by J. F. Holmes
Three Strikes
by John M. Olsen
____________________
30 years before present
Patty DeMarco was a patient woman. Her marriage had proved that over and over again. She tossed their dinner’s wrappings into the recycler as her husband Dagen watched a news announcer describing the latest UN orbital strike on Ross 154B. It was a research planet in a star system she couldn’t point to if her life depended on it. The rebels were getting out of hand.
Dagen pointed at the view screen as if the announcer could see and respond to him. “Dangerous rebels? Who are you kidding? Their so-called surgical strike was murder, pure and simple.” Dagen finished his green protein drink.
Patty glared across the dinner nook in their apartment, a cramped unit with just enough room for a bed and a table. They’d given up everything to move to the UNES refueling platform orbiting Earth. “I won’t have you badmouthing the government. Your grandparents died in the big crop famines, Dagen. And don’t forget they sent the Parkers groundside for sympathizing with rebels.”
“Sent groundside. Is that what they call it now? Have you called them? We haven’t heard a word from them.” His implication was clear. He thought they were in prison, or worse.
He lowered his voice. “Sorry, Sweetie. I know how it bothers you.” Dagen wiped dinner crumbs from his hands and stood. “I’ve got third shift, so I’ll see you at shift change.” He grabbed his helmet and kissed her cheek as he squeezed past to the door into the main hall.
She grabbed his hand to stop him and wrapped her arms around him with her head on his shoulder. “You be careful out there.” They disagreed on everything from politics to cooking, but they always fell back on their love for each other to smooth over the rough edges of their relationship. She recognized the limits a conversation could reach without hurt feelings, and so did Dagen. A successful family was a team effort, and always took priority over their differences. Besides, her legendary patience invariably won every time.
“I’m always careful.” He kissed her again, but longer this time, his warm lips giving her spine a tingle as intense as the first time he’d kissed her. That first kiss had led to marriage, then they’d raised three children, all grown now.
Patty sat at the communication console and rubbed a hand along its edge. It displayed their family picture. The photo was out of date, but it showed Dagen, Patty, and all three kids the last time they’d met for a shared vacation at a remote beach cottage only reachable by boat. That cottage was a mansion compared to their cramped station apartment, but living in orbit was worth it. This was where the excitement and high-tech work called to them like a siren song. Everyone here was part of something bigger than themselves, working for the greater good of humanity.
She brought up her credit balance on the console. Text messages to Earth were cheap, but messages via a wormhole ate through paychecks in a hurry. Ansible messages for a live video conversation with her daughter Stacee were out of the question. Nobody had money like that. She entered a quick message to Daniel and Bonita, who were still earthbound and happy to never go into orbit. They lived their ordinary lives groundside. Stacee was a different matter.
Growing up, Stacee had followed the news of settlers on distant worlds like most teenagers followed sports or singers. She’d joined a colony expedition to the Calvin system ten years before as a newlywed, with her childhood sweetheart Maurice.
Patty had never met her grandson Trevor. She knew him only through the messages, pictures, and videos Stacee sent at every milestone of their baby’s life. The boy might never see Earth in person. Humanity had come so far in such a short time.
She sent a text message to Stacee despite the cost. Family was family, even light years away.
With everything from her to-do list taken care of, she climbed into bed. Yet sleep eluded her, as she tossed and turned, seeking the cool spots on her pillow as she flipped it over and wadded it into a ball.
It was a Mother’s Curse to worry about her husband as he worked outside the station, attaching booster rockets to captured icy comets. She also wondered how each of her children fared, despite their regular messages to her. It would be years, if ever, before they could afford a wormhole trip, and too many trips to the surface would still eat all their savings.
The kids on the surface below would reply to her overnight, since their workdays were never in sync with the UNES platform and its geostationary orbit near the prime meridian. It was impossible to predict how long the message to Stacee would take to reach her, since it relied on ships shuttling back and forth through the wormhole network.
After tossing and turning for an hour, she drifted into fitful sleep.
***
The next morning, Patty passed Dagen in the hall on the way to her shift in the cargo registration and inspection office. He grabbed her and twirled around twice. One of his coworkers called out, “Get a room, you two!”
She whispered in Dagen’s ear, but loud enough for the coworker to hear, “I booked an observation lounge for later. Do you think that will count? You didn’t forget about our date, now did you, Dagen?”
They all laughed as they broke up, Dagen’s hands lingering on hers for a moment before he and his coworkers headed home on their various paths through the narrow hallways. Patty ducked into the office she shared with three other cargo inspectors. A sign on the wall read, “Everyone’s safety depends on you! Don’t let Earth down.”
The duty roster assigned her to a cargo transport for a contraband scan. At least she didn’t need a pressure suit this time, since the cargo bay of the ship held standard atmospheric pressure. One of her funniest experiences with cargo in a vacuum was when a child had sneaked a bag of marshmallows into a suitcase. It had taken hours to clean up the sticky white mess of expanded marshmallow foam. The vacuum quarantines sure took care of pest control, though. Not even cockroaches could survive the hard vacuum of space.
