by Allen Stroud
Travers picks it up. “What am I looking for?” he asks.
“Exactly that,” Duggins replies. “Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“How’s that helpful?”
“This is a multi-woven plastic polymer.” Duggins’s slow Texan drawl makes the words more palatable. “It’s really strong. You can’t cut it or tear it by any conventional means. You might use a laser to burn through it, or some kind of acid, but if either of those were in corridor six, they’d have triggered an alarm.”
“Could it have been weakened?” Travers suggests.
“Possibly,” Duggins replies. “Or it was subject to a massive force, exceeding the tolerance limits.”
“What about the active locks?” Le Garre asks.
“The active locking works as soon as you’re in proximity of the seat. The straps are programmed and powered from a local computer unit in the chair. The two ends seek each other out, embracing the detected person. It’s possible they could have been reprogrammed.”
“So, what you’re saying is…”
“This wasn’t an accident, or if it was, I’ve no idea how it happened.” He drops three black circular discs onto the table as well. “These are the mag sensors sewn into the chair. They are powerful enough to hold a person in place at five g’s without straps and with thirty per cent failure. There’s massive redundancy in these units.”
“These from stores as well?” I ask.
“Of course.”
They’re all looking at me again, waiting for my call, which is good. We’re in this together. I trust these three. I have to trust them.
“Speculation starts and stops in this room,” I say. “The crew will talk, come up with ideas of all sorts, and we can’t stop that, but we can discourage it and remind them of procedures. You want to voice something, you bring it here, with all of us together.”
“That go for you too, Captain?” Travers queries.
“Absolutely,” I reply.
Chapter Three
Shann
Four hours have passed. My shift is over and I’m back in my room.
After the briefing, Le Garre went to check in with Bogdanovic, Duggins started calling up his team for the Hercules intercept, and I went back to the bridge to help Jacobson.
Being in command is a blessing and a curse out here. We are all part of an interplanetary mission, and Fleet is a huge organisation, but you don’t feel that when you spend six months with the same people every day.
Some of the officer training manuals talk about ‘maintaining objective distance’ from the crew, but that never takes into account how being out here brings people together or drives them apart. As captain, I get to make that call – to be as close or far away as I want. I’m not a great people person, but I know I need to try, and I do try, every day.
I have friends, but I could do with making a few more.
While I was on the bridge, we received an update on the freighter’s position from the transponder and made some small adjustments. Then, just before I went off shift, Phobos Station came through with a more detailed cargo manifest.
That’s what I’m looking at now on my personal screen, scrolling through the listings. It looks like we’ve been sent a scan of the customs document. There’s information written all over it in scrawled notes.
I’m trying to decipher them. I can make out the occasional word – live organic material, toxic compound, radioactive material detected…
Phobos Station is a fairly new addition to Earth’s space colonisation outreach. Originally, the Mars colonies relied on an old orbital waystation platform called Gateway. This was one of the first colonial arks to reach the planet back in the 2030s, and for decades after, it acted as a transition point for new visitors, allowing ships to dock, reconfigure, repair or fuel up as needed before their crews made the trip planetside. It’s still there, working as a communications relay point, and gets an occasional visit from technicians or history buffs.
Phobos Station was built to take over the day-to-day management of space traffic around Mars. It’s a purpose-built rotating torus and maintains its position in a geostationary orbit around Phobos itself. The whole place has been operating for less than a decade, and the people who work there tend to be keen on their rules and regulations.
The scrawled notes are clearly the results of the inspection. I can only imagine the arguments that happened when the notes writer insisted the classified containers were opened or scanned. Whether they were or not, I can’t tell from what I have here. I’m not a mining expert, but my knowledge of the export regulations is pretty good. Sure, there’s a reason why small amounts of any of the above might be needed on a mining outpost in the asteroid belt, but crate after crate?
Something is very wrong with all this…
I open a comms line to the bridge. Travers’s face appears on my screen.
“Bridge here. What can I do you for, Captain?”
“Travers, have we sent Drake’s death notification?”
“It went twenty minutes ago.”
“Good. Lodge an official request with Earth for the full unredacted manifest of the Hercules. Tell them we’re on a rescue operation and we’ve reason to believe some of the classified cargo is dangerous.”
“You think we’ll get anywhere?”
“We have to try.”
“Okay.” Travers glances down. “We’ve had a mail call come in. I wasn’t going to wake you, but if you’re up, do you want your messages?”
“Sure, send them over.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks.”
When you’re this far out, communications from anywhere take time. The Khidr receives data packages regularly from colonies, ships and outposts that lock on to its transponder and broadcast a tight data stream. If we change course, this process becomes harder, as we become difficult to locate. So, there are also relay points – space buoys – that are continually looking for everyone and hold transmitted messages for us until we pass by.
