Lyra’s tone was clinical, devoid of emotion.
<So, with IR scans showing no heat signatures, can we assume the settlement is empty?> Judith’s voice filtered over the Link. Something in her tone told Nerishka that the woman knew exactly what she should be expecting.
<No,> Lyra replied tonelessly. <I don’t believe it to be empty.>
<Yeah…I didn’t think so, either,> Judith replied, her voice now hollow and edged with a tremor. Nerishka recognized it—dread. <I just almost stepped on a dead cat. It’s rotting, been dead a few days.>
<Keep your eyes peeled people,> said Dresden.
<What for, Boss? Zombies?> Kelem asked and the group snickered at that, but from the underlying tension, the banter was intended to help keep everyone calmer.
It didn’t.
LEADS
STELLAR DATE: 10.14.8948 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Greshan Settlement
REGION: Xerxes, Ayra System (Independent)
The team split up into pairs and proceeded to inspect the first two buildings. Nerishka remained with Dresden who took the larger structure to their right.
<Looks like a foreman’s property. Much larger than the rest.>
<Could just mean this person has a large family,> suggested Nerishka.
Dresden reached the door and palmed the lock, surprising both of them when it slid open. <Contradiction in security here. Sensors at the perimeter but they leave their doors open to anyone,> Nerishka commented over the team’s comms.
<Same here,> reported Kelem.
Dresden stepped inside first, pistol held high, tracking back and forth across the room. Then he relaxed and straightened, but only slightly. <Empty. Let’s check the rest.>
Nerishka nodded and headed down the corridor that ran the length of the boxlike building. The home—because that’s what the structure appeared to be—was made of rectangular portable modules that could be placed together to create whatever layout was required, convenient for adding more space as time went.
They’d stepped into a room decorated with a family in mind. Five low plush-cushioned wooden sofas occupied the right of the room, draped with rugs and littered with toys and puzzles. A few mismatched shoes were scattered on the colorful tapestry rug on the floor within the formation. Two slices of tree-trunks masqueraded as coffee tables, half a meter high and coated with a honey-colored glaze.
To their left sat an irregular shaped dining room table, continuing the theme of honey colored wood, its chairs covered in colorful, overstuffed seats. Beyond the dining area sat a good-sized kitchen, counters littered with open bottles and moldy pieces of bread.
As Nerishka drifted through the room, the common theme of mugs with their contents covered in mold, plates with uneaten food coated in a light green fur, flies buzzing around open jars along the kitchen counters. Someone had attempted a PB&J and had left the job half done. The sight brought a lump to Nerishka’s throat.
She walked stiffly through the living room, angling toward the left where a small hallway led to three rooms further down and an open doorway to her immediate right. She paused on the threshold of a small office.
Three maps covered the back wall, and shelving filled with boxes was to her left. The right wall contained a large window, throwing light onto the large desk in the middle of the floor. And upon the man who sat in the chair, facing Nerishka. <I have a body.>
<Me too,> came Dresden’s voice, along with those of Kelem and Judith on the team Link.
Dresden’s footsteps echoed behind her as he drew up at her shoulder. She didn’t turn to face him, just studied the dead man who sat so very still at his desk. He appeared to have been working on something and had fallen on his face, then died in that position. Nerishka pointed at the surface of the desk. <He was sick. Painkillers, bandages, bloody tissues. He didn’t make it.>
Lyra spoke up. <I estimate time of death to be fourteen days ago.>
Nerishka walked closer to the man and peered at the paperwork in front of him. They appeared to be maps of Greshan and the area surrounding the settlement—perhaps the entire farm property. He was lying on something—another map maybe?—and it was ripped away, leaving only the corner of whatever was taken.
<Someone was here after he died.> Nerishka pointed at the torn sheet. <He was lying on something that had been ripped away. Possibly something that could identify what happened here.>
<So, someone is trying to cover something up?> Dresden said, his forehead creasing in a frown.
