Crescent (17 page)

“He’s going to want more money, that one,” Cortez said and sighed. He gestured over to Vegan with a cock of his head. Vegan noticed and waved one gnarled hand.

“Probably.
This is his hangar, after all, Donovan,” Gerald said and smirked. He looked over to Ina for a moment, watching her shove a large duffle bag into Bean’s belly hatch. Donovan was just about to speak, but Gerald didn’t give him a chance. “Just be happy Vegan is greedier than he is loyal.
By the way, this Core Sec auditor…
 
He discovered the deleted departure record. Doesn’t sound like he figured out where we parked your little lifeboat, but you might want to be a little more careful with this run. That is, if you don’t want Core Sec or Kendall knowing about your…
 
intellectual
pursuits.”

With that, Gerald patted Cortez on the thick arm and then climbed up the docking ladder.

When Gerald poked his head through the bridge hatch he found Ina already seated in the control couch, the black harness crossed over her chest. Her smile turned into a pout as Gerald climbed the rest of the way onto the bridge.

“Hurry up,” Ina said. “I don’t know how much longer I can wait.”

He wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not. She seemed not to be.

“Just be happy we’re going at all. I had my doubts and I was ready to say no,” Gerald said. He still couldn’t believe he was going through with the trip after the trauma of the lifeboat job.

“Well, don’t you
worry.
This is for the best and you know it,” she said.

This struck Gerald as a strange response.

“It means the world to my dad,” she explained, “and so it means the world to me. Since he retired, my dad has been so lost. You see, he threw himself into being a surgeon after mom died. And when he hung up the smock, he didn’t have his work to focus on anymore…
 
he
started to fade away. When I introduced him to archaeology…
 
or rather forced him into pursuing it as a hobby, well, it…
 
it
really got him going again. Look at him now. It’s his life. So, you do you see how helping us means the world to me?”

That’s not what she was getting and you know it, Gerry.
His subconscious had adopted Marisa’s voice, and her voice sounded pissed off.
That skinny little bitch isn’t telling you something. And it has to do with what’s going on here on Crescent. She knows something, Gerry. Better be careful.
An added level of caution was not a bad idea. He seated himself in the control couch and crossed the harness over his own chest. It locked into place with a click.

“We’ll be on the surface in just under two hours,” Gerald told her. “Prior to entry we’re going to have to put life suits on, in case we lose pressure or anything else goes wacky. Okay?” Gerald was none-too-thrilled at the prospect of donning the too-small life suit again.

“Sure,” Ina replied with a serious nod. “You can never be too careful.”

She knows something.

Gerald could see Walter Vegan approaching Cortez via one of Bean’s external camera feeds. Gerald felt bad for Ina’s father. Vegan was not only a slimy fuck, he smelled like asshole, too.

“Bean.
Do you have the updated coordinates for the
Anrar
site synchronized with current surface scans of the planet?”

“Of course, Captain.
A foolish question.”

“Well then. Let’s go. Time isn’t on our side here.”

Bean lifted from the deck. The hangar’s auto-guidance system carried the ship toward the large, shimmering docking porthole. The ion field that stretched across the big opening kept the station’s atmosphere and the vacuum of open space politely sequestered to their respective sides. The barrier shifted like heat rising off hot asphalt. Ina put a hand on Gerald’s knee and blinked up at him. He patted her hand and called up several control overlays. He felt ill at ease. Touching her cool flesh only seemed to amplify that feeling. When they were free of the hangar, Bean banked and then rolled until the ship was inverted. They flew back over the docking hub and toward
Anrar
III. A few ships came and went as they sailed by, but overall, the traffic pattern was quiet.

Time stretched endlessly between beats of awkward conversation. Gerald was thankful when Bean finally spoke up.

“Captain.
The entry window will be reached in T-Minus fifteen minutes,” Bean said.

“Thanks, Bean.” Gerald looked to Ina.
“Time to put on your life suit.
I bought an extra. It’s stowed underneath the control couch.” He unhooked the cross harness and got to his feet. “You can put it on over your clothes,” he added. The last thing that he needed was Ina getting frisky as Bean throttled toward the hard surface of the planet. She’d be able to fit into the suit with her jeans and tee shirt still firmly in place. Gerald, on the other hand, had to lose most of his clothing to don his suit. He left Ina on the bridge to dress in the privacy of the small sleep quarters.

Gerald and Ina were suited up and restrained in the control couch just as Bean began to tremble from the first molecules of thin atmosphere bouncing off the hull. Ina’s smile broadened as the sympathetic vibrations began to increase. She gripped Gerald’s knee again, this time harder. The hull began to glow a feral red as friction worked its magic.

“
Bean’ll
shake more than a normal
lander
,” Gerald shouted over the racket. “Haulers aren’t the sleekest of vessels—not really meant to go planet-side. Capable, but still won’t give you the smoothest ride.”

“This is wonderful!” Ina cheered in return. “I love it!”

“I do not love this, Captain. Were I capable of feeling pain, I’d have aborted five minutes ago. Structure is in the yellow. Thermal monitoring is in the yellow.
Still below tolerance thresholds, however.
Eighty percent of our systems remain in the green. Regardless, I’m not enjoying this.”

“Let me know if we explode,” Gerald said.

The shaking subsided to a low vibration, and then all seemed still as Bean began to glide. Tangled wisps of cloud dashed the viewports with condensation. Ahead of them, the sun crested the craggy ridge of a distant mountain chain. Beads of moisture on the fore viewport captured the light and threw it back out as the colors of a rainbow.

“Captain,” Bean said, “I’m detecting man-made structures close to our destination coordinates.”

