by Patty Jansen
“Hmm,” Dr Chee said when she finished, and then he thought some more. “Have they had this self-sustaining capability for long?”
“The hypertechs are not dumb. They fiddle with everything, so they have to be aware how everything works.”
“None of them have engineering training?”
“You don’t have to be an engineer to run a recycling plant.”
“No, but you do to build one,” Jas said.
“You don’t.” That was the mistake these people constantly made: that you needed formal qualifications to do any job at all. They couldn’t look past their bureaucracy and their pretty certificates to see that even the more complicated jobs could be learned through necessity and experience.
Dr Chee rubbed his chin. “I think this sets a dangerous precedent.”
“The fact that they’re trying to save themselves? What else are they supposed to do? The station management is obviously not in control of the climate plant for whatever reason.”
His mouth twitched. He clearly didn’t like it, and thought that station maintenance should be solely the domain of those formally trained for it. These people and their rules drove her mad sometimes. God, how she wanted to dress them in a plain station suit, dump them somewhere in a tier 2 section of a random station to see how long they survived while sticking to the rules when their lives depended on it. They really had no clue whatsoever.
Melati rose. “I presume the prisoner is still in his cell?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“Is he awake?”
“Probably.”
Melati pushed herself out of the chair. “I need to see him.” She had so many questions for him.
Had he seen Uncle?
Had the operation to disconnect the recycling systems been successful?
Had anyone else been injured in the fighting?
If indeed he remembered any of it. If he would speak to her. If he could speak.
The cold air over her sweaty clothes made her shiver. Dr Chee and Jas moved aside to let her through. Boy, it was dark in the corridor.
A bit further ahead, light came out of two open doors. The soft murmur of people talking drifted into the corridor. She recognised Alan Dixon’s voice as one of them. He was in one of the cells with a couple of people Melati recognised from the IT lab. They sat on the floor with a tangle of computers between them. The light from the screens lit their faces from below. An emergency battery stood in the corner.
Melati continued to the security door, but when she held her PCD against the screen, nothing happened. Yeah, that was right. There was a power outage.
So she went to the next room in the corridor with a light: that was Lieutenant Kool’s office. He sat at his desk eating an energy bar by the light of his PCD screen. He turned sharply to the door in a “What now?” fashion. Oh, dear. Not in a good mood by the look of things.
“Are you almost done?” he asked.
“I’d like to see the prisoner.”
“In the dark?”
“I’ll take a light.”
He snorted, put the last of the energy bar in his mouth and heaved himself off his seat. From a small cupboard against the wall, he took an old-fashioned key.
“Because the normal controls don’t work,” he muttered. Clearly, that was her fault.
They went back into the dark corridor, where he opened the security door and the door to the prisoner’s cell and shone his light into the cell. For a moment, he froze in the entrance.
“Goddamn it, where is he?” He shone the light on his PCD on the bed, which was empty and untouched.
“I should never have untied him, but I had to go all soft because some woman comes in here complaining about his treatment.”
He pulled his gun. Went further into the room. He jumped to the other side of the bed. He swore and knelt. Tucked his gun back into his belt. Melati rushed forward.
The prisoner was on the ground, limp and pale.
“Careful,” she said.
She dropped to her knees and pushed him onto his side. He was warm, so at least that was a good sign. But his eyes were rolled back under his eyelids. His mouth was slack and open, with a dribble of spit running into his beard.
“Call Dr Chee.”
Lieutenant Kool disappeared into the corridor. The sound of his footsteps faded.
Melati worked quickly to undo the top buttons on Moshi’s shirt, revealing a good amount of chest hair. He was breathing shallowly. His pulse was irregular.
“Moshi.” She tapped his cheek with her fingertips.
By God, he was the only person to have come out of the station; he knew her family and how they were. He wasn’t about to die on them, was he? Had this Mariam Denzel woman tied the worm in his mind so that it would rip out vital brain functions when it escaped? That was the most disgusting thing ever. If Allion did that sort of stuff, she did not want to know about them.
Dr Chee came running into the room.
“He’s breathing, but his heartbeat is irregular,” Melati said. “I think the worm may have damaged Base4 when it came out.” And they would never, ever, touch any of the mindbase modules that started with “Base” in constructs who were already awake and functioning. That was the part of the brain function that controlled the body’s life processes.
Dr Chee knelt next to her, setting his med kit on the ground. He unpacked the heart stabiliser machine. For a while, he worked efficiently, attaching the patches to his skin and then inserting the thinnest of needles that would deliver current directly to the heart. When he finished putting the patches in place, Melati handed him the leads. She also monitored his heartbeat, which would slow down and speed up for no clear reason.
Dr Chee used the scanner to check the position of the needles and switched the machine on. Within half a minute, his heartbeat steadied. Phew.
Dr Chee rose and addressed Lieutenant Kool, who leaned against the doorpost and was watching the scene with a look of disapproval on his face. “We need to take him upstairs so that we can fix him.”
