Arbenz guided them through the chaos, meeting and greeting a succession of shiny-eyed young men and women all eager to announce their willingness to die for the Freehold cause. Dakota watched and listened to it all with some distaste, doing her best to ignore the curious and occasionally hostile glances she received from some. She was surprised to see a similar look of distaste appear on Corso’s face, when he thought people weren’t looking.
The Senator kept them moving, clearly not wanting to waste any more time than was absolutely essential. They were joined soon by two of the station’s staff, and Arbenz led them into an elevator clearly designed to carry large quantities of heavy equipment. As soon as they were all aboard, the elevator shuddered to life and dropped rapidly.
Several minutes passed, with Dakota wondering exactly how far down they were going. She glanced over at Corso and saw he was looking as apprehensive as she felt.
Something tugged at the edge of her thoughts: it was a little like sensing the presence of another machine-head. But this sense of otherness originated from somewhere far, far below them.
She ignored it after a moment, blaming her nerves.
The lift finally came to a halt, and they disembarked into a metal-walled antechamber with an airlock at one end and a series of cabinets ranged along one wall. The two men from the surface station stepped over to the cabinets and pulled out gel suits of the type normally used for orbital high-gee manoeuvring. It was freezing cold, and Dakota realized the gel suits were intended as a protection against hypothermia.
She pulled one on, aware of it forming around her body, immediately feeling warmer.
They filed through a narrow door and into the airlock. Once she was through, Dakota saw they were in a rectangular cavern carved directly out of the rock and ice. In the centre of the chamber lay a wide dark circle of water surrounded by machinery and ringed by a raised steel platform with steps leading up to it: a borehole, for want of a better description. A sealed and pressurized tunnel made from some transparent fabric led from the airlock directly over to the platform.
Arbenz led them along the fabric tunnel towards the borehole. Maybe we’re going fishing, Dakota thought, suppressing a semihysterical grin. As they approached the borehole, the water in its centre began to churn and bubble furiously.
She stared in amazement as a submersible rose out of it, its hull studded with instruments. A metal platform slid out from under the encompassing platform, locking into place on the craft’s hull, while the opposite end of the tunnel they were passing through slid forward on gimbals to connect with a hatch in the submersible’s hull.
A few moments later, the hatch opened and three figures in gel suits disembarked. The Senator took the lead, stepping up on to the encircling platform, and made sure to shake the hands of each of the submersible’s crew in turn. The personnel-two men and a woman-were apparently delighted to find Arbenz waiting for them. A few moments later they walked past Dakota and the rest, heading towards the antechamber.
Dakota peered down into the black, churning waters as she stepped up on to the raised platform. Heating elements were clearly visible for a long way down, ringing the interior of the borehole, and presumably there to keep it from freezing over.
She didn’t want to think just how far down through the solid ice the Freehold had drilled. The ocean under there had been dark for an eternity, and was deep enough to be effectively bottomless. The thought of plunging down into those empty depths, regardless of the circumstances, made her flesh crawl.
She turned again to Corso, who was standing beside her. ‘If you really found a starship,’ she whispered, ‘what the hell is it doing buried down here? And how did you even find it?’
‘Luck,’ Corso replied. ‘The Agartha was the first Freehold ship to arrive at Nova Arctis, but it ran into trouble straight away. It suffered an engine failure during a routine evaluation of the outer system, and somehow the derelict picked up on one of its distress frequencies and responded. The signal was extremely low-power, so they were lucky to pick it up at all. The crew managed to triangulate the source of the signal a couple of weeks later.’
‘Uh.’ A sense of numbness was spreading through Dakota’s body that had nothing to do with the subzero temperatures. A starship? But one, she could only assume, the Shoal knew nothing of.
It was like finding the Holy Grail-no, better. Transluminal technology, at least, was real.
As she followed the rest inside the vacated submersible, it was impossible not to think about the kilometres of lightless ocean below her. She took a seat in a cramped circular chamber. There was a control panel at one end of it, replete with displays showing infrared and sonar maps of the mountainous terrain above and below them, but from the craft’s interior layout Dakota guessed this submersible was automated rather than piloted.
And there it was again: a sense of otherness from somewhere far, far below, in the depths of Theona’s freezing subterranean ocean. It was like finding herself in an empty building, but nonetheless becoming filled with the absolute conviction there was someone or something nearby-but just out of sight. Her Ghost scanned the local comms traffic, but the only detectable signals were the usual low-level automated pings.
It had to be the derelict communicating, in some way she couldn’t understand, with her Ghost. Something was down there, and it was currently trying to say hello.
She looked around at the others, irrationally wondering if any of them could feel the same thing. Her skin prickled unpleasantly.
Corso had again taken a seat next to her. He turned to her and frowned, and she realized she must have looked more worried than she might want to let on.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked softly.
She almost laughed.
Something alien is signalling to me, from the depths of a bottomless ocean in a dead system, you stupid bastard. What do you think?
Instead she said: ‘If you’ve really found some kind of crashed starship, you lot are going to have a ton of shit coming down on your collective heads once the news gets out. Tell me it’s not a Shoal craft, because if it is, I might as well start writing my will right now.’
‘It’s not Shoal,’ Corso replied, after a moment’s hesitation.
‘You’re serious?’ She looked at him and saw he was. ‘So they really aren’t the only species with faster-than-light travel, after all? It was all a big lie?’
‘The derelict doesn’t look like any Shoal vessel anyone’s ever seen, but it has a drive mechanism that could probably spit it right across the galaxy. It has the external spine structures typical of known Shoal spacecraft, but that’s about as far as the resemblance goes. Plus, it’s old. Really old?