Valhalla Station: A Space Opera Noir Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth Book 1)

by Bruns, David

  Ruben Qinlao • Mineral Extraction and Processing Facility 12, Mars

  Li was late.

  Ruben could hear his own labored breathing in the vac-suit. It was like the air was too heavy, and his lungs had to work to pull it in. The nervous awareness that this was no quick fix, whatever Ming had promised Tony, was like a solid thing in his throat.

  The blast—blasts , he reminded himself—had caused cave-ins up and down the line. Qinlao Manufacturing had drilled tunnels far past the hard-scrabble dermal layer of Mars—deep into the planet’s vitals, where the richest mineral deposits waited to be mined, crushed, and leached of their precious metals by QM machinery.

  It was the devastation in front of Ruben that made him labor to breathe.

  The mangled equipment. The lost lives.

  The lost production , a voice whispered in his head. Was it Ming’s? Tony’s ?

  My own?

  The voice of Medina Li crackled over comms. “Coming up now, Mr. Qinlao. Apologies for the delay.”

  “It’s all right, Captain,” Ruben replied. “Gave me time to—” Take stock? Feel regret? “—think.”

  A shadow formed on the other side of the semiopaque, plastisteel barrier the damage control crew had erected around the refinery’s main entrance. The barrier served as a temporary bulkhead against depressurization until the outer dome sealing the underground facility from the surface was completely repaired. Some of QM’s engineers argued they’d need to rebuild the dome entirely to ensure structural integrity. Domes weren’t something you built half assed.

  But the regent’s orders were clear: get the refinery back online ASAP. And so the patchwork process to make that happen was under way.

  The bulkhead hatch opened. Li bounced quickly toward him in the half-g.

  Afraid he’s upset his employer , Ruben surmised. He took the gloved hand Li extended.

  “Pleasure to meet you in person, Mr. Qinlao.”

  “Ruben, please. Let’s not waste time here, certainly not on formalities.”

  “Yes, sir.” Li’s voice, crystal clear now without interference from the surrounding cavern walls, audibly relaxed. “I still think this is a bad idea, sir.”

  “I appreciate your opinion, and I respect it,” Ruben said. “But I want to see the damage for myself. Regent’s orders.”

  “This way then, sir. ”

  They passed through the bulkhead’s hatch into a small, waiting antechamber. Locks cycled behind them until the outer seals showed green. The door on the other side depressurized with a hiss of atmosphere before sliding aside.

  It’s an anthill that’s been kicked over .

  Ruben took his first steps into industrial anarchy. Engineering crews were moving everywhere, dismantling useless slag that had once been working mining equipment, bracing load-bearing walls with temporary columns. The constant activity had elicited the anthill image. But that wasn’t quite right, either. It looked like someone had taken a gigantic collection of enormous tools, dumped them on the ground, and then randomly scattered them around.

  There were no bodies evident.

  That was something anyway, he thought, embarrassed at himself. People had died here, QM employees doing the jobs they were paid to do. His distaste at the thought of seeing a corpse or two seemed disloyal to their memory somehow.

  “All twenty-four extraction stations were hit,” Li was explaining. “This was an extremely well-coordinated attack. Made in two phases for maximum damage.”

  “Are you sure?” Ruben asked. Those details weren’t in the official report he’d read. But that wasn’t a surprise. Official reports had a way of being leaked to the Undernet. No one put anything into an official report they didn’t want seen by the other factions.

  Li nodded. It was an odd, almost non-gesture inside the captain’s vac-suit. “The first round of explosives targeted strong points. Once those were compromised, the second round hit them again. The mouths of the mining tunnels were a principal target. Millions of SynCorp dollars in damages. It’ll take weeks just to clean up. Engineering is still trying to make it safe enough to work in here—the cleanup work, I mean. Restarting the facility? Not even on the radar.”

  They walked a ways, Ruben fascinated by the ballet of engineers bringing order to anarchy.

  “How many people died here, Captain?”

  “About a hundred.”

  About?

  “More than half of those were the crew personnel down the shafts,” Li said.

