by Richard Fox
The orbitals were mostly abandoned space stations designed to be self-sufficient city-states above Ganymede. They simulated Earth grav with centrifugal force. Habitat One had been completed, and three others begun, but then fusion and grav plating had come along. Even with the tremendous amount of energy plating required, it was still cheaper and easier to live on Ganymede. Controlled-fusion detonations had created the ice dome and valleys beneath Ganymede’s kilometers-thick icy crust. Between the ice, the moon’s thin atmosphere and its weak magnetosphere, no additional radiation shielding was needed. There was abundant water and ore moonside, too.
Now Habitat One served as a granary and transport hub, but the others were mostly empty. Dr. Emelia would be safer aboard one of them than anywhere planetside.
Dr. Inez cleared her throat. “The person you will be protecting is psychologically fragile. We feel it is best that she be allowed to stay in her home.”
Jack remembered Kip saying something similar.
Steepling his fingers, Hsu said, “Will you take the job?”
Jack wanted to say yes, but he remembered the whispers in the waiting room, and Kip’s anxiousness. “There’s more that you’re not telling me,” he said.
Inez shifted on her feet. Long Hair stood a little straighter.
Hsu’s nostrils flared. “That is on a need-to-know basis. I realize you believe your connection to the Sanders family guarantees you this position, but I’m not going to offer you more than 125,000 GR. Take it or leave it.”
Jack’s jaw didn’t hit the plating, but it was a near thing. “Yes,” he managed at last, clearing his throat. “Yes, that will be fine.”
“You’ll start tomorrow,” said Long Hair. A light flickered in his implant. “You’ll report at 0800. Dr. Inez will meet you there and brief you on your duties.”
Jack exhaled. In the background, he heard the sound of water running over rocks. Probably a tiny stream in one of the green walls.
“You’re dismissed,” said Hsu, and the door whooshed open behind him.
As he left, it hit him: he, a lowly grunt, was the one with behind-the-scene connections making other people’s lives uncomfortable. He was pretty sure that was something that would come back around to bite him in the ass.
***
Jack pulled onto Route One a few minutes later, and gunned his engine. Route 1 was underneath ice. It was pressurized but not plated. His body felt comfortably light, and even his decrepit hover was able to reach respectable speeds, but he kept it close to the tunnel floor, just in case. The sunlight that reached Ganymede was twenty-seven times weaker than Earth’s, and right now, the moon was in Jupiter’s shadow, and the only light came from the headlights of the hovers and a few weak tunnel markers winking here and there.
The Ganymede Public ‘Net cast rolled through his speakers. “Experts are still stymied by why the sun seems to be cooling, and can’t say when the trend will level off. With massive crop failures, there is talk that Earth may have to import food for the first time since extraterrestrial colonization. Ganymede agri futures have hit an all-time high.”
He almost missed the human-shaped shine of orange on the tunnel floor. Hitting the brakes, he showered icy flakes in front of the vehicles. The orange was a maintenance worker’s jumpsuit. The worker was prone on the ground. A few meters away, a civilian hover had half embedded itself into a wall, and a few meters back was an idling maintenance vehicle. Hitting the emergency frequency on his comm, Jack jumped out into the tunnel, the cold hitting him like icy fingers. There was the shadow of a driver in the crashed hover, but its engine was still humming. He or she would be warm, so Jack ran toward the downed man instead. A little maintenance ‘bot with eight black legs was beeping mournfully over the stranger’s body.
Dropping to his knees, Jack felt for a pulse even though the man’s eyes were wide and unblinking and there was a long gash on his head. Jack thought he saw the white of bone. The little spider-like ‘bot whined and a mechanical voice came from its central carapace, “Dead for fifteen point eight minutes.”
Pulling his hand away, Jack released a long breath and felt like the gravity on Ganymede had increased by a factor of ten. He heard the sound of an emergency siren behind him and wiped his face.
The door of the other vehicle opened, and the driver came lurching out. Swaying from side to side, he approached Jack. “You’re … going …” he slurred.
“Sir,” said Jack, standing quickly and walking toward the man. “You need to go back to your car. You may have a concussion.”
