Void

by Matt Thomas

  The computer showed him his options. His drifting orbit placed him closest to Thebe, temporarily, but there was nothing on Thebe. It was more of a navigational hazard than anything else. But Europa wasn't too far away. At the moment, its orbit kept it somewhat isolated, especially with Io still on the other side of the planet.

  Europa would work. There were enough facilities for him to have options, but they were small and spread out enough that he could slip in between the cracks. More importantly, Lind might be able to dig up someone who could help him find a way back home.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The weight and constant pounding on his knees threatened to collapse Lind. As though the bitter cold, the exhaustion, and the fear were not enough, the illusion of perfect smoothness of the frozen ocean moon's surface combined with ice blindness, deceiving anyone daring to walk across its surface. Above the surface, columns of ice rose in jagged teeth stretching far overhead. Twice, Lind stumbled to the edge of a crevasse without seeing it. If the fall didn't kill him directly, or smash his suit exposing him to the flash-freezing cold, he could lie there for days before he finally succumbed. A death in a crevasse would be nearly as bad as spending an eternity drifting in space. When he'd calculated his landing spot, it hadn't seemed so far away from the water processing station he found. After hours of walking, it might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

  The physical exertion wasn't the hardest part. Lind could trudge in a straight line from sheer force of will. Saying goodbye to the Mako took more of an emotional strain than expected. Something about going through the ship, intentionally leaving behind anything even remotely sentimental for fear it would identify him, ate away at him. Little remained of Kaye on the ship. Most of the memories attached to indistinct objects, like the coffee mug with the chip in it that his partner could never throw away. It all had to disappear.

  The disappearance itself became problematic. Lind landed hard, digging the belly of the Mako into the packed ice. Eons of temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing made the frozen water closer to rock. The hull buckled, sending off shrill alarms. Lind feared he breached the airtight seal, but oxygen levels remained constant as he ran downstairs to the engine room. Some basic manipulation shut off the engine coolant and overcharged the de-icing equipment. He let it run while he donned his suit. Even though the temperature outside approached absolute zero, the ship began to shift and settle within minutes. All other power got turned off before he navigated the hallways one last time by the beam of his headlight. Lind divorced himself from any sentiment and stepped out into the cold. As he walked away, he once looked over his shoulder to see steam rising from the melting ice as the Mako buried itself in the surface of the moon.

  That had been hours ago, and he wondered how much remained above the surface. The Mako would probably never reach the ocean, sinking to the bottom; its engine would burn out before then. But the ice would cover the crater it made as it descended, forever locking it into the ice. Only then did Lind remember the body of the crew member from the Guppy, Vasily, still stowed in the morgue. Inadvertently, he had taken the man from death in one anonymous, expansive grave to another.

  Off in the distance, a pair of lights blinked. Renewed with energy, he pushed himself forward over each frozen dune. Gradually, the dull gray of the landing platform resolved through the blue-white. Another hour passed before he reached it. Other than the navigation beacons, the metal itself seemed as dead as the planet. Ice particles collected along its edge, and geometric patterns splayed across the metal surface where water had refrozen. It appeared to connect to nothing, abandoned and alone in the inhospitable climate. Only a metal structure, the size of a large shed, protruded from the moon.

  Lind pulled himself onto the platform, making his way over to the lone building. As he expected, the assumption on which he had rested his entire plan, the structure had a large airlock door, a mechanical switch box, and a camera. Lind immediately set to sabotaging the switch box with his multi-tool. The sparks flew before it shorted out. Nothing happened other than the beacon lights going dark. Lind then took several steps back and sat down in full view of the camera.

  It took much, much longer than he anticipated. Nearly two hours went by, two hours where he struggled to remain awake, feeling the tingling of his recovering leg muscles after his trek. Oxygen became a concern; his suit could recycle a lot of it but it could not go on indefinitely. But, eventually, the metal door swung open and three men rushed out, as much as they could rush in that environment. They grabbed Lind by the arms and dragged him inside. Their Mandarin spilled forth so rapidly that Lind caught only a few words. As with his other languages, he'd never been able to speak it, other than a few key phrases, enough to order compliance and food, but he picked up enough words to infer the tone of most conversations. All he could tell is that they were confused and worried about the stranger in their midst. He heard the word for "ship" in several questions as they pulled him out of his suit and offered him water.

  They descended a long elevator shaft. He was completely out of his suit by the time they reached the bottom. A man, wearing dignity the way he wore his button-down shirt, waited for them, not letting them off of the lift. The first question came in Russian. Lind shook his head even though he understood the Russian better.

  "Who are you?" The man asked in only modestly accented English.

  "My ship crashed." Lind said.

  "Who are you?" The man repeated.

  "My name is James. James O'Neil." The name came from someone he had arrested in his second year as a Thirty-Two. A murderer who beat a man to death with his helmet because of a misunderstanding over a woman.

  "Where is your ID card?" The demand was strange until Lind realized they searched his pockets and found nothing.

  Lind shook his head. "I don't have it."

  "Who are you?"

  Lind took a deep breath, sensing that the situation was not going as well as he had hoped. He launched into the story he crafted.

