music playing in the kitchen. It felt quite homely, that, as if there might be a family around him.

There was, however, absolutely nothing homely about that dome. No pictures, no ornaments, it was even more impersonal than a budget hotel room.

And it was not long, just hours, before the Thing started, with the ice.

To begin with, he found it beautiful. Planet-rise was, indeed, spectacular, and as he stood there with a mug of coffee watching it he actually felt for a little while as if he could enjoy this. He felt suddenly bold, adventurous, seeing something that perhaps no human being had ever witnessed before. This system had been visited by a mining survey ship a couple of hundred years before, so it was already long since officially claimed as League territory. Their survey had been brief, however, and it was unlikely that any of them would have bothered to land on this unimportant moon. He might well, indeed, be the first human being ever to see this planet-rise.

The gas giant rose rapidly over the horizon and was very soon filling the sky, a glorious pale blue cloudy orb with a glitter of delicate rings. Even more beautiful was the transformation of the lunar landscape. As the planet-light flooded the scene, it revealed that that odd shimmer on the ridge was actually a thin crisp of ice crystals. They could not be water ice, of course, he knew that, but Andi had said there was a tenuous methane atmosphere which might crystallize out and thaw in the lunar day-night cycle. It could be quite pretty, she’d said, and she was right, it was. Jermane looked out over the sugar-frosted ridge, bathed in that cool blue light, and thought that it was very pretty indeed. And then, as the warmth of the planet light raised the temperature just sufficiently for the ice to thaw, it began to evaporate.

Jermane remembered from school science that when ice turned directly from solid to vapour it was said to ‘sublime’. Never had a word seemed more appropriate. It did not melt to liquid, but rose from the surface in delicate wisps that faded away as the planet-light increased. They didn’t curl or move as they would have on a planet with a denser atmosphere, just hung there like translucent ghosts, and vanished.

Jermane wished, later, that he hadn’t thought that about ghosts. The first time he saw them he thought they were exquisite – the whole thing, the subliming ice, the dark rocks, the gas giant filling the sky, filled him with a sense of awe.

He would, he discovered, enjoy that spectacle two or three times a day. The moon he was on rotated in six and three quarter hours. Planet-rise was a fraction later every time, with the ‘days’ growing a little shorter, but that was only a matter of minutes and did not seem important. Planet-set around four hours later was quite pretty, too, though nowhere near as glorious. As the last rays of planet-light faded from the surface, ice began to crystallise out again, shimmering across the ridge then fading back to darkness.

When he got up the next morning, it seemed to him that there was rather more ice on the ridge than there had been the previous day. He didn’t think much of it, till the next planet-rise revealed even more of a glitter than he was expecting.

Thinking perhaps that he was imagining it, he took a holo, put it from his mind and went to watch holovision. He had a thousand hour package on his personal comp with all his favourite films and series, and the Chanticleer had left him a movie-pack, too, so he had no shortage of choice. Setting a detective drama to run the entire series, he played a card game on his comp, too, trying to keep himself from thinking about where he was, and how terribly alone.

He couldn’t help it, though. The next day he found himself working out how big his dome was in relation to the moon that it was on. The dome footprint was about fifty four square metres. The moon, he calculated, had a surface area of around six and a half million square kilometres. It was the smallest of the three moons orbiting the planet. The planet itself was at least three hundred and forty two million square kilometres. Beyond that, the other thirteen planets and their moons took the ground area almost beyond human comprehension. And he was alone, in that, in what was effectively a four man tent.

He didn’t really start to get
frightened
, though, till the next planet-rise. This time he was able to compare what he saw with the holo he had taken earlier, and there was no doubt about it. There was more ice. It was forming lower on the ridge, bringing it closer to the dome. It had, he estimated, increased perhaps three metres, over the last day and a half.

It didn’t take much working out that if it continued to expand at that rate, given the distance between the dome and the ridge, the ice would reach the dome in about twenty five days.

Jermane told himself that that didn’t matter. It was only ice, and very
thin
ice at that, just a tiny scatter of crystals. And there was no way, he told himself, that Andi and the Chanticleer’s crew would have sited the dome here if the ice presented any kind of danger. They would have checked what would happen in seasonal cycles for the time that he would be here… wouldn’t they? He couldn’t remember them saying anything about it, but then, they’d been so casual about the whole thing, and he hadn’t thought to ask, himself. Who’d have thought there could be seasons on a moon, after all? But it was apparent that, with the days getting shorter, a kind of winter was setting in.

‘It does not matter at all,’ Jermane told himself, firmly, and out loud. ‘It’s just ice, it’s no big deal.’

Next day, though, the ice had crept closer. And this time when the planet-light warmed the surface, there was something eerie about the subliming wisps. It was as if they were moving closer to the dome, sneaking up on it during every period of darkness.

Jermane told himself not to be so stupid. He was getting spooked, that was all. It probably wasn’t a good idea to have a series full of horrific murders playing on the holovision. He changed it to a series of comic pirate flicks, and told himself that he felt better.

Within a week, though, he was very afraid. He was afraid that he was losing his mind, for one thing, with the fearful ideas that kept springing from an all-too fertile imagination.

The trouble was, he couldn’t dismiss all his fears as imagination. Jermane knew that humans had, as yet, explored less than one per cent of the worlds even within the Firewall. There were systems within days even of major inhabited worlds which no human had set foot in, yet. It was truly wild, out here, unimaginably vast and strange, just so much they didn’t know or couldn’t understand.

Spacers believed in ghosts, Jermane knew. Most spacers, anyway, even if they’d deny it. It was something that had always fascinated him. Spacers were, by definition, high tech, hard science people, techs and engineers. Yet they were notoriously superstitious, prone to belief in jinxes, hauntings, banshees and gremlins. There’d been a lot of talk on the Embassy III, lately, about the Fourth’s operations at Novamas, and the strange, beautiful ceremony that had honoured the Alari, a lost race long ago entombed beneath the ice of that world.

‘No, don’t think about ice,
stop
thinking about ice!’ Jermane told himself, severely. ‘You’re getting completely wound up and freaked out about this, it’s just
gas
, it freezes, it thaws, it freezes again, it’s just
gas
, it’s not doing anything on
purpose
.’

All the same he wished, with increasing desperation, that he could shut out the view of that encroaching ice. They ought, he thought angrily, to have thought of that when they designed this dome, and provided a blank-out function or at least some kind of blind. He even thought about trying to improvise one, perhaps by taping a sleeping bag over the window. But then, when he really thought about that, he realised that not being able to see the ice would not make things any better. On the contrary, he would feel as if it was creeping up on him unseen. He would have, he knew, to keep checking it, lifting the improvised blind to have a look. And besides, if he once gave way to his fears  like that, giving them solidity by acting on them, they would only get worse. He might well end up cowering in the shower, driven out of his mind by sheer terror.