Misjump Page 5

  No-one had any better suggestions and the conversation wound down. The crew filtered out, Jax giving Gregor a hard stare as if it were somehow his fault that things were not as expected. Lori brushed her hand over Gregor’s shoulder as she passed in a mute gesture of support. He appreciated it and answered with the slightest of smiles. He got up and walked back to the cockpit. He was getting used to sleeping in the pilot’s chair, but he would be glad when the AI was back up and running. He would need to set all the alarms to their loudest volume to be sure not to sleep through them.

  #

  Dawn was breaking on the planet below them, just as it always was for every planet at every moment. However, Gregor had positioned the ship so that the line between light and dark was as close as could be to under the ship and he had chosen an orbit that would allow them to follow it. This gave a good view of the equator in both day and night, and the twenty-two-hour orbit would allow enough time to do a reasonable search of the surface. It was a pattern that he had learned in the navy, but it would work just as well here. A cargo ship didn’t have the sensors that a military vessel would have used, much less those of a scout, but he would use what he had. He had been watching for several hours and nothing that he had seen was making him feel any better. There was no military or civilian radio that he could detect. He had even tried one of the suit radios in case the ship’s comms system really was on the fritz. The smaller transmitters would struggle to reach the surface but they should be able to pick up the stronger ground stations.

  The only light that he had seen on the dark side had been faint and green, covering hundreds of miles in a pattern like the spokes of a wheel. When the dawn had come to the area, it had been a deep ocean region. The ship’s database had mentioned that bioluminescent unicellular life was to be found in the Neuholme oceans, but it had not been obvious on previous visits. The sunlight seemed to creep over the surface as he watched, but he knew that it was revealing over 1500 klicks every hour. Erste would be visible soon, the largest city and spaceport on the planet. He zoomed the screen on the region and waited. High points flared to life on the screen with the rest of the landscape fading in as the breaking dawn reached them.

  The cameras didn’t give a lot of detail through this much atmosphere, but he could make out the lines of streets, oddly blurred on the screen. Gregor wondered if that could be an atmospheric effect, but it seemed stable. The spaceport area was still dark, a pool of black in the grey of the city. It started to fill with light unevenly, a crescent of illumination forming on the far side. He had seen that shape so many times but never here. He never wanted to see it again. That was a large crater, kilometres across. The impact must have wrecked the city, filling the streets with debris. The area around the crater was all blur, the buildings levelled, but the outlying areas had fared better. This couldn’t have been an accident, not with that kind of precision. That had to be a decisive blow in a war.

  Gregor didn’t know Neuholme well; it was just a stop on a cargo run for him, but he remembered the street markets with their spicy pastries and hot cups of peppery red wine. They had seemed like decent enough people. He had no idea why anyone would want to kill them. He didn’t even know if there were two factions that wanted to fight, but if there was anyone alive in that city, there was no sign that he could see. He checked the surface map and plotted a new orbit to take him over another town. He didn’t expect to find survivors, but you always had to look. His expression was blank as he worked. That was the way that he had learned to get through tasks like these. You focussed on the job at hand and pushed the consequences away for now. He hoped that the planet had been evacuated after the first strike, but he knew how unlikely that was.

  Three hours later, there was no possible doubt. If there was anyone on Neuholme, they were living without any electrical power stronger than a battery and with no source of heat larger than a campfire. There might be a hermit in a cave somewhere, but there was no real way to find them. The starport at Erste was not there anymore, but there was a secondary port, Grossemarkt, which could handle ships much larger than the Sarafina. He wanted a margin of error in case there was rubble on the ground. He opened a broadcast channel to the ship.

  “So, looks like no one is home, but we are running on empty tanks so options we don’t have. I am going to make a landing at Grossemarkt and should be easy. Ivo, if you head to engineering, just to be on safe side. Jax, would like you to be suited and booted, please. I don’t think that anyone is waiting for us but would be good to have options, da?” Gregor closed the channel without waiting for responses. There really was nothing to discuss. He hoped that he had sounded sufficiently positive. He knew that he didn’t feel it.

