Jewel (14 page)

“Feels like home!” Erik announced as he stepped off the
Euripides
’
landing shuttle in the fierce winds and driving snow of the tiny island in the
northern sea. The temperature was about ten degrees below zero and the biting
winds made it feel a thousand times worse than that, but Erik didn’t seem to
mind as he looked around with the hood of his parka pulled back. He actually
appeared to be enjoying himself.

Jewel wasn’t.

Her home planet, Luxor, had large swaths of tropical jungles
that had been mostly cut down and even larger deserts. It was either hot and
wet or hot and dry. You had to go to the small polar regions to find this sort
of driving cold and that wasn’t the sort of place she and her family had
visited that often.

She stepped tentatively off the shuttle and shuddered
against a blast of arctic wind. She’d thought the cold on the space station and
the colonizer ship had been bad, but this wind made the frigid air down here a
thousand times worse.

Erik turned about and flashed a wide grin. “Isn’t this
wonderful, Jewel?” He took a deep breath, basking in the chill.

Jewel tried to sink deeper into her winter gear, hiding from
the wind. “There’s nothing good about this cold,” she muttered, but Erik had
already turned around. He practically bounced as he crossed the landing field.

As she struggled through the wind after him and toward the
first pre-fabricated dome in the small settlement, she decided that while she
might not like Luxor very much, she really preferred hot to cold.

Shall I raise your body temperature for you, Luxora?
her bioware asked.

No!
Jewel insisted.
You will not make any
alteration to my body chemistry without my specific permission.

But you’re shivering
, Spy cajoled her.
Wouldn’t
you be more comfortable if you let me tweak your body temperature upward until
you get indoors?

Absolutely not
, Jewel repeated.
No messing with my
body chemistry. Now, were you able to gather the data I requested?

Of course
, Spy reported. The program actually sounded
insulted by the question.
By what prioritization scheme would you like me to
report on my findings?

Ahead of Jewel, the miner, Glorious Strongheart, started
burrowing into the drifts around the walls of the dome, searching for an
entrance to the structure. It would have been easier if the drifts weren’t
actually roof-high in many cases.

Erik stopped admiring the weather and hurried to help the
man. A half-dozen members of
Euripides
’ crew, including the four who had
searched Brynhild Station with Erik and Jewel, hurried after him. Jewel was all
in favor of hard work, but she didn’t intend to start digging in snow if she
could help it.

Is there power down here?
she asked.

Affirmative. Snója is powered by a still functioning
nuclear reactor.

Snója?

That’s the Ymirian name for this facility
, Spy
explained.
It means snow, aptly enough.

Jewel wondered if the bioware were trying to be funny. Many
of her friends had reported that their respective bioware packages showed great
senses of humor, but Jewel had never noticed that trait in her own. Not that
she had time to ponder the issue now.
I assume there are computer terminals
in this structure ahead of us?

Yes
, Sapphire confirmed.
Would you like to see a
schematic showing their locations?

That won’t be necessary
, Jewel told her.
Just make
certain that three or four are on and that they aren’t password protected so I
can sit down at a terminal and have an excuse to find all the data you’re going
to feed me.

Ahead of her, Erik and Strongheart finally found the door to
the structure, making it possible for them to finally get out of the wind, if
not the cold.

Sapphire appeared to read Jewel’s mind, something she wasn’t
supposed to be able to do except in the narrow parameters of sub-vocalized
instructions.
Would you also like me to turn the heat on in the building?

Jewel sighed.
Would I like it? Yes. But it wouldn’t be
smart so you better not. It’s going to be hard enough keeping you secret
without having you start dropping clues like turning on and off the lights.

* * * * *

“Hey, this terminal is in power down mode,” Erik said. It
had taken them more than four hours to get into the building and they were
exploring now with flashlights. “Someone left it logged on and it’s still
active after all these years.”

He immediately sat down in front of the terminal and tried
to access its software. “Hey, I’m really in,” he crowed. “What a stroke of
luck. Let’s see what we can find out about this place.”