Two airlocks later, she strolled down a narrow walkway between stacks of sealed freight containers. The familiar smell of machine oil and sweat greeted her like an old friend. Her only concern was for broken seals and the loose-crated cargo, since the sealed containers went through quarantine and scanning before docking. Month after month she assumed she’d seen it all, and month after month she was wrong.
Some contraband was due to uninformed wealthy vacationers, while other discoveries were the clever work of smugglers and thieves, the sort the government protected her from. The sort she protected the outer worlds from.
She checked one container after another with her sensor suite. It was a quiet week. Near the end of the row her tablet chirped, startling her. Rather than a sensor alarm, it was a notification that her message to Stacee had bounced with a security flag.
The flag must be a mistake. Maybe Patty had entered the credentials wrong, or maybe Stacee was on vacation.
Her tablet pinged again with a notice from her shift supervisor to return to the inspection office. Her shift was almost over, so interrupting it was unheard of. Something must have happened to Stacee. But it was paranoid to link the two events. Maybe her recall to the office was something ordinary. Her thoughts ricocheted over what might have happened to Stacee, or if the problem was more local. She knew it was her mothering instinct kicking in again, but that didn’t calm her.
On her way back through the airlocks, she scrolled through the message history on the chance she’d missed something. There, while she’d slept, was a message from Daniel down on the surface. In her rush that morning, Patty hadn’t taken the time to check her messages.
It read, “I’m worried about Maurice and Stacee. They’ve worked a lot of extra hours on the farm, and it’s wearing on them. Three days ago I got no reply, and today I got a bounce. Send word if you can reach them.”
Her imagination kicked into high gear and ran wild with deadly viruses, unknown animals on foreign worlds, and accidents. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t her imagination this time.
Did they have native animals on Calvin? An easy data search would tell her. As she approached the office, she saw her supervisor Harold in the hallway, waiting for her while glancing at his data tablet.
“Come into my office, Patty.” Harold’s eyes held a hint of sadness she hadn’t seen before.
“What is it? Has there been an accident?”
Harold aimed her at a chair but remained standing. “First, I need you to authorize something for me.” He handed her a retinal scanner, which she held up to her eye until the authorization on the scanner went from red to green.
“What’s that?”
“They need to search your personal records. I’m sure it’s nothing. You haven’t been watching the news today, have you?”
Patty’s heart leaped out of her chest and she grabbed the armrests of her chair. “Not while on shift. You know me better than that. Now tell me what happened. I’d rather hear it from you, whatever it is.”
Harold turned on the wall display behind him and selected a news broadcast with a large banner running across the bottom. The announcer said, “Again, breaking news comes to us from the Calvin system, where yet another orbital strike has destroyed a rebel group.” The picture panned across a series of huge craters, with smoking rubble strewn about. Crops burned in the distance. Soldiers worked their way through the rubble.
Large tungsten rods launched from orbit with minimal guidance systems. That’s all it took, according to a documentary Patty had watched a few weeks back, with Dagen giving her a running commentary on the orbital mechanics involved.
Harold looked at the floor. “I’m sorry, Patty. It was the farm where your daughter worked.”
“Their farm? How is that possible?”
“A citizen is on his way to the station to talk to you and Dagen. I’m sure he can tell you what happened, but he’ll have questions for you, too.”
Patty stared off into the distance, her eyes brimming. “Of course. Anything they want. She would never help criminals. May I go now? I’m meeting Dagen.”
Harold held a hand out but only reached half way to her. “As long as we can track you through your tablet. The citizen will be here soon, and he won’t want to wait.”
She wandered the halls toward the observation deck. Stacee had always supported a strong government. In her youth, the willful girl had berated her father for his backward views often enough. This had to be a mistake. It must have been the wrong farm, or someone else acting in secret.
The government was supposed to be careful. Isn’t that what a surgical strike meant? She opened her tablet and searched the contact list. There. The Parkers had sent her a new contact number before they left, but she’d been reluctant to use it after they were removed from their jobs on the station. She placed a direct call. Lag would be horrible, and the cost would be high, but she had to know. The display flashed an error message, showing the number was out of service.
Her feet carried her forward in a daze until she realized the observation area door stood before her. She opened the hatch to see Dagen already there, gazing toward Earth with his hands clasped together at his back. The sterile smell of scrubbed air did nothing to ease her fears.
His first words were, “You heard?”
“Yes. A citizen is coming. We’ll get this all straightened out. Maybe they weren’t there. She would never approve of anything illegal.” She wanted it to be true, but she fought a growing fear.
“You’re right. It’s my fault. I argued with Stacee over the rebels, knowing she would never budge. I wasn’t careful about what I said. They must have me on a list somewhere.”
Grief poured out of Patty in waves. “Do you mean she may be dead because of your stupid arguments? I can’t lose both of you in one day.”
He took her into his arms and held here there, standing in the blue and white glow of Earth. He caressed her back as she sobbed. If the Parkers were gone, what hope did she have? Innocent or guilty, her family would be under restriction. Dagen could face charges of treason, based on nothing more than casual arguments with their daughter. How had it all gone so wrong?