  The descent was smooth enough with some buffeting in the lower atmosphere. There was a fair bit of cloud cover over the city, and there were no navigation aids, not even GPS, but that was not that unusual even in civilian piloting. Supply runs for this type of ship were often to start-up colonies or small-scale operations with the larger haulage firms dominating the more profitable routes. Landings on civilised worlds were usually handled by the AI, so this was the most common type of manual landing. The cloud proved thicker than Gregor had been expecting with some heavy gusting winds that required the gyros to counter. The ship was under half a click above the surface when the Sarafina got under the clouds into nominally clear air. As Gregor had expected, the air was thick with rain that streamed over the camera lens. He switched on air jets to keep the image as clear as possible, but the end result was much less than perfect. He searched “eyes only” for the starport, slowing the descent to give himself more time. There was a grey expanse of something where the port was supposed to be and that had to be it. He changed the vector of the ship to give a close to vertical descent and jockeyed the ship down. There were round bunds, depressions with thick raised surrounds, for ships to land and take off, and he chose one towards the centre of the port. Because it was a reasonable distance from the buildings, it was most likely to be clear. The final stage was slow for the sake of safety. A mistake at low speed could be taken by the landing gear and a deliberate approach enabled the pilot to look for unpleasant surprises.

  As the ship settled into the concrete bund, the view went from mostly grey to entirely grey. Gregor cut the drive and the airlock-in-use light flashed on a second later. That would be Jax, eager to play soldier boy. Gregor would have done additional checks from the safety of the cockpit, but Jax had never been a patient man. Gregor switched one of the screens to show the feed from the front under-mounted camera. The image quality was poor with lines scanning diagonally across the screen, but it was usable and responded to the small joystick on the console. Since the AI was still offline, he would have to control it manually.

  Jax climbed up the curved wall of the bund and dropped flat, reaching around to unstrap some sort of long weapon. He shouldered the gun and started searching around, ignoring the rain that continued to fall. Gregor tilted the camera and zoomed, the image fuzzing and refocussing as he did so. The colour was leached by distance and the camera, making the view of broken windows in grey concrete look unpleasantly skull-like. Gregor panned the camera, looking for movement. Something flickered at the edge of the image and he tapped the stick left, panning over more broken windows. A blind flapped and Gregor reached for the comm. Jax should have his earpiece in.

  “Jax, movement, building ahead, eleven o’clock, taller one, da. Fifth, maybe sixth floor. Check it.”

  Jax didn’t reply immediately, but his hand made a thumbs-up on the stock of the weapon, barely visible in the degraded image. He moved his head to look through the scope. After a few seconds, his voice came through the cockpit speaker. “About three from the edge of the building, blue blind, yes?”

  Gregor squinted at the screen, trying to make out the colour. Yes, that was probably blue. He would have to see what he could do to fix the camera later. “Yes, half covering window, pale,” he said.

  Jax adjusted the sco
pe. “Nothing on the heat setting. I think it is just the wind.” He watched for a few seconds more. “Yes, nothing there but thanks. Good to know you have my back.” He went back to scanning the immediate area.

  Gregor switched his view to one of the rear-facing cameras and was rewarded with a much crisper image. He took a still, waited a few seconds and took another. He tapped the cursor keys, rapidly switching between the two pictures, but there was no meaningful change. He would have done the same with the front-facing camera but there was too much noise on the image. He touched a button on the comms board again.

  “Jax, I have checked rear facing and is nothing, no movement. Have you anything? Place looks deserted.” Gregor waited for a reply.

  “No,” said Jax, “nothing here. I see vehicles on the roadways, crashed and mostly burned. Weird though, none of this looks recent. If I had to guess, I would say that this was years back. Hell, trees are growing up through some of the wrecks. How sure are you that this is Neuholme?”

