“Prospecting in Beta Leonis”
The following is a piece of the yet-unnamed Book Three, just for those of you who have subscribed to this mailing list. I’ll try to give you first looks and pre-release content as I develop it. As I write it. Book Three is almost halfway done. It’s an exceptionally complex plot line, and I’m going along carefully to ensure I get it done correctly. One of the things I hate most is to leave loose ends, or have readers wondering “Wait, what happened to…”. It drives me nuts when I read a book like that, and I cannot stand doing it to my readers.
This excerpt takes place in Beta Leonis. I’m not going to give spoilers away, but now that the information about the star system has been made public, the underground of the VirtualNet has figured out enough about how to activate the Leap Point in Sol so that daring Resource Acquisition Vessel (RAV) crews that want a head start on prospecting in the system can do so. The UEH Navy is doing what it can to establish a blockade, but because of a number of issues (not going to say!) they lack the ships necessary. So some private crews sneak through. When they do, they go looking for good mining spots. What they find is more than they bargained for.
The Gambler
“I gotta tell ya, boss,” Shandia called over the radio, her smarmy tone mixed with atmospheric static. “You really take a girl to the nicest places. Twenty seconds to contact. RASA, confirm LZ is stable?”
“The landing zone is confirmed stable,” the ship’s artificial intelligence replied. “There is no thermal vent activity at the site.”
Captain Levi smirked as he fidgeted with the Beetle’s signal feed. This planet was causing all sorts of problems with radio signals. Between the heightened geothermal activity and the strange magnetic field, this mission was adding some new variables for his team to get used to. His ship, the Gambler, was a resource acquisition vessel, and RASA—the Resource Acquisition Service Assistant—came as a standard install with every mining vessel designed by Belevori Aerospace.
Levi and his three-member crew had been together for almost a decade. A typical RAV crew of four, everyone had more than one skillset to offer which allowed them to keep the crew small. RAV margins were razor thin, so it made sense to keep the team members as few as possible. Shandia was his pilot, but she also handled communications, navigation and was a pretty good backup engineer.
“Five, four, three, two, one, contact,” her voice said over the crackle. Levi felt the Gambler shake as her five extended pylons made contact with the rocky surface. The sound of hydraulics from the landing gear echoed outside as RASA angled the ship’s gear for best stability. Levi looked over to the other Beetle attached to the far side of the underbelly of the ship, opposite him. The six-wheeled Sub-orbital Reusable Vehicle, or SRV for short, was in ready-to-deploy status, just like his. And just like he was, Buck Jeffreys, the best damned deep-space mining roughneck he had ever known, was ready to deploy once the Gambler’s engine spooled down.
“Signal intermittent on RAD 1. Cutting in and out. RAD 2 is solid,” came the voice of Flea, his code splicer. Flea was probably in his thirties, though as Levi thought about it, he realized he really had no idea just how old the man actually was. Flea could pass as a teenager with his young face and diminutive stature, even with the pointy beard that reminded Levi of a billygoat.
Lights around the Gambler’s exterior angled outward from their standard down angle, landing position, flooding the area around them with illumination. Levi could hear—this moon had a light atmosphere—the engines whine down as Shandia cut the power. They had landed in a canyon on the dark side, an exo-planet fresh in the star charts as “Denebola 2B”. It was one of the moons of the large red gas giant on the other side of the Leap Point from Sol. The gas giant itself could be seen in the sky, a reddish brown orb of swirling colors resembling a watercolor painting. It took up about a tenth of the horizon.
The Gambler had been warned on two separate occasions to withdraw as it approached the Leap Point, once by the UEH Navy and once by Ceres Station Control. Levi had purchased information on the Virtual Net that the seller had promised could be used to activate the gate, and Levi had given Flea some of the emergency credit stash the crew had in order to get the parts necessary for a neutrino emitter. It had worked just as he hoped. Before the navy could interdict them, they had managed to make the transition and there was enough unofficial information available on the stellar chart for Beta Leonis that Levi had known to make for the moons of the gas giant immediately on transit.
