Indra Station

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “I didn’t really look at it like that, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that. A lot.”

  “As have I. I am presently designing a ship with what I believe to be the necessary capacity to take the role of the so-called ‘diamond’ ship that you will have piloted.”

  Lex finished walking Squee and headed for the parking lot. “I’m not saying I’m getting married because I’m pretty sure I was already married by the time that happened, but it’s the sort of thing that lurks in the back of my mind, you know? Do I even have a choice? When something that will happen has already happened, does that mean I’m helpless to change it? Do I endanger the timeline if I try?”

  “Yes, no, no.”

  “… I already forgot the order of my questions.”

  “Do you even have a choice? Yes. It just so happens that your choice will produce that result. Does that mean you are helpless to change it? No. We have observed that there are divergent timelines. You could easily shunt yourself into one of them. Do you endanger the timeline if you try? No. Timelines are never destroyed. They simply become inaccessible to the individual responsible for the divergence. You, at most, risk producing a new timeline distinct from the one we had intended to access.”

  “And how exactly is that different?”

  “It is effectively identical from your point of reference, but coupled with the issue of choice, it is also unlikely.”

  Lex hopped into his car, followed quickly by Squee.

  “You’re doing a pretty lousy job of decreasing my existential ennui, Ma.”

  “I apologize. As a consolation, please also consider the following logical conclusions that result from your own reasoning. As you have encountered a future version of yourself, and the actions of that future version of yourself were pivotal in your own survival, it is logical to assume that you must furthermore survive until that future point in time. While this does not present a solution to your emotional quandary, it does provide you with the rare distinction of being absolutely certain of your own survival until the completion of that time-displaced task.”

  Lex raised his eyebrows. “Like… you’re saying I’m invincible?”

  “That is one possible interpretation of the temporal consequences of your meeting.”

  “Huh…” he said. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Please also consider the following. It is possible that you were not married in that future time. You may simply have developed an affinity for jewelry.”

  “Ha! Yeah. Good point.”

  Lex piloted his hovercar out over the rocky wastes beyond the city limits. He’d be taking the scenic route to the bar. It would give him time to continue the chat that, for the first time that evening, was beginning to take the edge off the feelings that weighed on his mind.

  #

  Milliner rocked back and forth on the back legs of a chair as he watched the various screens and checked his slidepad periodically. The rest of his crew had arrived not long after he’d secured the cooperation of the technician, so now all that remained to be done before pulling the trigger was to sit and wait for the signal.

  “So, uh… do you have any more assignments for me?” the tech said, sitting uncertainly in the chair across from Milliner.

  Milliner glanced at him. “Not yet. Sooner or later you’re going to have to get any of the other nearby crew rounded up in here.”

  He nodded. “I can do that. That’s easy. This is the control node, so there’s plenty of reasons to get all hands gathered up here. Anything else?”

  “You sure got eager in a hurry,” Milliner said.

  “Well, you work for Kelso, right?”

  Milliner raised an eyebrow. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “It’s pretty obvious you’re part of some kind of syndicate, and it isn’t Patel’s crew. If anyone would try making a move against Patel, it’d be Kelso.”

  “You know, being too clever is a reason to shut you up, right?”

  “I’ve been on both sides of Patel’s business. Legit and otherwise. I can’t seem to get anything going. You think maybe if I make myself useful, I can skip a few rungs on the ladder in Kelso’s organization?”

  “Depends on just how helpful you think you can be. Sooner or later we’re going to need to get this whole thing pumping its power up to the station. Do you know how?”

  “Uh… no.”

  “That’s not a good start.”

  “But I know who can! We’ve got an engineer, she’s in the east node right now. Madeline Ecks. If you get her in here, you’d better believe she can get it up and running.”

  “Good to know. You’ll have to single her out to us once we round up your crew.”

  “Anything else?”

  “This whole thing is a big transmitter, right?”

  “… Yes,” Anand said, with all the certainty of a student who wasn’t expecting to be called on.

  “In case you didn’t notice, the data network is mostly down.” He thumbed through his notes on the slidepad. “Our eggheads back home suggested we could use it to send one-way messages to pretty much anyone in the hemisphere.”

  “Oh, right! Right, yeah. That’s easy. That’s this setting here.”

  Anand turned and brought up a communication menu on the main console. Milliner grinned.

  “I’d say I’m going to be able to put in a good word for you, techie.”

  #

  Lex’s conversation with Ma lasted for most of the ride to the bar. He’d taken his time, hoping that perhaps that would give Michella a chance to show up. Naturally, no luck on that front. He found a place for his hovercar not so far from the bar and gave Squee one last chance to stretch her legs before he stepped inside.

  Unlike the restaurant, the bar was in one of the older and more established neighborhoods. That meant it had a little more grit and a little more character than the places custom built for the sort of audience they were hoping to attract with the league. The owners of this bar had gone with a retro styling. That meant lots of simulated neon, for starters. The furniture was wood and had earned that unmistakable barroom patina the natural way, through a few years of spilled drinks and general drunken rambunctiousness. The name over the door was Rho’s, and it managed to find what might have been the single point of overlap in Lex, Michella’s, and Preethy’s tastes. Rough and crude enough to be interesting, but respectable and calm enough that you could be relatively sure you wouldn’t be stabbed unless you said something to deserve it. Lex had taken to hanging out there. That would probably have to end once the season started and the crowds started pouring in. Fun as it was to revel in the adulation of an adoring crowd, packing a few hundred of them into a small bar would get old in a hurry. Until then, he had the rare luxury of a place where everyone knew his name but none of them particularly cared.