  "I just took off from one of the platforms here and my cockpit filled with smoke. Something in the engine caught fire, and I lost control. It crashed a few kilometers from here. I barely had time to get out before it started melting through the ice. I must have left my ID in my cabin."

  "Who do you work for? Sadko?"

  Lind shook his head. "I'm independent."

  "Independent?" The man repeated the word as though he didn't understand it.

  "Yes. I'm an independent contractor."

  The other's eyes narrowed. "Where did you leave from?"

  "I'm from Ceres Station, but I crashed when I was leaving Platform Seven Bravo here on Europa."

  They met his response with silence.

  "Please, I need help." Lind pleaded. "If I can get to One Alpha, I know people there that can help me get back to Ceres."

  "Where is your ID card?" The question appeared for a third time.

  Lind got exasperated. "It burned up in my ship. Look, I'm an independent contractor. I can't just call up a company to get a new one. But, I know someone on One Alpha who can help get me to Ceres. Can you help me get to One Alpha?"

  "You need your ID card to get to One Alpha."

  Lind struggled with his patience, but remembered that he actually was desperate, not just pretending to be desperate. "But my ID card is destroyed, which is why I would really appreciate your help to get to Camp Alpha. From there, I can get to Ceres Station where my program manager can verify the loss of my ship and get me a new ID card."

  Dramatically, the man crossed his arms in front of himself, and raised on hand to his chin in thought.

  "Please, you can't keep me here and you can't just put me back outside. I could really use your help getting to One Alpha."

  "Okay."

  Lind waited, expecting something further. Instead, the man spun on his heels and walked away.

  He froze, his heart nearly stopping as the elevator again shuddered and moved. His disoriented stat
e kept him from telling whether the lift headed up or down. No windows meant no frame of reference. The expressions on the men still holding him, whether upright or in restraint he couldn't be sure, told him nothing.

  So, Lind sighed in relief when the doors opened onto some kind of common area, not the frozen wasteland of the surface. The realization that they would not turn him away, at least, helped him deduce that the hands under his armpits were assisting him, not dragging him, off the elevator. For a brief moment, he felt guilt. They placed him in a dining room and set a bowl of noodles and some water in front of him before abandoning him.

  Many looks shot his way, the stranger in half of a spacesuit eating alone in the corner. He finished his meal, not knowing how much time he had. It turned out he had quite a bit of time, because they left him alone for an hour before a young man, perhaps only twenty, dressed in filthy mining clothes, jerked out the chair across from Lind and sat down.

  "Going to One Alpha?" The man asked, struggling with each English word.

  Lind nodded.

  "Five hours."

  Lind stared at the man, trying to understand. "Five hours?"

  "Yes. We go in five hours."

  So, they would take him to the main station on Europa after all.

  "I'll wait here." He said, pointing to the table.

  The man nodded vigorously. Then disappeared from the table, leaving Lind behind with nothing but his anxiety about his next move.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The small submarine docked in the lower levels of One Alpha, the lowest level, Lind deduced. The trip took all day, through the ocean so deep and covered by ice he could make out the oversized, blind deyo fish as they swam around the spotlights searching the water around the craft. For all the times he had eaten them, it was the first time Lind saw one not sliced into fillets. It was strange how something so ordinary to his life could somehow be so alien to him.

  When they docked, Lind walked through the cargo doors, past the ore and other supplies being offloaded, past the longshoremen lugging the items from the back of the ship onto large conveyors dragging the containers off to be sorted. No one on his ship had spoken English, and Lind had exhausted is Mandarin within minutes. On the docks, he heard the usual mix of Mandarin and Russian, and he ignored it all as he made his way deeper into the station he once knew so well.

  When he found the elevator, the same large elevator he remembered riding down into the depths of the station on so many occasions, he experienced a flash of a moment where he and Kay had stood together, towards the end their first six months together. They had descended towards those docks Lind just left. Lind had been afraid, knowing full well that their extended investigation could potentially erupt in a violent end as soon as the doors opened. Kay made one of his wise-ass comments, which Lind could no longer remember. When the doors opened, both men laughed heartily in front of confused smugglers.

  That memory road led him back to his present goal, the rationale for landing on the moon in the first place. Buried in the station's mid-levels, through the hallways lined with piping instead of carpet and lights, tucked between the housing units and cafeterias for the working men and women who couldn't afford to live too close to space or the liquid water, Lind felt his way amongst the shops until he found one, anonymous save for a small sign in the window and an array of electronics piled out front. Only three locals occupied the narrow spaces between the disorganized shelves. The counter, stuck in the back and camouflaged with merchandise, nearly hid a woman staring at her own walls while she twirled a stylus between her long, lightly scarred fingers. Her dark eyes wandered until they found Lind, settling on him for only a second before collapsing into a glare of rage.

  "Agent Michaels. Some might see this as harassment." She said.

  "You haven't seen me in years, Suksi." Lind protested calmly.

  "And somehow, it feels like it was just yesterday."

  "Can we talk privately?" He said, glancing at the customers.

  She gave a single shake of her head. "Nope."

  "Please?" He leaned in and whispered. "I really need to talk to you."

