My reply was still forming when Deke burst back out of his quarters, dressed and ready fast enough to satisfy a Boot Camp DI.
“You guys ever been to Hudson Bay?” he wondered, heading up to the cockpit. “I never got here before, which makes this a rare place for me, since I’ve been just about everywhere over the last twenty years. There was some interesting shit that went down here a long time ago, but that was before I got back on the Fleet Intelligence payroll.”
“And what were you doing at the time?” Vicky asked him, finishing up her water, then tossing it into the recycling cannister affixed to the deck behind the navigator’s seat. “Private security? Working for the Corporate Council?”
Deke snorted a sharp laugh.
“I was a smuggler in the Pirate Worlds.” He shrugged at her wide-eyed expression. “Some of us didn’t adapt that well to civilian life after the war.” I wanted to come up with a smartass comment but honestly, I was impressed. Deke tapped at a touch screen, nodded. “Here we go. Transition in ten.”
He didn’t count down the seconds himself, letting the display on the main screen do the work. Bracing myself, I gritted my teeth and waited for the inevitable lurch of the passage out of T-space and back into our home dimension. I was grateful I hadn’t slept through the jump, because there was nothing quite as unpleasant as being woken up by the hypnogogic jerk of the Transition.
Even braced against it, I still lurched forward before I caught myself.
“All right,” Deke sighed, “we’re here. Let’s get linked up to that ComSat…”
He frowned, staring at the screen, and I followed his gaze. Not to what was there but to what wasn’t. Hudson Bay had a Fleet base… or it had before the Psi War, and since it was one of the colonies the Confluence supplied, I assumed there was still a colony there at least. But there was no transmission from traffic control, no EM activity at all.
“That’s weird,” he muttered, making no further comment but shifting power to the fusion drive, the boost pressing us back into our seats. “The colony here still has an orbital station,” Deke said as the Dutchman II forged a path toward the white-bearded world. “But I’m not seeing any trace of it.”
“Shit,” I murmured, reminded of our experience reentering the Cluster in the Ellen.
“Going closer,” Deke said, unnecessarily, and I got the feeling he was talking to hear himself talk.
Hudson Bay was a cold world, though not as cold as the Confluence moon. The habitable stretches weren’t sustained by hot springs, and there were areas near the equator that would have been very comfortable and temperate. If the entire equator hadn’t been solid water. The continents froze over for two-thirds of the year, but not enough to make them unlivable. The file images and videos I found in the database of my headcomp showed jagged, white-capped mountains and lush valleys bordering wild, glacier-fed rivers, and that matched what the external cameras showed from orbit.
What didn’t match the database was the cities. The biggest one, unimaginatively, was named after the planet, as was the case on a lot of the small colonies, but there were others scattered up and down the river valleys. Or there had been. Where those cities had been, now there were black scars on the land.
“Oh, fuck me,” Deke hissed. It was the first time I’d seen the man scared. “Hang on. We’re going down.”
I had a horrible suspicion that I knew what we were going to find.
[ 23 ]
I really hated being right.
“Sweet Jesus,” Vicky said, leaning toward the screen as if being closer would give her a better look. “It’s like someone ran a giant blowtorch over the entire place.”
Or an eraser. The blackened, charred ground had been leveled perfectly flat, burning away not just the buildings but even the raised dirt beneath it, but the damage ended abruptly at the edges of the city of Hudson Bay. It followed the road out of the city limits and off into what the maps told me was the Tahni settlement apart from the human township. The Tahni hadn’t been spared. However many decades we’d been at each other’s throats, we’d shared a fate on this world.
Deke said not a word, his expression hardened to stone as he guided the Dutchman II only a few hundred meters off the surface, following the line of destruction.
“This isn’t the same as the damage we saw from the Psi War,” I judged, surprised at how calm I sounded. Because inside I was not calm, not one bit. “It’s something different.”
“You know what it is,” Vicky scoffed, and when she met my eyes raw fear showed through.
“We don’t know for sure,” I insisted. “We never saw what… they could do.”
“Whoever or whatever did this,” Deke cut in, “they made damned sure not to leave anyone alive.”
“There are still people down there,” I said, not sure where my certainty came from. “This was recent. People would have fled to the wilderness when the attack began. They’re still out there.”
“Maybe, but how are we gonna find them?” Deke asked, motioning down at the trackless forests outside the city, half-buried in snow. “There’s no way we can read thermal signatures through those trees. And it’s not like there are any buildings left to take shelter in.”
He was right about that. The outline of where they’d been was obvious, the ends of dirt roads severed by charred craters, even the outlines of vehicles parked by the edges of barely existent tracks smeared out with black. Nothing made by man had been spared… nothing made by Tahni either.
“It was recent,” Deke agreed, “but that might mean days. It’s below freezing out there. They could have died of exposure.”
And I couldn’t argue with that either. How long would Vicky or I lasted if we’d run into the woods with nothing but the clothes on our back with snow covering the ground? I had a feeling it wouldn’t have been days. Plus, the Tahni were built for warm weather, and even after decades and a couple generations on, their biology might still betray them.
“If this is the… the Unity,” Vicky said, sounding reluctant to even say the name, “then we have to warn Munroe. They wouldn’t stop here. We have to get the Ellen out here, get them patrolling Trans-Tahni space looking for whatever did this.” She shook her head. “We can’t wait around.”
“If we leave,” I reminded them, “and there are any survivors, we’re letting them die.”
“If there’s a couple,” Deke countered, “maybe even ten or twelve, we could haul them out in the Dutchman II. If there’s any more… this isn’t a big ship. And we have no idea how long we’re going to be waiting for the Ellen.”
It all made sense but…
“It feels wrong,” I said. “Those people didn’t do anything to deserve this.”
“Yeah, I saw a shitload of innocent people die,” Deke said, bitterness dripping off the words. “Fucking billions of them. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not let the ones who survived that get killed by some other existential threat. And God knows whether time is on our side here.”
I sighed, the energy going out of me. I had to let this one go.
“Wait!” Vicky said, pointing at the sensor screen. “There’s something right there… a thermal signature moving on the road.”
She was right. We couldn’t have picked it up if whoever it was hadn’t left the woods and come out onto the road. Deke touched a control and the optical camera zoomed in on the lone figure. It was a child.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
