Contact. Her false nav alerts provoked another response. The signal was faint but recognizable.
It wasn’t Lam. It was 027. Vonnie felt like she was running through the dark on a maze of stepping stones. If Lam realized she was stalking him, he might move or shut himself down — she might miss him — but she needed to leap again.
“Priority One CEW lists, authorization Alexis Six,” she said. The electronic warfare codes allowed her to initiate maximum strength transmissions among their mecha in the pit. If necessary, they would draw on non-vital power sources such as their engines and weapons systems, shutting down everything except their sensor arrays.
Simultaneously, Vonnie hijacked four rovers on the surface. She sent them racing toward 027’s position beneath the ice as they synchronized with the other mecha, adding to the transmission of her slavecast.
Her actions didn’t go unnoticed.
Metzler, Ash, Johal, and Dawson appeared on her display. Her three friends wore pressure suits or armor, so they were in close-up, whereas Dawson stood at a camera inside Lander 05.
“Von!” Ash said. She sounded scared.
“What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing?” Dawson interrupted. “Administrator Koebsch, this is William Dawson in 05. Some sort of rogue operation is underway at—”
“Oh, shut up, Dawson,” Metzler said. “Von, what did you see? Are there sunfish?”
“She found two more of our relays in the ice,” Johal said, her gaze skimming back and forth across her visor. “They’re both damaged. One is close by. The other looks like it was taken six point four kilometers by the flood.”
Vonnie nodded, cherishing the warmth she felt. Her friends were trying to cover for her, but the lie wouldn’t hold up. Ash was right to be scared. Their careers were on the line. Lifetimes of education and service would boil down to whether or not Vonnie could reach Lam, fix him, and lead him to evidence that no one else had found. It was a long, shaky bridge to cross.
“Those are CEW codes,” Dawson said. “Why would you launch cyber attacks on our own mecha?”
“You’re a gene smith,” Ash said. “You don’t know how this works. 027 is nearly out of range. She’s trying to reestablish control before it—”
“You’re sabotaging our own grid!” Dawson said. “Why? To keep us from finding your precious fish? I suppose you’re trying to drive a wedge between us and the FNEE.”
“Leave her alone,” Metzler said.
She reached Lam. He appeared as a blip labeled Unidentified Mecha, which told her more than a non-engineer might understand.
“What is that?” Dawson said.
Her slavecast had elicited the barest response. Lam involuntarily answered with a single radar pulse, enough for Relay 027 to place his general vicinity, but no more. The ESA grid regarded him as a foreign construct.
He was fighting her — hiding from her — resisting her slavecast in a turbulent battle with himself.
I need to pin him down, she thought. But how?
027 was six kilometers west of the pit. Lam had traveled in the same direction, angling down from the surface, but he could be five kilometers beyond 027 or as much as eight.
He was inside a field of crumbling rock islands that stretched away from a mountaintop. Based on previous rover and satellite readings, they believed the mountain was dormant. Any volcanic activity had petered out decades ago. The complication now was that the rock would shield him. It interfered with her slavecast. Vonnie hoped to encircle Lam from above, but even accelerating at breakneck speeds, the rovers wouldn’t close on him for nine minutes.
“Administrator Koebsch!” Dawson said. “Administrator!”
“Here,” Koebsch said, joining the group feed.
“Vonderach is causing noise and cave-ins at the pit. She’s trying to scare off any sunfish in the area.”
“I need a minute, Dawson. I’m in discussions with Colonel Ribeiro. Von, you’d better have a good explanation for this,” Koebsch said. Then he muted his link with them, although his window scrolled with ESA telemetry, which he was delivering to Ribeiro as evidence that none of their abrupt signals were aimed at the FNEE.
He’s covering for me, too, Vonnie thought as the rovers sped over the ice. Their wheels jarred and bounced.
“You won’t get away with this,” Dawson said. “You—”
“What can we do?” Ash said. Outside in her suit, she’d started to run, hustling toward Lander 04.
“Got it!” Metzler said. Unlike Ash, he stood motionless in his armor, his visor leaping with data. He pulled three files and sent them to Vonnie’s station. “These are our best charts of the area, radar, tidal, and thermal analysis,” he said.
“Thank you.” Vonnie forwarded the sims to her rovers, rerouting them into a spread formation. Since she wasn’t sure of her target, several weak signals were better than one focused source. It was critical to keep Lam off-balance even with the most trivial scratch or nudge at his defenses. If she could transmit through clean ice beneath the surface, slanting her broadcasts past the thickest rocks and gravel fields…
…if Lam hadn’t shut himself down…
Where are you? she thought, acutely aware of each ticking second. Too much time had passed. There should have been another response.
“I’m turning the rovers ten degrees south,” she said.
“Make it twelve.” Metzler’s voice was low and taut as he highlighted the ice on the rovers’ left flank. “It’ll be tough hunting down there. If Lam gets beneath enough rock, he can wall himself off from us.”
“Ben!” Ash said. She’d entered the lander’s air lock, but stopped to yell at Metzler. He’d been popping stims again, trying to work eighteen-hour days.
The drugs made him careless.
“This mecha you’re pursuing contains the mem files of Choh Lam?” Dawson asked, snapping at the words like a snake. On their group feed, the crafty old man glanced between Metzler and Ash. “How did you know it’s him? Is he inside Probe 114?”
“We think so,” Vonnie said.
“You didn’t activate our standard countermeasures.”
“Lam isn’t near the pit, much less our new base. We’re trying to reach him, not the other way around. We need all the mecha we can get.”
“This is just another recovery effort,” Ash said.
“No,” Dawson said. “I don’t believe you.”
Vonnie ignored him. Behind her, Ash stepped into the ready room, heavy in her armored suit. Mecha assists clanked on her shoulders and hips, securing her weight before she unsealed her collar assembly.
“I have something,” Vonnie called over her shoulder.
Three of the rovers had focused on one peculiar blip among the rubble in the ice. It looked like metal.
Dawson jabbed his fingers at his display. “This is Doctor William Dawson,” he said. “I’m making a full record of actions taken by Engineer Vonderach and an indeterminate number of the crew including Sierzenga and Metzler.”
Vonnie cut her group feed. It had been four minutes since she’d initiated her slavecasts. That meant she had about seven minutes before Earth saw her datastreams, eleven more before new orders could travel back to Europa. Koebsch was the immediate hurdle. How long would he look the other way? Not long.
A new radar pulse swept up from the ice.
“Lam, it’s me,” Vonnie said, adding her voice to the barrage from her mecha. “If you’re hearing this—”