“You’re going …” the man slurred again, just as Jack reached him. The man reeked of alcohol, and Jack turned his face away.
“Damn this … body … too drunk to control,” the man barked. He slumped into the snow at Jack’s feet. “Too … drunk.”
The little maintenance ‘bot give a startled squeak behind Jack.
Turning, Jack saw the body of the dead man convulsing. The jerky movements stopped, and Jack released a breath. And then the dead man sat up, and his unblinking eyes went to Jack. “You’re going the wrong way!” he shouted.
Jack rolled back on his feet.
Standing, the man Jack had thought was dead shouted again, “You’re going the wrong way!”
Jack heard a hover door slam and someone say, “What the hell?”
Holding up his hands, Jack said, “Easy, guy …” The guy wasn’t blinking, even though his eyelashes were encrusted with ice. The maintenance worker wavered on his feet and then crashed to the ground. His eyes still didn’t close.
“Jesus,” said someone. Jack looked up to see a med team and maintenance workers.
“Sir, are you all right?” said someone.
Jack waved him away. “Yeah.”
He looked down the long green-tinged tunnel of Route 1. The route that took him home.
“Had to be a fluke,” someone said. “Implant life detection systems must have been wrong. He had to have still been alive.”
Jack remembered the non-existent pulse. He had to have just imagined it. The man had to have been alive … wide open eyes or not.
The drunk mumbled. “Wrong … wrong … wrong …”
Ganymede
1 YEAR, 11 MONTHS, AND 2 DAYS PRE-INVASION
Jack walked along the public walkway on the edge of the terrace. To his right was a railing protecting him from a five-meter drop; to the left were neat rice paddies interspersed with fruit trees. Beyond the paddies, the windows of residential apartments gleamed. Kathleen and his apartment only had a light shaft that opened to a tiny veranda. They shared the shaft with two neighbors on either side, one across, and over a hundred above and below. He took a deep breath. This was how the other half lived.
Up ahead he saw a vine-covered steel arbor that cut across the terrace. He verified the location with his comm. That was it. Stepping quickly, he wasn’t two meters away when a skin-plated security personnel stepped out from beneath the arbor. “Hands above your head!”
Jack lifted his hands as another skin-plated guard stepped out from behind the first. A light flashed at the side of the first guard’s head. Tapping it, the man said, “Retinal scan confirmed. It’s the new guy.” The man held out a hand. Even the joints of his fingers had plating on them. “Robert Singh, nice to meet you.”
Taking his hand, Jack said, “Jack Morita.”
Singh grinned. “I know.” Inclining his head, he said, “The doctor and Porter are waiting for you, go ahead in.”
Jack passed into the arbor and between two more guards. The gravity nearly made him fall to his knees—they’d set the grav plating too high to confound intruders. He felt a familiar buzz of static—a weapons scan. He saw the guards relax ever so slightly when it cleared. He was almost at the door when he heard one of the men say, “Any more loonies tell you the sun is dying, Singh?”
“Naw,” Singh muttered. “Not last night.”
Jack glanced back. Three of the guys were laughing, but Singh’s face was grim. B
efore he could ask, a glass door slid open and Dr. Inez said, “There you are.” Entering, eyes adjusting, he found her smiling thinly. Long Hair, presumably Porter, was standing next to her, not looking particularly impressed.
Nodding, Jack stepped into a living room that was minimalist, but expensive in its sheer enormity. The glass wall and door behind him was nearly three meters wide. The furniture and flooring were white and gray. The walls were made of the reddish stone common near the moon’s core. Plants poked here and there from its roughly hewn surface.
“I’ll be giving you the tour,” said Inez. Nodding at Long Hair, she said, “Porter will see you have a suitable stunner and will link your comm up to the intranet and the guard.”
She beckoned with a finger and Jack followed her up two low stairs. On the left was a counter, behind which was a kitchen with a small table. On the right was a hallway. Porter went to the kitchen. “Don’t turn on the ‘Net cast,” Inez said to him. “You know how it and you disturb the doctor.”
Porter nodded and waved her away.