In the old days, signals between distant spacecraft and mission control on Earth would be sets of piloting instructions jammed into the tiniest data packages possible. There’s less need for remote commands now, but more need for human contact beyond the ship. A reminder that life goes on outside our steel box.
The screen pings as my messages upload. I can tell straightaway who they’re from. Five are work-related queries, one is a programme subscription, and the last one is a video message from Earth.
That’ll be from my dad.
I stare at the screen for several moments. I need to steel myself to watch that message. Dad and I don’t get on, but I respect the fact that he stays in touch. He still lives in Edmonton. He knows I’m never coming back. For some reason, he takes that personally, as if he’s failed as a father.
I select the message and bring it up. “Hi, Dad,” I mutter.
“Hello, Ellie, I… We miss you.”
His recording stares at me in silence, as if he can see me through time and space. I suppose he was imagining my face as he spoke. He looks old and tired. I haven’t seen him in a year or more, I guess. I’m blinking and wiping my eyes.
“Jethry’s not well, Ellie. I thought you should know.” Dad looks over his shoulder. There’s clearly someone with him, but I don’t know who it is. Mom died seven years ago. Jethry is my younger brother; he lives with his wife and two children. We don’t speak to each other.
Dad looks at me again. “Jethry’s been taken in for surgery. The cancer’s back. It’s in his lungs. I thought you’d want to know, wherever you are. I hope this reaches you in time, so you can pray for him.”
The message ends. I flick it off.
You bastard, Dad. I’m helpless out here. He’s hoping I’ll come back, forgive and forget all that’s been said. I can’t, even if I wanted
to. I’m too far away. All this does is make me feel guilty, like I’m somehow to blame.
Maybe he thinks I am.
I don’t believe some higher universal power will reach down and save people if you make a wish. Sure, the universe is beautiful, there has to be something that made it, but we’re an insignificant part of all that. Life is fleeting and unfair. You make your own path with what you’ve got. I certainly have.
Maybe Dad doesn’t realise what he’s done here. He’s got no one else to tell, I guess. Something else for me to shoulder, along with all the rest.
The other messages will wait. The programme subscription is for Celerity – a period drama I watch when I get the chance to switch off. Doctors recommend we have an escape, something totally different from our work environment. Most of the crew enjoy those full immersion simulations, but we’re a long way out and that means data restrictions, so books, films and audio are best. I prefer them anyway. A Japanese programme about the fourteenth century shogunate period is pretty far away from what I do. The characters, situations and vistas are nothing like life on the ship. It’s subtitled, but I’m starting to pick up the language.
Some people find watching these things a reminder of what they’re missing, and it gives them something to look forward to when they get back from a tour. For me, they’re just a distraction and a way to slow down so I can relax.
That’s not happening now.
I boost myself off the seat and over to my bed. I grab the straps and pull myself down. They begin to wind themselves around me. The programme is automatic, adapted from a system first installed in secure psychiatric wards. I can feel the magnets in the mattress and my clothing too. The same must have happened to Drake when he moved into the chair.
Maybe that’s the weak link, like Duggins said. The computer system in the chair. If it had been reprogrammed, the straps wouldn’t activate.
Surely Drake would have noticed, though. If he’d seen the straps fail to engage, he would have activated his comms and reported the fault.
I close my eyes. For once, my mind drifts away quickly.
* * *
When I was a child, I could doze whenever and wherever I wanted. The world of dreams could be a better place than reality, an escape from the sidelong glances and whispers behind my back.
Restful sleep has always been harder to find. If there’s something on my mind, I’ll be thinking about it right into my dreams and nightmares.
Medical advances make life better for people with problems, but it takes time for attitudes to change. Growing up, I was surrounded by a well-meaning family. They wanted the best they could imagine for me, but what they envisioned was a limited existence, trapped by walls and defined by my differences.
I’d be sitting in a mobility chair, most of the time. Later, I got powered legs, but people’s habits were fixed by then. No one listened to what I had to say. The world would happen around me. All the decisions that affected my life were made whether I was listening or participating or not.
Until I escaped and took control of my own life.
The dream takes me through my memories. I remember being very young, sitting in a chair at the beach on a bright summer’s day. I can see my brother and my father playing. They’re digging with plastic spades, piling up sand and filling a collection of coloured buckets. They’ve just been in the sea; I can see the water glistening on my father’s sun-browned skin.
A part of me always wanted to join them. I could have done it. I could have crawled or asked to be carried to where they sat. But in that moment, I looked up into the sky and I saw something else. A future beyond the limitations of other people’s plans for my life.
None of them could have imagined I’d end up here.
There’s an electronic beep. I open my eyes. Someone’s outside my door. I don’t know how long I’ve been dozing. A flick of a button disengages the straps.
“Come in,” I say.
The panel slides back. “How’re you doing, Ellie?”
I sit up and smile. “Coping, Sam. How about you?”
