by Patty Jansen
Moshi said, “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to have done.”
“You had a task.”
“I made a loose agreement to keep an eye on Paul Ormerod. I did.”
“You let him escape.”
“I kept an eye on him. I wasn’t ordered or equipped to apprehend him or bring him in.” He assumed they were going to do that.
Command had been after the scientist Paul Ormerod for a long time. Working in the station to build business relationships, Moshi had stumbled upon the nervous and flighty man in a dockside café in the B sector. The man had asked him for a lift off the station. Initially, Moshi had agreed, but had pulled out when the man refused to show him the required paperwork.
“I’m happy to help a fellow in need, but I’m not a smuggler,” he had told the fellow.
Only later had he realised who this man was. The only mistake he had made was to tell his employer that he knew where the scientist was. He should have kept silent about it, but he’d been stupid to hope that it would lead to favoured status or maybe a bonus payout. By God, he’d learned his lesson.
“It’s your fault that Ormerod escaped. We had him cornered in the den. It was well-protected, and still people got in and let the carrier of Ormerod’s mindbase escape. Why? Because the original inhabitant of Ormerod’s borrowed body was looking for it, with all his vainness, his pathetic curly hair and polished abs. Because someone told the pathetic pod brothers of this pathetic piece of artificial flesh where he was. That someone must have been a civilian at the station. Someone who knew more than most other civilians.” She glared at him.
“It wasn’t me and that is the truth.”
“No?” Her voice sounded sarcastic. “You are the only person who has intimate, quite intimate relationships with the natives. Don’t you still have friends, and a so-called family in the station? One of these hypertech families? And a girlfriend?”
“She’s not a girlfriend. She’s getting married.”
“Yes, that’s quite sad, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you have wanted her for yourself?”
She was trying to needle him, trying to get him to say stuff that was none of her business.
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want?”
“There would be no point in doing that. We don’t need your knowledge or your approval for our next move.” She raised her arm where she carried her PCD around her wrist. “You can come now.”
The door opened and a woman came in. She was stocky and broad without carrying a lot of fat. Her skin was quite light for an Allion soldier, and every inch of it had been covered in tattooed patterns, including her broad lips. She wore her gleaming black hair in a tight bun at the back of her head.
Moshi knew her, too, even if only from rumours and pictures. Her name was Ruiha, but her nickname was “The Surgeon”. The size of her hands gave away that her specialty wasn’t microsurgery.
* * *
Another snatch of images, this time in a hospital room. Moshi lay on a bed that was uncomfortably hard. A couple of women were talking nearby in soft voices just out of the range of his hearing.
He couldn’t see them because he couldn’t move his head because it was encased in a harness and his head was taped to the table with a bandage across his forehead. A machine stood next to the bed with leads attached. He’d never seen this machine before and had no idea what it did. Melati hadn’t seen this type of equipment either.
A nurse in pale green came to check the machine.
“What have you done with me?” he said. His voice was hoarse and sweat ran down his temples into his hair.
The nurse didn’t reply, and now she had her back turned to him. Her skin was, like Mariam Denzel’s, extremely black, and without hair. Her earlobes were pierced and stretched so that they held wooden disks that dangled as she moved her head.
She said to the other woman in the room, “Starting procedure now.”
Moshi became aware of a tingling feeling in his hands as if he’d grabbed a live wire. It expanded into the rest of his body. Pain shot from his head down his back into his legs. He felt dizzy and weak. Lost sensation in his hands.
He screamed, “Stop, stop it!” But his tongue felt like rubber and the words came out garbled.
The pair of women didn’t move. They didn’t even look at him.
The tingling grew worse. With one eye, he saw the ceiling of the room; the other eye saw an empty corridor with the curved floor typical of a space station. He was running to keep out of the hands of a pursuer whose footsteps slapped on the floor behind him.
But then the floor suddenly disappeared to make way for a large hall where, a few floors down, winged spacecraft stood lined up. There was a huge window on the opposite side, showing a green planet with a distinctive blue hazy atmosphere.
He fell down into that hall, and fell and fell. No one knew he was there. He fell past galleries and balconies where people sat and worked. No one noticed him.
He fell and fell. In a few seconds’ time, he was going to go splat on the floor of that hall. He screamed, but his voice made no sound. He tried to grab onto passing railings, but they were too far away.
He was going to die.
Blackness encroached on his vision.
* * *
He opened his eyes and the world was white. He tried to move but his limbs wouldn’t obey his commands. A soft and regular beeping sound came from somewhere nearby. Slowly, he managed to turn his head. Blurred shapes resolved into blocky machines with blinking lights, some of which were attached to him by sets of thin leads. With the greatest effort, he reached up to his head. A thin bonnet sat snugly over his head, tied under the chin. Attached to it were bundles of thin leads that led to another blinking machine. What was this thing? Where was he? What was he doing here?
He couldn’t think properly, couldn’t remember what he’d been doing before he went to sleep with this thing on his head. It was only logical that he must have been in this room, lay down on the bed . . . but he couldn’t remember any of that.