The hallucinations they had all experienced, that was a bit more than they had bargained for. The data packet he had purchased warned that transitions played havoc with the mind, causing very real hallucinations. But they were a tough crew, and after a few minutes of disorientation, Levi had Shandi bolt for the safety of slip space. He heard that some of the more enterprising crews had come out here in search of the supposed pristine resources available in the system. After a short flyover of Denebola 2B, the two prospecting drones they had fired at the surface—RAD 1 and 2—had revealed the presence of several elements his crew should be able to turn for a quick profit. He knew there were other RAVs out here in Beta Leonis somewhere, as well as an unsanctioned science mission if rumors were true. Word in Sol was that the navy was about to lock the Leap Point down with a blockade, and so he had elected to move quickly.
Now, on the dark side of this volcanic hellhole of geysers and thermal vents exhaling sulfur into its nitrogen and ethylene atmosphere, they had landed the Gambler in a narrow canyon, roughly half a klick from the midpoint of the two drones. The obscure landing site would also make it difficult to spot the ship from orbit should Hegemony come looking, and the electromagnetic interference from the planet’s atmosphere would cloak their RAV’s signature on any but the deepest planetary scan.
A tall, circular vent was visible in the spotlights of the ship, ejecting its gasses into the foul atmosphere. The ground was extremely rocky, but the Beetles would have no problems navigating. He activated the holographic signal feed display on the dash control panel. He could see what Flea was talking about regarding signal intermittency. The first Remote Autonomous Drone they had dropped had definitely locked on to something and chosen this particular location to land, but it was difficult to determine what it found with this poor of a signal. Depending on how he adjusted it, the display would provide both a visual and audible indicator that could help define what elements were in the drone’s immediate vicinity. Something about the seismic waves and how they traveled through the ground at different speeds with different materials, he remembered. The drone would have fired its slugs into the ground if it landed correctly, and those slugs should be amplifying signal feedback. Unfortunately, sometimes the damned RADs could land in an inverted fashion and could not right themselves.
“You got a lock on RAD 2, Uncle Buck?” Levi said over the radio.
“Yep, solid,” Buck replied. “And I spy with my little eye…some molybdenum, and titanium. You seein’ that too, RASA?”
“Molybdenum and titanium presence confirmed from RAD 2 telemetry,” RASA replied over the radio.
“Well, we could definitely use the molybdenum,” Shandia said. “You’re good to detach when ready.”
“Thanks, darlin’,” Buck replied, and Levi could see the Beetle he was in begin to lower itself to the ground. When it was a meter or two above the surface, the four clamps holding it all detached at once and the SRV dropped, bounced and came to a halt. The clamps all retracted into the ship, and the SRV lit up with a bar of lights along its roof, shining out in all directions. It moved off in the direction of RAD 2. Levi triggered the release servos.
“Remember, we’re just retrieving drones and mapping the find,” Levi said over the radio. “Don’t fuck around out there.”
“Not my first time, boss,” Buck said.
Levi felt his Beetle detach, felt the slow drop in low gravity, and the bounce of the six tires. Then he too lit up the area and began to drive in the opposite direction, tracking RAD 1. He switched on the video feed, and the Beetle’s eight cameras came on and began relaying their images to Shandi’s workstation. Buck would have done the same.
“Got you both comin’ through relatively clean,” Shandi told them. “Flea is working to clear out some of the static.
“I’ll do what I can, but this rock is a fucking mess,” Flea added. Flea was a great techie, but the Gambler was designed for work in vacuum. Most of the resource acquisition activity they performed was in the asteroid belt in Sol. Other than the lack of breathable atmosphere, there was little to distort or interrupt signal traffic they used for communications with the equipment and each other. Sure, they had occasionally done some work on Ganymede or Europa, but most of the big companies had all the good spots on major mining prospects like moons. Crews like Levi’s had to pick from the leftovers, which usually meant working asteroids, or venturing as far out as Neptune to work some of its moons. But being that far out brought a whole lot of logistics challenges that were tough for RAVs with small crews.