“Mining facilities,” Ina said.
“A geological outpost.
A refinery.
Crescent’s initial materials were mined right out of this planet. The yield was low, though, and there were a lot of accidents. Quite a few people died down here in the early days. The mines were quickly abandoned in favor of asteroid mining. The asteroid mining actually turned out to be the cheaper route in the end. Can you believe that?”

“You know more about
Anrar
III than you let on, Ina,” Gerald said.

“Obviously, the precursor to any successful archaeological expedition is research.”

“Captain.
I am altering our vector now.” The ship banked hard. Gerald’s belly dropped to his feet. There was a big difference between space and atmospheric flight. His stomach had never quite gotten used to the latter. He glanced over at his adopted copilot. She still seemed thrilled; pleasure glowed rosy on her cheeks.

“There are probably some really nice finds here,” Ina said. “I wish Dad were here.”

Would he be squeezing the life out of my other knee?
Gerald thought, and detached her hand from his leg. He then proceeded to call up an overlay that showed the topography of the area below them in a shimmering relief. The cluster of sites pulsed crimson. According to the overlay, they were less than 15 kilometers away from their destination. Gerald dipped his thumb into the hologram. Ripples of light trembled outward, and he chose a landing spot where terrain looked reasonably level. When he removed his thumb, a yellow circle glowed in its place.

“Set us down there, Bean.
Looks like as good a place to land as any.”

Hydraulics whined as all-terrain landing struts extended from compartments on Bean’s round belly. There was a crunch when they touched down. The ship lurched forward, jerking Gerald and Ina hard in their chest harnesses, and then all was still.

“We good, Bean?” Gerald inquired.

“We’re good, Captain.”

“Time?
Weather?”

“There are eight hours until sunset in this region. Doppler radar indicates a sizable storm front one hundred kilometers south of our location, traveling north by northeast at thirty kilometers per hour.”

“Hope you brought our umbrella, Ina,” Gerald said.

“Well, no,” she said and laughed. “But, I’d like to stay as long as we can.” She unbuckled her harness. “It’s been a long time since I stepped foot on a planet.”

“Well, this won’t be any kind bargain. It’s cold, the air is thin, and gravity is three percent greater than Crescent’s artificial gravity. We’re going to be dead tired long before that rain gets here.”

She got to her feet, her eyes bright.

“We shall see about that…
 
Captain.”

(•••)

The air was thin, but bearable. Gerald had once gone mountain climbing on the planet Caen. Just a mile and a half into the ascent, his lungs had burned with the effort of each step. That air had been thin. That atmosphere of
Anrar
III didn’t seem that lacking at the outset. He looked to Ina. She stood toward the aft of the hauling vessel, hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she gazed back at the mountain range they had passed over on their descent. It was barely visible on the horizon. Gerald glanced at his PDA. The LCD showed their position as blinking white dot. The first site was within short walking distance. They could be there in less than twenty minutes—if the terrain cooperated.

The wind lashed out at them as they moved out of Bean’s protection. Thick clouds were rolling in from the west, diffusing the light. The assaulting air was cold; small bits of dirt and grit bit at their exposed flesh. Gerald pulled up the hood on his excursion suit. Ina, her own hood pulled tight over her head, was already on the move ahead of him, eyes cast down to her PDA. He jogged to catch up to her, the effort sucking the breath right out of him. The extra gravity felt like weights around his ankles. He reached out and wrapped a gloved hand around her elbow.

“You’ll want to look at the ground just as much as you look at your PDA. You don’t want to trip and break your ankle. Not here,” he said.

She looked up at him and batted her long lashes.

“Gerald. Are you being chivalrous?”

“Don’t call it chivalry, sweetheart. I just don’t want to have to carry you back in this gravity. Don’t think I could do it,” he said.

“You
are
my hero!” she exclaimed, then spent the next several seconds catching her breath. When she spoke again, her tones were more serious. “I see what you mean. Sometimes, I’m a little over eager.” She paused and looked at him with a slow grin. “But you knew that.”

The display on Gerald’s PDA counted down the meters that remained until the pair reached first waypoint. When the digits reached zero, Gerald looked up. The dark rock plain was strewn with large and curled pieces of charred, weather-worn metal. The scraps had clearly been part of some unknown larger whole that had likely met its demise in a powerful explosion. Gerald nudged a piece of metal with his foot. It was heavy and didn’t budge. Upon closer inspection, it looked like a hull plate. He knelt beside it. If there had been any defining characteristics on the plate, they had been stripped away by hundreds of years’ worth of blowing grit. Beyond the debris, there were towering rock formations; the protrusions looked like weather-worn pillars. It looked like the things had grown there. The wind howled through the stone grove.

“What is this?” Gerald called ahead to Ina.

“I’m not sure.” She had her hands on one of the pillars. Her glove was removed and she was running her fingers across it. “It’s ice cold.” Ina quickly slipped her fingers back into the glove and then she disappeared into the rocks. Gerald crouched beside the hull plate and turned it over, expending more effort than was wise. He sat cross-legged, panting for air.
Everything is heavier down here,
he told himself;
don’t waste your energy. You don’t want her to carry you back to the ship, do you?

Gerald caught his breath and got back to his feet, moving into the stone grove after Ina. He came out the other side to see her standing dangerously close to the edge of a gaping maw in
Anrar
III’s
face—so close that the toes of her boots were over the edge. Gerald approached her with caution; he didn’t want to startle her and risk her falling in. He stepped alongside her and forced her back a step, then leaned over for his own look. The hole was large enough to accommodate Bean. The walls of the pit were smooth—smooth to the point of appearing polished. Pieces of metal sprung up around the opening’s perfect circumference in tatters. There had been a man-made structure over the hole. That much was clear.