Linton Chronicles - Lodestar Laboratory
04 Apr 2018Andrew Linton
Previously13Apr3304, Lodestar Laboratory, Merope 1 b
It's a short hop from Pleione to Merope. The Lodestar Laboratory, where Dieter Wegener lived with his wife and two children is on Merope 1 b, some 2,000 light-seconds from the primary star. The moon is a rocky body with gravity at 0.13g.
The lab sits in a hot, sandy desert. It has medium security and there's a 1.5 kilometre exclusion zone, so I land and jump into one of the scarabs; I part drive, part fly over the terrain. As I approach I see that the base is quite small; a single tower for the offices and accommodation and a handful of buildings on each side of the central platform.
Lodestar Laboratory, Merope 1 b
I drive up one of the ramps and there's another exclusion zone. I grovel to a security officer until he agrees to let me come inside the main building.
The station head, Janis Struve, comes to meet me in person and we go to her office. She's taller than me by a good ten centimetres and is thinner at the waist by an even larger margin. Her sandy hair exactly matches the regolith surrounding the base while her emerald eyes look like gems embedded in a matrix of granite, however geologically inaccurate that might be.
"How can I help you, Commander Linton?"
"I'm looking into the disappearance of Lena Wegener and her children from this base. What can you tell me about that?"
Her expression is impenetrable, like her face actually is made of rock. She folds her arms defensively.
"I don't think there's anything I can tell you."
"Surely you want to know what happened to her and the little ones?" I say with my best pleadingly persuasive face. Guilt does the trick and she relents.
"I remember it, of course, but most people went to the panic room after the attack started. We didn't see the assailants, so I can't help you there. It was six hours later that we realised Lena had been kidnapped."
"When was this?"
"I'll have to look that up in the report. It wasn't an isolated incident, you know; there's a constant stream of commanders, funded by competing factions, who come here to scan our data. They do enormous damage to the base, routinely taking out the power supply and destroying the defence turrets."
"What about surveillance recordings? Do you keep them?"
"Yes, we need to keep them for the accountants. So much of our budget goes on repairs, we need the evidence to support our expense claims."
"If I could take a look at them, I'd be grateful."
She sighs.
"I'll arrange that for you and look up the date, but meanwhile why not wait in our mess and take some refreshment?"
I understand she wants to be rid of me.
"I'd rather take a look at the Wegeners' quarters."
She hesitates, then summons her assistant, who takes me to the third floor.
The apartment is comfortable, but not luxurious; it's sparsely furnished and has few personal or valuable items. Luckily for me, it looks as though nothing has been moved since the family was snatched. I pick up a few chairs that were knocked over in the raid and wander from lounge to kitchen to bedroom.
In the top drawer of a bedside table I find what looks like a PDA, but not of any recognisable brand. There's still some life in the battery and I power it up. I see an inbox and tap on the only entry. It's weird; the document that opens consists of strange symbols rather than letters. They look like Kanji characters from old Earth.
I notice a fingerprint pad on the side, so I guess that there's decryption software built into the device which does a translation for the owner, but for nobody else. I decide to take it with me.
Down in the security suite, I start looking at the surveillance footage. The recordings have been edited to hold only the incidents when damage was incurred and I silently thank the tidy mind of the accountant who made this happen; otherwise I would have needed to trawl through days and days of cameras looking at nothing happening.
I start at 16Feb3304, the date of the last known communication with Dieter Wegener, and the day he travelled from Stargazer to The Gnosis. Ship after ship arrives taking pot shots at the base's power supply and scanning the data-link. Even this is getting tedious when Struve's assistant arrives to tell me that the date I'm looking for is 21Mar3304.
I go straight to the files for that day. The first one is a solo commander who drives around the base, pausing at each turret, as though on a reconnaissance. Then the driver comes up a ramp, starts shooting at the power supply, and then goes away. Seems to me he's testing the defences, measuring the response.
A mere twenty minutes later, according to the clock on the recording, the second attack begins. Five combat ships with individual paint-jobs ignore the exclusion zone and start firing at the defence turrets, one each. Then five SRVs with paint-jobs matching the combat ships approach the base. They're coloured pink, orange, white, blue, and brown. Between them they destroy all the comms links on the base and then line up on either side of the main platform.
Of all the ships I wasn't expecting, a Dolphin swings into view and, bold as anything, lands right at the centre of the base. Six heavily armed commandos rappel down from the ship and head for the main tower; they're led by an exceptionally tall man who directs them mostly with hand gestures. The SRVs continue to patrol but there's no opposition by this time.
A while later they emerge surrounding a woman and two smaller figures, all kitted out for the short walk to the Dolphin. It's clear to me that this is Lena, Klaus, and Elke Wegener. They're bustled into the ship and everyone leaves. I try to get a name or ID off the ship but there's nothing visible. I rewind and capture a still of the gang's leader, but his height is the only distinguishing feature; he's a whole head taller than the rest.
Is kidnapping really so commonplace that these events are reduced to the appendix of an insurance claim for damage to property? It would seem so, since nobody troubled to alert Lena's family or the security services.
I'm wrapping up, thinking I've got everything I'm likely to get from Lodestar Laboratory, and planning my next move to visit The Gnosis, when a message pops up on my PDA.
Under other circumstances I would ignore such an offer while I'm in the middle of a job but two things sway me. First, The Gnosis is over in the ancient Guardian territory about 1,000Ly away. This will mean fifty jumps in the Corvette I've just acquired; it will be only a small detour to visit Rafaela. Second, I know someone at Obsidian Orbital who might be able to make sense of the symbols on the device I found in the Wegeners' apartment. It looks like I'm going to Maia.