“Careful, Bucky,” Shandi called, watching his video. “You drive over one of those vents and your Beetle is gonna fly away in this low g.”
“Again, not my first time,” he replied, some testiness creeping into his voice.
Levi drove his Beetle through a field of smaller stones, trying to work the SRV around a collapsed ledge of the canyon wall. The bumpy ride jostled him back and forth against his safety harness. The signal for RAD 1 hopped about on the dashboard, but he was navigating for what he perceived to be the center of the adjustment plot. As he began to get closer, the wave pattern started to resolve itself. Years of signal deciphering told him what song RAD 1 was singing.
“Some more molybdenum over here, looks like,” he called over the radio.
“Woohoo!” Shandi cheered. She was right, they really could use this find. Molybdenum was one of the rarer elements they could acquire, though they usually had to go through an intermediary to offload it because it was mostly found in less-than-minimum transfer quantities an official dealer would be interested in.
“Something else,” Levi frowned as he tried to get a reading on the feed. “I don’t know, maybe iridium. RASA?”
“Signal degradation prohibits a conclusive analysis, Captain Levi,” RASA said.
“I’d be good with that, too,” Shandi replied, and he could hear the smile in her voice.
There was a sudden flash of light, like one pulse from a strobe. It was everywhere at once, lighting up one side of the canyon with a purple glow. “What the hell was that?” Buck asked, his voice full of static now as the distance between them increased to the point where the atmosphere was too much for the receiver.
“Lightning,” Shandi replied, no evidence of alarm in her voice. “Atmospheric interaction with hydrocarbons. Ionized nitrogen just makes it purple. No big deal, just don’t get hit by it.”
“Hmph,” Buck grunted over the static. “Just lost the feed to RAD 2.”
“I lost it too,” Shandi concurred. “That’s weird.”
“Tracking in on its last known,” Buck said.
Levi rounded a side of the canyon and the ground opened up somewhat. The boulders that had been everywhere were more smaller stones now, and the Beetle crossed over them with ease. RAD 1 should be just ahead, likely on the other side of the small incline he was now heading up.
“Ah, shit,” Buck swore over the radio. “Canyon narrows here. Can’t get the Beetle through. Drone should be on the other side of the opening. I’ll check it out on foot.”
“Copy, Buck,” Shandi replied. “Your suit will be fine just so long as you don’t bump up against a thermal vent.”
“That could be what happened to the drone,” Flea commented. “If it landed near a thermal vent or lava spout, it could have gone offline from heat.”
“Copy,” he acknowledged. “Last known ping has it within twenty-five meters.”
“There you are, you little bastard,” Levi said as RAD- 1’s running lights announced its location. It also illustrated how it had flipped over on surface contact and was pointed down at an angle. “I’ve got RAD 1. She’s inverted.”
“Copy that, boss,” Shandi replied. “You heard my last to Buck? Goes the same to you. Careful of the vents after exiting the SRV.”
Her warning was valid. Some of these thermal vents were reading well above eight hundred degrees centigrade, and would melt his suit if he got too close. A short but wide vent of gasses was pushing up slowly from an area right beside the drone. He flipped off the lights on the Beetle for a moment to confirm that there was an orange glow coming from inside and found that there was. Some sort of magma down deep. He put the Beetle’s lights back on and positioned it so he could egress with minimal hazards.
“Son of a…” Buck’s voice complained. Before he left the SRV, Levi switched over to Buck’s camera feeds. The screens were smaller and would not have the same level of detail Shandi had back in the Gambler, but camera two and three showed Buck trying to pick his way carefully through a bunch of sharp looking rocks before having to squeeze himself between a narrow wall.
“Sucks for you, pal,” Levi said to himself, opting not to transmit. He closed his visor and heard it seal, and then flipped the cabin atmosphere setting to equalize with outside pressure. Another two successive flashes of purple lightning lit up the sky. As if the landscape of this planet was not eerie enough, the lightning gave it a creepy, hellish feel. He pulled the lever above him and the side door to the SRV opened upward and away, allowing him to spin the driver’s seat sideways, unlock his safety harness and climb down. His suit lights activated automatically as he exited, but there was plenty of light already coming from the Beetle. He walked carefully over, performing small hops in the low gravity until he got to the drone. Taking care to avoid the steam from the vent, he turned it right side up and then synched his suit’s wrist screen to the drone’s interface. Once it accepted the connection, he queried the slugs it had fired earlier.
