Transport 3_The Zone

by Phillip P. Peterson

  Execution! Marlene nodded.

  “Furthermore, we need food and water to supply our Venus base. I expect all food that is harvested to be stored in a central depot and for a record to be kept of anything that is taken out of it.”

  Richards stood up. His face was flushed. “We hardly have enough for ourselves after fighting off those beasts. And what’s more, your men have prevented us from doing our work in the fields for days.”

  “How many people do you need us to provide for?” Marlene asked.

  “Fifty.” He turned to Richards. “But we still have supplies in the depots on Venus. So we won’t suffer any shortages. You can continue harvesting the fields right away and use the off-road vehicles. But you must log out with the commanding officer when you leave the settlement. I want to know where every colonist is——at all times.”

  “Where’s Russell?” Albert interrupted the general. Marlene didn’t think it was a good time to ask, but didn’t say anything.

  Morrow turned slowly to look at Albert. “Mr. Harris is on Venus awaiting trial, Mr. Bridgeman. If it was up to me, I would also put you, Mr. Holbrook, and Ms. Slayton up against the wall, but my superiors decided to make an example only of Mr. Harris, as the ringleader of the mutiny.”

  “My God!” Marlene said. “You want to have him executed?”

  “He will get a fair trial. But in the face of the overwhelming evidence, it is the likely outcome, yes. He is guilty of the worst form of high treason. He must bear the consequences.”

  “But——” Holbrook began.

  “Shut up!” the general hissed, spinning around so abruptly that his beret slipped. “You were once a highly decorated military astronaut. Then you robbed your country of perhaps its most important possession. You will never be able to atone for that, and as far as I’m concerned, banishment is punishment enough.”

  “Banishment?” Marlene looked startled.

  The general straightened his beret. “The group of former mutineers will never set foot on Earth again and will die here——regardless of whether we succeed in wresting the secrets from the transporter on Venus.” He reached down for his bag, which he had placed on the floor beside him. “Thank you, we are done for now. Major Palmer will arrive shortly with more detailed instructions. I expect you to follow them to the letter.”

  The general stood up and started for the door.

  “Hang on. I still have one question,” Holbrook said.

  The general stopped and turned his head slightly without actually turning around. “What?”

  “The transporter. A few days ago we tried in vain to reach another planet. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Now Morrow turned around and looked his former subordinate in the eye. He chuckled softly. “Very perceptive of you, Mr. Holbrook. You’re right! We have already made some progress with the technology and control of the transporter. We immobilized it from Venus.”

  Chapter 3

  Russell was lying on the uncomfortable cot in his cell, mulling over the situation.

  On Venus!

  Morrow had been right. He should have thought of it himself. Twenty years ago, Russell and Chris had destroyed all the transporters in the solar system, so that nobody from Earth could reach them. Apart from one——the transporter on Venus! The pressure on the surface of this hellish planet was almost one hundred bar——equivalent to the pressure three-thousand feet below the surface of the ocean! The temperature was a blistering nine-hundred-and-thirty degrees Fahrenheit and the atmosphere consisted of a poisonous mixture of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and sulfuric acid. High above the ground, clouds rained thick drops of sulfuric acid. How it had been possible to set up a base in these conditions was an absolute mystery to Russell. The flight alone would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. But clearly they had made technological strides and found solutions. It must have been a mammoth undertaking and mind-blowingly expensive.

  But most of the time, Russell thought about his family. He simply could not accept that he would never see Ellen and the children again. He racked his brains for a solution. Perhaps he could strike a deal with Morrow? But what could he offer him?

  He wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Eventually the same two soldiers who had taken him to General Morrow came back to collect him from his cell. After again walking through the maze of corridors, they stopped in front of the infirmary. The soldier with the glasses, whom Russell had nicknamed John Lennon, knocked on the door. After a few seconds with no reaction he knocked again.

  “I’m not deaf, for God’s sake!” came the throaty voice of a woman through the closed door. Lennon winced slightly and pulled a face. They waited together.

  Russell pointed at the emblem above Lennon’s chest pocket. “It reminds me of the Air Force symbol. Did they change the design?”

  Lennon shook his head. “Darkbridge,” he said by way of explanation.

  Russell understood. Darkbridge was the name of an arms manufacturer that had already been in the process of a massive expansion twenty years ago. So the government had handed over the construction and running of the Venus lab to a private company. And the men beside him were probably mercenaries, not soldiers. “Isn’t conquering space the job of NASA?”

  The taller of the two men smirked. “NASA doesn’t exist anymore. And now shut up.”

  The door to the infirmary opened and the grumpy-looking doctor waved him in. The room was small. A treatment chair that could be tipped back to a lying position took up much of the space. Several shelves were crammed with books, instruments, and medical devices. A small desk was covered in papers. A bottle of whisky had obviously been hidden in a hurry beneath a folder. Glass doors led to a tiny room with an operating table, around which there would barely be room for three doctors, and a diagnostic device that he could see was a CAT scanner. A door leading into a third room was labeled “Intensive Care.”

