Cold Welcome

^{CHAPTER TEN}

The Long Range Recovery Team’s aircraft could stay up in the huge oval designated as the target area for hours. Long enough to make finding survivors possible, though not certain. SAR-One joined the crew that had brought the plane out. “The more eyes, the better,” Commander Depeche said from the pilot’s seat. “The Rector’s got her undies in a wad over this. Says it’s about the Commandant, but I figure it’s more about her niece or whatever—a Vatta aboard.”

“It’s a hit to Slotter Key’s reputation, too,” McCoy said. “Especially sabotage. The inner worlds have been snooty about us out on the margins for a long time.”

“There’s that,” Depeche said. “Ula, let McCoy have your seat for a while. Take a nap or something.”

“Fine with me.” Ula Maillor grabbed her hot-cup out of its stand on the way out of the cockpit. “I slept the last third of the way to Pingats last night. But don’t think I don’t know you just want to talk politics with McCoy.”

“I live for talking politics with McCoy,” Depeche said.

“Gossip,” McCoy said. “Not politics. You just like the down and dirty.”

Depeche raised an eyebrow. “And you don’t?”

“You know I do. So who’s sleeping with whom that’s new and interesting? Any tagged dirty money?”

“No sex, but there’s a rumor that Vatta Transport is going to reorganize and move its headquarters to the Moscoe Confederation. Slotter Key will just be a regional hub for them.”

“Already heard that. Blondie coming here was public.”

“And the admiral. Between those two and the Rector, they hold the most shares.” Depeche glanced over at McCoy. “And someone I know knows someone who claims the old lady is sure who bombed their headquarters back when.”

“I thought it was the wicked cousin. Whatsisname… Osmar or Osmin or something—”

“Osman. No, not him. He was with that pirate bunch, all right, but he’d been banned from Slotter Key permanently decades ago. They’re thinking the construction firm did it, put the bombs in place in one of the expansions.”

“Paid to do it, or their idea?”

“Guy I know thinks someone hired ’em. Maybe just a foreman or something, maybe the head. But if the Rector thinks it was the head… then heads will likely roll.”

“Can’t blame her for that,” McCoy said.

“No. But it makes life too interesting for the rest of us, her being head of Defense and all our lives in her hand. Made Orniakos furious when she called up and reamed him out for doing his job.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“That Space Defense Force ship Admiral Vatta came with sent their shuttle after the one that went down, when it changed course. Came right down into our airspace without asking permission, live weapons and all, and Orniakos told them to get out and stay out. Rector wanted them left alone on her say-so.”

“Sounds… like a mess.”

“It was. Is. Admiral Hicks is mad at Orniakos for making the Rector mad, and mad at the Rector for not informing him first, and there are rumors all over Region V headquarters about it. At least she asked Hicks to send us, so here we are. I get flight hours, so I’m happy, if no one else is.”

McCoy laughed. “In-law trouble again?”

“No. Kids. Kory’s turning out too much like me, and the school’s nagging at us about him and my so-called parenting style. I just need some time away.”

“Lost prime signal,” Jamie said from the station behind them. “Right on schedule.”

“What’s happened?” Depeche said. He twiddled some controls, scowling at the displays.

“It’s all right,” McCoy said. “We won’t have satellite contact for the duration, but Jamie’s a great navigator. Besides, in this weather it’s dead simple. Miksland to port on the way out and Miksland to starboard on the way back. Just stay in sight of the coast.”

“But what happened to the satellite?”

McCoy shrugged. “Something about Miksland, they told us. Sounded like a lot of hand waving to me, but after all—it is a terraforming failure. For all I know it’s made out of giant magnets or something, but unless you’re way, way high, nothing works right. Jamie, are you running the nav string? What’s the weather and fuel situation?”

“Yes, sir. Tailwind now, and headwind coming back,” Jamie said. “You want sixty-three percent of the fuel for the return trip, or we have to cut overland, and we don’t like that.”