One appeared to have fired up into the canyon wall. He swore. These things were supposed to know when they were upside down and not fire their survey slugs into the air. It had two others that had not fired, so that, at least, was something. He took a few steps back and ordered the drone to fire the remaining slugs.
Thump, thump. Two loud concussive sounds vibrated the ground beneath his feet. The drone was now interfacing with the signals from the slugs.
“What in the holy hell…” came Buck’s voice over the radio. “My drone is toast.”
“Did it…did it melt?” Shandi was asking. “I can’t see too well over your suit camera. It looks like it’s crushed or something.” Levi swore as he began to receive the data from his RAD. These damned things were expensive.
“This isn’t what crushed looks like,” Buck replied. “It’s almost like it’s…peeled or bent open. Like a fruit or something.”
“What?” Flea asked. Levi could almost imagine him peering over Shandi’s shoulder trying to get a decent view of the screen.
“Don’t think a hard landing could do this, or a thermal vent,” Buck continued. Levi gave his drone one final glance and walked back to the SRV. He hopped inside, triggered the closing of the hatch and vented the internal atmosphere, before repressurizing with O2. When the light over the cockpit pressure gauge turned green, he popped his visor and brought up the video feed from Buck’s suit.
“Yeah, something really wrecked it,” Flea was saying. Levi leaned into the display to the view from Buck’s suit. Lines of static broke up the black and white image, but he could clearly see RAD 2, and it was just as Buck had said. The small hull had been pulled back on one side to expose the electronics inside. Wires and circuitry had been pulled from the interior, as if someone had been searching for something in the drone’s shell.
“Buck, get the fuck out of there right now,” Levi said. He watched Buck turn and could see that he had pulled a pistol from his suit and was pointing it into the darkness. The view point shifted back and forth, as Buck surveyed his surroundings.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said. “There’s something out here. I can hear it moving around. Sounds like scraping. Like sand paper or, I don’t know.” Levi watched as Buck started to withdraw, keeping the light and the gun angled toward the area he was retreating from. He was walking backward.
A flash of the silent purple lightning illuminated the entire area, casting shadows from rocks and crevices, but providing just enough time for Buck’s camera to pick up something moving off to the far left. A dark form had crawled quickly behind one of the larger rocks. In the brief second, it had appeared low to the ground, moving on many limbs. Some sort of animal?
Buck saw it too. “Shit,” he breathed into his mic and gave up on the slow retreat. He turned toward the crevice he had originally passed through and pulled himself up to hop back through, back to the safety of the SRV. Through his suit feed, Levi could see the lights of the Beetle just beyond the opening.
Suddenly the camera feed lurched backwards and for a moment, Levi thought he saw the red orb of the gas giant in the sky before the camera flashed static and went out. It came back a second later, pixelated and fragmented as the software tried to interpret the poor signal it was receiving. Buck’s radio channel showed it open and transmitting, but the sounds that came through were gurgling, or choking.
“Buck!” Shandi screamed into the radio channel. “Buck, talk to me! Boss? What do we do?”
“I’m heading that way now,” Levi replied, with far more calm than he felt. He was a good kilometer away, but the Beetle was flying over the rocks—literally. He was applying a lot of upward thrust from the SRV’s jump jets to keep it aloft and leaping over piles of rocks in the low gravity. This was very risky driving, and he would have torn a new orifice on anyone from his team who he caught doing it, but whatever was happening to Buck was not something that could wait.
Buck’s camera feed was still shaking, a non-uniform cadence that had the view of the top of the canyon and the stars above vibrating. He did not seem to be moving, but his body was quivering. His mic was no longer transmitting.
