Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle (29 page)

“I’m not sure why you need us,” Eric said. “Sounds like a job for Liz’s engineers not vipers.”

Burgton smiled. “You know me, I never expect trouble but I’m always prepared for it. Operation Oracle is Liz’s baby, but you two are to take care of her and any security related issues. If I knew what they were I would tell you. Chances are, on a dead world like this, all you’ll have to do is keep her engineers from wandering off without their environment suits on.”

Eric laughed and Gina grinned.

Liz scowled at the mockery, but it didn’t last. “My people are ready to board, George. All our equipment is aboard. When can we go?”

Burgton looked at Eric. “Tomorrow?”

Eric glanced at the holotank and nodded. “We’ll upload all this to study on the way. Tomorrow is good. What ship?”

“
Hobbs
, one of our freighters. Kushiel is classified as a war memorial and gravesite. Going down world is prohibited because of that.” Burgton grimaced. “The system is rarely visited, but if a ship did pass through for some reason, a freighter will raise fewer suspicions than a destroyer.”

Eric nodded. “We can go down in one of her cargo shuttles.”

Gina listened as they hashed out a few more details and watched Liz at the holotank controls. She had found the cityscapes again. Gina wondered if the buildings in the pictures were still standing.

“I guess we’ll find out,” she said and joined Liz at the controls.

* * *

Aboard Hobbs, in orbit of Kushiel

A snowball, Gina remembered thinking back at base. Kushiel did indeed resemble one. The terrible bombardment that had tortured the planet more than two hundred years in the past had triggered an ice age beyond anything Gina had ever heard tell of. The kinetic and nuclear strikes had thrown so much debris into the air that it had shrouded the planet with cloud, some radioactive, that had lasted years. Sunlight reaching the surface had been badly reduced, lowering mean temperatures and starting the long decline into permanent winter.

Hobbs
was an unarmed freighter, but its sensors were decent and they’d been scanning the surface since the ship settled into Kushiel’s orbit yesterday. They already knew a lot about local conditions, cold and inhospitable, and that most of the surface was covered in ice, making the situation worse. The icecaps covered much of the surface with glaciers marching across once fecund land. They reflected the sunlight, not allowing it to be absorbed, and the vicious circle was therefore complete. Like some kind of runaway engine, ice perpetually generated more ice. Only at the equator was there any land not covered year round, and it was of no interest to them. It had never been settled.

The atmosphere was laced with nasty stuff too. Sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide levels were dangerously high even now. The Merkiaari had done a real number on it, and not by accident. The result even had a proper scientific name—impact winter—and was akin to something scientists had long known would happen after a prolonged nuclear exchange in atmosphere—nuclear winter. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two, except in the means used to create them, and in their duration. A decade after the event, Kushiel’s atmosphere really should have begun to repair itself. The textbooks all agreed upon that, but the Merkiaari had wanted to make a statement. Their version of impact winter was of long duration because they had kept hitting the planet until they succeeded in stripping the atmosphere of its ozone layer. Other weather effects played a part too. Kushiel’s precipitation levels were way down, not really surprising when you realised that most of the planet’s water was locked up in the ice sheets.

The planet would never recover, or if it did it would take so many years they would need to be measured on a geological timescale.

The atmosphere would be lethal to anyone exposed to it even for a short time. Gina knew that she could breathe it if she had to—though she was sure to be unhappy about it—as long as her IMS had the resources to continually repair the damage to seared lungs. Eric and she had packed a lot of viper supplements just in case. Liz and her team would be required to breathe canned air 24/7, absolutely no exceptions. Not that it would be a real problem, seeing as the sub-zero temperatures would require them to wear full environment suits while outside anyway. The suits were climate controlled and contained their own PLSS (Portable Life Support Systems) that should keep everyone breathing good air rather than the poisonous crap that Kushiel now used for its excuse for an atmosphere. During downtimes, everyone could get out of their suits either in a shuttle or in the pressure domes they planned to erect as a base camp when they had a good candidate for the memory module’s location.

It was that location they were searching for. Captain Gibson would be adjusting
Hobbs’
orbit many times over the following days until he could deliver a full and comprehensive survey of the surface. Until then, Liz’s team was twiddling their thumbs checking and rechecking their equipment, while Gina and Eric haunted the bridge, annoying Gibson’s crew by looking over their shoulders—figuratively speaking of course.

Gina was paging through the data available at one of the observer stations. She didn’t literally need to look over anyone’s shoulder to sate her growing curiosity. The data from the ship’s sensors was available in raw form instantly to anyone wanting it, but letting the ship’s computer crunch the numbers for a few minutes rendered a more useful result. The images of snowy wastelands were by far the most numerous. Interesting only for background really, but she didn’t filter them out for fear of missing something. She let her eyes skim each frame, knowing her own internal database was soaking up the data for rapid recall later.

When the ship passed over the locations where towns and cities had once been located, and there were many of them old as the colony had been, she stopped to study each one in greater detail. Sometimes there was little to learn. Lot of craters down there, she mused, blunted now by age and softened by the ice and snow. Other times, ruins reared up out of ice fields, stark and lonely. Rarely were intact but abandoned towns revealed, undamaged by war but fallen to ruin by time’s gentle caress. When they did appear on the scans, images of streets buried in ice, with drifted snow banked against the buildings and blowing into them through third floor windows were common.