The door opened, but Patty kept her face buried in Dagen’s chest, unwilling to recognize whoever stood at the door. It had to be the citizen. Finally, the stranger cleared his throat.
Dagen took her hands in his. In one of his palms he held a small mechanical button with an antenna. “A last resort,” he mumbled.
A last resort for what? She was lost in events over her head.
The citizen was a tall man with an olive complexion and a precision haircut. His suit bore the marks of a rich man in both style and texture. He was used to his position of power. Patty glimpsed the shadows of two men outside the door. Did they honestly think she or Dagen would flee while on a space station? Even if she wanted to, there was nowhere to go.
She wiped her tears on a sleeve and stood beside Dagen. Her voice quavered as she spoke. “Welcome, Citizen. What can we help you with? I’ve consented to your search, and we will do whatever we can to clear this up.”
Dagen stood silent as a wooden statue, watching the citizen. She’d never seen such a look of resignation on Dagen’s face. After all those arguments with her and anyone else who held an opinion, he’d gone quiet. Was it really resignation, or was he waiting for something?
“I’m Citizen Sharp. Yes, I saw your approval, Mrs. DeMarco. Our scans have cleared your communications. Your husband, on the other hand, is in a great deal of trouble.”
Dagen stepped forward, but he stopped as a guard stepped into the doorway with his right hand on a weapon. Dagen said, “Do what you want with me, but leave her. She’s done nothing but support you and the UN her entire life. You and I both know it’s true. Our daughter and her husband were as loyal as they come, too.”
“You’re right. We know these things as well as you do. I didn’t need Patty’s permission to look through her records. I’m a citizen. It was another test to see how dedicated she was. I’ve taken an interest in your family for months, because it was your daughter who reported illicit crops on Calvin. She was our informant. She takes after her mother that way.”
Patty’s eyes grew wide. “You rescued Maurice and Stacee before the orbital strike?” She let out a sob that was half laugh.
“I’m afraid that would have betrayed us and given our primary target time to flee. I’m sorry for your loss. They were both devoted to the cause until the end. We are better for their sacrifice.”
Dagen stepped forward. “You murdered them? For convenience? Only to kill your real target without warning?” He reached a hand out toward the citizen, but the citizen’s reflexes were too fast. In an instant he had a weapon raised to point at Dagen and pulled its trigger. The weapon ejected a strange wire mesh that hit Dagen in the chest and stuck to him.
Dagen went rigid. The button with the tiny antenna in his hand fell to the floor behind him as he grunted.
Patty had never seen a weapon like the one the citizen used. Was it electrical? It could be anything. She had no way to know, and could do nothing without risking her own life. How it worked didn’t matter. It held Dagen still, except for an occasional twitch.
The citizen adjusted a dial on his weapon, and Dagen’s ragged breathing stopped as his face turned red. The smell of ozone grew.
Patty yelled, “Stop! What are you doing to him?” She reached a hand to Dagen but pulled back at the biting tingle in her fingers when she touched his arm.
The citizen glanced up as if to read something. Maybe he was reading. She’d heard of the optical and audio implants the wealthy used. “The allowed punishments for attempted assault on a citizen are clear. To bring up sedition would be redundant.” With a vicious twist he adjusted the dial again and Dagen crumpled to the ground as an electrical arc glowed across the wires.
Dagen had only been defending her, and now he lay there, unresponsive. Dying or dead. She leaned forward, but the citizen trained the weapon on her.
“We can discuss this, or not.
The choice is yours, Mrs. DeMarco. Being free of your extremist husband, you have much to look forward to. He was a sympathizer, and he hid the full extent of his betrayal for years. Hid it from both you and the government. Our closer look discovered him because of your daughter Stacee’s work. I know you’re not like him. We can help each other, but it’s up to you.”
What could she do? The love of her life lay still on the floor, and his killer stood before her offering help. Nothing could bring Dagen safely back into her arms. She hid her rage and terror and controlled her expression. Her marriage to Dagen had taught her that skill with regular use.
“I loved Dagen more than you can know, and now he’s gone. Stacee is gone, with Maurice and Trevor.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “What about my other children, sir?”
The citizen flinched. “The risk evaluations of your groundside children came up positive, like Mr. DeMarco’s. They’ve been taken into custody and will go into rehabilitation, if they cooperate. Your profile, however, shows an unusual level of dedication to what you believe in. We can use that dedication to help you make the most of your life and the UN.”
Could she believe him? His flinch at her question told her the children had been in custody before the citizen had arrived. Her entire family might all be gone now. Her whole world turned upside down. What monster would sacrifice innocent people to attack an enemy from orbit, then remove the evidence of their sloppy methods? Dagen was right about everything, and this citizen offered her a life dedicated to the organization that had killed her family.
She had nothing left to live for. Or did she? Stacee’s bravery had helped her to fight for what she believed in to settle a new world. Dagen had fought a different battle, and believed different things, but had fought, nonetheless. She, too, was a fighter, but what did she believe in? What would she fight for? Patty had argued enough over the years to know when to bluff and back away, before striking an unexpected winning blow after she’d thought things through. The choice was simple. She would fight for her family, for justice, and for truth.