“Buck!” Shandi was still shouting into the radio as Levi’s Beetle roared past the Gambler, tires touching the surface just enough to propel the SRV forward as the jump jets flared intermittently.
“I’m suiting up, Captain,” Flea said. “In the cargo bay now.”
“Negative,” Levi replied. “Stay put. I’ll be at his location in three.”
“But cap…”
“Damnit, Flea, you can’t do shit from where you’re at.” Levi sent the max thrust into the jump jets, allowing him to float the SRV over a field of thermal vents rather than navigate through them. One of the vents caught the right side of the Beetle, and Levi had a momentary vision of being blasted into orbit from the force, but the SRV passed through unmolested. He almost crashed into the canyon wall on the other side when he got a glimpse of something with…was that mandibles? Something had passed over Buck’s suit camera view and all he could think about was mandibles or pinchers. He flared the thrusters with a curse and the SRV slammed into the ground, wheels locking up and sliding to a halt. When he looked back at the transmission display, whatever had been there was gone. Static still washed over the screen, but the shaking had stopped.
“What the fuck was that?” Shandi called. Apparently, she had seen it as well. Buck’s SRV was just ahead, maybe twenty or so meters. The area was saturated with light from the Beetle’s multidirectional light bar, and the “v” shaped opening in the rock the roughneck had made his way through on foot stood out in contrast against the beige and brown of the canyon wall.
Levi cycled the SRV’s cockpit and flushed the oxygen back into storage tanks as he slammed his visor closed. He pulled the lever and popped the hatch and leapt out of the seat in the low gravity. He turned and reached under the back of the seat and pulled forth “Vikki” from a strap holding her down. The Mossberg 590 shotgun was something he used whenever he needed to settle disputes with competing prospectors who believed that they had put down a stake before he and his team had. Sometimes diplomacy required a heavier hand. He confirmed Vikki was loaded, flicked on the powerful tactical flashlight attached to the rail on top of her, and began to make his way to Buck’s SRV.
“RASA can’t pick up anything from the drone or from Buck’s suit, apart from the camera,” Flea called over the radio channel.
Levi grunted his response, hefting the shotgun to the ready as he walked around the abandoned Beetle. He could see where Buck had jumped out of the cockpit, the tracks in the dirt were clearly boot marks, and they led up to the opening in the canyon wall. He turned his own suit’s lights to flood, and walked deliberately toward the break.
“Careful, cap,” Shandi whispered, watching his suit’s video feed. Another flash of purple lightning, providing a brief glimpse of the large area on the other side of the canyon opening. He jumped up, and in the low gravity he landed on one of the rocks lodged between the two parts of the wall. As he did so, he crouched with the Mossberg pointing into the area beyond.
Buck’s landing point in the dirt was also obvious, and Levi could see he had walked off at an angle of roughly twenty or thirty degrees to the right. Levi’s suit lights could not penetrate the darkness beyond. He leapt down, again, landing in a crouch and panning about.
“RASA, how far am I from Buck’s camera signal?” Levi asked over the radio.
“Sixteen meters in this direction,” the AI replied, and an arrow popped up on his visor’s HUD.
He got up slowly and began to walk in that direction, panning back and forth as he did so in order to allow the suit illumination and tactical lighting on his weapon to cover as much area as was possible. He froze for a moment when he thought he saw movement behind a large boulder, but after a few seconds, he dismissed it.
He could see Buck now, lying on the ground face up in the dust. There was a massive tear across the chest, almost vertical but not quite. The lower half of the suit was gone, torn from the top and it was then that Levi realized that Buck was no longer in the suit. He was nowhere to be found. He knelt down to the helmet, noting as he did that his own image came through the video feed.
“He’s not here,” Levi whispered, as if speaking too loudly would draw attention from whatever was out here with him.
“What?” Shandi asked incredulously. “Where is he?”
“Don’t know,” was all he replied. There was a sound out there. At first he had thought it was the steam from a thermal vent—the hissing he had heard earlier when he was near the one by RAD - 1. RAD - 2 was a few meters away, completely ripped apart. He could see now why Buck discounted the damage being from impact. There was no way a crash would result in the kind of dismantling of the probe that was before him.
