Exploration 2.1

It takes Selina a few hours to reach Portal Island in her speedboat. She parks it quickly at an empty dock, taking note of the boat that Kamal had reportedly taken, and leaves the equipment that the Alexandria dockmaster had made her take for the trip in the boat. It is after three in the morning, and she tiredly rubs her eye as she heads into the small settlement. It's after-hours for the Dockmaster, and she doesn't want to bother or wake any of the employees if she doesn't have to.
She heads straight for the Portal. The portal's attendant is also asleep, although cameras note Selina's approach. As a citizen in good standing with the training to utilize the portal's systems, no alarms or notifications would go off because of her presence. She just goes right to the computer near the portal.
The portals functioned only for civilizations which had developed wireless network technology. A user was able to connect to a free portal using any computer's wireless connections. A new connection would prompt a message: 'Please enter password between one and five words'. At the beginning, no one had known how the Portals had worked, or any of the passwords required to use them. Today, the portal on Nordic Frog Beach was connected constantly to a server that contained information on all the connecting worlds. The connected computer had its own security and records system, mostly because no one knows another way to restrict portal access. Unless it was disconnected manually, or powered off, no one else could connect to the Nordic Frog Beach portal.
It's the record-keeping system that Selina is primarily interested in. She opens it up and checks the portal's history. It takes her but a few moments to find that Mr. Haasan had traveled to Stormworld. Good. She could go directly there and find a place to rest before setting out after him - provided that he hadn't yet left Port England.
The five-word password to access a world described conditions there. The first word provided the predominant geological condition. Nearly all habitable worlds were designated 'rocky', though other designations existed. The second described atmospheric condition, the third designated whether the world was life-bearing. The fourth described unique local conditions. The fifth word is for planetary type. Stormworld, thus, was 'rocky cloud dead storm satellite'. Its atmosphere was foggy and rainy. Lightning storms were common enough to be described as 'constant'. Stormworld did not have native life, and it was the moon of a gas giant.
Selina inputs the password, and the portal's green circuitry flares to life. Without hesitation, she strides straight through.
Travel through the portals is instantaneous and disorienting. In a moment, the environment changes from an outdoor space on a beautiful subtropical island to an indoor space during a lightning storm. It takes her brain a few moments to process the change. Most portal-jumpers stand stunned for a few moments while they get used to the change. The sound of the rain on the building's stone roof slowly filters through to her. She blinks to get used to the bright artificial lighting, a major contrast to the dim moonlight on Nordic Frog Beach.
Selina looks around. Port England wasn't a "port" in the strictest sense, being atop a rocky spire rather than adjacent to any body of water. It was built like a large old-fashioned train station. It had a huge central chamber, inside of which Selina now stood. The portal stood in the center of the room, balanced on its end on a rocky spire which extended through the floor of the central chamber. Arranged around the room are benches and various kiosks, providing access to information or fabricators. A balcony runs around three of the walls, accessible by staircase. Doors on these three walls access offices or small dorms for explorers on Stormworld to use. The fourth wall has only doors on the ground floor. Selina knows these doors lead to a garage of sorts -- larger-scale fabricators capable of deconstructing and reconstructing various vehicles.
A few people -- maybe a dozen in total -- mill about the Port. A pair here, sitting on a bench, talking over an open terminal. A trio up there, leaning against the railing of the balcony and resting. Nobody takes special note of Selina, although a few look over in her direction when the portal flares to life. Interplanetary travel is old hat to people like this, and she just seems like a rumpled and unprepared lone wolf.
Having taken stock of her environment, Selina connects to the portal using her hand terminal and shuts down the wormhole.
As tired as she is, she needs to make sure that Kamal wasn't anywhere in the Port. She'd feel like a real fool if she went to one of the dorms and passed out while he was still here, only to miss him while she was sleeping.
It doesn't take her long to confirm, with reasonable certainty, that he'd already left the Port. A couple of the hangers-about had seen him earlier, and records in the garage confirmed that someone who had his ID had fabricated a mountain cruiser and left about twelve hours ago. It was long enough that she wouldn't be able to chase him down and catch him by speed, so she just hopes that it takes him more than a day or two to get killed.
Tracking on Stormworld was practically impossible. The constant lightning interfered with electronic surveillance, and the ground was pretty uniformly sharp rocks, meaning nobody left tire tracks or footprints. Visibility was poor because it was foggy most of the time, and humans didn't have any settlements farther out than Port England. Selina checks the Port's surveillance records anyway, sees that Kamal's vehicle was logged headed northwest before it had left the port's scanning range. Selina chews her lip, tapping the table surface of the public computer kiosk that she is using. It wouldn't be easy to find him like this, and she wasn't looking forward to the level of danger that she'd be in, but she did love a good investigation challenge. What's more, when she found him, she'd need to contend with someone who was a possible hostile. Someone who set off a nuke right in the center of New Alexandria. She'd need to be ready when the time came. Kamal was her only lead on the source of that explosion, and she intended to insure that another one wouldn't happen.
For now, though, it was time to get some food and rest.
Another kiosk in the Port provides Selina with dinner -- more nutrient cubes and purified water -- and a quick sign-in gives her access to one of the small dorms that ring the central chamber. The little room is closet-sized, with a twin bed, a bar to hang clothes from, and an outlet for charging. No luxuries for gatecrashers. Selina chows down on her nutrient cubes, washes them down with the water, and then collapses into the bed. She never has any trouble sleeping, and she's unconscious before she can even start thinking about counting sheep.
Selina's sleep is short, and not particularly restful. The constant pounding of rain on the roof, and the boom of thunder echoing in the distance make for a less-than-restful environment despite the Port's best attempts at building-wide soundproofing. She rarely dreams, and today was no exception to that. Instead, she just experiences a darkness filled with a rushing sensation, her eyes swimming with sleep and her body restless as she tosses.