  There were a half-dozen people in the bar, which for a weeknight on a sparsely populated planet like this was a pretty good crowd. Notably absent, though, were Michella and Preethy.

  Lex checked his slidepad. The network hadn’t come up even briefly, and thus he had no messages. If he’d been thinking, he would have asked Ma if she could set up some sort of relay through the ship to keep at least him in touch, but it would have been pointless in this case, as all the people he was waiting for still wouldn’t have been able to contact him. The time was 10:21. If Preethy’s calendar was to be believed, she should have wrapped up her last meeting of the day twenty minutes prior. That wouldn’t have meant much if it was Michella, but Preethy’s time as a secretary had elevated her punctuality to the point of mania.

  “Who you looking for?” asked the bartender, who knew a missed connection when he saw it.

  “I was expecting to meet Preethy and/or Mitch in here. Have you seen them?”

  “Not today.”

  “Uh… Set me up with a beer, would you?” he said. “And a water for the little lady here.”

  He plopped int
o a booth and kept his eye on the front door. Squee stood on the back of the booth and sniffed at the patron in the next seat. As Lex nursed his beer, he felt the irritation and frustration start to steadily shift to concern.

  Having a slidepad usually meant you couldn’t get away from information. Now all he could do was sit and wonder. Sure, Michella was known to disappear for days at a time. Usually she gave some sort of an indication of that. Ma had said she was still in the orbit of the planet. What the hell was she doing there? This wasn’t Golana. There wasn’t a massive orbital transit hub. At least, not that he knew of. And what of Preethy? She had an important job. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that she would have been held at a meeting, but in all the time Lex had known her, she’d never even missed a call. Last time she’d had a meeting run long during a network outage, she’d sent an underling to personally deliver the message that she would be late.

  His mind plunged in tighter little circles of concern. After a half hour he was left with half a warm beer, some heartburn from the expensive dinner, and a knot of anxiety in his stomach. The bartender marched over in time to see him push his unfinished beer aside with an air of finality.

  “You want me to get you a fresh one?” he asked.

  Lex grabbed Squee and tossed some chips on the table. “No more drinks. I’ve got some driving to do. If Mitch or Preethy show up, tell them I went to talk to Mr. Patel.”

  The bartender looked at the clock on the wall, then looked back to Lex. “Nick Patel?” He seemed unconvinced.

  “That’s the one.”

  “You’re going to pay a visit to Diamond Nick Patel in the middle of the night?”

  “I’d rather give him a call, but infrastructure is conspiring against me. Besides, it’s not even eleven yet. I’m sure he’s a night owl.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “It wasn’t my first choice. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Lex marched out the door and headed for his car.

  Diamond Nick Patel. In a way, he was the source of most of Lex’s current strife. The man was the official leader of Patel Construction and the majority owner of ORIC. It was also an open secret that he was the head of his own criminal organization. Preethy insisted that Nick was “pivoting away” from that side of things, however. The league was his big foray into entirely aboveboard business dealings. As far as Lex knew, Nick hadn’t dirtied his hands with the organized crime side of his multipronged business strategies for months. That was mostly because Lex made it a point to avoid knowing anything Mr. Patel didn’t want him to know. Plausible deniability was pretty darn important when you had a brief but notable history of mob entanglements and found yourself in the orbit of another mobster.

  Lex had managed to keep his association with Nick as cordial as it was rare, but that was about to change. Since Patel was the mastermind behind one hundred percent of the industry that made Operlo economically viable, if anyone was going to have any answers, it was going to be him. The tricky bit would be asking the questions. Lex had only once found himself on the wrong side of Patel’s good graces. His nose was still a little crooked from where the mobster’s thugs had introduced it to a table during their “polite questioning.” This wasn’t likely to end well.

  Chapter 5

  In a darkened, weightless room, an airtight hatch rattled a bit. Sounds of frustration and desperation filtered through it until, with a pair of clicks, the hatch drifted open. A dimly glowing slidepad poked out from inside, angled such that its camera could serve as a crude periscope. When the coast was confirmed clear, Michella nudged it into the room and followed it.

  The station was still in some sort of low-power state. At first she’d hoped that would mean she could move without fear of being spotted on cameras. She probably could have, but for the fact that the low-power mode had also defaulted all the doors to locked. This had forced Michella to go back to the service conduits to navigate this place since their hatches all had manual clasps she could operate. Or so she’d thought. After squeezing her way through a dozen tight passages, she’d come upon a bulkhead with a sealed blast door blocking the way. It made sense as a fail-safe to make sure that even if someone had been foolish enough to leave the maintenance hatches open during a failure, the ship would still be divided into multiple airtight sectors, but she would have preferred to learn that without having to work her way backward through twenty meters of claustrophobic conduit.