That was when the hissing sound stopped, and then started again. Not hissing, scraping, he thought. Like wood or maybe a sack being dragged across a gritty surface. Like sand paper, Buck said. It was coming from the direction of two large boulders, one tilted and leaning against the other. He had the shotgun at his shoulder pointed in that direction, but there was nothing to shoot at.
Just then the scraping stopped, and a low, almost digital noise like a guttural growl made by a robot or a cybernetic creature—certainly not a sound a living thing should be able to make—came from between the rocks. It vibrated slightly, the pitch modulating through several low levels before cutting off. To his extreme left, a similar digitally altered techno-organic combination replied, though the cadence and pitch was different. He quickly turned and leveled the shotgun in that direction, but there was only darkness and the far canyon wall.
“Get out of there, captain,” Shandi whispered over the radio. Her voice broke up with the last word, but he got the message all the same.
“Can’t,” he replied. “Gotta find Buck. He might still be alive.”
“Not without his suit, he ain't," she disagreed. She had a point.
The distorted growl sounded again back to his right, closer this time, and he turned to see an enormous dark form in the suit’s light right in front of him. A claw clamped down on the shotgun as he tried to bring it over and fire, but whatever it was held the barrel fast. He noted it had several arms and a posture bent forward toward him, but no head that he could make out.
In his panic he pressed the trigger and the shotgun thundered harmlessly away. The larger arm on his side swiped and struck him while the smaller maintained its hold on Vicki. He was knocked flying through the air, releasing the shotgun as he sailed backwards and landed on his rump, picking up some dirt and sand as he came to a halt. The creature was tall, at least two and a half meters, maybe three. It shifted its weight back and forth on legs that were almost too thin to support its massive frame. Three claws on the arms not holding the shotgun flexed and clicked as they closed and opened.
Another appeared beside it, materializing out of shimmering air from the darkness. The purple lightning flashed twice more in rapid flashes, and in those flashes, Levi saw a multitude of crawling creatures making their way toward his location. They parted around the two large creatures as they rushed forward. He brought himself up onto his arms and crabwalked backward in a panic, and he vaguely heard himself shriek. He flipped over, pushed himself up and tried to scramble back to the opening in the canyon that led to the SRV’s, but in that moment he knew he would never make it.
He turned back to the swarm of crawling bug-like creatures, his face grim. He angled his camera so he was sure the image would pick up what he was seeing, and called into the radio. He did not call to Shandia, or to Flea, but to RASA.
“RASA, execute Flounder Five-Seven-Two-Epsilon,” he told the AI calmly. “No recall.”
“Confirmed, Captain Levi,” RASA replied. “Flounder Five-Seven-Two-Epsilon. All crew members prepare for emergency lift off, ten seconds.”
“What? Fuck you RASA!” Shandia yelled, and Levi heard it, but it would not matter. She could not override it. The first of the creatures reached his location and began to sink its pinchers into his leg. He yelled in pain and kicked at it with his other foot, and sent it flying. But another got there just as he did and latched on to that leg and began to tear into it. The suit ripped to shreds. He cut the radio feed, not wanting his team to hear him go out like this.
“Five seconds until emergency lift off,” RASA told Shandia and Flea over the radio. RASA would also be announcing this throughout the ship. Shandia was in her chair and would strap in quickly. Levi could only hope Flea could get safe. He leaned forward and smashed his fist into the thing on his right leg. Another of the creatures had leapt in the low gravity and launched itself at his torso. He caught it and tossed it hard to the side, and it struck a small boulder and squeaked in what he hoped was pain. He continued to kick, but in seconds, there were too many on him, biting, tearing into his flesh. He screamed until his helmet’s visor was cracked, then he could not find the air to do anything except die.
He did not even get to see the Gambler as it blasted off from the planet at maximum thrust. It would eventually come to a halt once in orbit, at which time RASA would turn the ship’s control back to the crew.
But at least they would be alive.