The Lieutenant’s face was hard. “He carries some sort of worm. What is the chance that he’s been designed to fall ill, so that we help him and allow him into the more sensitive areas of ship?”
“If you want to question him, you’ll need him alive. There was a worm in his mindbase, but it’s gone now. He’ll be relatively safe. Anyway, as precaution, we will also isolate the CAU.”
“Your messing with his mindbase knocked out everything in this corridor. Are you happy to allow that to happen to the hospital?”
“I can’t treat him here. He can stay on this machine for four days, maximum. If I take it off, he’ll be going into terminal failure within an hour, and there is no saying what he will do in that state. He might be manic. He might be violent. Then he will collapse and die. To have any chance at fixing him I need all our BCI equipment. His Base modules are in terminal failure.”
Melati shivered. In the construct lab, they had never yet lost a construct to Base module failure, but they’d come close several times. Did natural born people even suffer Base module failure?
Dr Chee had to go and explain all of this to Lieutenant Kool, none of which helped the prisoner’s cause and lost them valuable time. He kept saying, “We have all the equipment in the hospital, not here. We can isolate the room from the rest of the ship.”
Lieutenant Kool wouldn’t budge. Dr Chee argued. Lieutenant Kool told him to stop wasting his time. Before retreating angrily to his office, Lieutenant Kool told him to put a request in with the ship admin, to the acting captain, to the captain. “And make sure your department pays for someone to come and fix the fucking lights in here.”
Then Major Dixon came out of the room where he had been working to isolate the bug, and got involved as well. He outranked Lieutenant Kool, but he was Force, not Flight and technically didn’t have any authority on board the ship other than over his own people.
He said, “He’s got to be taken out o
f here. His presence disturbs our work. We may need to reset all your systems and that will upset the heart regulator.”
Dr Chee agreed with this and they went into a heated argument over whether the security of the ship or the prisoner’s health was more important, or whether that was even an issue.
In the middle of all this, Melati panicked. The people on the station might all be dying of asphyxiation, and these suits here were arguing over who controlled what?
She retreated from Lieutenant Kool’s office, went into the corridor and pulled out her PCD.
Captain Dolchova was not impressed by being contacted on her off shift, but after Melati explained, she said, “Isolate him. Keep him where he is. Do what is necessary to keep him alive.”
And that was really the worst of both sides of the argument.
Lieutenant Kool’s smirk went from ear to ear when that order came through. He sat back in his chair, his beefy arms crossed tightly over his chest. “So. Get your stuff. This is a prison. This is where he belongs. He’s an enemy soldier.”
And Melati didn’t have the energy to argue that technically he wasn’t, and that he was caught up in this situation as much as the other civilians.
Two nurses came from the hospital with a trolley. They lifted Moshi onto it along with the heart stabilising machine and wheeled him against the back of the cell, which was getting ever more filled up with equipment. They needed to get still more stuff.
Melati went with Dr Chee in the next lift. On the way up, she expressed her frustration, but he said, “We have everything under control for the time being. We’ll keep him alive.”
“But can we do anything about his mindbase?”
“Not yet. I don’t think he’s stable, but as long as he remains attached to the machine, we can keep him alive. We can read the Base4 module and prepare a new one that we can use as soon as we get the word that he can come upstairs. Maybe other modules will need fixing as well. We’ll get everything set up so that we can press the button as soon as he comes up or we get the machine down there.”
Melati nodded, feeling control of the situation slip away from her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Not really, apart from taking a rest so that you’re fresh tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know when we retire for the night. I don’t expect him to wake up before tomorrow morning.”
His voice carried that uncertain tone that said, “If he wakes up at all.”
Melati nodded. “Please, do your best. He knows what goes on in the B sector.” She was so tired that she felt close to tears when she said that. She had neglected her family, and right now that realisation felt like a stab to the heart.
“I’ll try.” The lift stopped, and they walked into the hospital corridor in the second topmost floor. “Meanwhile, Alan will try to isolate the worm to see what we can learn from it.”
“You will call me when you need me, right?”
“Sure,” he said, but she gathered from his tone that he’d avoid doing that if he could. He’d always been protective of her. He’d long ago split up from his partner and had no children. Sometimes she thought he regarded her as his daughter.
Dr Chee went into the main lab where Jas was instructing some of his boys how and where to put equipment, and Melati went to her office in the empty lab next door. The lab staff had already gone for the day, and she sat amongst the idling screens, still thinking of Benjamun and his family. She had never considered Fatima a friend, but seeing her fight for the survival of her people, and stand up against fully armed Allion soldiers made Melati feel selfish. She should do something to help. She could just about see Uncle tell everyone in the rumak, “Wait until my niece and nephew come back with the whiteshirt army to liberate us.”
And then for ten long months, the ISF ships did nothing, causing even Uncle’s boundless optimism to wane and forcing him to weather ridicule from his friends and customers.
