The Rhine

by R L Dean

  The street narrowed at the first security checkpoint and traffic was funneled through a scanner. Two unarmed, private security guards watched everyone as they passed. The cart driver jockeyed for his place in line, starting and braking several times, and jerking them in their seats. As they passed the scanner and guards, Misaki noticed the edge of a giant hatch looming overhead in the ceiling, like the portcullis on the gate of an ancient castle.

  Traffic spilled out of the checkpoint and the driver beeped his horn several time, swerving and gunning the cart. For one brief moment she wondered if Yuri knew how to drive carts, as well as piloting the Sadie. Considering her dislike of him it was a surprising thing to muse on.

  Mat collects broken things, and people. Haydon had said.

  There were already too many echoes in her head, she needed to focus. She took a silent breath. By the time they reached the second checkpoint the voices and feelings that vied for her attention were silent.

  The driver turned so sudden she thought the little cart would tip over. He pulled up to the curb and slammed on the brakes. Misaki unbuckled and got off with everyone else. The cart pulled away as soon as the last passenger's butt left the seat.

  She filed in line with a dozen others, waiting to pass through the gate. The guards here were wearing plastic smiles and using hand scanners to scan badges. Calmly she waited for her turn and held up the badge as she stepped between the guards. He scanned it, then, with his smile unchanging and a nod he said, "You have a good day Miss Saito."

  Misaki stepped on through. Saito. She hadn't even checked the name on the badge.

  A walkway carried her along with several others to the plant's underground entrance. It was a plaza, with tiled floors, convenient stores, restrooms, and eateries. A giant Apex sign and logo hung over a fountain with green plants surrounding it that sat between two wide escalators. She had never set foot in the plant, but she knew where she needed to be. Checking a direction board she chose the escalator on the left and stood patiently while it carried her up.

  The upper level was given over to function, rather than comfort and esthetics. The plant and its attached refinery was a collection of sealed buildings and small domes spread out over two square kilometers of the lunar surface. Beyond was the cold black sky and death.

  Hatches lined the walls with color coded direction boards beside them. The security desk was occupied by three guards. Misaki stood in line behind a group of men in hardhats, by the heavy gloves tucked in their belts she guessed they were welders. There were two retinal scanners and the line moved quickly. Drawing on that famed Japanese composure her mother taught her, when it came her turn she stepped up, handed over her badge, waited for the guard to scan it, then put her eyes to the retinal scanner. It beeped.

  "Thank you, Miss Saito. Have a nice day," he said, with the same mechanical smile as the others of his kind. And for some reason she thought Haydon could mop the floor with all three of them at the same time. It was hard enough pushing Mat out of her head, why was Yuri and Haydon invading her thoughts now, at this time?

  Because they're family, a little voice in the back of her mind told her. Not the time to have an epiphany, she told herself.

  She gave the guard a brief smile as he handed the badge back, then walked around the desk and palmed the control pad to the Storage Maintenance Facility hatch and stepped into the corridor. As the hatch closed behind her she walked like a woman on a mission, as if she knew where she was going. Hatch seven-a, she said to herself. Hatch 7A would take her to a secondary control room. It was supposed to be at the end of the corridor, isolated and required a code to enter.

  Other technicians and engineers walked the corridor, moving between the hatches and carrying oversized handcomms. Except for the occasional polite nod they ignored her. When she found the hatch and reached out to the control pad she felt her palm turn sweaty. Almost as if Mat's ghost were still holding her hand. Swallowing, she pulled the access code from where it was burned into her mind along with all the others she had been given and entered it on the pad. The hatch opened.

  The control room was small. A low bank of terminals and screens set beneath a plexi window that went around the whole room, and beyond the tank farm stretched out across the gray landscape. And— another technician was in the room. He looked up from his screen and turned toward her. She stepped in with a smile on her face.

  "Uhh ..." he started.

  Think Saki, think! Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a fire extinguisher just to the inside, by the hatchway. As the hatch closed she said, "I need this." And started unstrapping it from the wall.

  His eyebrows shot up and he stood. "What? We have a fire ..."

  "Yes, it's ..." She pulled the extinguisher loose and swung it around, striking the man on the side of the face. Misaki was small, but she used the Sadie's gym regularly, to try and remedy the physical weakness brought on by the designer drug the tug crew fed her. He lost his footing and fell against the terminals, then turned and looked up at her, his eyes wide.

  She gritted her teeth and slammed him in the head two more times, the fire extinguisher making a thunking sound as it struck bone. The technician slid to the floor, and lay there unmoving. Her eyes wide and breathing hard she stared at him.

  Oh God, oh God, did I kill him ...

  There was surprisingly little blood. Maybe he wasn't dead. Then she took a deep breath and stopped. It wouldn't matter anyway. Dropping the extinguisher she stepped over his body and looked at the terminal. It was already sitting at a command prompt. The technician was harvesting diagnostic data on several of the building sized tanks, the progress was counting down in one corner of the screen beside readouts of gas composition, pressure, and temperature.

