Tag: pickman's models

The Bad Week!

He didn’t need to ask her what she meant by the term. “As well as we could. We managed to get all but one of the surviving domes under lockdown, but the mutineers in Bloch Dome had somehow managed to disable the HVAC control, so we had to go in and stun them by hand. That was Hell.”

By now the memory didn’t suddenly flash into his brain. It ambled in, almost comfortably: They were still in the life-support tubes when the mutineers stumbled upon them. Tobias’s team had been offered no quarter by their foes, and it was all that Tobias could do to keep his troops from responding in kind. He’d had to stun one of his own team to keep her from strangling a stringy-haired maniac after they’d finally dragged him off the soldier he’d been disemboweling with a rusty saw.

“Stunners? You were lucky, Commander. We had no stunners, no pacification gas after the first week — the fool that Bruno replaced saw to that! — and not enough hibernation drugs. But when our rebels had been taken? Oh, we had knives. Such a helpful crowd control measure, knives. Cheap, simple, no power, no moving parts. Just an edge and a throat.”

Reithner’s eyes may have been open, but they were looking at nothing in the room. “They cycled us all through crowd control at first, you know. And we all did it. Even Bruno took a turn, slicing the throats of those too violent and insane to trust. But you could tell right away who among us hated it, and who did not. The ones who did not somehow found themselves on the rotation more often. They even volunteered! And we did not forbid them.”

Lunar lairs have to be smmmmaaaaal…

It’s actually not very hard to secure a man in a spacesuit; control his air, and you control him. Supposedly the local environment was habitable, but Tobias didn’t trust those readings for a moment. Judging by the generally horrible features of his captors, there were probably all sorts of contaminants down here.

Subconsciously, Tobias had been expecting a long, torturous journey through endless passages and caverns, but that was ridiculous. All of this atmosphere had to brought in, heated, and kept from escaping, after all. There could be no luxuries like a vast complex. Not on the moon. Instead… just down the way was a door, which led to a three-story atrium. That had a collection of rooms scooped ouf of the rock, and that was the end of the matter. 

Whether or not it was the end of them would be a different story.

We really need to get this one to bed. The other one, too.

He wasn’t the only one disquieted by their surroundings. “Twisty passages, all alike,” he heard Buckley mutter at one point. “Bo– sir, I think that a lot of this is fresh.”

“Fresh?” asked Reithner. She was still steadier than Tobias had expected. Possibly even steadier than he was. “You think these people still have enough energy to dig? Without machines, no-one would waste calories on that.” She sniffed. “Even with machines, what would be the point?”

Tobias’s light unfortunately found a metal plate that had been hung on the wall. Dimly-remembered and particularly unwelcome memories let him recognize the stylized features of Madam Corpse-Mask.This etching had been done by somebody with real skill, somehow managing to evoke both her skeleton body, and the flayed sacrificial face she wore. The outlined horror almost glowed, even after he hastily moved his light elsewhere. Was there a hint of it still on his retinas? Surely not.

“If these people are Red Imperial cultists, Lieutenant,” he managed to say calmly, “then we should try not to understand their point. We might succeed.”

Time to buckle down on some stuff.

“Anybody got a suit that’s still got a working translator?” Tobias looked around, grimacing at the irregular chorus of head-shakes. Apparently the Euros had cannibalized all the ‘useless’ circuits and chips from their suits, too. And why not? He snorted. Everybody speaks English up here, because we won’t speak anything else. “Well, maybe we’ll find somebody who does speak it. Until then… we got a trail to follow, Buckley?”

Buckley was crouched over some of the furrows. “…Yes, I think we do. It’s faint, but our, ah, suits can track them. We’ll need to take it slow. Nice and careful, no messing around.”

“Understood. We’ll proceed until we find somebody. Squaddies up front, and we all keep together. Buddy up, and yell if your buddy’s gone, even for a second.”

“Understood, sir.” Reithner paused. “Assume hostile intent now, sir?”

“No,” Tobias responded, “but be prepared for it.”

A book! That nobody can read. Yeah, that’s never a problem in these kinds of stories.

“What happened here?” asked Reithner. No, Tobias decided on the spot. She’s not asking a question. She’s trying not to think about the answer.

Buckley wasn’t as patient. He peered at the rough walls, pointing out the scratches — and faint brown stains. “All waist height,” he noted, then traced the furrows in the crushed-rock lunar floor with one foot. “You either walked out of this room, or you got dragged.”

