The Dark Colony

by Richard Penn

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ said Rasmussen. ‘If there was major crime going on here I would have reported it. What fish?’

  ‘Maybe you don’t know. Maybe they kept you in the dark. There’s enough small stuff here to get you out of that uniform you’re disgracing and into a shit-shovelling detail. If you tell us all you know, I’m told we can save you that, make it a disciplinary matter.’

  ‘I can’t do that! You’re only here for a day. These people will shove me out the lock if they know I’ve given you all the details.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Lisa. ‘You’ll be moving to the station. We’ll need an honest cop here to clean up the mess you’ve made. Probably Gurit Gabai, serve her right.’

  ‘I…’ Rasmussen hesitated. ‘This is a personal vendetta of yours, Johansen. What’s getting you all heated up?’

  ‘I’m not all heated up, I’m doing my job, following orders. If I was heated up you’d not be sitting there with all your parts intact. But if you want to know why this is personal for me, I’ll give you a name. Sidro Pavlovic. The man in the “rope gun girl” incident. You know that name? You let him out didn’t you? Maybe you thought he didn’t deserve to be locked up, that I deserved to be raped? Is that what’s going through your slimy mind?’

  ‘I… he hasn’t—‘

  ‘Has he been out attacking more girls on your watch, Rasmussen? ’Cos if he has, I’ll -’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Rasmussen. ‘There’s been nothing like that. Look, can we get back to where I talk and you don’t kill me? I can see I have no other way out.’

  Lisa turned away, signalled Tommy to continue the interview. He and Shani started the long job of going through all the incidents. Lisa shut herself in the bedroom, and checked her phone. She was looking for a plan. There. CrowdLabs had left a map of the surface colony, cross-checked with the video records from various people moving around it, with the familiar red patches indicating anomalies. That would do. Thus calmed, she set an alarm and took a nap.

  Up at six thirty, she took a brief shower and changed into another lemon yellow suit, then returned to the living room, where the interview was still going on.

  ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ she said. ‘You’re going back to the hall, and we’re all going to meet for breakfast, just like we arranged. You two, shower and change now. We are all going to chat, nice as pie, and you are going to give us that tour. Every now and again I’m going to ask to look in a place you haven’t shown us, and Lo! And Behold! There will be a still, a tobacco farm, maybe a coke stash. You will be as amazed as I am about finding these things, and we will pat you on the back for being a clever cop, instead of kicking you in the balls for being the shit you are. Is that clear?’

  By now Rasmussen could see that going along with the plan was the only way forward. ‘But what about the others? The people who have been… helping me… keep the peace?’

  ‘The Phobeans are going to review the evidence we’ve collected, and decide who to charge. You and I are going to arrest them, and you’re going to come up with us to the station, to “help” get them there. Someone will come down to take over here.’

  The day went according to plan. They had an audience in the hall and everywhere they went. First they took the short tunnel to the hangar, which felt very strange to Lisa. It had the large cold open space like the hold, and yet it had gravity. She missed her rope gun, and found herself tripping over cables, expecting to be able to move freely through the air. When they got to the single large airlock, Tommy opened it and they found a sluice duct, just like in the hold. Lisa’s plan was showing a red zone, and when they removed the cover there was the extra duct. Lisa wanted to keep her eye on Rasmussen, so she sent Tommy in. He sent out images unmistakably of a still, using the vacuum of the lock cycling to separate spirit from mash. There was nothing else there at present, but it would make an excellent drop box for items to be smuggled onto the bus.

  Next up was the farm. A maze of plastic-lined tunnels led through the rock of the cliff, barely a metre wide in most places, with handles glued to the inside of the steepest sections. At the end of each branch was an air-door, a water-filled balloon blocking a narrowing in the passage. The sun was up outside now, so they could see the bright green of plants through the big lens formed by each door. A systematic search would take days, and there were no cameras in farm tunnels.

  Lisa ensured here phone was in privacy mode, then spoke to Rasmussen. ‘Here you go, Karel, this is your chance to save us some time. Where are we going to find the grow-op?’

