by Patty Jansen
True. And that would not bode well for Hasegawa and the others left behind. “What can we do about it?”
Ari pointed his gun at the underside of the walkway. “One for me, one for you.”
“Shoot them?” A horrible feeling crept over her.
“It’s either that or be discovered and have everyone else killed as well.”
True. God.
She hoped the guys decided to go back up the ladder.
They didn’t. The walkway vibrated with footsteps. The lights cast long shadows ahead of the two as sunlight peeped over the rim of the station. “I take the first one, you take the second one.”
Melati waited.
The men came closer and closer and—
Two shadows appeared above them through the mesh of the walkway.
“Now,” Ari said. He jumped aside and fired.
Melati stepped out on the other side of the walkway and fired, too. The charge that went off and the way it hit the walkway were all silent. She could hear the crack and zhing in her mind. One of the men fell down. Melati could feel the thud when he hit the station’s outer skin. It had been the man closer to her; it seemed like Ari’s shot had missed. His target had jumped the railing and come down on the other side of the walkway.
Ari fired a second time.
It was hard to see because the power had cut out again. There was no indication that the shot had hit anything, and she didn’t think it had. But the man in question was nowhere to be seen. Melati stared in the darkness, clutching the gun in both hands. The only light was the reflected glare from the opposite side of the ring and it only showed the walkway and the frequent protrusions, many of which were large enough to hide behind.
Ari crouched under the walkway.
They waited.
Melati felt awkward in the suit. She couldn’t turn her head properly; she couldn’t see behind her. She couldn’t hear anything except the whooshing of her own breath inside the helmet, and that was fogging up again, because they were in ink-blackness and it had suddenly gone very cold.
She needed a better overview of the scene. A bit further down, a ladder went up to the walkway.
“I can see him better from up there,” she said.
Ari didn’t protest. It was probably a stupid idea, but she had to do something. Her air reserve was now at a quarter of the tank. There was no more option to go back to the ship. They had to continue on.
She slowly headed toward the ladder.
But she’d only put her foot on the bottom rung before realising that, during the blackout, the man had climbed back up there. The glow from a tiny emergency light under the walkway made the soles of his shoes visible.
He looked down as she looked up. He saw her.
In one leap, he vaulted the railing.
Melati fired. Ari fired.
Two beams hit the man mid-jump. He froze in action and fell on his back on the deck with a thud that made the floor vibrate.
“Make sure he doesn’t get up!” Ari said.
Melati stumbled away from the ladder towards the aggregate, feeling sick.
Even from a few paces off, it was clear that he wasn’t going to go anywhere.
The skin on one of his arms had peeled off. Flesh mixed with electronics. Blood dried while she watched.
“What do we do now? Leave him like this?” Ari sounded shaken.
“Can’t do anything else. They’ll know that they went out. They’ll miss their comrades. They’ll investigate. We’d better hurry up.”
“Yep. Better hurry up.”
Ari looked spent. Smears of blood coated the back of his suit. He clambered back over the tether railing onto the walkway, collected the trolley, and they set off at a good pace across the remaining section of walkway, and then down the side.
The entry hatch was not far from there.
Ari held a screen in front of him. “This takes us to the very start of Jalan Jakarta.”
Melati knew that part well: it was where the storerooms were. She remembered the emergency exit there and had never thought about anyone coming in that way. “I hope it works.”
Ari attached his equipment to the hull.
There was a panel with opening instructions on the outside, but after more than seventy years in space, a lot of the text had corroded off.
He turned the clamps, secured the hinges. A light flashed.
The door opened.
Melati heaved a sigh of relief.
They went into the airlock. The section’s light must be off again, or the light in the airlock didn’t work, so Melati used her PCD. It was a poor light source; it showed the dust on the floor but didn’t allow her to identify it. She moved her feet in it, but the soles of the boots were too thick to allow her to feel. Flour perhaps? From any of the boxes that were stored there. It was a wonder that none had flown off into space when the outer door opened. There were a lot of different things: rice, spices, beans.
“Probably some of Uncle’s supplies,” Ari said, but she felt so tense that she didn’t laugh at his joke.
That had been really close. The two dead men’s mates could be waiting on the other side of the airlock. Her heart was thudding.
Ari activated the panel and pushed a few buttons. The outer door shut again. “Seems to work so far.”
They waited as air was released into the little chamber. Melati strained to hear sounds from inside the sector. But the station was just turning into the sunlight and the ticking and clicking of expanding metal drowned out every other noise. She remembered the sound from when she lived here, but didn’t remember that it had been so loud.
It was so loud because the air had returned.
Ari was doing something, hunched over the panel.
“Air is safe now.” And then shortly after, “It works.” He took his glove off and pressed some buttons.
The door on the inside of the station started opening. Melati expected light to come through from the corridor—this section of JeJe was more respectable than the other end—but there was hardly any glow at all.
The door opened to reveal the corridor empty. No sign of movement.
A mess of discarded boxes and other things stood piled up against the walls. A couple of emergency lights were on in the ceiling, but that was all.