  She killed the diagnostics and began typing a long string of commands. The skills she drew upon now were not learned in the simplistic engineering classes of a Martian college. No, this she learned from her time in the FMN movement. Eric knew people, and some of those were highly skilled programmers. The kind that walked and talked like UNSEC personnel but never wore uniforms. These were also the skills that allowed her to survive aboard the tug ... showing the pirates a way to do more than simply turn off their transponder, but to encrypt the ship's system data, change the locking programs on the hatches. Make the ship secure from hacking and entry. Hours sitting at a terminal doing that was hours the monsters were not doing ... things to her. Hours that she was alive longer, with the hope of a rescue.

  Mother taught her that hope was something powerful, something tangible to hold on to— sending her to Mars had been a manifestation of that hope. And then Mat showed up. And now here she was.

  Accessing the tank farm's various security, monitoring, and maintenance programs could only be done from two control rooms, thus the reason she was here at this terminal. But the presence of the technician led her to believe it was not near as unused as she was told, so she worked as quickly as she could while another part of her prodigious brain hoped that no one else would show up.

  She opened the security program and changed the monitoring daemon, a simple hack around the code that tested a litany of variables for a false or a positive value. Then digging deep into the maintenance program she found the routines that regulated tank pressure and started the real work of altering the existing code. It took longer than she expected. Apex didn't hire ungifted programmers to build and maintain their software infrastructure, the coding was tight.

  The routine relied on monitoring data from the tanks and sent commands to each pump to increase pressure, or told valves to open and bleed off excess pressure. It would have taken several hours to skew the data coming in from each tank, so she changed the values of the variables in that single routine. The beauty of it was that she left the math alone, and the rest of the routine would take its designed course.

  A handcomm beeped and Misaki's breath caught in her throat. Her heart was hammering like a rabbit's. There was another beep and she realized it
was the tech's that she clubbed to the floor. It was glowing through his lab coat pocket.

  Someone might come looking for him. She had to hurry.

  Opening the last program— software designed to restore other damaged software from backups— and with no time to finesse it she set it to boot loop. It would sit in the server's memory, running, but never actually starting its scheduled scans.

  Alright, that was it. Taking a deep breath to steady her nerves she looked out the window at the tank farm and licked her lips, they were suddenly dry as the lunar dust. In the distance a mining ship was landing— a crane was ready to take its canisters. It made her think of Mat. At the tram station she was on the verge of asking him how long he had to wait until the canisters could be dropped and when he had answered before she could ask her reply had been awkward. Good. She was wondering what she would have done if Yuri already had the ship in queue when the tech's handcomm beeped again. Turning and stepping over him she opened the hatch and walked out, again a woman on a mission. Don't bother me, I'm busy.

  There were people further down the corridor, but no one near her. As the hatch closed she dithered between reprogramming the lock and just leaving. The cameras would catch her, it may not matter in the end but she couldn't afford delays at this point. A curious guard watching the right feed might come to investigate. Tugging the front of her lab coat she headed back the way she came. If her programming was correct, and if she could leave the plant in the same amount of time as it took to get there, then she would be clear of the blast. There would be chaos in the dome, but she might still make the tram to Osaka, home, before UNSEC locked everything down.

  It was difficult to keep to a brisk, business like walk, knowing that a bomb was just outside ticking down to an imprecise time. Keep it together, Saki-chan, it's almost over. You just need to make it home. That was her mother's voice. Her reason to live ... the one that made it worth continuing to survive in the Hell that was the tug. To have hope, and then hide who she really was from her rescuers ... a weak coward.

  I'm sorry, Mat. I'll never forgive myself ... but there are greater things I have to think about.

  Exiting the corridor she walked past the security desk, giving one of the security guards a quick smile as he looked up at her. Stepping to the escalator she folded her hands at her waist and waited. It gave her the aura of calm, while her insides were chewing themselves apart like the grinders rock-hoppers used to turn big rocks in to little ones.

  From the plaza she headed back to the secondary gate, security didn't pay her any mind. They were more concerned with the line going in than the line going out. Even so, in the back of her mind she was waiting for the emergency alarms to sound— the body of the technician found, or he was just unconscious and woke up, or someone found the changes she made to the maintenance software.

  She waited at the curb for a taxicart with a group of plant workers. When one arrived, a middle aged man with dirty coveralls and smut on his face stepped aside and let her have the last seat. He smiled and nodded. It sent chills down her neck and she wondered if he would make it out of the plant in time. As the cart pulled away from the curb, she shuddered inside and didn't dare look back. Random acts of kindness could not deter her now, not with the prize so close. Five minutes later the cart was waved through the tunnel's first gate, another minute and it pulled to the curb of the tunnel entrance and jerked to a stop. As she got off, more people got on and the cart driver made a sharp u-turn and headed back into the tunnel. Those people wouldn't make it.

  The protestors were still there, along with their UNSEC minders. And she saw a white haired man she recognized from the newsfeeds with them now. Joining the protest was a smart decision today, they just needed to stay away from the plant for a little longer and they would survive.