Inez led Jack to the hallway. “You’ll be expected to respond to any unauthorized entry situation.”
Jack’s brows went up. With only a stunner? He remembered Kathleen’s words. “We need this job, Jack … I’m worried about Isaac,” and held back his response.
She led him up a set of stairs, and with each step the realization that he was just going to be an overpaid … something … became heavier. “I want you in there,” Kip had said last night, when Jack had managed to get him on the comm just before the scientist had returned to Aoiten. “I know you’ll stand up to authority if you see anything unusual.”
“Standing up to authority hadn’t helped last time,” Jack had replied. The opinion of a grunt hadn’t meant anything.
“If we’d known earlier, we could have shut him down earlier,” Kip had replied. “I need you to look after my aunt, Jack. I trust you.”
Jack’s hand tightened on the banister. They reached the second floor, passed a few rooms, and walked to an office without a door, but with a wide window to the terrace, now shuttered. A friendly older woman waved at Dr. Inez. Another woman with shoulder-length white hair was standing around a projected holo that stretched from floor to ceiling. Still as a statue, she was talking to someone on a comm. Even in the blue light of the holo, Jack could see a smattering of freckles on her face that reminded him of Kip.
Kip had said that his aunt’s specialty was wormhole physics. Wormholes typically looked like a swirling blue mass, but the holo looked like a fringed iris surrounding a pupil. As Jack looked on, the “fringes” slipped into the pupil and the image appeared to turn inside out. The woman kept talking in a stream of numbers and maybe Greek letters that could have been gibberish or equations.
The friendly older woman approached them, and Inez quietly introduced her as Janice, the doctor’s nurse. She nodded toward the woman at the holo. “And that’s Dr. Emelia Sanders.”
“Just call her Emelia,” Janice whispered to Jack. “She doesn’t stand on ceremony.”
Dr. Inez scowled at that pronouncement, and Jack had to fight to keep his lips from quirking. Dr. Emelia was a lot like Kip. But he supposed he and Dr. Emelia wouldn’t be getting drunk like he and Kip had. Kip could talk like a doctor for hours without saying anything, but he was a fun drunk.
As Jack and Inez left the office, Jack couldn’t resist trying to do something. “Is there anything about Dr. Emelia’s case that seems unusual?” he asked the doctor.
Dr. Inez swiveled on a narrow heel. “What do you mean unusual? Have you heard something?” She crossed her arms.
What did he mean? Shrugging, Jack said, “Anything unusual about Dr. Emelia’s case?” Besides the fact that they had four men in skin-plating outside, and they were hiring another man just to hang around inside for a ridiculous amount of money.
She dropped her arms. “No, it’s all perfectly normal. Absolutely no biological warfare afoot, if you’ve heard those rumors.”
Jack froze. She sounded so certain. It reminded him of Dr. Walton.
His jaw got tight. So many unknown unknowns.
Ganymede
1 YEAR, 11 MONTHS, AND 1 DAY PRE-INVASION
Jack was pacing the length of Dr. Emelia’s house when his comm chimed with Kathleen’s tone. Flipping it open, he found a text. Isaac sick again. Leaving work to pick him up. Love you. He remembered his conversation with her this morning. “But when he’s been sick, there hasn’t been a fever, that’s good, right?” She’d frowned and looked away.
Hearing footsteps, he snapped the comm close. Looking up, he found Dr. Emelia approaching, extending a hand to shake his. He took hers gingerly. The woman was tiny, and seemingly frail. “We’re going to brew a fresh cup of coffee. Care to join us?” Dr. Emelia said, just as Janice poked her head around the corner. Dr. Emelia frowned and whispered, “Unless Porter or Inez is here, they never tell me anything.”
Janice pursed her lips, but then Dr. Emelia gave her head a tiny shake, and Janice released an audible breath.
Jack cleared his throat. “I’m not sure if I should—”
But Janice scowled, and Dr. Emelia blinked and said, “But we’d enjoy the company, we get bored talking to each other and—” Her brow furrowed and she looked at a spot in the air at the level of Jack’s chest.