  ‘Not in any of these. This is where we grow our food; kids come through here. No, you need to look at the detention tunnels.’ He led them back towards the centre, then down the lowest of the tunnels cut into the rock.

  19 In Detention

  They reached a pressure door with a security lock. Rasmussen pointed his phone at it, and a voice said ‘access denied.’

  ‘What? What have you done to my codes, Johansen? I’m still superior officer on this station!’

  ‘I haven’t done anything, Karel,’ said Lisa. She looked at Tommy, who seemed equally baffled. ‘The people at Mars must have downgraded your codes, while we sort this out.’ She was reluctant to split their party, but if the inspector had denied Rasmussen access, she could not override it. Foxes, geese, missionaries… ‘Tommy, you stay out here with Karel. Shani and I’ll go in and take a look.’ She wanted an armed guard on Rasmussen, and she didn’t want Shani near him either.

  She waved her phone at the door, and it opened, then closed behind her and Shani. Prisoners spent the days in a special section of farm tunnels, and the nights in cells. There was normally a guard present during the day, but the place was unmanned at night. Call buttons and cameras linked it to the police office for safety. She consulted her phone; there were three prisoners in the cells, and the guard had not yet arrived for his shift this morning.

  ‘Phone police deny access to detention centre all personnel,’ said Lisa, making up commands as she went along. ‘Exception deputy Thomas Hansen.’ The phone read the command back to her for confirmation, then she accepted it.

  ‘I’ve checked the cells,’ said Shani, who had been here before on teacher business. ‘Rebecca Yitchak is in one, and Boris Volkoff in another. The two of them are married, and got into a drunken brawl in the bar last week. They have no money so Karel can’t fine them. He tosses them in here to cool off for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘And Popovic?’ said Lisa. ‘He must be in here too.’ Lisa had not been looking forward to seeing her would-be rapist again, but not finding him was worse.

  ‘Just those two,’ said Shani, looking worried. ‘The other two cells are open.’

  ‘Phone police report location Sidro Popovic. Over,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Location Sidro Popovic number three detention tunnel. Subject is on work detail from 0800 until 1600,’ replied the computer. Lisa drew her gun immediately, and moved to the arms cabinet in the corner of the office. ‘Have you trained with a pistol, Shani?’

  ‘A pistol! I’m a schoolteacher, Lisa, not a cop. There’s not much call for it in my job.’

  ‘Well, you’re some kind of cop now, but I can’t give you one without training. Could you handle a stun gun?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ replied Shani shakily, taking the yellow boxy gun in her hand.

  ‘The computer’s telling me Popovic is in tunnel three, but I don’t trust it. Let’s go see.’ There was a green glow through the door in the opposite corner, so they moved that way, Lisa well in the lead. They passed more air doors, each securely closed. It took a few minutes to open an air door, so Lisa felt safe leaving them behind her. The third door was also closed, but the telltale beside it indicated zero pressure on the other side.

  She consulted her map. There was only a single pressure compartment in that part of the farm, so in theory, if Popovic was in there, he was dead.

  ‘Phone police emergency call Sidro Pop
ovic,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Popovic out of range,’ the computer replied. If he was dead, the phone would know it, so he was hidden somewhere, or escaped. That farm tunnel could hold the key to all that had been going on here, she had to get into it.

  ‘Phone Tommy Hansen. Tommy, I need you to go outside for me, and that means leaving Rasmussen alone. Any idea how we can do that safely?’

  ‘I’m ahead of you, Lisa. I’ve rounded up a few of the people we took witness statements from, part of Shani’s resistance group. I’ve issued them stun-guns and set them up at Steve and Tony’s, you remember the gay couple? Anyway, he’s bottled up and I’m free to move. What do you need? I’m moving towards the hangar now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Tommy, but I need you to go out in a suit. There’s a detention tunnel here, tunnel three, and it’s deflated. The plants in it are green, so it’s been done recently. Can you get to it from the outside and seal it up? Over.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. There’s a quad-bike here, meant for a person in a suit. I’ll put its camera on my feed, so you can see what I’m doing.’