She wakes up after just a few hours.
It's always the same light level on Stormworld, at least where people can live. The light is dim, filtered through layers of clouds and fog, though it changes in direction regularly. The sun hovers just above the horizon and makes a loop all the way around every day. Stormworld is tidally locked, which means one side of the planet faces the sun at all times, and the other side faces away. The extreme heat differences on the two poles cause the storms across the equator, but also allow for the relatively mild temperature.
Waking up with the same grey light streaming in through the window as you had when you fell asleep is a little bit disorienting for Selina, used to the short nights on Nordic Frog Beach giving way to beautiful sunrises. She hauls herself out of bed, pops a caffeine pill, and pulls her jacket back on. There's a mirror in her room, and a small sink, so she washes her face and wets her hair. She smooths out her pants with her palms as best as she can, and runs a hand through her long hair to disentangle a few knots. Thus halfway between disheveled and neat, she opens the door and heads back out into the central chamber.
First, she heads to one of the informational kiosks. Connecting its computer with her hand terminal, she downloads an area map of the known region around Port England. About a hundred kilometers to the west is an permanent Anansi hive, and Selina activates a pathfinding program she's already installed to map a route between Port England and the hive. Selina suspects that the Anansi have better maps than the humans do, and possibly better surveillance equipment as well. If anyone had seen Kamal's vehicle or knew where he might be, it would be them.
Second, she heads into the garage.
The garage is another open chamber, although the ceiling in here is half as high as in the central entryway chamber behind her. Three rows of metal lockers fill the left third of the room. Pits with elevating platforms, like you'd find in a mechanic shop (where the mechanic stands in the pit to perform maintenance on an undercarriage), take up the remainder of the space. Unlike the old-fashioned mechanics' equipment, though, these pits are nanofabricators logged with various designs of vehicles that can survive on Stormworld. Using a terminal in front of each pit, you would select which vehicle you wanted, and then wait a few minutes for the vehicle to be fabricated. Once it was done, the platforms would elevate it to ground level, and you could board and drive it away.
Selina heads over to the lockers. Like everything else here, their contents were publicly-owned, and as long as you safely replaced whatever you borrowed, you had access to whatever you wanted. The lockers were filled with supplies useful for traversing Stormworld, organized by item type.
Selina looks through the lockers for half an hour. From their contents she selects a heavy insulated jacket and hat, thick boots, a pair of trekking poles, and a duffel with dried food and bottled water. Finally, she goes to the weaponry section. She selects an extendable baton with an electric stunner at the end -- an incapacitator -- and an automatic shotgun, which she loads with shot, or pellets. She doesn't want to have to use any weapons, but outlaws on Stormworld were pretty infamous. She doesn't want to be helpless if she gets ambushed for her stuff.
She changes into the new jacket and boots, leaving her Protector uniform behind in the lockers designated for personal belongings. Thus equipped, she lugs her poles, duffel, and weapons to the nearest terminal for vehicle fabrication. A quick check confirms the station's batteries are topped up and a vehicle can be fabricated now. Only a few designs are publicly available, and Selina chooses a mid-size option.
Oversized tires surfaced with thin spikes provide traction on the slick, rocky ground on Stormworld. A Faraday cage deflects lightning strikes from the squat, armored body of the machine. Resembling a miniature military personnel carrier, the vehicle would be large enough for Selina to throw her equipment in the back, pick up more stuff if she needed it later, and to comfortably ferry passengers back home if she needed to. Plus, the mid-size option provided its own lightning reactor, which meant she wasn't in any real danger of running out of energy, provided she was struck by lightning frequently enough.
A few keystrokes and the cover slides over the fabricator she's using. From the inside, a loud whine and low hum issue simultaneously as the machine does its work. A status bar on the station's terminal shows the progress of the vehicle's creation like the loading bar on a computer download: 15%, 22%, 26%, 31%, 38%... After about eight minutes, the fabricator stops humming. Vents open up on either side of the closed panel. Searing steam spills from the vents for an additional minute before the panel opens up again, and the platform raises Selina's new truck up to surface level.
Selina isn't allotted a personal vehicle on Nordic Frog Beach, but driving was still among the skills offered during Protector training. Selina loves to drive, though she prefers lighter, faster vehicles to ones like this. Still, despite the dire circumstances, she can't help but smile as the truck is revealed, steam still billowing from the inside of the fabricator around it. She was going for a drive, during a lightning storm, on an investigation, across the surface of an alien world. Things like this are what she loves about her life in the Protectorate. She used to read stories about Old Earth back in school, fascinated by humanity's homeworld and the lives people had led on it. She had learned early on about corporations and corporate jobs, about how people would spend decades sitting at a desk in an office saving up the money to afford an apartment in a 500-meter tower. As a child, her parents had laughed when she had loudly declared to all that she would never work sitting down.
'Not precisely true', Selina thinks as she sat down in the cab of the truck. Her weapons she throws on the seat next to her, with the duffel and poles getting thrown in back. "Close enough," she adds out loud, as the garage door slides open to reveal the sheet of rain falling on Stormworld's rocky surface. The garage's floor gives way to a sharp decline, and as she drives the first few feet forward, her stomach falls with the front tip of the truck. The truck's suspension bounces as its wheels find ground, and Selina can see the mountain's sharp face drop down into the fog. At the bottom of the mountain, she knew, there would be a rushing white-water river fed by the runoff down the mountain from the rain. Other sharp black spires extend from the fog at varying heights. Her terminal's pathfinding program has finished its calculations, and Selina pulls the map with the route up on the truck's screen as she begins to carefully drive down the first mountain.
It wouldn't be easy to find Kamal in all this mess, but it would probably be some fun.
Go to Exploration 2.2