“Why not?” Depeche glanced back over his shoulder.

“Instruments don’t just fail to connect to anything, they go crazy,” Jamie said. “If there’s ground fog or clouds, you can get mixed up easily. Some of the mountains are high.”

“You’d think someone would put a landing strip on that place, even just an emergency one,” Depeche said. “I’d feel a lot safer if they had.”

“Floater!” Seth called from the starboard side. “Debris.”

LRR’s recorder, Van, brought it up on the screen. “Code matches what you found before. Different piece?”

“Looks like,” Seth said.

“I’ll do a circle,” Depeche said. They spotted seventeen pieces of debris, none that looked like a body or a part of a raft, and recorded every marking on them.

“Back on original course,” Jamie said finally. They flew on another hour. This time, Lili Vela saw something first.

“Floater. Orange. Could be a body.”

When Van brought the image up on the screen they could see that it was, at least, an orange survival suit. Missing part of one arm.

“Floater Two,” Seth said, from the other side of the plane. “Appears intact… no… foot missing.” In the next half hour, they found two more bodies. All were clearly dead, all in survival suits, all damaged by either the shuttle crash or sea creatures, and without retrieval capability they could not tell which.

“I don’t suppose there’s much reason to keep going,” Commander Depeche said.

“Do we have enough fuel?” McCoy peered out the cockpit window.

“Yeah, for another hour, about, but why? We’re not going to find anyone alive.”

“We don’t know what happened yet. If there’s more debris—a raft, even empty or damaged—it shows some might have made it down, deployed the rafts.”

“Sure. Fine.” They flew on in silence.

“Floater. Orange. Might be a raft.” Seth pointed; Van zoomed in on it. Oval, the right shape for a raft as they came nearer. Flotation chambers mostly full. Canopy down, water sloshing—he felt cold to the bone suddenly. That water sloshing inside the raft wasn’t a layer over the raft floor; the floor hung down in two ragged—partly ragged—pieces, as if someone had sliced through it.

“Debris got it,” Lili said, peering at the screen. “Puncture marks—shrapnel from an explosion maybe—and then something sharp, some part of the shuttle or personnel module—some of that may be sea life, too—it’s a wonder it’s still afloat.”

“If they had only one raft in the water, that would explain the bodies—whatever did this would’ve killed some, knocked others overboard. The cold would’ve done the rest.”

As the plane circled, Van recorded every detail he could.

“Time to go,” Depeche said. “Have you got what you need?”

“Got it,” Van said. And under his breath, to those in the rear compartment, “I hate this kind of flight.”

“Do you mostly get the bad ones?” Seth asked.

“We’ve had some saves. Found people in rafts, then could tell a ship where they were. But this—without the proper navigational aids—nobody takes a ship through here, do they?”

“Not in my lifetime,” Seth said. He leaned back against the hard seat. “No nav help, no satellite contact, and the water’s cold enough to kill you in less than an hour, even in summer. Ice on it in winter—solid off toward the pole, windblown chunks of it here. Shipping all stays north of Pingat Base, and mostly north of Miksland altogether.”

“And you actually run SAR out here?”

“Practice runs,” Seth said. “This is the first emergency—nobody’s crashed while I’ve been stationed here. So our usual routes are north and west of Miksland. We come here to practice navigation without modern instruments in case we need it somewhere else.”

“You found bodies? How many? Who?” Grace felt her heart skip a beat, start again.

“We don’t know.” Admiral Hicks sounded depressed. “They saw five, and the remains of one raft. This was the Long Range Recovery plane—it can’t land on water and can’t hover; there’s no way to retrieve anything. The bodies had damage; they filmed everything but there are no facial features and we can’t tell if injuries preceded the crash or not.”

“And the total number on the shuttle when it left the station?” She had been told that, but she’d gone blank on it.

