by Patty Jansen
The Station Storage Office was on the left-hand side, an empty shopfront with just a counter and a number of screens.
She went inside. She didn't need to speak to the single attendant behind the counter. He looked busy, handing someone a box from which all manner of items protruded.
The group of young people in the corner watched this interaction, and as soon as the box’s owner made his way to the exit, they approached him.
Tina was too far away to hear what was being said, but she saw how the owner shook his head and then the man's female partner yelled something at the young men, at which everyone in the room looked around.
"Any trouble?" the man behind the desk asked.
"No. These people were just about to leave us alone," the woman said.
The man behind the counter glared at the group of youths, who quickly made their way out of the office.
Someone else in the room asked, "What time is the auction?"
A mate chimed in. “You're already late. We’re waiting."
"We shall start momentarily," the man behind the counter said, and then he spotted Tina and asked, “Can I help you?" Almost as if he was glad for a distraction.
“No, I'm just looking something up."
Tina went to one of the screens, but the tension in the room could be cut with a knife.
The office’s public access screens were placed on the four sides of pillars that supported the roof. There was plenty of room around them, and instructions were written in large script on the main menu. Enter your name, and the date that your items entered storage.
Tina was about to type in any of the names she would have used as aliases—fake IDs with proper identification if this was needed—but then she stopped.
All these people could see over her shoulder.
So she went to another screen, one on the far side of the pillar, where no one could stand behind her.
But people still watched, and more people came into the shop. The employee opened a door to another room which contained rows of chairs. It seemed the auction was about to begin.
Most of the young people filed in, but some lingered back, as if hesitant to be seen in the auction room.
From what Tina remembered, there was usually a lively trade in selling keys and unknown content of lockers, including bidding wars for those keys, especially if they were virgin keys, meaning that no one had opened the locker since it had become legal for the station authority to confiscate it.
Tina typed in the name of the contact she’d keyed to be able to pick up the content of the box: Louise Metvier. She selected the date she had deposited the material in the box. Then she was prompted she to show her ID to the scanner at the top of the screen.
Tina pulled out her ID and held it up, mentally crossing her fingers that this fifteen-year-old process still worked.
The computer opened an information screen.
The locker was in the document storage area, and the screen gave her a number as well as a code that she needed to open the locker. Tina copied it down, and then exited the screen after having given the command that the data should be destroyed after she had retrieved the content.
She quickly left the office.
She found her locker in a section that had a wall with tiny cubicles labelled for document storage. It was easy to find, but she walked around the area twice just to make sure no one was following her.
Of course no one stored actual documents in these boxes, just devices that held the documents. It was one of the few ways to ensure that no one hacked the information.
It was such a device that Tina found inside the small space: a small reader of a generic make, a dark-grey flat box that would project its contents either on a table or wall or a special screen, if you had one. In accordance with Perseus Agency rule, it was not linkable to wireless networks, and any copying had to be done with a dock or cable, the old-fashioned way.
There used to be a shelf in the office that contained boxes of these things for general use of agents.
This was the device that she had placed in here, untouched, because the seal over the screen was still intact.
To her surprise, the locker contained a second device, one she definitely hadn’t put in there. It, too, was dark-grey and flat, sealed with a piece of tape. She guessed it to be a few years more recent.
Well, crap.
She took both out of the locker, stuck them in the pocket of her jacket and shut the door. Then she made her way down the corridor. Her footsteps echoed weirdly in the narrow space, creating the impression that someone was following her. She looked around, but the corridor on both sides was empty, although the curved floor did not allow her to see very far.
Without her uniform and her weapon she felt naked. Theft and robbery were quite common in these stations and police were always busy. Many of the big passenger ships arrived with stowaways who might work in the kitchens for their passage, but if discovered they would be left behind on the stations. They had no papers, no official identity and no home. Back when she worked with the agency, the captain would always warn the crew about them when the ship came into dock.
A few of these illegal ship people sat on the floor a bit further down the passage. They barely looked up when Tina passed.
But as soon as she had gone a little distance, she noticed that a group of three men walked behind her. They pretended to be talking to each other, but they stopped whenever she did, and made a clear effort not to look in her direction when she looked in theirs.
They were not in uniform, and didn’t have the typical slightly-too-casual appearance of Federacy agents trying to look casual.
No, they were just a bunch of friends going for a walk. Or were they? She was starting to see danger in everything.
Still, it was better to go back to the hotel.
Ahead in the corridor, a group of people were entering a door that, when she came closer, turned out to lead into a stairwell. She followed them down to the next level, walking quickly.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs to see if the three men were still behind her.