“They have forgotten us,” she imagined him saying and she could hear the sad tone in his voice.
Maybe the hypertechs had come to that same conclusion earlier and had decided to look after themselves. What were these things they’d been buying from Moshi?
She sat down at one of the screens and opened the INTAL database, which the crew were always encouraged to browse. It held all known facts about the enemy. Of course everyone knew that the facts were very selective and coloured to put everything ISF did in a good light and everything Allion did in a bad light.
Of a man called Mobashar Qureshi the database said: New Hyderabad. Pakistani descent. Merchant. There was a picture of a younger man that looked like it had been taken at least ten years ago. He sat at a table in some sort of eating-house. The other people at the table had been blurred out. He looked sideways at the person to his right, as if listening to a conversation.
Underneath, it said: suspected affiliation with Allion.
Well, cross out “suspected”. He wasn’t from New Hyderabad either, although he might hold citizenship there. He was a fully-fledged Allion merchant.
And, here came the disturbing thing: she didn’t think he was a bad man. Allion had conscription army and he’d served his time. Then he had become a merchant. He struck her as being lonely, missing a real family and disillusioned with his former bosses.
It was written in the way he’d helped the hypertechs, in the way he’d refused to toe his superior’s line on the case of Paul Ormerod. He’d seen a glimpse of what Paul knew, and decided that the knowledge shouldn’t fall in anyone’s hands.
She supposed that Allion had stations and planet-based settlements. There would be places like New Jakarta, where people didn’t particularly care about the war or about which side everyone was on. Places where they were just trying to survive and make their lives better as people did in the B sector.
Allion was a company. They had always made their living by making and selling things. Was it really so surprising that a good number of merchants had entered the highly commercial mining stations in ISF-controlled space to sell their products to what they would view as backward societies? It was not as if Allion people could be recognised in a crowd by the horns growing from their foreheads.
The deep question was: how much of an enemy was Moshi if he was helping the tier 2 people to look after themselves? And maybe they should help him in assisting the hypertechs. If they could get a foothold in the station, they could secure the B sector, as well as help drive out the Allion occupiers.
Dolchova would never support that idea.
And this, ultimately, came back to the division between Fleet and Force.
To Cocaro and her fellow Force crew, bases and stations with their population were major assets that should be maintained at all reasonable cost, even if that included hand-to-hand combat within the confines of station corridors and threshing out a tricky agreement with an opponent.
Captain Dolchova adhered to the Fleet principles, which were more dogmatic, of the shoot-em-up variety. They moved around in their own self-sufficient ships, so were happy to sacrifice a base for the sake of an outright victory that, in their eyes, was a more lasting solution to a conflict. They shot their projectiles from a great distance and mopped up the damage later.
In the brief course in military training that Melati had been forced to undertake, the two approaches to space warfare had even been discussed. And she had never paid much attention to those lectures, because war was never going to happen, right?
“So that’s where you’re hiding,” a male voice said behind her.
Melati gasped. She hadn’t heard Ari enter the lab and goodness, was that the time? She’d missed dinner, and yes, now that she thought about it, she was extremely hungry.
Ari came into her little office and shut the door to the main lab behind him. He still wore his flight engineer uniform complete with the breather mask that dangled down his chest. Since she had left him at lunchtime, he’d obviously been working on one of the larger craft that hung on the outside o
f the Felicity’s hull, where maintenance required working in a hard vacuum. Ari had obtained his vacuum accreditation recently and never stopped mentioning it.
The view is beyond belief, he would say, and, We spend our entire lives inside a tin can without ever wondering what’s outside.
While he sat down, he took one look at the screen of Melati’s computer and frowned. “More trouble?”
“Yes, some. But we found out who he is. This is the guy.”
He looked at the screen. His face did not betray any emotion.
“Do you know him?” Melati asked.
“Personally? No, but there are a few guys like him around. The ones I know are truly based at New Hyderabad. Most of them don’t mingle with us, or with hypertechs. They sell tech to the mining operators.” Those were all Taurus Army constructs who maintained and supervised the mining processing plants, a huge section of the station that Melati never had much to do with.
“He’s friendly with Benjamun, Fatima and Iman.”
“Hmmm.” Ari thought for a while. His face remained impassive. Melati had never been sure what Ari’s relationship was with the hypertechs except that as a member of the sekong, with his pink nails, make-up and long hair, they seemed disapproving of him. But the language of money was strong. With his interest in technology, Ari’s relationship with the hypertechs was probably a lot stronger than appearances suggested.
“Ari?”
He blew a breath out of his nostrils. “Benjamun is a decent fellow. I would trust him. I’m not so sure about the others.”
“Fatima is his daughter.”
“Yes, but . . .” He spread his hands and let them sink again. He shrugged.
She sensed that there was a bit more under the surface, but Ari had many secrets and was not inclined to share them unless he had to. Some secrets were probably better off staying hidden.