His fingers punched the keyboard while Jewel wandered about
preparing to discover another active terminal.

Erik chuckled. “Oh that’s cute,” he told them. “They call
this station Snow.”

Jewel dutifully laughed like the rest of the people trying
to warm up in the frigid building.

“I’ve found a lighting and internal temperature control,”
Strongheart told them. He manipulated the console and luminous panels on the
ceiling eliminated the darkness. “Are there any objections to my seeing if the
furnace still works?”

“Be my guest,” Erik told him. “These computers are a big
break. Maybe we’ll get lucky there too.”

Jewel sat down in front of another terminal.
Okay
,
she ordered,
why don’t you start by putting a map of this colony up on the
screen?

The entire colony?
Spy asked.
Or just this
settlement?

This settlement, of course, but be sure to include the
mine. That’s what they’re all interested in.

There is no mine at the Snója settlement
, Spy
informed her.

Oh, that’s just great
, Jewel mentally hissed.

Spy apparently missed her sarcasm.
Yes, it is most
fortunate. While your crewmates may be able to gather limited additional
supplies of raw armenium stored on the far side of this settlement, it is
unlikely that they have the ability to reach the actual mine.

Which is where?
Jewel asked.

The map on her terminal screen shifted to include a section
of the northern sea to the west of the island.

The mine is situated forty-two miles off the west coast
of Snója beneath approximately four-thousand, two-hundred and fourteen feet of
water.

That’s approximate, huh?

This time the bioware might have caught her sarcasm.
If
you would prefer more accuracy—

“What have you found here, Ms. Aurora?”

Despite his bulk and atypical proportions, Glorious
Strongheart moved like a cat. His sudden appearance behind Jewel completely
startled her. “I, um, I just asked it to show me the mine,” she said.

“And it brought you here?” Strongheart asked as he pointed
at a tiny icon on the screen off the coast of Snója. He did not sound happy.

Jewel considered playing dumb but her pride wouldn’t let her
stomach it. “Yes,” she said.

“Can you blow that image up for me?” he asked.

Jewel picked up a terminal stylus from a place it had
probably sat for two decades. It felt ice-cold beneath her fingers as she used
it to expand the small space around the icon until it filled the entire screen.

“That’s it,” Strongheart said. “They even named the spot.
Hey Exec, what does the word ‘Surtheim’ mean to you?”

Erik rose from his terminal and crossed the domed habitat so
he could join Strongheart in looking over Jewel’s shoulder. “Surtheim was the
home of Surt—the Fire Giant,” he told them.

Strongheart pointed at the screen again. “Does that sound
like a good place to find armenium?”

* * * * *

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to look down from orbit
and find something under a mile of seawater?” Peron asked via the com unit four
hours later.

“Just keep looking,” Captain Kiara told him. She was also on
the bridge, her voice carrying to the crew on the moon’s surface through the
open com-link. “Are you sure about this, Aurora?”

Jewel was getting damned tired of everyone turning to her
for their answers—especially since she thought what they were doing was
fundamentally unwise. It had been a major mistake to let Strongheart catch her
finding information in the settlement computers. “The mining platform is
clearly listed in the Snója inventory,” she told everyone. “In fact, there were
two platforms, Jörmungadr I and Jörmungadr II, but they lost one pretty early
on in their time here.”

“What’s that term mean?” Peron called out. “And why did
these Ymirians have to make everything so hard to pronounce?”

“It’s from another myth,” Erik said. “This one refers to the
Midgard Serpent, a monster responsible for storms and tempests at sea.”

“And you’re sure it sank somewhere near the mine?”

Jewel stepped back in and picked up the story. “That’s what
the records say. The first mining platform went down and they lost a lot of
people on it. After that, they got a lot more careful about basic maintenance.
Apparently the water is quite corrosive here—not acidic as far as I can
tell—but hard on plastics, polymers, rubber and just about every sort of synthetic
they brought down with them. I haven’t been able to find out yet if they knew
what was causing the trouble, but it was something in the water, and maybe the
snow.”