  “Take a seat,” the doctor spoke in an indifferent tone of voice.

  Russell hesitated. A week ago he would have done anything to have his illness treated. But to be healed only to face a firing squad was not what he had dreamed of. He had toyed with the idea of refusing the treatment. But Morrow had warned him that he would be treated with force if necessary, so he didn’t stand a chance anyway.

  “Well get on with it, I don’t have all day.” The doctor’s breath smelt of whisky.

  Russell shrugged and lowered himself into the treatment chair.

  “Wait outside,” the doctor barked at the soldiers. “You’re in the way here.”

  Lennon didn’t budge. “We are under strict orders not to let the prisoner out of our sight.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit what the old guy said,” she flared up. “This is my infirmary and I make the rules here. I will not start the treatment until you fuck off. You can wait outside——that’s the only door out of which he could exit. He won’t get away!”

  “He could take you hostage.”

  “Look at him!” She waved a hand in Russell’s direction. “He’s a wreck. He won’t be taking anyone hostage. And where would he take me? Now get out!”

  “I will report your uncooperative behavior to the general,” Lennon said, visibly angry. But he opened the door to leave.

  “Sure, you do that.”

  The soldiers left the room. “Idiots!” the doctor murmured under her breath after the door closed.

  “The old guy?” Russell repeated. He couldn’t suppress a grin. “It doesn’t sound as if you’re too impressed by Morrow.”

  She looked at him sternly. “He does his job. Same as I do. Unfortunately, the needs of the crew are not very high up on his list of priorities.”

  Russell held out a hand. “Russell Harris,” he said.

  She looked at him as if he were a lab rat awaiting dissection. “I know who you are. It’s thanks to you that we’re on this shit-hole of a planet.”

  Russell nodded. “Yes, I guess so. But can you at least tell me your name?”

  �
��Dr. Megan Payne.”

  Russell lowered his hand after the doctor didn’t show any sign of taking it. He laughed. “Payne? That’s a fitting name for a doctor.”

  She grimaced. “After thirty years in the job, you can imagine how often I’ve heard that one.”

  “Yes, I can. So what happens next? What do you intend to do with me?”

  Dr. Payne rolled a thigh-high device with a big screen over to the chair. “You will now get an infusion with genetically engineered antibodies. With this resonance-field scanner, I can see whether the treatment is working.”

  Russell had to take off his shirt and the doctor attached a flat plastic ring, which was connected to the diagnostic device via a cable, to his chest. Then she took a pouch of clear liquid out of the refrigerator and attached it to the infusion set. Russell winced as the needle entered a vein in his right arm.

  “What are you giving me?” he asked.

  “It’s an immunotherapy. Around ten years ago it became the first choice for treating most types of cancer.”

  “A kind of chemotherapy?”

  The doctor rolled her eyes. “No, this immunotherapy works completely differently. When you were unconscious I did a biopsy of the affected lung tissue. We identified the cancer-causing mutations in your DNA with a gene sequencer. Then we synthesized artificial T-lymphocytes, which react with the specific T-cell receptors of the carcinogenic cells. It’s like a personalized vaccination that has been produced to treat your specific type of cancer.”

  Russell looked at the clear plastic pouch that was already nearly empty. The skin around where she had injected him was red and sore. “How many sessions do I need?”

  “Just this one. In fifteen minutes we’re done. Tomorrow I’ll do an MRT and a further biopsy and in five days or so all of the carcinogenic cells should be destroyed.”

  Russell shook his head. When he had left Earth twenty years ago, cancer had in most cases still been a fatal disease. Even treatments lasting several months usually only delayed the inevitable outcome.

  “There seem to have been huge advancements in medicine since I left,” he said.

  Dr. Payne shrugged. “In some areas, yes. Particularly in gene therapy there have been some major breakthroughs and there are new treatments available. This kind of equipment is now standard in most hospitals.” She grimaced. “But in other ways, Earth has moved in the opposite direction.”

  “Earth ...” Russell let the name of his home planet roll from his tongue. He wondered what had gone on there in his absence. “I have no idea what’s happened in the last twenty years.”

  “You haven’t missed much.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  The doctor went over to her desk, picked up a book-sized tablet, which changed color at the touch of a button. Writing and images appeared on the screen. She handed it to Russell. “The headlines from yesterday,” she said drily.

  Russell scanned the page. The main headline was about fighting in northern Spain. The article reported that government troops were advancing on Barcelona. Montserrat, a strategically important mountain had been occupied, and the troops had massacred many Catalonian civilians.

  Russell looked up in shock. “War in Europe?”

  “Europe hasn’t existed for about fifteen years. After the global financial crash in 2021, the European Union collapsed. Separatist movements proliferated, and national borders disappeared.”

  “America?” Russell asked.

  “A secession of the central states was avoided by military force, after the Republican President was blown up in an attack in Oakland ten years ago. The ongoing economic crisis isn’t making matters any easier.”

  “My God! I don’t think I want to know anymore.” Russell was silent for a while and watched the infusion bag as his eyes filled with tears.

