Night Shift

by Robin Triggs

  “Cruel.”

  Silently we moved pieces. I was already losing, I realized, my position cramped and my options limited.

  “The engineers liked him,” I said. “He had their respect.” Again I moved my knight.

  She said nothing.

  “He could be charming, couldn’t he?”

  “I don’t want to talk about de Villiers, can you not see that?” She broke, broke hard, and in the split second that she was looking up at me, I once more saw the fierceness, the wildcat that she kept so carefully caged, that I’d seen only once or twice since we met. She stared hard at me, mouth half-open before she swallowed and visibly reined herself in.

  Silence. Just the tick of her equipment, the seismometer in the corner and the air-conditioning overhead. Slowly she lowered her head back to the game.

  “Weng,” I said quietly, “you’re going to have to tell someone what happened between you. When the long night is over, someone from the Company is going to want to hear your story. Is going to take your story. You know what I mean – truth drugs, Psych tests. You know what’ll happen.” I paused, wishing I had those things available to me here. “Weng, I promise I won’t tell anyone what you say—”

  “They all know anyway!” she almost shouted. “I hate them, hate them all…I hate them all…” She trailed off.

  I sat in silence, waiting until she was ready. I knew she would talk now.

  “He told me I was beautiful.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, the anger drowned in her pain. She stared through the board. “He… We met up with the others in Tierra and stayed there a week before we came out here. He told me I was beautiful.” She pushed a pawn to the sixth rank, attacking my bishop.

  I sat in silence. I waited.

  “I knew about his family, but it was easy to forget. I could ignore all the photographs in his quarters. I could fool myself that they meant nothing. But he didn’t care for me, not really. He used me. And then he tired of me.”

  “He started a relationship with Fischer?” I prompted. Her last move looked like a mistake and, barely thinking, I took the pawn.

  Now Weng looked up at me. Tears fell from her cheeks and landed unheeded on the board. “Fischer? Yes, Fischer. And all the rest. They’d seen me walking around, happy, and not one of them had – not one of them had thought… They were laughing at me. Laughing at me! The poor, naive little peasant girl, only fit to be eaten up, to be…to be used!” She broke down, crying properly now. But she recovered herself quicker than I’d thought possible. She wiped her eyes and threw her hair back from her face. She ignored the loss of her pawn and switched her queen to the opposite flank.

  She looked at me again, her expression challenging me to make mockery. When she spoke again, she was back in control. “I went to McCarthy. I made a complaint against de Villiers. But he told me that no rules had been broken. Do anything you like as long as the oil keeps flowing, the coal keeps rolling out. Keep the lights on in Brasilia. Let them power their stupid televisions for one more day….”

  “Why did you think that I was here because of you?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her nose as if I was asking something inconsequential. “After going to McCarthy, I wrote to his superior. I complained about both McCarthy and the commander. No rules had been broken? That man – that man, he broke rules every day, every single day, and McCarthy did nothing!”

  “You thought I’d been assigned to look into your complaint?”

  She nodded. We fell into silence.

  After about half a minute, I cleared my throat. I wasn’t quite sure how to ask this.“Weng…”

  She looked up at me, her expression neutral, her posture dignified.

  “Weng – did you kill Commander de Villiers?”

  She smiled grimly. “No, Mr. Nordvelt, I did not.”

  “Can you tell me what you were doing two nights ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing two nights ago, Weng?”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “Alone?”

  She curled a lip back to reveal her teeth. “Yes. And you have lost this game, Mr. Nordvelt.”

  “What?”

  She looked at the board and I saw it – the pawn move that had opened up the diagonal for the bishop, the queen ready to sweep down upon my king.

  I smiled wryly at her. “You realize I’ll have to check the CCTV?”

  “CCTV can be fooled.”

  I looked at her. Did she know I was bluffing? That I’d already established the footage had been blanked? But I couldn’t see anything but defiant pride in her expression. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Don’t put your faith in machines. Don’t put your faith in people. I’d say that you should have no faith at all, Mr. Nordvelt.”

  Chapter Eleven

  And then my compscreen was hacked.

  I’d returned to my rooms for some quiet time, to think, to plan, to reflect. I also had to log de Villiers’s death and Fischer’s accident and Fergie’s new status. Even in this mess, in the chaos and isolation and in the darkness, procedure mattered. To the Company, at least.

  I missed the message at first. I switched on the machine and scanned my fingerprints. Then I set the combi-maker for coffee. It was only when I returned to my seat that I found it.

  I’m watching you.

  Black on a yellow background: impossible to ignore. The usual interface icons were still visible as grayed-out features behind the text. I stared at the screen for a long, long time.

  I felt numb, battered. I should have been angry or afraid, but I just felt…numb.

  Had the hacker needed access to my room? This wasn’t my office; this was my bedroom, my sanctuary. I cast around but couldn’t see anything else wrong, nothing out of place. The ruffle in the bed where I’d not made it properly, my book, the rosewood puzzle box by the compscreen, and the memcard still jacked in to the screen’s side.

