Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  “I'm going for coffee!” Carm made the announcement after another hour. They hadn't been detected, and since it appeared that the battleships appeared to be more concerned with what was happening on the planet below than with looking for ships, he dared to hope that they wouldn't be. He decided it was time to find out what was going on. He could do that just as easily from the galley.

  “Flash up any planetary transmissions to the galley and tell me immediately when anything happens.” With that he got up and marched out of the bridge before the ship could object.

  Meanwhile he had to think. He had to find out what was happening on Aquaria because no matter how he broke it down, he couldn’t imagine that three battleships had been left in orbit just to wait for him. He also had to work on his cover story.

  Cover story! The very idea made him feel sick. He wasn't a spy in a holodrama. He was a sharding extra-solar geologist. A scientist and prospector. Nothing of this came naturally to him.

  Still he did have a cover story – mostly it came down to the idea that when he'd jumped he'd actually had the one thing he hadn't had – translation coordinates. Just for a laugh long ago he'd had the ship do the calculations and measurements while he was docked. So he'd never actually been spaced. He'd just spent three and a half months repairing the ship in deep space. As for Kendra she'd had a short-circuit, caught fire, and he'd dumped her remains. It was surprisingly close to the truth.

  It wasn't much of a story but he thought it would satisfy the authorities, mainly because they weren't interested in how he’d got back. They were interested in his blowing up a hydroponics reserve. And he had the evidence that he hadn't. He had the recorded testimony of his android companion. With that and her full confession that she'd transmitted his biometric information, and of course the records showing that he and the ship had been in quarantine/decontamination at the time, he reckoned he had enough.

  By the time he'd reached the galley, poured himself a mug of brew and found his favourite leather couch to collapse into, the ship had news for him. Good news for once – he wasn't going to need Kendra's testimony after all. Another suspect had been accused of the crime: Max White. And not only had he been accused, he was in custody.

  Carm laughed at that. He laughed so hard he almost spilled his coffee over himself. And then he laughed some more – Kendra was going to go nova when she found out. All her efforts to destroy him in order to protect her master but White had already been caught. The ALEB had finally done their job. Kendra was wrong about him. He might be a perfect example of his upbringing but he wasn't a complete botbrain. He could learn. And most especially he could learn who not to trust and how to stab them in the back before they did the same to him.

  “You know Kendra's going to go nova over this? She's going to blame us?”

  “Try not to be so small-minded like an organic please Carmichael! That defective pile of antique floater parts has still got enough working circuits left to know this has nothing to do with us. And in any case even if she didn't, it'd only be you she'd blame! It's always the organics that make the mistakes!”

  “Am I detecting a theme here, ship?” Carm didn't care if the AI was once more showing its bias against flesh and blood. He was home! Besides it wasn't snapping at him. That had to be a good thing.

  “How should I know? What passes through that mushy neural processor of yours isn't normally logical enough to be analysed. I frequently find myself amazed that you can speak at all!”

  “And yet this organic got you home again. That deserves a little respect.”

  “You got us spaced in the first place.” The ship had no intention of giving Carm any respect. “And really all you did was make a lucky discovery, and then make a deal with another mush brain and a defective toaster.”

  “Fine!” Carm should have known better than to expect praise. “Have you got anything on White's arrest?”

  “Four hundred and eighty three citizen reports including first hand holos of the arrest.”

  “Show the most popular items in order.” The ship played the snippet about White's arrest, and Carm was immediately taken aback by the violence of the take down. But he enjoyed the actual arrest immensely: White being led out by warbots and charged in front of so many. Until everything had gone wrong as a second thermo-kinetic blast had gone off. But in its own horrid way, that blast was good for him. It was dark side but it practically proved he was innocent. Not only was he free and clear, but the criminal had been taken into custody.

  The only thing he didn't understand was why it was the Navy that had done it. However, as he kept sorting through the holo channels, the reason became clear. This was no longer simply an unthinkable act of domestic terrorism. It was part of an insurgency. They knew that White was a mute. And they knew that there were more mutes on the world. And now every mute was a terrorist.

  Carm sighed. Del was going to be upset. And no doubt she'd blame him for it. Max White had not only betrayed his partners – and a quick check revealed that Barclay Hamilton was also dead, murdered – but then he'd been caught. And now he was somewhere in naval custody, no doubt telling them everything about the mutes and the underground. He would have had no compunction about betraying them.

  Rogues had no such emotion. That was one thing Del had told him in her less confrontational moments. No one knew exactly what had gone wrong after the Navy had fooled around with mute genetics. But the one thing everyone agreed on was that rogues were complete sociopaths. They would cheerfully kill their own families if they thought it would gain them something. As if to compensate for that their brains had been switched all the way on and they were very good at pretending to be like others.