An empty chair stood next to the bed and another one faced a workstation against the wall of the room. There was a cup next to the touchscreen so someone must have been sitting there recently. He didn’t remember.
What had they done to him? If only he could free himself of all this rubbish on his head. His half-numb fingers found the fastening to the bonnet under his chin and undid the clip. The thing was hard to get off. It tired him to raise his arms and his head. His fingers kept tangling in the wires. He didn’t have the strength to pull the bonnet off.
“Let me do that for you.” A male nurse came from behind him and slid the thing off. His hair underneath was sweaty and felt cold now that it was exposed to the air.
“Where am I?”
The nurse didn’t reply but asked in return, “Do you know your name?”
That question disturbed him deeply, because he hadn’t thought about it. He was just a person, a man on a bed in a strange room. He hadn’t needed a name.
“Do you know where you come from?” the nurse asked when he continued to be silent.
Another baffling question. Had he ever been anywhere else?
“The name of your mother?”
“Stop it with the questions! Give me time to think about it.”
“As you wish.” The man retreated.
* * *
He raised his head again. He was in a small hospital room, filled with machines and one other bed, but it was empty. His head pounded with the effort, but he raised himself on one elbow, searching the room for clues as to what he was doing here.
The door to the room opened. A female nurse came in carrying a grey shirt and trousers of a service uniform. “Oh, you’re awake.”
She laid the uniform out on the bed.
“You can get up,” she said.
Her face was friendly, but her voice was hard as steel.
He pushed himself up and staggered from the bed. Felt nauseous. Wondered if he shoul
d ask for a bowl to puke.
The nausea subsided after a while, allowing him to begin dressing himself.
Where the hell was he? What had they done to him? He stopped, staring at his hands doing up the buttons to his shirt. There was no logo on the chest and he felt that there should be one.
A woman came in. She wore a uniform with three stripes and three little meteorites on the chest. Her skin was black as the night, she had no hair and her eyes were golden brown, almost metallic.
She eyed his plain uniform and nodded.
He struggled to remember the significance of this woman, what she had done to him and why she knew him. His mind remained blank on the subject.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. There was something in the fake gentleness of her movements that set him on edge. What had happened after she started questioning him? Why didn’t he remember?
“What did you do to me?”
She didn’t reply.
He drew his own conclusion. “You made me forget things.”
She still didn’t reply.
“What did you get out of my brain? You searched me, right? You put things on my head and read my thoughts and memories and then you wiped them.” He was breathing fast.
After another long silence, she said, “We’re going to let you go.”
“What do you mean, let me go?” His voice rose to a squeal.
Her face hardened. “Look, I know you’re confused, but you can address me as appropriate to my rank.”
He gulped. “Let me go, ma’am?”
She gave a cold smile. “That’s better. Yes, let you go. Out of the station.”
He didn’t remember that he was in a station. Panic rose in him. What station was this? But no, she was just trying to distract him with her talk about the station, and didn’t answer any of his questions.
“What did you learn from me? What memories did you steal?”
“We do not steal.” But her voice sounded smug. They had stolen something, he knew that for sure. But then he remembered something else. Before they took his memories, he remembered saying to her, “I know nothing.”
Another thought: maybe her messing with his thoughts hadn’t given her the information she wanted from him and maybe being let out of the station was his punishment.
Because he did know nothing, right?
He followed her out of the room, through a long corridor.
It was strangely quiet everywhere. A space station should have lots of people, but he only saw a few pale-skinned, dark-haired men shuffling in a line carrying sacks. Their faces were emotionless and their gazes fixed on the floor in front of them.
New Pyongyang, a small snatch of memory told him, and he remembered a hall full of desperate people, queuing up at the transport desk to buy tickets, with their bags and their children. Crying, and looking scared. Guards shouting at them. Fighting over the few available tickets. An explosion seen from space, strangely silent, debris flying from one wing of the station.
This station wasn’t New Pyongyang, because . . . there were no Allion soldiers at New Pyongyang. That meant that he had been at New Pyongyang, and that he had left the station and travelled through space.
It meant that he knew how to fly, because that was what private merchants did.
It meant that he had to have a home somewhere else.
It meant that . . . there were stars out there, bright and cold and billions of light years away.
He shuddered.
Piecing together his memories, one little clue at a time. All the strands were tangled. He was lost.
The woman led him into a large arrival hall, also strangely devoid of people. Only a couple of small ships sat at the dockside. Shops and offices were empty and dusty. The text on the windows was gobbledygook to him. Then through a passage onto a dockside walkway.
“Here you go. This is yours,” the woman said. She gestured to a small ship. He stared at it. It didn’t bring back any memories that he had obviously lost involving this ship.
“Um . . . what am I supposed to do?”
“You get in. You fly.”
Could he even do that? He didn’t remember. He let his gaze roam the outside of the craft. It was not very big, and it looked a bit battered. There was a symbol on the side, but he had no idea what it meant. And because he felt really awkward and because clearly she was expecting some sort of response, he asked, “Where do I go?”