  She didn't share his discretion. "What, you think you can say 'please' and I'll let you pry into my life again?"

  The customers had crept closer to them both, hoping to get a good view of whatever personal drama was about to unfold. Lind straightened turned to them with false confidence. "I'm a Thirty-Two. I need to talk to the shop owner." The three backed away, placed down the merchandise and shuffled out of the shop.

  "Great, now you're chasing customers away."

  "You and I both know they're not your real customers."

  "The money they'd give me was pretty real."

  "You know what I mean."

  "I don't believe that I do, Agent Michaels."

  "Look," he whispered. "I really need you to do something for me. I'm in trouble, and I think you're one of the only people who can get me out of it."

  "Jesus Christ." She said, leaning back against the wall and shaking her head. "What kind of relationship do you think we have, you and I, where I'd have the slightest interest in help you?"

  Lind stared.

  She let out a scoff. "Since you're incapable of understanding the question, let me answer it for you: You were investigating the death of my husband. You thought I had something to do with it. I helped you because I wanted to know who killed my husband, and I didn't want you thinking I killed him. You were a means to an end."

  "Your husband was running a pretty big smuggling ring. He wasn't the greatest guy in the system."

  She jabbed a finger at herself, baring her teeth. "He was to me."

  "And I couldn't help but notice everyone I interviewed, including the suspect, disappeared within days, and not in the 'found a new life' kind of way, with no significant impact to the operation."

  It was her turn to remain silent before resuming her offensive. "We're not friends. I never cried on your shoulder. You weren't my source of strength in a time of loss. You were a pain-in-the ass I tried to get rid of for weeks. Both you and your buddy. Where is he, by the way?"

  "Kay died." Lind managed, trying to figure out where in his desperation he found her as an option.

  "That sucks." She said without sympathy. "So why don't you tell me whatever sob bullshit story you have, so I can tell you to fuck off."

  "They think I killed someone. I had to crash land here and ditch my ship, my ID, everything."

  Suksi's eye-roll said enough. "Who thinks you killed someone?"

  "The Thirty-Twos."

  "You're a Thirty-Two. At least that's what you just told my paying customers."

  "I think I stopped being one two days ago when they watched a suspect fly out of my airlock."

  She laughed, long and hard. "I figured you'd be the type to do something stupid like that. People generally can't give you information if they're dead."

  "I didn't shoot him out the airlock."

  "Mmm-hmm."

  "I didn't."

  "Sure."

  He pressed himself against the counter, leaning in and lowering his voice. "Look, I came here because they're looking for me. I don't think they're the only ones, either. I ditched everything because I needed to fly under the radar, and I thought you could help me out."

  "And why, Agent Michaels, would you think something ridiculous like that?"

  "Well," he hesitated. "Because . . . Well, you can do things with identities . . ."

  "Let me stop you right there." She said. "First, I think you're full of shit. Second, I know you've always had these delusions about what I do here, what my husband did here, and I'm not giving you anything you could twist into some bullshit case. Things must be pretty slow for you to show back up here, years later, trying to convince me to do something illegal."

  Lind leaned in, unable to control himself. "Your husband got his throat cut and his body dumped on the landing because someone was getting greedy in the black market out here. I know you do thi
ngs. I need you to do those things for me."

  "I wouldn't plan on me doing shit for you."

  "Check it out. There's got to be a warrant out for my arrest. There's another Thirty-Two searching for me. My ship's off the grid because I buried it in the ice. I got here by walking across the surface in a survival suit to an out station, and convincing them I was shipwrecked and that I needed to be smuggled here because I didn't have an ID and I needed to get home." Lind spat out the words, exasperated, hardly believing any of what he said could be true.

  "That's quite the ruse you've created there."

  "It's not a ruse!" He barely kept himself from screaming. "I need a new ID, so I can get through every scanner between here and Earth."

  "And what would you do once you got to Earth?"

  "Do you give a shit?"

  "Not really, no."

  "So are you going to help me or not?"

  "Look, even if I believed you, I'm going to state for the recording devices I'm convinced you have, that I'm in no position to do anything for you. Even if I could, what's in it for me?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "My understanding is that forging a new ID is outrageously expensive. Were you planning on paying me in cash or did you want to win me over with charm? What would I get in return?"

  "Well, I'm a Thirty-Two, and helping me would . . ."

  "No, you were a Thirty-Two." Suksi corrected. "Now you're a fugitive like anyone else. You've got nothing. If you're so cut off from everything, then there is absolutely nothing you can do to help me. If you tried anything on my behalf, it would only highlight both of us. So, to sum up, helping you gets me worse than nothing. It gets me trouble. And I don't like trouble. So go look elsewhere, Agent Michaels."

  "Where am I supposed to go?"

  She shrugged, a sadistic grin blossoming on her face. "No idea. There's a longshoreman strike going on. I'm sure you can get work as a scab somewhere. Good luck getting past the picket lines. At least they won't ask for ID before they pummel the shit out of you." She poised her finger dramatically over her tablet and what Lind assumed to be an emergency call button. "I can't say the same for station security. So get the fuck out."