“The snow?” Kiara repeated. “Are you telling me my shuttle
may already be damaged?”

Jewel sought out Erik’s eyes, wondering how to answer that.

He shrugged unhelpfully in reply. “We haven’t been able to
ascertain that yet, Captain,” he announced. “Do you want us to break off our
search and return to the ship?”

Jewel expected the captain to vehemently reject that idea,
but she surprised Jewel. She actually considered Erik’s question for several
seconds before responding. “No, I think withdrawal would be premature. Mr.
Strongheart, are you telling me you think you and your people can mine the
armenium, even under a mile of seawater?”

Like the captain, Strongheart hesitated before answering.
“Those wouldn’t be ideal conditions. If we still had a sea platform to operate
off, I’d be more inclined to give you a blanket assurance. But, no, I’m not
sure we could reopen their mine based on the equipment I’ve seen left down here
so far.”

That equipment included a large seagoing boat in dry dock
together with two smaller, speedier looking craft. There was also a large
stockpile of all-environment suits—each heavily patched—that could be used for
underwater work and a wide array of tools that had quite satisfied Strongheart
when he’d first looked them over.

“So why are we spending time on this, Strongheart?” the
captain asked. “If we can’t open the mine again, why are we looking for a
sunken mining platform?”

“Two sunken mining platforms,” Strongheart corrected her.
“And as to that, the reason is quite simple. If Surtheim was like any of a half
dozen underwater mines that I’ve worked on over the course of my career, then
it had a significant stockpile of harvested ore sitting on the platforms at the
time those structures sank. If we’re lucky, the Ymirians even dumped the raw
armenium into sealed cargo containers for us like the ones they stored on the
Genesis
.
So no, I don’t think it’s practical for us to try to open the mine again
without a working platform, but if we can find the sunken Ymirian platforms and
dive to them, we could potentially recover several dozen tons of additional
ore.”

Jewel watched as the words “several dozen tons” sank into
the minds of the crewmembers listening to Strongheart’s end of the
conversation. It took a moment, but the frowns quickly turned into happy smiles
again. Every last one of them was thinking about the millions of solars those
tons of ore might earn them, and ignoring the intense dangers that recovering
that ore would subject them to.

“Excuse me, Captain,” she interrupted, “but are we
forgetting that there is a reason these mining platforms sank? Or that the
state of all of the equipment we found is at best sub-optimal? This is not the
simple salvage mission that you and Mr. Strongheart appear to be discussing. It
is very possible that lives will be lost if we pursue the course that Mr.
Strongheart is proposing.”

“Ms. Aurora is not a miner,” Strongheart reminded everyone.
“We’re professionals. We know our trade and we understand the risks.”

“I’ll bet the Ymirians thought the same thing,” Jewel
argued, “and look at what happened to them.”

Strongheart didn’t seem impressed. “You’re mixing fruits and
vegetables. We don’t know what happened to the Ymirians.”

“Yes, we do,” Jewel shot back. “They died out there, on the
sea, trying to bring up this armenium.”

Thanks to the information Spy had dug up for her, Jewel knew
her assertion was mostly true. She was still working through the documentation,
but out of a colony of some one thousand miners and support personnel they’d
lost at least four hundred and twenty to water-related disasters in the
mine—and that was before the last platform went down.

She shook her head in disgust. She’d only just started
reading about those dark days in the logs, but it was obvious now why the
people on the station had committed suicide. They’d mobilized everyone they had
for the relief effort and due to a series of catastrophic equipment failures,
lost most of them too.

“I think we have to operate on the assumption that the
miners know their business,” the captain announced. “We’ll give your plan a
try, Mr. Strongheart. What do you need from me?”

“Well you could start by sending my people,” Strongheart
said, “and whatever equipment my number two tells you we need.”