“Anywhere. Wherever you came from.”
But the trouble was that he didn’t remember where he came from. There were stars out there, and other things, like . . . He gasped as another memory came to him. “But there’s warships out there.”
“Yes.” Her face was impassive.
“You want me to go out there where the warships are? Isn’t that . . . dangerous? I don’t remember how to . . .”
“We’ll look after you. You don’t have to fly. The craft has been pre-programmed and you won’t have to do anything.”
“What about the warships?”
“They will find you interesting.”
“But where am I going?” He felt cold, deep in his bones. He didn’t like being “interesting”. The warships would shoot him to pieces, as they had done to the delegation that had gone over there to talk. Twenty three delegates and their crew and assistants. They’d seen the images of the ship’s fragments exploding into space. People had gotten very angry. That was how bad those guys were. International Space Force. Ruthless assassins of people who came to bring trade and wealth to impoverished communities.
“If they’re smart, they won’t shoot you. Not that we can count on ISF being smart, but I’m betting they won’t. If they’re smart, they take you in and start questioning you. And that’s when you unleash your payload.” She laughed, not in a nice way.
Now he understood. He lifted his hand to his head. “In here? But what do I. . . ?”
“Nothing. It will happen all by itself.”
“Oh.”
She grinned at him.
In a way, that made him feel good. The siege was taking too long. Bassanti had planted this angry thing that mucked up the recycling and kept breaking things in the station. They needed to pay ISF back for it. The ISF dogs deserved to die. Because, because . . .
“They will capture you. They use crude mindbase technology. You’ll be playing dumb because you can’t remember anything. So they try to see your memories. They will see me saying this to you. They will know, by that time, that it’s too late.” She laughed.
* * *
Melati gasped.
It was too late; it was too late.
They had already infected the ship with some terrible contamination. Like the base, it would now have to be abandoned.
If she squinted, she could even see how the malicious worm intermingled with the prisoner’s mindbase. The worm had many filaments of data that buried themselves into his memories about select subjects and had its roots interwoven with his thoughts. It was like the skin that formed over the white sauce from the canteen that dried and became rubbery when you didn’t eat it quickly enough.
Melati tugged on it. She peeled off a corner and yanked it free. The strand came apart in her hands. Thoughts fluttered free like little butterflies.
They flapped against the sunlight, they solidified into glass.
They fell and shattered over the ground, bouncing in millions of tiny, glittering pieces.
Wherever they hit, a spot of black appeared, as if memories were being erased. They were all around her, sharp shards of glass that glittered with their razor-sharp edges. The shards rained over her arms, cut her skin—
“Melati!”
That was Dr Chee.
She gasped and lifted the visor of the helmet, breathing fast and sweating.
Chapter 7
* * *
MELATI PULLED OFF the helmet. The breeze from the air vent made her face cold and she hadn’t realised how hot she’d been.
Both Dr Chee and Jas we
re in the room, staring at her, two pale, wide-eyed ovals in the darkness.
“What’s going on?” Dr Chee asked. “What did you see?”
“There is a worm.” She was taking great gasps of breath. Her mind was all muddled and she was still trying to work out which of the images she had seen had happened to her and which were part of the memory. “He brought it in here in his mindbase. It’s going to destroy the ship. It’s too late trying to stop it. We have to tell Dixon about it, but probably it’s already too late.” She tried to push herself up, but her hands were so sweaty that they slipped off the armrests of the chair.
“Melati, calm down. That’s why we’re in the correctional department: because we’re walled off from the rest of the ship so that there is no cross contamination. It’s impossible.”
“What about contaminating me?” She had felt the fragments hit her skin.
“Impossible. You were just wearing a VR helmet. Watching rendered scenes.”
She stared at him. Of course she’d known that. How dumb.
Her breathing calmed somewhat. She shouldn’t panic. Everything was under control. They had expected this and made provisions for it. “Did you see anything escape into the system?”
“We did. A routine interrupted our processes and shut down half the computers and affected the systems in this corridor. Why do you think we’re sitting in the dark here?”
Yes, now that she thought about it, she should have noticed that, too. Not that it was entirely dark in the room, but the only lights were the emergency backup that was battery-operated and another emergency light that sat on the table.
Melati took another calming breath. In and out.
“Dixon and his people are at work in the next room, trying to contain this thing that they implanted in his mind. It fled the very moment you started watching the recording. It didn’t get very far.”
Melati wiped the sweat from her forehead. She accepted the glass of water that Jas held out to her.
Dr Chee asked, “Did you learn anything else remarkable about him or the station?”
“Yes . . . if what I saw can be trusted. I think it can. It looked real. There were real people in it.” She drank gulps of water and then she told him of the plan by the hypertechs to run the B sector as their own closed system with their own recycling. He listened with a serious look on his face. Jas stood by the door, and his expression was more horrified than Dr Chee’s.