  Dr. Payne looked at Russell sympathetically, went over to her desk and fished out the bottle of whisky from under the file. She poured a little of the golden liquid into two glasses, wafting one of them under her nose.

  “You shouldn’t drink any alcohol in your condition, but it doesn’t stop me, either, despite my awful liver values.”

  Russell took the glass and held it uncertainly. Then he downed the entire contents in one gulp.

  “It’s the only way of coping with this shit,” the doctor added, after placing her own glass back on the table.

  “How can it be that everything’s going to the dogs, but the USA still has the money to finance a gargantuan project like a base on Venus?”

  Payne took another swig from the bottle and busied herself with the infusion pouch, which was now empty. She removed the needle from Russell’s arm and stuck a plaster over the little wound.

  “The government got it into its head that it had to get hold of the transporter. The secret came out years ago, and the US didn’t want to risk the Russians or the Chinese getting to Venus first.”

  The treatment was finished, and Russell was taken back to his cell. He waited to feel the effect of the treatment——pain, nausea or one of the other side-effects associated with cancer treatments. But he felt fine.

  Over the next few days he had several check-ups. His blood was tested and he had a CAT scan. The checks were carried out by an assistant and he only saw the doctor again after three days.

  She stepped into his cell and waited for the soldier standing behind her to close the door from the outside. Then she sat down on the bare cot. “Congratulations, Russell. The treatment was successful. Your blood values look good, there are no more tumor markers to be seen. You’re cured.”

  Russell sat down on the closed toilet seat and looked at Payne impassively. Cured ... The fear of dying of cancer had overshadowed his life in recent weeks. He had hardly been able to believe his ears when Dr. Lindwall had given him the diagnosis. He had spent several days wallowing in self-pity and feeling angry before resigning himself to his fate. And now along came this other doctor and told him that his impending death had been averted by a simple infusion. But what good did it do him? One death sentence had been replaced by another. “I can’t tell you what I would have given for this news just a few days ago,” he whispered.

  Dr. Payne nodded. “I know. It’s just a reprieve until your trial. And we already know the outcome of that.”

  “I probably deserve it,” he replied.

  The doctor shook her head emphatically. Either she hadn’t noticed his sarcasm or she was ignoring it. “I’ve been against the death penalty my entire life. I became a doctor because I wanted to save lives. What kind of a medic would I be if I thought the deliberate extermination of a life was a good thing? To heal somebody in order to execute them is one of the biggest perversions of our system. If I’ve understood correctly, you wanted to save humanity from self-destruction. Could I condemn you for that?” She looked down at the ground. “Then I would have to condemn myself,” she added flatly.

  Russell looked up. “What happened?”

  Dr. Payne shook her head. “It’s none of your business.”

  “I’m fairly certain you’re not here of your own free will,” Russell persisted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “On Venus, I mean.”

  Her lips curled into the hint of a smile. “Nobody is here out of choice, that much I can tell you. Everybody here fucked up in some way and is now atoning for what they did. The same goes for the mercenaries and the crew. Who would come to a hell-hole like this of their own free will?”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Six months. And I still have no idea if I’ll ever go home.” She laughed.

  “Do you have a family back on Earth?”

  She shook her head. “No. I never had time for that.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Sometimes I wonder why I even want to go back to Earth. To be honest, the planet makes me sick, or rather the people that live on it. But at least I can see the sky from there.”

  “On New California we also have a beautiful blue sky,�
�� Russell said.

  The doctor frowned. “Where?” Then she nodded. “Oh yeah, the planet that you escaped to.”

  “Yeah, and there’s clean water and enough to eat.”

  “I only hope your descendants don’t one day make the same mistake as humans on Earth, and turn their planet into a shit heap.” She grimaced as she spoke these words and stood up. “Although your cancer has been cured, you only have seventy per cent of your lung capacity left. The cancerous tissue is scarred as a result of the therapy and will never recover. So don’t overexert yourself.”

  It was a strange order to give a man who would spend the rest of his short life in a cell! But he nodded. “Thank you.”

  Dr. Payne opened her mouth to speak but decided against it. “I’m done here!” she said loudly and the guard let her out of the cell. The door closed with a thud and Russell was alone again.

  Chapter 4

  “Psst!”

  Marlene turned around in bed and sighed. She had waited all evening for Albert and finally gone to bed. She couldn’t help feeling annoyed when she saw him standing in the bedroom door. But he smiled impishly, and her anger subsided.

  “I didn’t expect you anymore,” she said sleepily.

  He walked over to the bed and took off his shirt. His eyes showed only too clearly what his intentions were. Despite his age, Albert still looked fantastic. Taut muscles rippled beneath his tanned skin. He’d had a good physique to start with, and their way of life on New California had only enhanced it. It was almost impossible to avoid doing regular exercise here, and the food they grew was not the kind to lead to a belly.

  His fingers stroked her breasts, but she didn’t even feel a tingling sensation. “I think I’m too tired.”

  Albert threw his pants in a corner and clambered under the covers with her. His warm arms crawled under her nightshirt. “I have an excellent idea of how to wake you up again,” he said in a husky voice.