God, were they all dead?
Chapter 22
* * *
ARI WAS THE FIRST to take off his helmet. While Melati was undoing the clips to hers, he looked around, wiping sweat off his face. “Well, that didn’t go quite as I’d hoped.”
He noticed the blood on his suit, and tried to wipe it off, but only succeeded in smearing it over a larger area.
“There will be trouble about that.” As soon as Melati lifted the helmet off her head, the familiar smell hit her in the face. Cooking, stale food, years of overcrowding. The air was a bit stale, and it was quite cold.
“Yes, there will definitely be trouble,” Ari said. “As soon as they’ve worked out that their mates aren’t coming back and send out a team to look for them.”
Melati couldn’t get that image of blood mixed with electronics out of her mind. “Where is everyone?” Ari asked.
They had come out in the very start of JeJe. To the left were the doors that gave access to the foyer that gave access to the BC block. There was no one to be seen and no sign of activity.
They listened, but the only sound was the hissing of air out the vents, and even that seemed too soft.
“What the hell . . .” Ari led the way into the passage.
The naked metal floor curved upwards and disappeared behind the roof of the curve in the distance. The floor reflected the ceiling lights set at regular intervals. This section had always been a bit quiet. It was where the clothing ateliers were, and craft workshops and other things that attracted older citizens. Prayer rooms, teahouses. The shops and rumaks would start a bit further down, but there was no sign of activity there either.
It was eerie, and all that kept Melat
i going was that there were thumps and faint sounds of voices from elsewhere in the station that indicated that someone was still alive. How many people had died?
In JeJe itself, there was nothing left of the atmosphere of busy chaos. The doors to the shops and rumaks were closed. The baskets that stood outside the shops, gone; the tables outside the rumaks, gone.
Melati walked next to Ari as if in a bad dream. “What is going on?”
At that moment, one of the doors opened and a little head poked out. The boy looked about eight. He had pale skin and a round face framed by thick black hair. As soon as he saw Melati and Ari, he withdrew back into the door. Children giggled.
“Who are you?” Melati asked.
The door shut quickly.
Melati knocked. “Who is there? There is no reason to be scared. We’re Melati and Ari. We’re back to help you.”
There was no reply.
She knocked again.
Then a woman’s voice said something Melati didn’t understand.
“Oh, I get it. They’ve put the New Pyongyang refugees in here,” Ari said.
God, yes. Melati remembered seeing the long lines of bedraggled people lining up to enter the station. She had wondered whether StatOp meant to put them in the disused BC block, but a lot of that was even more unsuitable for habitation than JeJe was. “Then where is everyone else?”
“Upstairs, probably.”
That made sense. The B sector had always been crowded, but at least they’d had the bottom floor of JeJe to run their businesses. The tier 1 enforcers had never liked the fact that illegal businesses flourished in the B sector, but they turned a blind eye because they knew that the workers could not afford the inflated prices charged by approved operators, and those operators didn’t want to be forced to lower their margins.
But it looked like Allion had done its best to kill all commerce in the station, which was odd for a commercial enterprise.
Melati and Ari walked down the corridor, with Ari wheeling the trolley. Door after door was closed, although Melati heard noises inside the apartments. They came to the lift foyer, the place where young people would hang out, but that was now eerily empty. One of the lifts stood open.
They went in and Melati pressed the button.
In the upstairs foyer, a couple of young men hung around. They gave Melati suspicious looks, but didn’t appear to recognise her. Melati walked past them, which seemed to puzzle them a lot. She didn’t recognise them either. They wore dark clothing, but nothing that resembled a uniform. She would have expected Harto’s hansip vigilante to be around, but maybe they’d been disbanded, or arrested, or killed. Harto had died during the unrest; she’d learned that from one of Ari’s first transmissions from the hypertechs.
The cold feeling inside her grew, as the young men continued watching Melati and Ari while they walked down the passage.
The atmosphere was a little more familiar here, if messy. It appeared that this was where all the illegal rumaks had gone. Tables and chairs lined the passageway. Some people sat eating. Melati vaguely recognised some faces, but no one spoke to her. As soon as she and Ari had passed people spoke up in surprised voices.
Some picked up their food containers and scurried inside. Not one person talked to them, although some appeared to recognise them.
The door to her old apartment stood open, still smashed from when she fled. Surprisingly no one had moved in, but she had no doubt that thieves had done their work and had stolen everything from within that they could carry.
Melati’s heart ached to check out what was left of her comfortable home, but they had to keep going.
Melati knocked on a door down the corridor. “Uncle.”
Her heart was thudding so loudly that she couldn’t hear anything. There was no reply, so she knocked harder. “Uncle. It’s me, Melati.”
She could now clearly hear footsteps. Each door had a little glass eye that showed who was on the other side. A dark shadow moved there. There was the sound of a male voice. The lock on the door was turned and the door opened a crack.
“Melati!”
