Chapter 38

“Distraction was good; can confirm search results.”

Sam sent that message while drying off after a warm shower and waited for water to boil for the tea she was making. She was chilled to the bone even after a hot shower and wanted the tea and a blanket. When Jeff had sent her the next stage of his plan, she was suspicious, but seeing for herself entirely convinced her. The rumours hadn’t seemed credible at the time, but when she saw Erin Kaya throw Sachiko to the wolves they started to seem far more likely. Jeff was always bitter towards the Kayas, so she had been willing to believe that him trusting the rumours was just a part of his fixation, but she went along with his plan with the slight hope that she could get back at someone who hurt her friend.

Following the schedule, when the morning of the match came, she waited outside her door in the dark as a snow-bike driven by a stranger pulled up. It was the quietest one she had seen since hitting the Antarctic and it was driven without any lights. Even the emergency lights had been stripped off. As she got on and the driver wordlessly started driving, she noticed that the treads were shaped so that they pushed snow back into their tracks as they went, burying their tracks in snow in a quarter of the time it would naturally take. An experienced tracker would be able to follow them, but a casual observer would probably not even notice they had been there.

Midway through the trip they pulled up alongside another bike, a larger one with a trailer filled with equipment and the vehicles were swapped. Sam rode in the trailer as it had more space and, while she was there, double-checked the equipment.

They eventually pulled up at a familiar stony beach as her driver, dressed in too much thermal gear to have any distinguishing features visible, called out to her in a grouchy voice.

“Tell Jeff I’m done after this. Getting the gear here costed as much as I owed him and those cloak and dagger types seriously had me worried.”

After unhooking the trailer, he drove off, leaving her to wonder what Jeff could have done and who the people he was talking about were. Also wondering how she would get back, but that wasn’t her immediate issue and was reasonably confident that something had been planned.

Alone on the stony beach, she pulled a canned tent out of the trailer and let it deploy itself. After she used it to get changed, she rolled the cart into it to prevent it from filling up with snow. When Sam had last been on that beach, the floodlights had kept the area bright. In the dark of the near constant night, her only light was the torch that was built into her thermal dive suit. With a third test of her equipment, ensuring the air takes were full and the battery was water-sealed, she waded into the sub-zero water. Solo diving was never considered safe and diving in general carried some risk. Diving solo in Antarctic waters while no one knew you were there; that was suicidal.

She moved quickly through the water with the aid of a sea scooters that had a bag of tools carefully tied to it. The scooter had a dash cam fitted to it, and for the sake of validity it recorded the whole process. Before long, Sam’s wrist watch lit up, the indication that the distraction was on and she could begin her job. If the intelligence Jeff gave her was accurate, the Kaya company could have a submersible helicopter to her location within five minutes of noticing her. Jeff’s acquaintances would apparently take care of digital surveillance if there was any, and the distraction should hold human attention. Rig combat was a sport that controlled the very borders of nations, as well as being a spectacle to watch, so there were very few people that would have no interest at all in a match between the world champion and the latest technology. That would especially be the case for the people who were willing in a rig-based industry; there jobs could be impacted after all.

She arrived at her destination a minute later, the concentric rings of precious metals that floated there with the engravings of every pilot and mechanist’s name. When she was there before, she hadn’t thought about how it remained in place there. Currents and wildlife could have easily swept it away. Looking beneath it, the answer was apparent. The under side was held by a thin forcefield tube, one that sunk to the frozen bottom of the sea floor. Shining a light down, she could see a full scale forcefield generator, one that had been adapted to function underwater. That was a ridiculous expense, especially when the same job could be accomplished with a metal chain. Diving closer to the device, it started to become clearer. The device wasn’t originally a generator, instead it was a repurposed research submarine. The entirety aside from the generator was buried in the soil, but it was without a doubt a sub.

To be exact, it was the Lanternfish, the submarine used by Hora Homi; the woman who would marry to become Homi Kaya. Hora Homi’s team discovered formless particles as a by-product of their deep-sea research program. It was international team that used a repurposed American submarine, the Lanternfish, to investigate pressures and temperatures normal subs couldn’t stand for long. Being the only research vessel of the time to have a shield generator, a new technology then, allowed them to make a string of discoveries that were the envy of their fields. Homi was there as a biologist and doctor and discovered the formless particles in the shield generator. From then on, her career was spent finding uses for the particles in medicine, which allowed for prosthetic limbs made from them. Homi’s daughter, Erin Kaya then completely overshadowed her mother’s accomplishments when she invented the rig core and changed the entire world.