  Gregor took a deep breath and made sure that his voice was calm. “I am sure. Look, four o’clock, a squat building, see it?”

  Jax grunted assent.

  “Read what it says on it for me,” said Gregor flatly.

  “‘Welcome to Grossemarkt’,” said Jax. He squinted through the scope, shifting the rifle. “It says ‘Make Neuholme your new home. Immigrants welcome’ underneath. None of this makes any sense, Gregor. We were on Neuholme less than two weeks ago. This didn’t happen in the last year let alone the last week. What gives? How long were we out there for?”

  Gregor rubbed his eyes tiredly. “About nine days. The orbit matches what it should be for nine days and there is no way that the low berths kept you alive without power for any longer than that.”

  “Bullshit,” replied Jax. “Whatever happened here is years past.”

  Gregor shrugged pointlessly. “I know that it can’t be, I have eyes. However, is. Look for something with a date on it and we will know, okay? You wearing helmet cam?”

  Jax swore again.

  “I will take that as no, then,” said Gregor.

  “We may as well just stroll up to the terminal building. I don’t think that there is anyone here and if I am wrong, it will be good to have some company,” said Jax.

  Gregor couldn’t argue with that. He switched the comms to a general channel and started to explain what little new information they had.

  Jax was showing clear signs of irritation long before the rest of the crew was ready and had taken to patrolling around the ship despite finding no signs of life other than a few weeds growing from cracks in the concrete in the thirty minutes that he had been circling. The crew assembled outside the cargo ramp dressed in environment suits on the advice of Gregor and Lori. The atmospheric screen had come back with slightly elevated levels of radiation with no obvious toxins, but it made sense to be careful, and the environment suits were the closest thing that they had to body armour. Each suit was in a different colour to make identification easier. Jax stayed in the one piece Kevlar jumpsuit that he had initially gone out in despite the water that kept running down into the neck. They carefully made their way towards the terminal building, following the path from the bund that merged into a narrow roadway designed for small buses and supply trucks. Landing and resupply fees were always a challenge for small trader ships such as the Sarafina.

  Meilin spoke first. “Gregor, you didn’t see any other ships on the way down, I think, yes?”

  “None. If people evacuated, they would have taken anything that could fly,” Gregor replied.

  Meilin looked around as she spoke. “There is not a great deal of damage here. I think that they would have been able to get to the ships, but this is not a large spaceport. Surely there could not have been enough ships to get everyone off quickly.” Her tone made it clear that this was not a question.

  “Depends how many survivors there were," pointed out Jax.

  They rounded the last of the bunds and stood outside the terminal building. There were no wrecked vehicles here, and much of the glass was still in place although crusted by many years of dirt. It was obvious that this spaceport had not been in use for a lot longer than nine days, but no-one commented on it. They sheltered under the grimy glass roof that extended from the terminal building, the rain no longer drumming on their helmets.

  “We should look for anything with a date on it and the best chance of printed records will be in there. Jax, do you think that you can get the door open?” said Gregor.

  Jax walked forward to the large glass sliding doors. “Maybe,” he said. “It depends if it is security glass. That stuff is tough.” He tried to pull the door open, his muscles tensing before pulling back with a jerk, the doors opening without resistance. “Yeah, well, sometimes it is easy,” he commented, smiling. He turned and looked through the door. “What the … That makes no sense. Who steals the inside of a building?”

  The terminal building was bare concrete inside, grey and unpainted and strangely massive without the clutter of signs and overpriced shops. Coloured cables ran over the wall in parallel lines leading to sockets and dark light fittings. The light was dimmer inside, the glass roof dirty and the rain clouds above dark. Lori turned on her helmet light.

  “Knock it off, Lori,” said Jax. “That will make your head an easy target. You want that?”