They were.
Shit.
She let herself out of the door at the bottom of the stairwell, and entered another featureless corridor.
It was virtually empty, except for two people at the very end.
Tina headed that direction, but had not yet reached the end before the door to the stairs behind her opened and one of the men peeked out.
The fact that they were following her like this meant they were not just casual friends. They were also not from the station authorities, because the authorities had many other ways to follow people inside the station. They only needed to track people’s communication devices.
These guys weren’t even smart about following her.
Holy crap, what did they want? She had no way to defend herself. Rex was alone at the hotel.
Tina sped to the end of the corridor as fast as she dared without running. It ended in a T-intersection. She randomly chose left, because that was the direction the other people had gone. She had no idea where she was, and hoped that if she followed other people, she might end up in the commercial passage from where she could find her way back.
But the new corridor was just as long and featureless as the previous, and what was worse, no one was in it.
Tina ran.
She looked over her shoulder several times, but she knew that she was not fast enough to outrun a couple of men half her age, if they decided to give chase. She was woefully out of condition.
At that point, her training kicked in. When followed, and finding another safe area is not an option, do something unexpected.
The biggest unexpected thing she could do was to go back to the ship, anywhere that led these characters away from Rex.
The docks were well monitored with few people, and few ways to hide your face or identity scan from security cameras. It was a gamble, but all spies—whether from the Federacy or not—were rel
uctant to be identified. They might not follow her in there.
Then she could fake some sort of issue with the ship and call a security guard to escort her out. Or she could find something to keep in her pocket as weapon.
She quickly made her way through the passages back to the docks. The disks in her pocket thumped against her leg.
It seemed she had been right about the pursuers: they didn’t dare come into the lift with her.
She had at least as much advantage on the men as it took the lift to get back. If they were going to follow at all.
When the door opened, Tina ran through the passage.
But when she arrived at the ship, it was to find someone already there.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In the access tunnel, someone had piled up blankets, and when Tina came closer, a goose waddled out of the shadows, honking at her.
“Lenna, come back here!” a young voice called.
The urchin Rasa rushed out and grabbed the goose around the neck and chest.
Then she stopped, looking at Tina. “Oh. It’s you.”
“I thought I said you couldn’t stay in my ship.”
“I’m not in the ship.”
True. “But you’re blocking the entrance.”
“You can get past.”
“Without getting bitten?”
“I’ll keep them away. I swear.” The goose in her arms was trying to free itself by pushing its orange feet against her shirt.
“Why did you come back?”
“I have nowhere else to go. Outside, this area all belongs to the gang. When I go there, they steal my food and hurt me and try to sell me to the pimps.”
“What sort of gang is this?”
“Thugs, you know. They mug people and steal stuff from the big ships. They get caught sometimes, but then they come out of jail and join the gangs again. They’re not nice to girls. If you’re a girl, you want to stay away from them. They’re all around the docks and that area.”
“All right. Stay here. I still don’t want the animals in the ship. I’m trying to sell it and need it cleaned up.”
“You mean the ship will be taken away?”
“I don’t know what the new owner will do with it.”
Rasa’s eyes were wide. Heavens. Just how long had she lived inside?
Tina had just kicked the girl out of a safe home and now she was going to take the home away.
Rasa held the geese to the side while Tina walked past to the ship’s entrance.
She asked, “Do they lay eggs?”
“Of course they do. They’re all girls. I can sell you eggs. They’re very big. Half a credit for four.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tina went inside the craft and sat down on the bench, leaning her head in her hands. This was all a lot less easy than she had imagined. She’d come here simply to sell the ship, not to solve all the unsolvable problems she had left behind, and all of everyone else’s problems, and save the universe while she was at it.
Ultimately, a desire to save humanity from itself was why she had left the Force, and, having found that, fifteen years later, humanity was still keen to destroy itself, all kinds of reasons were tugging at her to have a second attempt at saving the universe.
She blew out a breath.
Let’s see what was on this extra disk that obviously someone at some stage managed to place in the locker.
An image of a man popped up in the air. He wore a Federacy Force uniform. He was middle-aged, his hair was short and grey, his eyes brown and his bearded face quite friendly. Well, damn it, that was Vasily Demetrov, colleague and friend.
He stood at the front of Project Charon Station’s meeting room. Some of Tina’s old colleagues sat in the audience. Even Jake Monterra was there.
Vasily was a doctor for the agency and, once a year, he would give a health report of all the agency’s employees, as part of a very long and boring progress report.