  Lisa and Shani moved back into the office. There was nothing they could do without entering the tunnel. She projected the scene from Tommy’s scooter on the wall.

  There was a small scooter airlock beside the big lock the bus had gone through, and they saw this open. There was a rush of steam as the pressure in the lock was pumped down, then the door opened to show the crater floor. The sun was setting now, and the side with the farm tunnels was shaded.

  ‘I’m not used to driving around on dirt, Lisa,’ said Tommy. ‘Can you give me directions?’

  ‘These tunnels are on the far side of the hangar, Tommy, turn to your left.’ The view bounced up and down alarmingly, as the quad sailed over minor bumps. ‘Better keep your speed down.’

  ‘I’m aware of the… principle,’ said Tommy, ‘but I keep expecting the thing to operate like a space-boat.’

  ‘There… take a left, into that gap. Now right. You should see the deflated tunnel… yes, there, to your left. Better get off the quad and get your gun out. We’ve a prisoner missing.’

  The view switched to Tommy’s shoulder camera, as he bounce-walked along the side of the tunnel. It was a thick plastic inflatable tent, about ten metres long and three wide. Normally it would be three metres high, but it had slumped down, supported only by the dried-out plants inside.

  ‘I can’t see a break on this side, Lisa,’ said Tommy. ‘I’ll have to work around to the other side.’ He walked back to the quad and around the end of the deflated tunnel, then up the other side. Half-way down was an obvious tear, ten centimetres across. The escaping air had blown a pile of dust and gravel away from the side, and there was snow everywhere.

  Tommy went back to the quad, took a large patch from the rack on its back and stuck it on. Lisa moved back to the tunnel door and turned the valve to refill the tunnel with air, overriding the latch which had shut it off. Pressure started to build, and Tommy watched the patch to ensure it stayed on. Once the pressure had equalised, Lisa opened the air door, entered the tunnel and quickly applied a patch on the inside. An outside patch was never to be relied on.

  She and Shani looked around. ‘What do you know about plants?’ asked Lisa.

  ‘What I know about everything,’ said Shani. ‘I know what we teach in school. What are we looking for?’

  ‘Tobacco, maybe cannabis? Does cocaine grow on trees?’

  ‘Now then children,’ said Shani, in teacherish tones. ‘What do we do when we want to know something? We look it up on the Internet, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes Miss Adikari,’ said Lisa, in a lispy voice. They called up relevant plants and projected them on the walls.

  ‘They all look like plants to me,’ said Lisa. ‘Anyway, that’s not the priority. Where the hell has Popovic gone? If the computer thinks he’s in here, there must have been seen here last. He’s not lying here dead, that would be too easy. Where would you hide an exit from here?’ All the sides and the top of the tunnel were clear plastic, so that left the floor.

  She explained the problem to Shani, and they split up, examining the floor for places where there might be a hidden hatch. The central walkway was smooth, the same material as the rest of the tent. Most of the floor was covered with plants, seemingly undisturbed. There were patches of clear earth, but the smugglers would need to close the hatch from underneath, so simply burying it was not on.

  At the end of the tunnel furthest the door was a water butt, empty now. The water would have boiled off into vacuum, but it stood on a palette, slightly raised from the floor. As Shani continued her search at the other end of the tunnel, Lisa raised the palette, seeing that it opened a pressure hatch underneath.

  She moved to climb into it. There was suddenly a loud explosion. The tunnel was breached! She felt the pain in her ears and heard the sucking sound that every spacer dreads. Reflexes built by long training made her climb down the tunnel, upwind towards secure air. She saw Shani ripping an escape bubble from the rack by the door. Lisa pulled herself down the tunnel against the inrushing air, and slammed the hatch closed behind her.