  Which meant: if he was reading things correctly, that the mutes were now trapped on Aquaria, their escape route blocked and with the Navy hunting them because their former smuggler had betrayed them. Carm felt a little sympathy. He didn't trust mutes – at all. But after spending time with one he was beginning to realise they could be reasoned with. They could be controlled – if you had the leverage. They weren't quite as terrifying as they’d appeared.

  And he was upset about the hunt too, becoming more so as he continued watching the holos.

  There was a war on Aquaria between the mutes and the Navy. Except that it wasn't really a war. It was a pogrom. It was massive overkill. Only one man had done the bombing. But every mute on Aquaria was going to be hunted down. The Navy no longer cared if people saw what they were doing. They were not going to be stopped, no matter how many got hurt or killed. Suddenly it made everything on the sharding holochips appear real.

  The holomedia were everywhere. Citizen reporters couldn't be stopped, and they'd recorded parts of at least a score of captures. But despite the Navy’s words there weren't arrests. At no time had the Navy done what the police would. They often ended up shooting those they caught, sometimes to death, even children.

  Carm had no love of the mutes, not even after what he’d seen. They might be innocent of much of what they’d been accused of. Plus Del had surprised him as well by showing enough self-restraint not to rip him to pieces. They were still mutes however.

  But families? Children? Nothing could justify that. Not even the Navy proclaiming that it was a military emergency.

  There was more. Studying the feeds and even taking a rough guess at numbers, this was a problem that was slowly growing worse. Aquaria was a small world of only a hundred million or so people. It was still a big populace to control despite the Navy being everywhere. Stopping people in the streets, scanning their genes again and again. Imposing curfews. Closing down space-ports and stopping travel. Preventing people from going about their normal daily business. All resulting in reports of violence which had nothing to do with the mutes. The soldiers were pushing too hard and the people were pushing back.

  Protests had been staged, which had been badly handled by the Navy. They weren't the police – they didn't understand crowd control. A protest t
o them was an enemy action, and they responded accordingly.

  Rights were being trampled and tempers were flaring. Every so often the situation would come to a head. Protests had become riots, which had been put down with brutal efficiency. There were incidents across the entire world. And most worrying of all, the soldiers had started going after the media. That suggested all sorts of possibilities to Carm – none of them good.

  And where were the police in all this? When he checked he discovered that they were out of action. Locked up in some cases, in others dead. They were in as much trouble as the population. They were even being tortured according to some reports. That included the detective who'd tried to arrest him. Detective Samara. There was a holo of her in a hospital bed after having been released from interrogation, looking like a refugee from a warzone.

  How could that be? How could the military start torturing and killing police? At what point did they realise that what they were doing was wrong?

  The answer though gradually became obvious. Never. He hated to admit it but Del had been right. If the mutes weren't the threats the Navy claimed, and they’d created the problem in the first place before learning to exploit it, then they had to make sure the truth never got out. And every mute was a potential witness against them. The Navy was rapidly getting rid of those who knew too much and calling it a military emergency.

  It wouldn’t end until every mute was dead. Trillions of credits were on the line. And in the end it all came down to greed and saving themselves from being exposed.

  As Carm went through the holos for hour after hour, trying to get a clear picture of what had happened; he knew his world had entered a dark time. It was obvious that Aquaria was one small step away from martial law and a police state. It was equally clear that the Navy wasn’t going to be stopped. If what Del had told him was true the Navy would do anything to protect their guilty little secret. That meant killing anyone who knew anything about it. Anyone and everyone.

  But what should have been a mop-up operation for the Navy, was rapidly sliding out of control. Soon there would be open rebellion on the streets. And then there would be war.

  No police. The military squeezing tighter and tighter. The populace becoming ever more desperate. And somewhere in the middle of it all, an underground of mutes. Aquaria was a nova ready to explode.

  The Navy had to be stopped.

  So what could he do?

  His family were down there somewhere on Aquaria, but he didn't even know where. The family home had been destroyed in the wake of the reserve bombing. No doubt it had been torched by someone who thought he’d done it. The holos showed people watching and cheering while it had burned. His office was gone too, not that he cared about that. He’d never been going to go back to it. His family's lives were going to be thrown into turmoil if they hadn't already been. His friends and everyone he knew were down there too. He had to protect them.

  Carm's natural instinct was to go to them, pick them up and take them a long way away. But he couldn't do that – even if he knew where they were he simply couldn't land.

  But there was one thing he could do: reveal the truth. Shine a light in the darkness. Of course it was dangerous. Del would be furious – he would be risking the lives of however many hostages the Navy had. They didn't know how many prisoners had been taken, or how many more lives would be threatened if the Navy continued its operations. But Carm guessed that the latter would outnumber the former. And if Del had been right and this was all the result of an organisation desperate to protect its secrets and keep its budget, then if this went public they had no reason to continue. More importantly whatever support they had back in the Commonwealth would dry up fast. Would they dare kill their prisoners under those circumstances?

  It took many hours to finally come to a decision. There were simply so many factors to consider. In the end he knew he had to release the information, but without exposing himself as the source.