  If somebody had been in here, they might have accessed anything. The thought left me cold, although there was nothing dangerous on the card, only personal items. But it would be a violation.

  De Villiers’s datapad was on the work surface where I’d left it. It didn’t look to have been moved, but – but the sweat was cold on my brow. If anyone took the datapad, if they’d seen the message I’d supposedly left for the commander…

  I paced the floor once, twice. I had to do something with the damn thing. Had to get it out of there. Had to talk to Fischer – I was working on the assumption that she’d seen the note, and…and she must be convinced to keep that to herself.

  I took a long, deep breath and cradled my coffee. I sat and tried to remove the hacker’s warning, but it was beyond me – I just didn’t know how to begin. But at least the interface icons still worked, and I was able to cover the message with open files. I brought up the CCTV logs – no surprise to see them blanked for just a few minutes earlier in the afternoon. So was the hacker also de Villiers’s killer?

  The anger I’d been barely aware of, so preoccupied had I been, surfaced unexpectedly. I wanted to punch something. Wanted a fight. I wanted to call Theo and go the full twelve rounds with him – to let him beat me to the canvas and keep getting up until I was nothing but blood and bone.

  But I had work to do.

  I added my notes to the base log as quickly as possible. And then I needed to be elsewhere, doing something definite rather than just sitting and chasing my thoughts round in circles. My mind wasn’t working properly. I had to get out.

  I almost walked into Greigor outside my office. He mumbled an apology and said something about getting an item for Maggie. We made no eye contact and strode off in different directions.

  I needed to know my turf. I’d been putting it off, but now, filled with a restless urgency, an undirected anger, I stalked through corridors, through all t
he public rooms. I wasn’t expecting to find anything in particular, especially not in places as well frequented as the rec room or the canteen. I just felt I had to go there, to stare into corners, to consider and discard impossibilities, to know every space.

  The base was quiet. The engineers were out, at the mine or at the oil platform. The support staff kept mostly to their offices.

  The upper floors revealed no secrets. I went down to the basement, past the laundry and into the storeroom beyond.

  This was a large space, its footprint nearly as big as the whole building and with the base generator at the far end. As far as I knew, only Max had real reason to come down here. I looked down rack upon rack of spare materials: battery packs, sheet metal, wires and cabling…

  It was, in other words, the perfect place for a stowaway to hide. I hoped – I needed – to find something or someone.

  My footsteps echoed around the large, dimly lit space. I walked slowly now, my anger lost in the gloom. The generator growled gently in the far corner. The floor was smooth concrete, the walls breeze blocks. My breath hung in the air.

  I made my way across the floor, skirting machine parts, spare tools and stacks of boxes. I wondered if this was where Max got the parts for her sculptures. I looked with interest at a dump of surveillance equipment: scanners and cameras and fittings.

  I saw nothing out of place, no sign that anyone had been hiding down here. And the more inescapable the realization that I’d found no one to blame, the more the frustration grew.

  The air was becoming warmer as I approached the far corner of the chamber; the generator, fueled from an oil tank which in turn was fed directly from the refinery, released ambient heat into the room. It wasn’t until I was about ten yards away, when I was beginning to sweat, that I saw that I was wrong. The generator should have been carefully insulated to reduce wastage, but part of the cladding had been ripped clear. The metal of the engine was exposed, and the cladding itself rolled away to build a little insulated extension. A still had been built in the warm. It looked like it had been fashioned by a medieval alchemist; a dark, viscous liquid was gently simmering through glass pipes and beakers, becoming steadily lighter as it went. Eventually it dripped into a large metal tub.

  I went to the tub and sniffed at it. The oil-alcohol smell was so strong that my eyes started to water.

  I fought down the urge to kick it over, to smash the equipment to pieces. I settled for slamming my foot into the cladding, shaking my tears into the brew.

  Breathing heavily, I stood and thought for a few minutes, finished my search of the basement, then went back upstairs.

  * * *

  I checked my suit carefully before I went outside. I had left this too long; I should have visited all the external buildings the day I arrived. How would I know if anything had been moved or altered? But no use worrying. I visited the garage, the cold store, walked around the coal shed and the oil tanks. Spent an empty moment by de Villiers’s corpse.

  Snow crunched beneath me as I crossed to the mineral sheds, where iron bars were stacked, ready to be dragged by crawler trains back to the coast. A giant truck crouched in the corner of this warehouse, evidently the way that the ingots were shunted here from the smelting plant. But none of these buildings were heated, and nowhere did I see any sign of an interloper.

  I had hoped to visit the mine today, and the derricks that pumped up the oil. But it was already getting late, and it had been a long day. I decided to make Maggie’s lair my last port of call.

  The hydroponics lab was the largest building in the complex, at least in terms of its footprint. It looked like a massive row of conjoined greenhouses, just like the Company hothouses that you saw on the shuttle into London. All told it covered about a quarter of a square kilometer. I entered through an airlock – a proper one, not like the vestibule into the barracks – and waited for about a minute before I was allowed into the building beyond.

  It was like being in a tropical paradise. I felt a moment of overwhelming heat before my suit adjusted.