  Lori looked at him, her features hidden by the helmet light, which was unusually bright. “We are wearing all the colours of the rainbow, and we just landed in a big old ship. If anyone were going to see us, they would have. Besides, look there.” She pointed at a line of dirt left where the door had opened, now crumbling without the support of the glass. “No-one has been here in years.”

  Jax looked and then nodded. “Right, okay. Let’s get inside then. Safer than out here.” The others walked in while he guarded the rear against some imagined foe. He backed in through the door and turned to face the rest of the team only to find them milling around looking at the walls and floor. Ivo was examining a panel mounted proud on the wall, sticking out to make room for cladding. Meilin and Gregor were looking at the cable runs while Lori was just looking about. Jax brought the slugthrower up to his shoulder and started using the scope in thermal mode.

  After about a minute of this, Gregor spoke. “Okay, team, huddle. First thoughts?”

  “Looks like just us here," said Jax. Gregor nodded and looked at Meilin.

  “The cable runs go to distribution points, but nothing plugs into them. I would expect more cables under a false floor or over a false ceiling but not a trace, not of the cables, not of a floor, not of a ceiling,” she said. Gregor looked over to Ivo.

  “The panel is for security and fire alarms. It is rigged to power — dead of course — but I can’t see any wires for the sensors, and I don’t think that they would be using wireless. That would be too easy to jam,” said Ivo. Gregor looked over to Lori.

  Lori shrugged. “I don’t think that this place has been stripped. I think that they were still building it.”

  Gregor nodded. “I agree. This is building in progress, not working spaceport. No sign of ships ever having been in other docking bays, but this confirms. It all makes no damn sense.”

  “I thought that this was supposed to be the second biggest port on the planet, busy as all hell. What gives?” asked Jax.

  “Hell if I know,” replied Gregor. “Let us look for papers, documents, anything to give us clue. Meilin, see if you can find anything in the ship’s records about when this place built. The rest of us, search.”

  While Meilin searched the ship’s computer via her PDA, the others looked around the building. Jax insisted on going first with his rifle held ready despite there being no sign of anyone having been at the spaceport for years. While the main areas were empty, there was a small space that looked like it might have been intended to be a machine room of some kind. It had large crates that had been pushed together to form a table and cable spools arranged as makeshift s
eats. Long since dried up mugs and a kettle stood on the crates, and a yellowed newspaper lay abandoned on one of the reels. Ivo called for Gregor and the crew searching other areas came to see what had been found. Ivo handed Gregor the paper without comment.

  “Right,” said Gregor, “Meilin, did you find out when this place built?”

  Meilin nodded. “The record said that it became operational in the summer of 953, but it clearly didn’t.”

  “Agreed,” said Gregor. “This paper is dated 958. I think that this place could maybe have been finished in two years, yes?” He looked around and the others nodded. “Then I have no idea what is going on. Last week, it was year 1053 and none of us born in 951. Ideas? I have none.”

  Jax swore. “No way, man. We can’t have travelled in time. That just can’t happen. Whatever the hell is going on here, it ain’t that.”

  Meilin looked at him, her head cocked as if about to ask a question. “Well, my physics professor thought that time travel was impossible. He used to ask where all the time travellers from the future were. But I think Jax is right. We can’t have travelled through time except in the usual way or at least not by much. The world outside is wrecked and it didn’t happen recently. Maybe there is not a century of damage but maybe there is. Trees grow slowly. But there is something more definite. We know that this starport was never finished because we can see it, but we also know that it was a busy port two weeks ago. I cannot be sure when we are, but we are in about the right time. It is everything else that is wrong, as Gregor says.”

  After a few seconds, Gregor spoke again. “Neuholme was in the right place for it having been sixteen days since our jump from here. It is 1053. I am certain. Somehow, we misjumped and ended up here, wherever here is.”

  “Well, isn’t that fantastic! What the hell are we going to do now? We are humped — and hard,” said Jax.