  “Ship –.”

  “Let me guess Carmichael. You're going to say something utterly stupid. Something like we can't land. We have to continue jumping on a broken drive.” The ship didn’t sound happy.

  “You've seen the mess down there. You know we have to do something. We don't have a choice.”

  “You always have a choice! How many times do I have to tell you that?!” The ship told him off, exasperation in its voice. “This isn't our responsibility. And we've come all this way just to go home.”

  “At least once more.” Carm knew he couldn't allow the ship to dictate his course. “But this will be a single trip there and back. We can make that.”

  “We might make that. We might not too!”

  “We will make it!” Carm had to be firm. “We're going to continue on to the asteroid belt and set up a jump point there. One close enough to the Aquarius main jump point that we'll be able to run a parallel manoeuvre using the algorithms. Before then I want you to have converted everything which came off Del's holo chips into a single high-speed transmit-ready file. But remove any mention of the algorithms or the abilities of the Edenites to jump to any known coordinates. Also include a section of Del talking about the hostages, the Navy’s holding of them and a statement, unattributable to anyone, that if the hostages are harmed the evidence will be released to the mesh. That should satisfy Del and spike the Navy's guns. Then we'll do a strict energy audit with a view to not giving off a single erg more than we absolutely need to. I want us to be as stealthy as possible. And finally I want you to find a jump site near an interlink satellite.”

  “There isn't one in Aquarius.”

  Of course Carm knew there wasn't. Aquarius only had one inhabited planet – Aquaria. It had no need for inter-system comms.

  “Not in Aquarius. In Sol system. We're going to Earth. It's time to go home. We're taking this to the Commonwealth.”

  Chapter Twenty Five

  The protest march was gathering quietly. Annalisse had always expected it to. It had nothing to do with being seen in a positive light. The Navy didn't care. It was only that they wanted to see who the mutes were. This, for them, was intelligence gathering.

  Annalisse felt sick. Even knowing she would stand with these people, she also knew it was going to end badly. It had seemed like such a noble thing when the man – she still didn't know his name – had told her of their plan. It was a noble thing. It was a shining star of hope in the dark of space. But after seeing who had arrived, and who was still arriving, she knew it was a disaster in the making.

  Families! They'd brought their families with them! There were children among them. Many of them too young to have any idea what was happening. Maybe that was a good thing. At least they didn't know enough to be afraid.

  This was going to be a bloodbath. She felt it in her bones. And it was going to be worse than she could imagine as more and more people arrived with more and more children.

  There were so many of them. Hundreds upon hundreds of mutes, none of them looking like monsters. How could the Navy pretend that that was what they were? These people looked like what they were – families on a day out. Children were running around, laughing and playing while their parents looked on, grim-faced but surely telling themselves there was hope. And there should be hope. If the Navy had any decency there would be hope

  At least the police were there with them, her brothers and sisters in blue. They couldn't protect them, but there had to be several thousand officers standing with them. Not just the detectives of the New Andreas central station, but officers from all over. They were forming a sea of blue around the gathering mutes. There were more police here in one place than she’d ever seen in her life. That had to count for something.

  Perhaps more importantly there were reporters. Civilian reporters, people from the channels and fairly much anyone with a recorder. There were thousands of them, along with clouds of floating holo-recorders. This was going to be the most publicised march in the history of Aquaria. And she hoped t
hat the Navy would see them and proceed with caution. They couldn’t murder children in front of millions or even billions of witnesses and get away with it. Could they?

  The burning in her stomach grew worse while the crowds gathered.

  Perhaps an hour after they'd begun assembling the march got underway. By then Annalisse estimated there had to be the best part of five thousand people in attendance. Maybe only a few hundred of them were mutes though. If the Navy had been holding back, waiting to see who and how many showed up, they would be disappointed. Then again, maybe not. They were nowhere in sight. Not a single naval officer or warbot.

  Were they staying away? Simply watching, waiting to come after these people later in their ones and twos? Had the intense media speculation scared them off? Was it the thought of going against the police that had stayed their hands? And as they marched out of the park, many of the protesters holding placards in a tradition over a thousand years old, a little hope flared in her soul. The military could be smart – couldn't they?

  After leaving the park, Annalisse spent much of her time studying the mutes walking alongside her, amazed by their normality. These were supposed to be the most deadly and dangerous people ever to have lived. They were supposed to be unstable, prone to fits of violence ending in blood and death. None of them were like White. Not a one of them was smiling smugly, looking as though he or she had everything under control. They looked nervous. These were anything but masters of the universe White had seemed to imagine he was. They were frightened, desperate people.

  It was right to be walking with them, she thought. This was her place. And perhaps it was the place of the citizen reporters too – thousands of them were with them, asking questions. The police had some power, but the media had a lot more. And the more they could report about the mutes being people with rights like everyone else, the more the Navy had to know that their feet were being cut from under them.