For the Good of the World

Chapter Seven

And why had anyone been running an experiment in the first place? The Ancients had only visited the Sunlit Station for their annual Landing Day celebration. It was supposed to be an evening of drunken trips down memory lane onboard the Sublime Light down in the lander bay, not scientific research.

She gritted her teeth as she brushed her will over the terrarium and commanded it to restore the default environmental controls. It's like Umbrata, Lucina, and Sententia don't care how suspicious all of this looks. They've slapped the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability on mass murder like they expect me to shrug and turn a blind eye.

The station pulsed knowledge through her again with a louder clamorous reverberation than before. She clasped numbing hands to numbing ears with a wince, but the sound wasn't truly audible, only mental. Dread and urgency poured into her, triggered by the station's direct neural link. If she did not retreat somewhere warmer in two minutes, she risked a rapid descent from hypothermia, to frostbite, and then death.

Via growled under her breath as much as her shaking body allowed. Then she raised the terrarium's temperature to 0 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve the bodies without compromising the station, retreated to the habitat wing to warm up, and contacted Mitis.

"Are you sick?" the Lifesupporter asked, his bushy brows drawing together in worry as his face took shape in the gray mists filling her mind's eye.

Via shook her head and snuggled lower into the blanket she'd wrapped around herself. "Just a bit cold." She sipped her mug of hot coffee from the station's cafeteria. "I need you to come to the day-side, and fast."

He frowned. "A little cold? Kid, I can feel the hypothermia from here. What's wrong? I can get there in maybe an hour if you need help."

"I'm fine. It's not for me." She swallowed. "I'm afraid I need you to perform some more autopsies."

After she slipped out of the Caeles a few minutes later, she sighed and, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, rose from the bed where she'd retreated. She had an hour or so before Mitis arrived, assuming he wasted no time hopping on a lander. Back to work. 

She returned to the lander bay, intending to visit the spherical Sublime Light. The cryo-ship had been equipped with excellent environmental sensors that were vastly different than the colony's nanite-based technology. The ship had been designed to not only transport its cryogenically-frozen passengers through the stars but help survey their new home. Its sensors may have detected what the station could not, and no sorcerer could disable or erase records that weren't nanite-based.

Maybe it picked up something useful.

Even with hope surging through her, she still gasped when she stepped onboard the ancient blue cryo-ship, which glowed like a moon in the black lander bay.

The modulated voice intoning on the circular bridge to twenty long-empty cryo tanks spoke in crisp English. "Warning: dangerous geological anomalies detected."

Via hurried to stand beneath the spiral-shaped speaker, though she knew the ship could sense her even from several miles away. "Computer," she said in her stilted English, excitement squeezing the air from her chest and making it hard to form words. "Tell me about the geological activity."

The ship could not initiate a neural link to show her its answer, so Via focused hard on understanding its foreign words as it gave her a purely verbal response. "Fifty hours and thirteen minutes ago, my sensors detected a sudden shift in the pressure and temperature of an underground coal seam in a cavern three miles from here. The resulting subterranean fire produced several toxic gasses, including carbon monoxide. Then I detected an anomalous fissure in the local bedrock that--"