“Twenty-eight, Rector. If they were alive and able when the passenger module landed, I’m sure they’d have tried to launch two rafts. If they were all in one, it would be overloaded; the storm that hit the area shortly after they went down could have caused it to fail.” He cleared his throat. “We must consider it likely that no one survived. The weather, the water temperature—no one could survive in it for more than an hour at most. Five bodies—others could have sunk, been taken by sea life—”

“Fish?”

“Most likely, yes. Or cetaceans. If the crew or passengers survived, if they made it into more than one life raft, we would still expect some communication, some transponder signal.”

“And there’s nothing.”

“Nothing at all. I know your particular interest—”

“My primary interest is that Spaceforce personnel, from Private Ennisay to the Commandant of the Spaceforce Academy, were aboard a shuttle that crashed and we haven’t found them,” Grace said. “That my grandniece was on the same shuttle is unfortunate, and yes, of course, I am concerned about her as well. But my duty, as Rector, is to Spaceforce. Five dead we know about but that leaves twenty-three who might be alive. We must not abandon them.”

“Rector, the winter storms are lined up now and we do not have any bases nearer than Pingats to fly from.”

“One more search,” Grace said. “One more, the next day they can. I take your point; I’m not going to insist on risking crews after that, but—”

“One more. We will do that.”

It was over. Grace leaned back in her chair and stared through the solid wall into her imagination: giant seas, tiny rafts rising and falling on them, rain or snow or sleet, howling winds. If they were not all dead, what would they be doing? How long could they survive in that cold, with just the resources in the rafts? Even if they caught a lucky current, and it swept them north out of the polar circulation, that was still winter, still cold. Suppose all twenty-three were alive, and in two rafts—thirty days’ rations for forty would feed twenty-three for… fifty-two days. That would not get them even to midwinter, let alone to spring.

“We have to find them in fifty days or less,” Grace said to MacRobert.

“How?”

“I don’t know. But in fifty-two days, if they’re all alive, they’ll run out of food. We can’t let them starve to death, Mac. We can’t.”

“They can fish,” Mac said. “The rafts have fishing gear.” He grimaced. “If the weather lets them fish. If the fish are there.”

“Water?”

“They have desalinators. Hand-pumped.”

“We need to locate them. Hicks has authorized one more search. They could cut off some of the distance to the search area by flying over Miksland. High altitude, to avoid that communications problem.” Grace cocked her head at him. “If we knew what it was, maybe we could fix it. ISC might have someone—”

“Government’s not going to like involving them, and if crews think flying over part of Miksland is especially dangerous, Hicks isn’t going to push them.”

Grace glared; MacRobert’s return look exuded patience. She sighed. “Mac, sometimes you are annoying.”

“The truth sucks.” His expression offered no hope.

“Yes. It does. Let’s hope the next flight shows something.”

“You know they’ll call off the search,” Admiral Driskill said. “She’s bound to be dead. We should inform our governments that you’re taking over.”

Dan Pettygrew, interim commander of SDF, felt the knot in his belly tighten. “I’m not ready to assume that,” he said. “We’ve been told there’ll be one more search mission, and that the reason for ending the search after that is distance and weather. They could well still be alive.”

From their expressions, none of the other admirals agreed.

“Pordre thinks she may be. He thinks the communications problem is a deliberate event, and thus indicates someone may know they’re alive and be frustrating attempts to find them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Admiral Hetherson said. “No one would do something like that.”

“Oh, they would if they could, but I doubt it’s possible.” Admiral Driskill leaned back. “I wonder if they’ve contacted ISC to ask about it.”

“Have you?”

“No. I’m sure someone at ISC is aware of the problem, given that Admiral Vatta is—was—somewhat involved—”

Pettygrew wanted to wipe the smirk off Driskill’s face, and others, but held his temper. “I will inform the governments when I myself am satisfied that either she is dead, or her absence is impairing our ability to respond to threats. Neither is the case now.”

Pursed lips, sideways glances—but they didn’t argue. Good.

“And now for the quarterly budget review,” Pettygrew said, tapping his stylus on the agenda.