  She felt awful leaving Shani to fend for herself, but the first rule of an air emergency is to survive. The sucking dark will get you in seconds, and then you are no help to anyone. She was reasonably sure that Shani would be safe in the bubble. She would have thirty minutes of air, plenty of time for rescue, and Tommy was just outside.

  Now, what had she gotten into herself? The dark tunnel must lead to a large space, or it would have evacuated through the open hatch. And that space contained at least one person, probably armed. And that person not only knew she was here but, she now realised, had contrived to get her here alone. The bastard was ahead of her every step of the way.

  ‘Armed police!’ she shouted, lighting the flashlight on her gun and pointing it down the tunnel. ‘Come out and show me your hands!’ Well, that wasn’t going to happen, was it? She thought for a minute about staying where she was, waiting for rescue from outside. But it was likely this was the only entry to the hostile space, and that farm tunnel must be split wide open by now, it would take hours to fix.

  ‘Phone police emergency Tommy Hansen!’ she said.

  ‘No signal,’ the phone replied in its flat tinny offline voice. No help there. The only way was forward. She let herself down the shaft, which soon curved to the left, a horizontal tunnel only big enough to crawl through. She could see a hatch a few metres down the tunnel, opening into a larger space. The hatch had been deliberately blocked open, so that there would be enough air to fill the tunnel. Oh goody, somebody wanted her alive.

  Nothing in her training told her how to enter a room alone with an armed man. In fact, it said not to. Wait for backup. She knew that Popovic did not want to kill her, he’d had plenty of chances for that.

  ‘Popovic!’ she shouted. ‘Is that you in there? What do you want?’

  No reply. He probably wanted to creep her out. It was working. She could not see into the space, except for a rounded bulk opposite. She projected the view from the gun camera onto the wall beside her, and inched forward, gradually widening her view of the room. It was a small hold, a square room not much bigger than a flat, with the spherical tanks of a small boat taking up most of the space. She could see a boat-sized airlock door to her left. It was a tiny boat dock. The door must have been concealed in the cliff face.

  That explained them keeping her alive. They wanted to take her hostage while they escaped in the boat. She decided to assume there were two of them, Popovic and some outsider from the dark colony. Having lost their insider in the harbour office, they would not be able to escape unseen. They assumed the station would not fire on a boat with Lisa in it. She wasn’t sure about that, but she didn’t want to try it out.

  What to do? She could close the hatch and hide in the tunnel, let someone else find the boat. But night had come and they might get away. She had no way to alert the colony. If this wa
s the only way in, having someone else in the tunnel with her wouldn’t help anyway. She was it.

  Lisa thought for a moment about firing a few random shots, see if she could get them to reveal their position. Then she remembered she was in a small room with several cubic metres of rocket fuel in plastic bubbles. Not a good idea. Well, if it neutralised her gun, it did the same for theirs. She safetied hers, and slid out of the hole. The boat was resting on the bottom of the hangar and too tall to climb over, so the choices were: left towards the boat cab, or right towards the main engine. Thinking about the effect of a short burst on the rocket, she moved left.

  As she reached the corner, there was a flash of movement and a dark figure jumped in front her, holding up a large knife. She saw that it was single-edged, the first thing she had been taught to look for in an edged weapon. She expected a downward chop, and time seemed to slow down as it came. She brought the rifle up to parry the knife, and sparks flew as the steel ran down under the barrel. Knowing she only had a second to spare, she kicked down to the floor with one foot for leverage in the low gravity, and up into the man’s stomach with the other foot. In the restricted space she had not got in a disabling blow, but it sent the man back against the wall. Raising the knife again, he came at her a second time, but she had more space now. With the same double action, she kicked higher this time, catching him under the chin. He fell back in a partial back flip, and did not get up.

  Where was the other guy? She had convinced herself there were two. She saw that the man she had defeated was Popovic. If the second man was in the boat he might not be so keen to keep her alive. The window of the boat was right beside her, and she looked in. If there was someone in there, she’d have to risk a shot… no. The cockpit was empty. Popovic was on his own. She opened the hatch, in case someone was hiding in the foot-well, but that was empty, too.