“The same, only I don’t have all the facts.”
“Neither do I.”
“No, but rank has its privileges.”
“It does indeed. Come in, that’s an order.”
He laughs and enters my room. Sam’s a second-generation Martian. His parents were among the first people born on the planet in Jezero colony. We’ve known each other for nearly ten years, most of my life since I left Earth. When I got command of the Khidr, he was the first person I recruited. He’s the quartermaster and runs the ship’s stores, making sure everything’s where it’s supposed to be.
The door closes, and he moves to join me on the bunk, hooking a leg around the end and settling himself down. “So, what’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you everything, Sam, you know that.”
“Sure, I’ll get the details from the briefing, but I’m more worried about you and how you’re managing.”
His hand squeezes my shoulder. We were lovers in the past. That’s not where we are now, but he cares, I know that. I care for him too. He’s my friend. Probably my best friend out here.
“Things are difficult. The two incidents happening at the same time is a stretch for us all. Le Garre’s leading the investigation into Drake’s death. Duggins is prepping the teams for the Hercules rendezvous.”
“Yeah, he’s been down to see me with a requisition list.”
“Good. That shows his mind is on the job.” I rub my eyes; they feel sore. “I got a message from Dad.”
“Hardly the best time. You watch it?”
“Yep. Jethry’s cancer is back. They’ve taken him in for surgery.”
“Jesus, Ellie, that’s a lot for you to handle in one day.”
“I know.”
His arms are around me without my needing to ask. The warmth of his body is a comfort and a reassurance. I let go and the tears come, along with gut-shuddering sobs. Crying isn’t much fun in zero gravity. The water forms into bags around my eyes, forcing me to wipe them away so I can see. Sam is my closest friend. He knows what I’ve been through to be here, what I still go through in terms of my baggage and stored-up guilt. He doesn’t say anything more. I don’t need him to.
As the straps re-engage around us, I let myself drift off to sleep. This time I don’t dream.
* * *
The first manned spaceflight to the Moon took just over two days.
The first manned spaceflight to Mars took six months.
These days, we’ve shortened journey times a lot. Conventional rocket boosters have become more advanced and efficient. We also have a resonant cavity drive, which can be used when we reach sufficient speed. Six months becomes eight weeks, which is how a patrol like ours becomes viable.
I don’t know how it all works; I don’t have to. But like everything else, I have a rough idea, and I do know there’s a lot of redundancy built in. There’s also a feeling you get when they switch it on. A weird feeling in your stomach that I can’t explain.
I’m awake with that feeling right now. Sam is gone. I’m alone. He must have left hours ago. The straps disengage as I sit up.
I glance over at the digital counter. I’ve another hour before I’m due on shift. There are no new messages, so I guess the ship has managed without me.
An hour is plenty of time for me to go through everything before I go back to the bridge.
Last night’s correspondence is waiting for me. I drag each of them down from the mailbox and open them. Three are scientific queries – two from Earth and one from Mars. I find the data for the Earth queries on the system and prepare replies for each of them. The Mars query is a bit more complex. An ensign on the SETI station is asking about some minor communication and scanning anomalies he’s discovered in plotting. I’m not sure why this has ended u
p with me. I forward the query to Ensign Jacobson and ask him to reply to the Mars Station officer with some comparative data.
The other two messages are military. The first, an inventory request, is easy to answer and update. The second…
Well now, that’s strange.
Captain Shann,
This is a pre-authorised transmission. It was triggered when you made an inventory request on a classified cargo being transported from Phobos Station to Ceres.
Attached to this message is a data archive that outlines the purpose of these shipments. The clearance grade of this information is above your rank authorisation. However, it has been provided to you owing to your unique situation. You have authorisation to share this with senior crew on a need-to-know basis.
Good luck, Captain.
Fleet.
There’s a file attachment. It’s password encrypted. I have a set of flag passwords that are for rank-authorised files. I don’t know whether they will work on this, but I assume they will or a way to access the information would have been provided. Much as everyone trusts that the communications officer on duty won’t be reading private correspondence, additional security is required at times. In this case, I’m grateful for it, in light of what may or may not have been done to Drake.
I read the message again, carefully. The fact that it’s been sent automatically after we requested the information about the Hercules piques my interest. The freighter wasn’t named either, which suggests there’s been more than one shipment between Phobos and Ceres.
Interesting…
Chapter Four
Shann
…protesters staged rallies across the country on Thursday, denouncing efforts by national governments to repeal the landmark Healthcare Entitlement law, which has extended medical suffrage to more than four hundred million of the world’s poorest people.
Several thousand people gathered outside the intergovernmental building in New York City to deliver ‘the Millions petition’ to Earth’s continental council. The veracity of the enormous list of written names has yet to be determined, but if it is genuine, this would be the largest signed document ever to exist.