“We’d like your company,” said Janice.
He was pretty certain his job was to make sure Dr. Emelia was happy. “Sure,” said Jack.
A few minutes later, he was sitting in the kitchen, a cup of real coffee in his hands, and was filling Dr. Emelia in on her “favorite nephew.”
Clutching her cup with both hands, Dr. Emelia nodded calmly. Her white hair was very neat and her eyes were very bright. She reminded him of his gran.
Janice was smiling, stirring her own cup, when Dr. Emelia nodded and said to a point in the air, “His name is Jack.”
Janice put down her cup so quickly it spilled, and rushed to a cabinet. She gazed into it with a look of dismay and dashed from the room.
Dr. Emelia’s head ticked, not once, but three times, as though she had a bug in her ear. “Do you have something to say to me?”
“What?” Jack asked. “From Kip … no.”
Standing up, Dr. Emelia shouted into the air, “We have to go there!”
Running back into the room, Janice said, “It’s okay, Hon.”
Whirling at her, the doctor shouted, “I’m not talking to you, Janice!” Grabbing her head, Dr. Emelia screamed, “Get out!” just before Janice punched a med-stick into the side of her neck.
The doctor’s blue eyes went vacant, and she slumped back into her chair. Jack stared at her, swallowing. After a few minutes, Dr. Emelia looked up at him and slurred, “Must be fun working for a crazy bitch.”
“Shhhh …” said Janice, gently tugging her arm. “Let’s get you to bed.” Dr. Emelia followed obediently.
A few minutes later, Janice caught up to him patrolling the front room that overlooked the terrace. “So,” Jack asked, “was that unusual?”
Nervously pushing back some gray hair, Janice said, “No, not at all.”
Ganymede
1 YEAR, 9 MONTHS, AND 5 DAYS PRE-INVASION
Jack entered Orbital’s main headquarters. His eyes were too dry, and he felt the lack of sleep pounding behind his temples. Blearily passing through the security checkpoints, he almost bumped into Singh.
“What are you doing here?” Singh asked, though Jack could have asked the same. Singh was supposed to be outside Dr. Emelia’s house.
The guard put his plated hands on Jack’s shoulders. “Are you hearing them, too … I mean … it … whatever? Have they been telling you we’re going the wrong way? That it’s dying?”
There was a gleam of sweat just beneath the plating on Singh’s brow.
Shaking his head, Jack said, “What … no … I have a meeting with Dr. Inez about—” He couldn’t say the last words.
Releasing hi
m, Singh took a step back. “It’s just me, then … maybe she was right to fire me.”
“Fire you?” Jack repeated, his thoughts splintering with the weight of the last few days and Singh’s words. Jack had only been working for Orbital, what, maybe two months, but Singh seemed like a good guy.
“I’ve got to go,” Singh said, striding past Jack.
Bewildered, Jack watched him leave and then made his way to Dr. Inez’s office.
***
“Childhood brain stem glioma, that’s highly unusual, isn’t it?” Dr. Inez said from across her desk.
Not curable, the doctors had said. Growing, spreading, and unusually resistant to standard treatments.
Jack swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.” He took a breath. “I can remain on duty for now.” He had to, even though he really wished that he could find a job that was more active. Except for a few conversations with Dr. Emelia and Janice, he had too much time to think.
Jack cleared his throat. “But I will need leave when …” He couldn’t finish.
Body very tight, Dr. Inez said, “I understand, and of course, you can be given leave in these circumstances.”
Voice thick, Jack managed a strangled, “Thank you,” and glanced down. Dr. Inez was clutching her armrests so tightly her knuckles were white. Something in him went cold.
“Do you, ahhh … have any idea when he contracted this disease?” Dr. Inez asked.
He looked up. “It’s not contagious.” Were they going to fire him because they thought he’d spread cancer?
Dr. Inez made a weak sort of half-smile. “Oh, yes … I mean … do you know how long he’s had this condition?”
Doctors. They couldn’t just say, I’m sorry, take all the time you need, they had to drill down into all the nitty gritty. Skin heating, he said, “Well, it’s fast growing—”