  Rows of large planters stretched away from me on either side. Each of them was around a meter from base to top, and made of aluminum or some similar metal; they terminated in a clear plastic lip, another foot or so high. Inside those I could see liquid swirling gently, and in the liquid grew plants.

  On the nearest benches, a cereal was growing, green and unripe. Beyond that I could see half-grown bushes, and fruit plants, and…and many different kinds of vegetation. More than I’d ever seen in my life, and many more than I could identify. A small machine crawled along the floor. It seemed to be scanning the plants. It paused by a specimen, then reached out an extending arm to snip off a particular twig. It caught the item and fed it into its body. Then it trundled onwards, blades at the ready.

  Over all of the planters hung great artificial lights, long strips linked to the ceiling by slender wires. They were all on, but seemed to be filtered slightly so the light that shone down on the plants was a sort of blue-yellow.

  There was a noise behind me; I spun round, adopting some sort of ridiculous crouch as if I were a gunslinger.

  It was Greigor. Only Greigor, stepping round a row of planters, carrying a can in one hand. He raised his free hand in greeting, but there was no smile for me. I’d never seen him smile, not at anyone. Just those deep brown eyes looking down on me.

  I began to breathe again. I hadn’t even realized how on edge I was, how paranoid this affair had left me.

  “Mr. Nordvelt,” Greigor said, his tone light – disingenuously so if his expression was anything to go by. “What brings you here?”

  I straightened slowly. “I came to see Maggie.”

  He nodded. “She’ll be in her office. Far corner.”

  Before I could reply, he’d stalked past me in the direction he’d indicated with his eyes. I hesitated before following, unsure if he was leading me or not. I didn’t try to keep up – I let him pull away a little, in fact. I wasn’t sure of much, but I knew I had little inclination to talk to him – not before I’d found out more about his background and why de Villiers had seen fit to issue him a reprimand.

  Around me the vegetation still amazed. I encountered two more of the little gardening machines before I came across the professor.

  “Making the Antarctic green?” I said by way of a greeting. Greigor was a few dozen paces away, pretending to study some kind of shrub.

  Maggie smiled and wiped her hands on her already-besmirched lab coat. “Anders, hello! Welcome to the future of Antarctica! Are you here for the tour?”

  “Just looking around, thank you.” I wanted to smile back, but Greigor’s presence was a sour note in the air.

  “You’re welcome here anytime, you know,” she said. “I spend a lot of time here, just me and Greigor and my little machines, so I always like to have visitors.”

  “I need to ask you a few questions, I’m afraid.”

  “Come on, let’s go to my office. We’ll have a coffee and a chat.”

  “I’d rather see where you grow the marijuana,” I countered, a little sharper than I’d intended. I didn’t dare look to see Greigor’s reaction.

  Maggie froze for a moment before turning to face me properly. She gave a rueful smile. “How did you find out?”

  I shrugged. “How else can you obtain drugs in a place like this?”

  “I’ll show you the plants, of course. And it’s hemp, by the way, not marijuana. Officially, at least. I confess I’ve tried to subtly ‘up’ the recreational characteristics of the strain. But are you sure you wouldn’t like a chat first?”

  I couldn’t see why it’d make a difference.

  Her ‘office’, as she called it, was half cozy academic’s lounge and half laboratory. It was contained wholly within the greenhouse, and resembled it in some ways. Planters again ran down the center of the room. The main difference was
that the lab also had places to work, with benches, esoteric equipment and a fume cupboard at one end. The planters were all filled with growth – some tiny seedlets, one a great bush that was threatening to spill out of its container. I wandered along the row and there, tucked away half-hidden at the back, was a single specimen: a leafy plant that had the typical fingered leaves of the cannabis plant. Both leaves and stem were so dark a green as to be near-black. The veins across the leaves were much, much paler and almost glowed under the ultraviolet light that had been set up over it.

  I bent forward to look at it in more detail. A great, heady smell of marijuana rose from it. I reached out to stroke a leaf.

  “Don’t touch that!” Maggie snapped.

  I pulled my hand back as if burned, and looked round at her in surprise.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to shout. That’s a new strain, Greigor’s research project – nothing to do with what you came here for. The stem is very fibrous, good for fabrics – but he’s transfected genes from the nightshade plant to build on that. It’s poisonous.”

  “Poisonous?”

  She nodded. “Very. That’s not the crop we smoke, believe me. That’s the thing with genetic splicing – you’re never quite sure how it’s going to come out. Touching it wouldn’t have done you any harm, but you might have damaged the plant. It’s the only healthy example of that particular variety.”

  “You didn’t make much attempt to hide it from me,” I muttered as I crossed back to her.

  “Why should I? I told you, this is serious work. Could clothe the world, this stuff. We’re fully authorized to do this – the world needs fabrics as much as it needs power.”

  “But if it’s poisonous—”

  “Poisonous, yes – not venomous. But you’re right, we need to work out how to process the fibers so they’re safe. That’s a later phase.”

  “Why this combination? Why—”

  “Because they work. They produce something that’s tough, durable and flexible. That’s science.”

  “You care a lot for your research.”