The door opened fully and there stood Uncle. He still wore that grease-stained shirt that said Paris although he had lost a fair bit of weight. His hair was a lot greyer than it used to be, and there was a lot less of it.
He came into the passage and enfolded her in a hug. “Oh look, Auntie Dewi, Auntie Gema, look who’s back!”
Then he hugged Ari.
Melati followed him inside.
The tiny hallway seemed even more cramped than usual, since it now also contained the table, stove and cookware from Uncle’s rumak business. Electrical wires dangled from the ceiling like party streamers, and the walls were barely visible under a mess of hooks from which hung pots and pans and kitchen implements. In the corner stood a tottering stack of chairs.
“You’re now cooking here?”
“Oh, dear niece, so much has changed here, and not for the better. Those poor people from New Pyongyang needed somewhere to live. We met with the block association and said yes, they can live downstairs. We thought they’d be hungry and would come up to buy food. We thought they’d be happy to grow things for us and trade eggs for food, but they’ve been the most useless customers ever. They never come to eat. They never come here at all. We made the room for them, but they just keep to themselves. No money, nothing to trade, they just sit there and wait for the daily food delivery. That food is so bad, you don’t even want to feed it to the lizards. So we have to run the rumak up here, and only for our own people, but it’s not very good. We can’t cook at night, because of the curfew. The blueshirts will come and take you away if they catch you. You know how the kids used to get caught by the enforcers and would have to work in the recycling plant? This is nothing like that. The enforcers were a joke compared to these. No one has ever come back from where they’re being taken. It’s bad, bad, bad.”
Auntie Gema had shuffled into the hallway and stood at the door, taking in Melati’s appearance as one judges an item to buy. “Still no man, huh?”
Melati hadn’t truly expected the aunties to hug her if she returned, but seriously, couldn’t they even pretend to be happy to see her?
“Where is Grandma?” As she asked this question, a feeling of dread came over her. So few of her immediate relatives were left.
Uncle began, “Grandma is—”
“No need to talk over my head, young man. I may be old and it takes me a while to get to the door, but I’m not dead yet.” She came to the door, old and bent and more ancient than Melati remembered her.
Melati choked up. “Grandma!”
She hugged Grandma, carefully, because she felt so old and thin. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you.” Her vision blurred with tears.
“Come on, come on. You’re a big girl.” But tears rolled down Grandma’s cheeks. “Look at you, all done up in whiteshirt uniform. What’s this?” She pointed a crooked and wrinkled finger at Melati’s badge.
“I’m a Lieutenant in the ISF, crew of the Starship Felicity.”
Ari said, “Before we get to the chats, Uncle, make sure that your door is locked and you don’t open it to anyone. We are not on a leisure trip. We had an unfortunate encounter with two Allion aggregates, and we have with us on the trolley all the electronics and programs to set up your recycling system. We urgently need to speak with the hypertechs.”
Everyone in the kitchen went silent.
“Is that our Ari speaking?” Auntie Gema said. “Is he talking about work?”
“A lot of things have changed, Auntie,” Melati said. “He is right. There are two Allion warships coming this way. They will be within range in about three weeks. Our ship the Felicity is going to provide backup to the two ships that have gone to meet them. There will be a confrontation unless we can fix the station’s recycling. We need to speak with Benjamun and Fatima and Iman.”
Auntie Gema sucked in a breath.
Uncle shook his head.
“Anything wrong with them?”
“They’re hypertechs. That’s what’s wrong,” Grandma said. “They do their own thing. Don’t trust us, don’t show their faces so that we don’t know who they are. Could be blueshirts underneath for all we know.”
“But they’ve been trying to fix the systems.”
“All they’ve done is stir up ghosts,” Auntie Dewi said. “It was their messing with the lights that caused it.”
“Don’t you start with those stories, Auntie,” Uncle said. “I don’t trust the hypertechs either, but that’s because they don’t tell us what they’re doing. For all I can see, they’re trying to do StatOp’s job, but it would be nice if they told us about it. Some of us might even want to help them. They’re not the blueshirts’ pawns. The blueshirts thought so, in the beginning, but the hypertechs are not as bad as all that.”
“What’s this about ghosts?” Melati asked.
Auntie Dewi gestured at Uncle. “See, they want to know.”
Uncle rolled his eyes. “Ghosts! That’s the reason that no one ever takes us seriously, because if there is anything we can’t explain, we start talking about ghosts.”
Melati insisted. “What exactly do these ghosts look like?” She remembered seeing the strange form when looking at Moshi’s memories.
Uncle snorted.
“There are voices,” Auntie Dewi said in a self-important tone. “Talking in gibberish like the whiteshirts or the blueshirts—”
“They are the spirits of all those poor souls that were killed,” Auntie Gema said.
“Let me finish, sister.”
“You take too long. She said they were in a hurry.”
Melati interrupted them. “What do you mean—killed? What actually happened to the enforcers? Are any still here?”
“I don’t think anyone here could tell you that,” Uncle said. “We haven’t seen any since—”
“Killed,” Auntie Gema said. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Because of the ghosts.”