Despite Homi’s success and fame, the rest of the Lanternfish’s crew faded into obscurity and even the sub itself supposedly went missing.

Knowing that it was a sub and not just a generator, Sam took a spade from the tool bag and dug around the edges until she found what she found the manual release to a half-buried hatch. Prying open the panel and turning the release caused the door to open enough that she could swim in with her tanks off then pull the gear in after her. Inside a small chamber she closed the outer door and started pumping a manual drain. The inner door wouldn’t open with the chamber filled, and she had to pump for several minutes before it was drained enough that she could get through. Making her way through the ship was inconvenient as the sub was on its side, but Sam followed the signs and made her way to the ship’s bridge.

Once there, Sam saw that the majority of the systems were left offline and only the generator and power were functional. When the environmental controls were turned on and a fresh supply of air filled the ship, she took her breather off to save the tank’s supply. Looking at the power display, it seemed that someone was regularly resupplying the ship, and the generator could last, as it was, for around three years without a resupply. Even then, it was equipped with a mining system that would let it dug up its own fuel if there was any around.

While she was looking through the ships computers, she noticed the downward facing windows. The Lanternfish wasn’t just there to hold the monument it place, it acted as a plug to a cavern underneath it. Shining her light and pointing the camera, Sam peered down the cavern. The sub blocked the hole and apparently had pumped the water out, ensuring that the cave was dry. Her light reflected off the black and white cavern soil, soil that was laced with the reflective colour of a rainbow, like the tunnel was itself a cut diamond.

Leaving down a hatch to investigate and only a metal platform that had been drilled in place there, Sam walked down the catwalk that spiralled along the cavern wall. As she went, she could see signs of digging having been done in the frozen soil, like something ball sized had been removed from the walls at those points. When she had descended far enough that the sub was no longer easily visible, she saw what was being dug out. Small black cubes within the ice. They weren’t perfectly cube shaped, but they were still very close; as close as a natural object could get to being a perfect cube while still seeming plausibly natural.

There wasn’t just one or two, there were hundreds around, thousands even. That wasn’t the most socking find, either. At the bottom of the tunnel, she found the frozen bodies of the Lanternfish’s crew, aside form Homi Kaya. Their bodies were encased in ice and preserved, as if they hadn’t aged a day in the three generations that followed.

After making sure that the recording was made, she dug out one of the cubes and placed in in a pressure-proof airbag. When the bag hit the outside pressure, it would rapidly inflate to negate the pressure and float to the surface. From there, she could make her own assent and wind it in with a long cord attached to her tank. She made it back to shore couple minutes later. Where another driver was waiting for her. Thankfully this one was in a snow car and not a bike. The driver had already packed up her tent and attached the trailer; it seemed that she was running late.

The driver directed her to the back cavern of the truck sized vehicle and inside was a small recovery area, complete with shower and kitchenette. After a quick shower and a change of closes she sent a quick message to Jeff to tell him it went well and waited for the water to boil. She hadn’t really spent that long out there, but it felt like longer. When the car dropped her off mid-way and what was probably the original bike returned her home, she was tired. Most of the sunless day was spent in transit and the cold water had brought out the fatigue in her, even if the thermal suit mitigated any danger to her life. The recording she made was copied by each of the drivers as they went and the cube was being preserved within the cold storage stasis of her workspace.

If the rumours were right, then what she found could bring about the end of the Kaya Company. Doing that would hurt Sachiko, but Sachiko had encouraged her to find out the truth for her. Sam hadn’t told Jeff that she had discussed the rumours with Sachiko, but she trusted that Sachiko wouldn’t do anything with what she said. Besides, Sachiko was already busy trying to secure her position as a pilot while the company pushed to have her start training for a management position. Even though Alicia, Sachiko’s mother, had only recently joined Erin in the senior most board position, the company wanted to look more proactive in the face of reduced profit forecasts.

While she sat on a sofa with a blanket over her, a message arrived from Jeff.

“Good work out there. I’ll finish organising a lab and we can get started when the award ceremony begins.”