<Or someone needed information and this man was slumped over on it.> Nerishka shrugged.
She leaned closer to the corpse, and studied his face, glad for the respirator. She didn’t want to contemplate the odor that would have filled this home. The man’s eyes were open, glazed over with blood that had dried days ago. His fist was clenched tightly and Nerishka frowned, leaning close to him.
<Be careful,> Dresden warned, glaring at her when she glanced back up at him.
<I am. I just need to see what he has in his hand.> Lifting a pen from the desk, she inserted it into his closed fist and pushed open the rotting fingers one at a time. A small shard of metal lay on his palm and Nerishka picked it up. But before she got a chance to study it, Kelem’s voice came on the team Link. <You better get over here. You’re not going to believe this.>
Nerishka hurried out into the glaring sunlight and followed Dresden down the wide street. The other two had gathered at the far end of a small alley that ran between two buildings to a clearing beyond.
She’d just reached them when Dresden said, <This whole thing keeps getting more and more confusing.>
Nerishka skirted the huddle and stopped in her tracks, staring at a twenty-meter crater. <It’s an impact site. Larger than the hole back in the forest.>
<But where’s the thing that landed?> asked Judith, staring around them.
<Depending on mass and velocity, it could have been obliterated on impact,> Lyra replied to the team.
Nerishka circled the depression and studied the area around it. <There are a lot of boot marks all around the crater.>
<Scanning,> Lyra confirmed, plotting the various footprints on Nerishka’s HUD, overlaying it on a map of the immediate area, including the crater.
<Looks like the work of a cleanup crew,> Dresden said with a low grunt.
<They go down into the crater. It appears whatever landed here was removed by the owners of these footprints,> said Lyra. <No radiation source here anymore, though. They cleaned this one up properly.>
Nerishka frowned. <You know what this means? Something fell that someone wanted to get back, and they didn’t care about the people that died as a result.>
<Ok. Spread out and let’s see where these guys went,> said Nerishka.
Lyra expanded the map to include the entire settlement, overlaying the multiple footprints as they tracked through the streets. <These footprints belong to thirty-eight different people—which matches up to the estimated team complement that was sent in a few weeks ago.>
<They searched the entire site but didn’t touch the bodies,> said Dresden.
Nerishka nodded slowly. <Or maybe they came immediately after the crash and took the material away, and the people in Greshan died after that.>
<That fits the evidence,> Lyra said. <Otherwise, why leave a second mess behind>
<Have we seen a second cleanup team come in at all?> Nerishka asked Lyra, a suspicion forming in her mind.
<No. Nothing that I can see on the local networks.>
Nerishka nodded, one eye on the team as they worked their way through the settlement. They appeared tense, wary, as though expecting something to jump them at any second. Lyra sent her a comforting rush of emotion.
<You guys OK?> Nerishka called out to them.
<Yeah.> Kelem grunted. <Well,
no? This is insane. What’s so important that you grab it, and don’t come back for the people.>
Judith glanced over at Nerishka. <What have you not been telling us, Nerishka? I get that you can’t share top secret details but this, whatever happened here, is huge. People can’t just die like this without anyone even knowing about it.>
<That’s exactly what happened here. And that’s why I’m here. I need to find those responsible for this, and what they were doing that could have caused it.>
Dresden spoke up, <We should head out. Whatever fell here is long gone. We don’t need to continue exposing ourselves.> He glanced at Nerishka who nodded.
<Yeah, and we should do that on the double. We have incoming,> yelled Lyra over the team Link. <A ship has just lifted off from Arraphka, making a bee-line for this place.>
The group scattered, racing for the tree-line as fast as possible. <How long do we have, Lyra?> asked Dresden.
<Ten minutes, tops.>
<Let’s get moving, people,> Nerishka said as the team raced through the streets and across the fields toward the jungle.