  Ruben watched as two workers wearing loader exoskeletons each clamped on to the ruined end of a massive machine. A compactor, he thought, what the crews used to crush extracted rock to make it easier to liquefy its precious metals before chemically reconstituting them into their pure form.

  “It sounds like the point was to cause maximum casualties,” Ruben said.

  “That was part of it. Hey! Watch your angle over there! You’re about to hit that temporary pylon.” Following Li’s pointing finger, Ruben saw one of the cleanup crew stop, look, and adjust what he was doing. Or she. In the suits, it was hard to tell. “But the biggest impact, long term, is the hit on productivity. The ripple effect across the Company. It’s only one facility, but still…”

  “Your report was very specific about the explosives used,” Ruben said.

  “C-4B, old military grade stuff,” Li confirmed. “I’d only ever read about it before this. In the reports on Graves’s Rebellion.”

  “What’s that? Machine lubricant?” Ruben pointed at a wide splash of brown streaking the gray of a reinforcing wall. It looked like someone had dipped an enormous brush in Martian red paint and dragged it along the wall. Only, it had dried to a dull rust color, almost indistinguishable from the wall itself.

  “It’s blood, Mr.—Ruben.”

  Ruben stared at the wall, his imagination filling in the details of how the blood came to be slung so high. How could one human body contain so much of it? Or had it even been one human body… The inside of Ruben’s stomach fluttered. He had the sudden epiphany that throwing up in a vac-suit might not be the best idea.

  “We’ve removed the bodies,” Li said, “at least the ones we can get to.” His tone held a patient sympathy for a civilian’s lack of familiarity with violent death. “The rest of the cleanup, well, we have to make the place safe first.”

  “Right. I understand.” But he didn’t. Not really. Not any of it. “Everyone that could be evacuated…?”

  “At Wallace Med.”

  “Right.”

  “You know,” Li began, “it wasn’t all tragedy. There were heroes too. People who helped before the rescue crews arrived.” He sounded like he was trying to make Ruben feel better. Which only made Ruben feel worse.

  “That’s good to know. Sometimes the worst in people brings out the best in people. I guess.”

  • • •

  “Weeks?” Ming’s modulator burbled with disbelief. “We can’t wait weeks to get that plant back online. ”

  Ruben sat across from his older sister, absorbing her anger as he usually did, especially lately. He glanced at the 3D motion image behind her on the bookshelf. Her favorite, the one of her as a young girl with her father, Jie, on a worksite in Japan. She rose in the image, trying to catch a butterfly. Reminding himself of that younger Ming saddened him, but it also gave him strength.

  “That’s just to make the facility safe again,” Ruben said. The truth was the truth. “Bringing it back online will take much longer.”

  The silence of the room was broken only by the antigrav whir of his sister’s maglev-chair. Ming was taking in the facts, thinking through their ramifications. At least, he hoped she was.

  “So far we’ve been able to keep up with the quota,” she said. “But that will get harder with time.”

  Ruben nodded. “We’ve done that by bringing more crews into the other refineries. More bodies in the mines, more processors on the line. But many of those workers are green, the product of rapid recruitment. Accide
nts are happening more frequently.”

  “Incentivize them,” Ming said.

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. Sometimes the vocal enhancer seemed to hinder, not facilitate, understanding.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Incentivize the workers. We’ll pay higher wages for extra hours.” Ming’s eyes became animated. It warmed Ruben’s heart to see it, until she spoke. “Run a lottery—we’ll give the most productive crew a week’s paid leave to Vegas-in-the-Clouds. Hell, we’ll even stake them. QM can write off the losses next quarter. If any of them have families—”

  “Not many do,” Ruben interjected. Training loners for crew work was a corporate strategy. Workers came to love their crews as their surrogate family. Productivity benefited when crews felt they weren’t just working for the Company, but also for each other. And they looked out for one another.

  A safe worker is a long-term investment paying off, every day .

  One of Tony Taulke’s pearls of wisdom.