  She’d lost track of how long she’d been dragging herself through the station’s innards before she finally found an accessible maintenance room, but it felt like ages. Worse, whereas the station humming away in its normal state made for uncomfortably warm conduits, once the station had gone to low power, the subsystems had shut down and taken their waste heat with them. The temperature of the whole station had dropped considerably, to the point that her fingers stung when she had to manipulate the latches while moving from chamber to chamber. The maintenance room was only slightly warmer, but it still came as a relief.

  That relief slipped away when she discovered that the utility room door was, like the bulkheads, automatically locked down. She boosted the light on her slidepad and swept it over the door.

  “Come on. There must be a manual release,” she grumbled. “These latches look promising.”

  She tugged at the first of them, and a small panel on the door popped open with what looked like a pump handle inside. A small red tag was attached to the handle. In three languages, it boldly announced: Caution: Manual release pump to be used only in emergencies. Manual door operation will activate an alarm unless bypassed with rescue station key.

  She narrowed her eyes at the simple mechanical keyhole beside the pump as though it were mocking her. There was the outside chance that the indicated alarm was disabled by the station’s limited power. There was also the chance that it was battery operated and setting it off would give away her position. It was a bit of a coin flip. Considering that if it came up tails, she’d be found by unknown parties with unknown intentions, it was best not to risk it until she knew she had to.

  Michella opted instead to try activating the console. A few clicks and flashes of internal lights suggested something was happening.

  “Thank god,” she breathed as the boot screen of the console lit up dimly. “If there was one thing that would work with the station in standby, I had a feeling it would be the utility console.”

  The system was sluggish but functional. It got as far as asking her for her credentials, then flipped to a load screen that ticked with agonizing slowness through a progress bar.

  When it was completed, she found that the network was all but crippled. Most menus were grayed out. A large flashing notification listed the known issues.

  “‘Power status: manual standby. Long-range communication: powered down. Short range communication: powered down. System monitors: low power…’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is working? What can I turn on?”

  She tested the limits of her stolen access, but if she’d wanted to be able to navigate the system in this state, she should have found a higher-level employee. At her current level of access, she couldn’t even unlock the doors.

  Trial and error eventually revealed that the surveillance system was another low-power system rather than one that was outright powered down. Her log-in gave her some level of control over it. Rather than a full video feed, the many cameras took single frames every few seconds. The system lacked audio and motion detection. Most rooms were too dark to see anything useful. That did, however, make it easier to spot the rooms with something interesting going on. Even better, in its emergency mode, the system had switched on all the cameras, even those that had been blacked out when she’d checked earlier.

  Even the one in the utility room she was in now.

  Her heart jumped into her throat as she spotted herself on the security display. If anyone else with a similar level of access had booted up a
console, they’d know just where she was. She doused the light on the slidepad, dimmed the console screen, and maneuvered herself such that her body was between it and the camera. When the screen updated, the room looked more or less like a wall of blackness with nothing but some faint LED glow to suggest there was anything there. She crossed her fingers that no one had seen her, then continued to observe what the screen had to offer.

  The docking areas all had at least one person milling about with a powerful flashlight. Each was dressed in the same jumpsuit as the rest of the crew. All of them carried hefty pistols.

  “Those are ballistic firearms.” A bit of poking revealed the gesture necessary to zoom in. “Large-caliber pistols. Station security wouldn’t dare have a ballistic weapon like that as their standard weaponry. Too much risk of hull rupture or damaging vital systems.”

  The journalist inside her practically giggled with glee at the prospect that she once again had found herself with exclusive access to what had the makings of a hell of a story. This wasn’t a military operation. If it were, these people would have carried station-appropriate weaponry, worn military uniforms, and would have announced their intentions. Ditto for police. That left terrorists, paramilitary fighters, mercenaries, or criminals. No matter which it was, it was a story. Her excitement was somewhat tempered by the fact that she was very likely in extreme danger, but that didn’t stop her from recording a few shots of the various screens for B-roll when the story broke.

  When she was satisfied she had recorded all of the relevant visuals, she started to think like a tactician. If she operated under the assumption that the people with weapons were all working together, she could get a tally of just how many people she was dealing with. By her count, there were twenty or so perpetrators. That was more invaders than people on the manifest.

  Michella rummaged through her bag. As a disarming bit of misdirection, it had worked brilliantly, but now that she found herself in genuine need of practicality, she wished she had something a bit more reliable. She tugged at the ancient zipper and peered inside. Near the bottom, floating among some spare pads and pens, she found her stunner. It was a small device, not much larger than a cigar lighter. Lex had bought it for her a while back, reasoning that her nose for news would eventually lead her into a corner she’d have to zap her way out of. At the time, she’d suggested he was being overprotective. Now she found herself wishing he’d invested in the beefier model. This one was only good for a single incapacitation before it needed to recharge, and that recharge took a minute or two. That was plenty defensive power if she wanted to stop a mugging, but she wouldn’t have a chance of knocking out enough people fast enough to retake the docking bay and get herself out of here. Still, it was better than nothing.