Once they reached the dying forest, Lyra spoke up. <They’re still moving straight for the town, we should circle around to avoid their flight path.>
The team veered to the south, following a route Lyra highlighted. At the ten-minute mark, a flash of light grew behind them, followed by a rolling thunder and a hot wind that whipped through the trees, knocking some of the sicker ones over.
<Holy shit!> Kelem cried out. <Did someone just nuke that village?>
No one responded for a minute, then Lyra spoke up. <Yes, low-yield, tactical. Greshan is gone.>
<They leave the place to sit for two weeks, and then blow it to atoms half an hour after we arrive? You do the math.>
<Motherfuckers,> Kelem muttered. <Are we made?>
<We used a cover to rent the truck,> Dresden said, nodding slowly as the team formed up in a loose circle the, a-grav unit pulling up behind them a moment later. <We have to assume it’s blown. We can’t go back to the vehicle we used to get here.>
<Damn,> Judith muttered. <It’s a long walk back to Arraphka.>
<Seriously, Judith,> Dresden cocked his head, a scowl visible through his faceplate. <Do you think I only had one way out of here? I had another all-terrain vehicle dropped off twenty klicks south-east of here. We’ll be back on the space elevator in a day tops.>
Kelem barked a laugh and clasped Dresden’s shoulder. <I shoulda known you’d have a contingency.>
<We should get on the move,> Lyra advised. <Ayran Space Force has just dispatched two ships to investigate the site.>
<I bet they have,> Nerishka replied. <I’m pretty interested in what they find out.>
Three hours later, the team paused in a ravine to strip out of their hazsuits and hide them under a pile of rocks. Nerishka took care to place the sliver of metal she’d secured into a sealed, lead-lined container before pulling her suit off.
The a-grav unit was running out of power, and they dismantled it and shoved it into a small cave, shouldering the equipment it had carried.
<Had to ditch the thing anyway,> Dresden said as they set out once more. <Was way too hot to take back.>
<You say that, but you’ve the smallest pack,> Judith commented as they climbed out of the ravine, a laugh on her lips.
<You seem in good spirits,> Nerishka said to the woman who only shrugged in response.
<Just another day on the job.>
* * * * *
Four hours later they were finally back in a vehicle, taking a long route around to the south-west, where they’d enter the city from the other direction.
The official line was that eco-terrorists who supported the jungle’s re-growth had destroyed Greshan. It was a bit extreme, but from the network feeds, the public seemed to be buying it. There was a history of ecological conflict on the planet.
Still…ecological terrorists dropping a nuke is pretty farfetched, Nerishka thought. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
<You know what this means,> Dresden said privately to Nerishka.
<It means a lot of things. What are you focused on?>
<How high it goes. For a nuke to hit, and a cover story to be fully fleshed out in hours? Someone high up has an interest in this staying hush hush.>
Nerishka looked into Dresden’s serious eyes and nodded in response. <Yeah, maybe I made the right call following the breadcrumbs to Xerxes. Seems my mark on Anahita was working for heavy hitters. Heavy hitters who just wiped out all the evidence.>
<We’ll figure something out,> Dresden said after a few moments of silence. <If nothing else, we start digging into who dropped the nuke. That sort of thing takes some work to pull off.>
Nerishka couldn’t help gritting her teeth at the thought of how coldly calculating their adversary must be. <I hope they were sloppy. I want to find these assholes and take them out.>
<Me too.>
* * * * *
They were still within the jungle when Nerishka realized she hadn’t thanked Lyra for her work in the field.
<You’re amazing, Lyra,> Nerishka said. <We’d all be dead without you.>
<Thanks,> the AI responded with a blush and managed to sound awkward. <I’m just doing what I think is best.>
<Let’s agree to call that AI gut instinct…if AI had guts.> Nerishka smirked and Lyra responded with a grin.
<Right now, my gut says you should get some sleep. You’ve been awake for nearly fifty hours.>
Nerishka realized the AI was right. She hadn’t slept since waking up on the Belshazzar the day it had docked at Nimrud Station.