  “I said if they do. We’ll set up vacations here for the entire nuclear unit. Up to six people. That allows crews without blood kin to qualify too, increasing competition. Trench diving in Valles Marineris. A week’s chaperoned scaling of Olympus Mons. By yourself? No partner to speak of? We’ll find one for them in Lander’s Reach. You can rent those by the hour, I believe.”

  The warmth in his heart withered.

  “I’m not sure that would help much in the long run,” he said.

  Ming’s eyes focused. Yes, this was the most present she’d been in a long time. Ruben found himself wishing it wasn’t the case. And hating himself for wishing that.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded. “People always want more luxuries—”

  “We’ve already suspended the safety protocols to get more bodies working more hours,” Ruben said. He could hear the edge in his own voice. “Offering more money, more luxuries, for ramping up production—especially with the greener crews—it’ll just increase the likelihood of accidents.”

  “So what?” Ming said. “There are always more workers. I’ll contact Elise on Earth—there are always dreamers looking to move off-planet, out of her factory-farms.”

  The tension between Ruben’s shoulder blades became painful, as if his muscles were drawing his scapulae together to meet at his spine.

  “As I said,” he began deliberately, not trusting himself to maintain calm, “the accidents are adding to the problem. Multiplying those can only—”

  “What’s your solution then, little brother?”

  He took a moment to breathe. “We should be up front with the other factions. Adjust our output so they can adjust their need for manufactured goods and distribution quotas. No one can blame us for being victims of the Resistance.”

  The sound of a croaking frog came from Ming’s vocalizer. Ruben recognized it as laughter.

  “Everyone will blame us. They’ll take their cue from Tony, and we know where he stands. We have to clean up our own mess, little brother.”

  I wish she’d stop calling me that .

  “Tony Taulke knows that the power of the Company is in its unity,” Ruben said. “He might grouse privately, but publicly, he’ll accommodate the situation. He has no choice.”

  Ming guided her maglev-chair around the desk slowly until she’d settled next to Ruben. “Never believe you know what Tony Taulke is or isn’t capable of. Give him an inch of his foot in the door on Mars, he’ll take the whole goddamned planet.”

  That makes no sense , Ruben thought. Taulke has decades invested in QM. He’d never put that at risk over something like this . He was about to speak when the chime sounded.

  “Yes? ”

  Ming’s ill temper seemed to fuel the speed of her chair as she moved back behind her desk.

  “Ma’am, Helena Telemachus has arrived for her appointment.”

  “Send her in,” Ming said. Then, to Ruben: “The spider is here.”

  Ruben shared a look with his sister. If there was one thing that could end an argument between them, it was Helena Telemachus showing up. Family unity. Faction unity.

  “Regent, so good to see you again,” Helena said as she entered. She was careful to offer her left hand for Ming to shake, Ruben noticed. “And Ruben, always a pleasure.”

  “Ms. Telemachus,” he replied.

  “H, it’s been a long time,” Ming said. Not long enough hung in the air between them.

  “Please, I prefer my given name these days,” Helena said. “Not that juvenile affectation I used to go by.”

  “All right, then.”

  Helena turned. “Let me introduce Mai Pang, my assistant for this little media trip.”

  Mai smiled at them both. Ming ignored her.

  “I suppose Tony wants an update on the situation?” Ming said.

  “Yes, let’s get right to business.” Helena took a seat next to Ruben, who stood and offered his own to Mai. She demurred, standing formally a polite distance from the other three. “Please brief me on the situation. Leave nothing of consequence out.”

  Ming turned to Ruben, who gave Helena the latest. Confirmation of the C-4B explosives used, the apparent emphasis on causing the greatest death and damage possible, and Medina Li’s prognosis of weeks of cleanup before reconstruction could begin. Ming offered her idea for inspiring increased productivity. At first intrigued, Helena asked Ruben’s opinion. He gave it honestly under Ming’s glare.

  “No, I think you’re right,” Helena said, “and Tony would agree. We’ve got enough of a narrative to shape as it is. No need to add to it with more accidents on Mars. So, there’s no good news? Only inconvenient facts?”

  The room was silent. Then Ruben remembered the one positive thing Li had shared with him.

  “There were heroes too,” he said, “not just victims.”