“What we see here is the trend continuing from last year and the year before. We have an increasing number of our research workforce struck by a variety of health conditions that they didn’t exhibit prior to joining the agency, and that they can’t attribute to anything in particular, other than that their employment by the agency has been a common trigger.”
Someone in the audience made a protest.
“Yes, I know about the objections that people voice against me, but the data doesn’t lie. This is not a healthy place to work. When you join the agency’s research staff, you are three times more likely than the general population to contract certain conditions. You are four times more likely to contract other conditions, and up to seven times more likely to contract an illness of any kind. This happens over so many different conditions that it can no longer be considered a statistical anomaly. Something in our environment at the station is making us ill.”
The audience wanted to know more. Had he checked the recycling and food production, had he considered sabotage by those groups who disliked the station where it was and who might have, by some means, obtained a pretty decent feel for their operations?
Vasily said they’d checked all this.
Tina remembered this talk, even if she couldn’t see herself in the audience, and didn’t remember anyone recording it.
Tina also remembered how, during this talk, she had the revelation that this could be caused by the dust from the rift. It should be something they should investigate.
She’d grown accustomed to seeing the flashes of light that erupted from the area known as “the mouth”. She’d seen the chunks of rock that the agency pushed into it disappear. She’d done analyses on the fragments of material that the mouth spat out.
Biological analysis, no less. Then the material she’d spotted coming out reached the area where they sampled rocks. They found something: molecular structures that were dividing and growing as they were being observed in a solution and at a temperature where nothing should be alive. That was the point at which she had become concerned.
The projection changed to show herself in the spot where Vasily had stood.
“The existence of a rift at Project Charon is a poorly kept secret. It was discovered thirty years before I started working with the agency, when the agency was looking for an area to conduct antimatter experiments, but no one is sure if these experiments caused the rift, made it bigger or whether it was already there. At first no one knew what this rift was. We discovered it's a portal to another universe. We noticed that clouds of dust came out. We sampled the objects that came into contact with these clouds of particles. I was appointed to the team as biologist, but after the initial sampling, I was told my services were no longer needed. The only time I was allowed to study this material, I was highly concerned, but when I raised the alarm, authorities only told us to monitor the situation closely.”
The younger Tina in the projection ran her hand through her hair. She looked pale and ill. Pregnant with Rex, even if she didn’t know it at the time.
“We saw the molecular structures on our probes, but we never got to see data from any of the other samples they collected that had come out of the rift. I find the obstruction of the flow of data across research groups disturbing at the very least—let’s not forget we’re talking about alien organisms—but certain elements in the research division seem what I shall call “uninterested”. So I present to you the findings that led me to my position, which is: we should not touch, culture or otherwise interfere with this material. It’s highly dangerous.”
The projection changed to show a long thread of tissue at a high magnification. Taken with a scanning microscope, Tina was well familiar with these images. She used to make them all the time, studying rocks and fragments of ice and other material captured near the rift.
“These cellular blobs are typical of the type of structures we first observed,” she said in the recording. It was strange to hear her voice from fifteen years ago.
“The word organism isn’t o
ne I like to use for this thread of material. In its basic form, it is nothing but a blob of material that contains the four basic elements and building blocks of life. The blobs can be soft, pre-protein based or hard, mineral based. There is no structure in these threads or blobs other than the basic molecular structures. They are literally what scientists used to call the soup of life. But when you grow this material in the lab, it’s likely to change in nature overnight, becoming fungus-like or slime-like and resembling known structures.
“If we insert biological material of known origin, say, a lettuce leaf, the alien molecules imitate the cell structures, but at the same time turn the ensemble of leaf plus alien molecules into something different: a live creature of its own. A living lettuce leaf.
“This alien material is more than the building blocks of life. It’s able to turn into any kind of life it wants. It’s an origin of life. If you’re religious, you may call it God’s putty.
“We don’t know what drives it and what triggers change. Until we know this, the risk of infection through this material is huge. If we come into contact with it, we’re likely to become infected. If we’re infected, it has the potential to change us and who—or what—we are.”
Mentally, Tina filled in what she had wanted to say back then: she believed there was a chance that many people were already infected. She had taken a lot of flak for going everywhere in her protective gear.
“I don’t believe that the agency is taking enough steps to prevent the spread and contamination. I have raised this with my superiors, but they haven’t addressed my concerns. I believe the agency hires experts to give them advice. I’m an expert. I am of the opinion that this material is highly dangerous. I will no longer be involved in the spread of it, or in the cover-up that hides the danger from the rest of humanity.”
She wondered why Vasily had sent all this, and where he was now.
But then she noticed another folder.
Chapter Twenty-Four