She took Lyra’s advice, and didn’t wake until they pulled into a different bay on the far side of Arraphka Tower from where they’d departed.
“Have a good sleep, princess?” Judith asked with a laugh as the vehicle rolled to a stop.
“Queen, not princess,” Nerishka winked at Judith as she slid out of the vehicle, glad to be standing on ground that wasn’t moving.
A stack of cargo containers rested at the back of the bay, and the team stored their equipment inside, signaling cargo drones to take it back up to Nimrud and begin its transfer through a variety of shipping companies before delivering them to the safe house.
Everyone was either tired or waking up as they rode the elevator back up to the station in silence. Nerishka nearly fell asleep twice and ended up using her nano to stim her into full wakefulness.
As the car was slotting into the station’s transfer hub, Dresden signaled Judith and Kelem. “We’ll meet you back there. Nerishka and I have to have a chat.”
Judith’s eyes slid to Nerishka and she gave a slight nod, while Kelem grunted. “Works for me.”
Nerishka watched them depart first, angling toward the maglev platform before she glanced over at Dresden and saw the look in his eye.
Great. Time to talk.
GATES
STELLAR DATE: 10.15.8948 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Nimrud Station
REGION: Xerxes, Ayra System (Independent)
“So, where are we going?” she asked, wondering what he was thinking, if he was pissed or worried. His expressions for those two feelings were often hard to tell apart.
Instead, he only shrugged. “We’ve got a shitload of samples from the site, but still no real answers. We need a lab and I know a guy.”
<I do not believe we need a lab,> said Lyra, sounding hesitant as she barged into the conversation.
“You got something?” Nerishka asked.
<You were all busy running from impending doom, but I noticed that the settlement had a surface to air cannon.>
<What?> Dresden asked. <What for?>
<I’m sure you’ve noticed that they’re heavily mining the asteroids in Ayra’s inner asteroid belt,> Lyra began, <And we’ve just passed Xerxes aphelion, which has it within fifteen light-s
econds of the belt’s inner edge.>
<Ahhh,> Nerishka nodded. <They get debris from the mines. But enough that they need a cannon in a settlement as small as Greshan to protect it?>
Dresden chuckled, shaking his head as he stopped at the edge of the concourse they were walking through, peering out at the world of Xerxes below them. <It’s a scam. I’ve seen ones like it before. Someone gets a scare going about falling crap, gets some legislation passed that requires people to have insurance for it, then some weapons manufacturer gets wise to it and works out a deal where insurance companies charge less if folks buy surface to-air-cannons for protection.>
<Wow,> Nerishka shook her head. <That’s quite the racket.>
<Yeah, you know how it is. But we saw that impact crater, if they had a STA cannon, how come they still got hit?>
In their minds, Lyra’s avatar straightened, a smug smile on her lips. <They got hit by multiple meteors, and I finally know what it was.>
<Stars, Lyra,> Nerishka groaned. <Stop being such a tease, spit it out.>
<OK, fine. So, we caught traces of Gold-198 and Iridium 192. Two very different radioactive isotopes that decay at wildly different rates. The gold is nearly undetectable after twenty days, but the iridium would stick around for a lot longer. Even a gram of iridium—as we saw from that first meteor strike—is fatal within just a dozen meters. But we know that the cleanup crew didn’t cover the whole dead zone down there, they just visited the main impact site and left.
<If Ir-192 had fallen across the whole dead zone it would have been a very different story—that whole place would have practically glowed. However, if their insurance-scam-mandated STA cannon hit a piece of falling debris that contained gold 198…well that could very well cause an airburst effect over the dead zone.>
<Shit,> Nerishka whispered. <Are you telling me that Greshan’s protective air cannon effectively killed them all?>
<I believe so,> Lyra replied. <It’s possible that there was iridium in the main impact site in the settlement, but that would have only killed people who got close. Not everyone would have died, in fact most of the populace would never have had any ill effects if it was dealt with properly.>