  Misaki took her original path back, until she reached the Landing Zone tram station. She couldn't risk running into Mat, if he recognized her in the lab coat and hardhat there would be no way to explain what she was doing. By all accounts she should be on the tram to Osaka or still waiting in line on the platform.

  The engineer inside her head said that it should be soon now. Things were about to turn chaotic. She needed to get back to the platform, and hope the tram was there. If she couldn't leave before the plant blew she might be stuck here for days. UNSEC would lock down the dome while they investigated what happened.

  When she made the entrance to the tram station it was all she could do not to run. The platform was still crowded with workers, but now the screen over the tram's tracks showed an ETA of fifteen minutes in big glowing green numbers.

  She hurried to the women's restroom, and this time she was a bit more aggressive about her place in line. It still took ten minutes for her to get in a stall. She pulled the lab coat off and stuffed it along with the ID badge down the disposal. The contacts were a little harder to remove than they were to put in, and it took a moment to get them out. She dropped them in the toilet. Next came the hardhat ... what was she going to do with it? It was too big to fit in the disposal. She felt short of breath, what was she going to do with the stupid hardhat ... wait, she knew what ...

  There was a popping sound. An echo that seemed to come from somewhere overhead, and then the floor vibrated slightly.

  Misaki dropped the hardhat and jerked the stall door open. Everyone's eyes were as wide as hers. They were looking around at the ceiling. She shoved her way through the crowd, several others pushing along behind her, almost using her as a battering ram.

  It was the same on the platform. People looking at the ceiling.

  "Meteorite!" Someone yelled.

  Suddenly there was a loud crunch, and the floor bucked. Misaki pushed her way to the lockers as the crowd began to panic. People were pushed off the platform onto the tram tracks ... the screaming started.

  Her handcomm beeped, causing her breath to catch in her throat. She pulled it from her pocket ... it was Mat. Oh God!

  Someone started shouting, "We've been hit!" The rest was drowned out in a klaxon blare and red flashing lights.

  She accepted the call, or thought she did, she had to stab at the little screen two more times before Mat's dark face appeared. You could see the worry. Somebody slammed into her, crushing her against the lockers and knocking the handcomm from her grasp. She was shoved aside as people around her were caught in a surge of panic.

  The sound of metal twisting, ripping, filled the station and there was a tremor, like an earthquake.

  What have I done?

  31 - Eric

  Cydonia Depot was located in a nameless crater about four hundred kilometers east of Capital Burrow. This was going to be a big job, and Eric knew it. The crater itself, eroded by time and perhaps by water at one point in history, was three kilometers across and two-hundred and fifty meters deep. He had done his research and reached out to another team to join his. They were in a rover behind him, following as Weng lead them at a snail's pace through the dusty hills and gravel filled trenches of the Cydonia wilderness. Eric didn't think Weng's temper was going to survive the trip. Jeffery had complained about her driving across the open channel and her response had been a vehement string of curse words linked with numerous pronouns.

  The job was risky. Because of the terrain it had to be done during daylight hours. There were two satellite pass-overs scheduled for the region, and potential UNSEC drone patrols between the depot and Capital Burrow. Eric knew that Lieutenant Colonel Compton was denied additional manpower, forcing him to rely more and more on automated surveillance. That was a positive, but Jung's intel was spotty on those patrol patterns or whether the Colonel had some other hardware up his uniform sleeve. For all Eric knew the man might have a giant telescope on Olympus Mons— an all seeing eye. Even so, the risk was worth it.

  Like their last target, the old Settlement Base dome, the Cydonia Depot had been around since the beginning of the colonization effort. In fact, machines had constructed it a few years prior to the arrival of th
e first colonists. It was established as a storage and repair depot for UNSEC shuttles and was a hub of activity in those early years. And, like Settlement Base, it fell into disuse as the colony began to get itself situated. Currently there were three thirty year old shuttles sitting in hangers and an assortment of old parts still in inventory. But none of that was what mattered. What made the depot a target to take risks for was the contents of several of its other hangers.

  With Sol-X pulling out of Mars the Big Three ... well, the Big Two now ... saw an opportunity to round out their inventory of luxury goods. The intel that Jung gave him access to showed that AgraSource was trying its hand at producing candy and was renting space to store a thousand crates of something called spiced chocolate bars. And PermaTech was renting two hangers, filled with home decor. All of it useless junk, not necessary for Martian survival.

  Striking the depot would be, as the Earth saying went, killing two birds with one stone.

  Through the open channel Barnes, the cell leader in the other rover, said, "Satellite passing in ten."

  "I know," Weng replied. "We're almost to Tannhauser ..."

  The rover jerked and slid sideways, slamming Eric and his team around in their restraints. Jeffery yelled something obscene and impossible to do. Weng cursed for a solid minute as the rover jinked and finally lined out.

  "Sorry," she said. "Frost. We're almost there."

  Barnes was laughing over the channel.

  Tannhauser Petram was a tiny dot on any map of Mars you looked up, almost invisible among the more impressive geological features of the planet. It was a boulder eroded into the shape of a mushroom, with enough room under its 'cap' to fit a couple of rovers and hide them from the satellite's prying eye.