“Hold on,” Tobias said, pointing at a wider-than-normal crack in the wall. “There’s something in there — oh, wow.”

Reithner had been staring at the room; she started at his exclamation, then relaxed. “What is it?”

“A book.” He pulled it out. “An old one, made out of paper and everything.”

“How old?” asked Buckley. “Like, you know, an illustrated folio?” He meeped laughter at Tobias’s look. “Hey, I read history.”

Still working on the story sampler!

Or, in the case of some of the shrines, other people. “How long?” Tobias asked, without looking. 

There was enough air that he didn’t need the radio to hear Buckley’s response. “A week, sir. At most. In this heat the flesh is going to — well, you can see what’ll happen.” He sounded clinical about it, which made sense, right? “It’d be really unsafe to take off your helmets in this muck, sir. Trust me on this.”

“Understood, Buckley. You see something interesting, Lieutenant?”

Reithner jumped, slightly. She had been peering at a painted frieze of — well, the inscription said ‘Maguglpur,’ but the picture was clearly of the god the Red Imperials called ‘Bonefarmer.’ The half-flesh, half-skull was diagnostic; so were the little pictures of humans, impaled on femurs. Worse, it was fresh. The horrible scenes Tobias had studied at the Academy had felt distant, safely consigned to history. This was something from current events. 

Yeah, back to this.

The mural Reithner was illuminating with her headlamp was… well, it was ugly, and there was no getting around it. It didn’t even have the dubious virtue of technical skill; the artist had pounded and smeared it onto the rock wall using whatever materials were at hand. Possibly literally, Tobias thought as he averted his eyes. You can always get brown and red that way.

“That’s… Steelfang, right?” Buckley growled. “The Red Imperial god of death?”

“One of them, yes,” Tobias replied with utter calm. “He’s also sort of their god of farming. That’s why his mouth looks like a scythe, the better to reap his victims. The cult thinks blood makes the grain grow. Give me a good reason not to burn that damned thing off the wall.”

“We do not have incendiaries.” Reithner sounded hot, rather than cold. “Why did we not bring incendiaries?”

The desire in her voice made Tobias get himself back under control. “Right. Douse that light, Lieutenant. We don’t need to see it any longer.” He took a calming breath. “Lieutenant, Buckley, private circuit.” He waited until they both clicked in to continue. “Give me a good reason not to blow the airlock, and leave.”

Airlocks!

The first team was made up of three grenadiers and two Squad members, and when the door opened again, they had the exact same number of people. “There’s power and air, sir, but no people manning the gate,” the Squaddie told Tobias. “No communications network up on the other side, either. My suit couldn’t even find anything to handshake with.”

Reithner had been listening to one of the grenadiers, presumably telling her the same thing. “Nothing from our suits, either. The atmosphere is breathable, but the temperature is at thirty seven degrees.”

“Well, at least there’s no ice — no, wait.” Tobias frowned. “I forgot: your people still use Celsius. You’re saying it’s hot in there?”

“Yes. Blood temperature, in fact.” She sounded incredulous, which was fair, because so was Tobias. Most of Heinlein Base had been shut down and sealed off in order to conserve heat; the other human-occupied outposts had the exact same problem. If this place was that well heated, they probably had power, and to spare. Yet one more reason to investigate, he thought. Not to mention, handle gently.

Airlock!

It was definitely supposed to be a gate. Whoever had put it up had taken doors from the shipping containers up on the surface, including the frames, then mounted them into the rock. There was even a doorsill. The problem was that it was an airlock. Improvised and jury-rigged, but definitely an airlock. That had implications.

Not to mention hindrances. Tobias examined the walls on either side. “I don’t see any communication jacks,” he announced. “No jacks, ports, or plug-ins. Anybody else?”

“No.” Reithner sounded bothered by that, too. If anything, she sounded even more upset than Tobias. “Not even an emergency transmitter. This is a highly unsafe installation.”

“Or they don’t have anybody they want to talk to,” Buckley pointed out. “How far inside do you think we can get with the door closed behind us before we lose signal?”

“Right away.” Tobias had extended his suit’s sensor cable, and was now waving it around. “There’s no EM radiation coming through ahead of us. Once we’re inside, we’re cut off from our bases until we can find a transmitter that’s set up for surface communications.”

“Not gonna lie, sir: that sounds like a great reason to not go inside.” Buckley had gotten more and more darkly sardonic over the last few months, but right now there was no humor in his voice. “They don’t want to talk and they probably don’t want guests. Let’s take the hint.”