Kushiel had been a core world with a large prosperous population; its loss had been a horrifying shock back during the Merki War. The fact of the matter was that no matter how much everyone preferred to think otherwise, the Merki were not confined to nibbling around the edges of Alliance space, or invading border worlds. There were no rules or universal laws of physics preventing them from sending incursions directly against core worlds, even against the big six... even Earth itself! The only reason they didn’t try was the size and strength of the defences mustered nearby. Six huge fleets and countless task forces and system pickets protected the Alliance with more added every year, but back then the Alliance had yet to be conceived. Every system was on its own, unless it happened to be part of a political unit already such as the Kalmar Union.

Kushiel had been vulnerable because of its location within the Human sphere of controlled space—it was a core world due to being colonised early in terms of Human expansion, but it was located in what could only be termed a cul-de-sac of barren suns. Because of that unfortunate happenstance, Kushiel was more like a border world in terms of its defensibility. Its own little fleet of ships, like most back then, had been mustered against commerce raiders—pirates—not alien invaders. The lack of habitable worlds nearby meant Kushiel could not call upon allied ships for help and expect them to arrive in time.

Anyway, that was history, but it did affect what Gina and Eric needed to do in one way. Kushiel was an old colony world and that meant its population had bloomed and grown into the many hundreds of millions in terms of numbers. The people had spread out all over their world, building homes and communities. Kushiel had cities with populations in the millions when it died. That meant Gina had a good many targets to consider for their first explorations, big targets. And they would be explorations, not salvage operations at first. Eric had proposed, and Gina agreed, that they explore the various sites alone before ferrying Liz’s engineers and equipment to the surface. It only made sense. What if they landed everything only to find out that what they were looking for was on the other side of the planet?

Liz had protested bitterly, even trying to pull rank. She said this was her operation and that the General had sent Eric and Gina as security, not to run it for her. She wasn’t under their authority, and neither was her team. Eric reposted by saying she damn well was under his authority, and that as the project’s security officer he would decide when something was safe. If he decided it wasn’t safe, she would stay aboard ship in the brig if that’s what it took to make her stay put. The salvage part of Operation Oracle was hers, everything else was his.

Liz had appealed to the captain as the ultimate authority, but Gibson had failed to intervene on her behalf by explaining that his ship was part of Snakeholme’s merchant marine. Despite its unarmed status—not strictly true as even freighters were allowed limited defensive armourment within the Alliance—
Hobbs
and its crew like all such crews, held a reserve commission in Snakeholme’s Defence Force, and the SDF was commanded by General Burgton. In other words, he would do what Eric said.

Gina found it all very amusing.

What she didn’t find amusing was her growing realisation that finding what they sought was like looking for the proverbial needle in a world full of haystacks. She had a plan of course. She was filtering out buildings with an obvious use not connected with their quarry. Buildings such a residential blocks, shopping malls, vehicle parking structures, and many others in an attempt to narrow the places they needed to search. Even so, the task was a daunting one. She had to do the same with every city and town they discovered, and of course, they didn’t really know if the one they needed had even survived the bombardment.

“How’s it going?” Eric said wandering over from where he had been watching things. “Anything stand out?”

“More than Haverington you mean?” Gina said.

Eric nodded.

Haverington was the name given to Kushiel’s capital city and centre of government. Surprisingly, it had survived the Merki bombing, probably because it had been taken in the opening battles of the Kushiel incursion. Liz considered it a good bet for the A.Is location based upon the idea that the city was important, but Gina wasn’t so sure. There were other places. University towns seemed just as reasonable to her, but Liz was quite insistent that the capital be the priority. Gina was happy to comply if it made Liz happy. And besides, she might be right.

“Yeah,” Gina said. “I’ve got plenty to check out. Too many. This could take a lot of time. The thing could be anywhere.”

“Not anywhere,” Eric disagreed. “They were people like us, not aliens. We just need to think like they did. Where would we put it?”

“Under a bloody mountain.”

Eric scowled. “I’m serious.”

“So am I. The Oracle facility back home makes perfect sense to me.”

Eric rubbed his forehead and seemed to be counting to himself. “Let me try again. We need to think like Human colonists not vipers. Now. Where would you put it?”

Gina frowned at the consol she had been using. She still thought her earlier thought had merit. University towns? But seriously, with modern comm tech the A.I could be anywhere on the planet and still be accessible, and if Liz was right the memory module would be close by. Archives and stuff seemed another good bet. Infonet servers and nodes... all that good stuff.

She explained her thoughts to Eric.

“Good. Find them.”

Gina grinned. “Yes, sir captain... how?”

Eric wasn’t smiling, he was serious. “Find me an intact library.”

Cargo Bay 5, Aboard Hobbs, Kushiel System

Gina gunned the engine and drove the APC (Armoured Personnel Carrier) up the ramp and into the shuttle’s cargo space. There was plenty of room.
Hobbs’
shuttles were big suckers, as was the freighter they served.
Hobbs
was a super heavyweight among freighters, nominally in the same class as super dreadnaughts and fleet carriers because they all weighed in the millions of tons. Displacement wasn’t everything of course.
Hobbs
, being a freighter, was basically a series of hollow boxes within a pressure hull containing drives, power plants, fuel bunkerage, and crew spaces. That made for a huge ship. The only things built bigger by man were the stations, and one or two of the biggest shipyards where
Hobbs
and ships like her were constructed.

Gina climbed down from the cab and made a quick inspection, but the automatic clamps had engaged properly to secure the wheels. There were six on each side, equipped especially for this trip with tyres rated to handle the sub zero temperatures of Kushiel. She hoped the thick chevron shaped blocks of tread could handle the conditions or she would be walking. She understood why the regiment didn’t use ground effect vehicles, the marines also used wheeled and tracked vehicles exclusively, but this was one mission where anti-grav would have come into its own.