  “Heroes?” Mai asked. It was the first time she’d spoken.

  “Yes,” Ruben said, flashing her an unconscious smile. “Even amid all that confusion, all that death. I guess you never really know what you’re made of till tragedy strikes.”

  After a moment’s contemplation, Helena’s face lit up. “Did any of these heroes survive?”

  Ruben shrugged. “I’m sure some did. I can ask Captain Li—”

  “Do that,” Helena said, her tone distracted. “I want a list of three or four, if that many are still alive.” The way she said the last bit made Ruben wince.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Regent,” Helena said, turning to Ming, “maybe we can’t get your refinery back online any faster. But we can distract the public narrative. And crucify the Resistance in the process.”

  “Oh?” Ming said. “And how do we do that?”

  Helena’s smile was thin. Her green eyes sparkled.

  “Leave that to me.”

  Chapter 7

  Kwazi Jabari • Lillian Wallace Medical Complex, Low Mars Orbit

  “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell de blood of a Kenyan mon!”

  The bass-drum voice boomed in the blackness, reverberating off invisible walls. Rastafarian in accent, English fairy tale in cadence. The rhythm embraced the stride of a giant who enjoyed the game of stalking his prey.

  Kwazi stood frozen in the darkness, able to move but terrified of moving. The giant’s voice was everywhere.

  “Hide in de tunnels, hide in de rocks, I’ll strain your blood to make my stock!”

  Where is Amy?

  He had to find her. That’s why he was here. They were trapped down a hole in the underbelly of Mars. He had to find her and cut her golden hair and weave a rope out of it to lift them out.

  Whenever he inhaled, red dust clogged Kwazi’s lungs. The giant had ceased his incessant pacing, was listening. A cough threatened to give Kwazi away, but he stifled the impulse. How long could he hold his breath before passing out?

  Amy!

  “Don’t you move,” Aika Furukawa said, coalescing from nothingness in front of him. She bit at her thumb, looked up at him from benea
th arched eyebrows. She was almost coquettish, which fit not at all with her words. “Don’t you leave her like Mikel left me.”

  I don’t know where she is . I’m trying to find her.

  The giant couldn’t hear his thoughts.

  Right?

  A silver light appeared far across the cavern. The dust blocking his lungs evaporated. Kwazi moved toward the light, careful to step lightly. The sharp edges of the Martian rock sliced the soles of his feet. Each step cut his flesh.

  But Amy was in the light. Kwazi knew it.

  “I smell you, Kenyan mon,” the giant mused in the shadows. His tone smiled. “I smell your bloody feet.”

  The ground upended, cast itself sideways. Kwazi fell backward, sliding toward the light. The rock cut through the loose, white hospital gown he was wearing, lacerating his backside.

  “There you are!” the giant roared.

  Kwazi ignored the pain. Amy was in the light.

  “Find her,” Aika encouraged him. Her whispered voice was somehow as loud as the giant’s.

  The ground pitched more sharply, gravity pulling him faster.

  The light grew brighter, its silvery blaze starting to burn.

  The giant’s feet boom! boomed! in pursuit. Their thudding became the heartbeat pounding in his ears.

  “Kwazi!” Aika called.

  The giant’s hand reached, and he was sliding now too, laughing at the game.

  “Kwazi!” Another voice, not Aika’s.

  He lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the searing silver light.

  “Amy?” His voice was feather light.

  A stark, white ceiling replaced the dark void of the mining tunnel in his dream. A persistent, metronomic pinging replaced the giant’s heavy stride. Kwazi recognized the sound as a device registering his pulse.

  He tried to clear his eyes. The leering face of the giant receded. Aika too had vanished.

  “Where’s Amy?” he asked.

  “Amy?”

  A woman in white stood over him, framed in the overhead light. Her complexion was olive, her smile open and comforting. Red piping lined her white uniform, and a red medical caduceus adorned her left breast. When she leaned over him, the pleasant scent of rose petals pushed aside the antiseptic hospital air. Her hair, brown streaked with black, reminded him of Amy’s, though it looked nothing like Amy’s. It wasn’t even the right color.