by Patty Jansen
Somewhere in the darkness someone vomited. The red lights made an eerie sheen over the heads of all the people in their harnesses.
A small hand felt for Melati’s.
“I’m scared.” Simo. “Is it OK to be scared?”
“You can’t help being scared.” Her mouth felt funny and stiff with nerves. Another person vomited, and she just hoped to be able to control herself with the tricks she’d been taught in training, but the darkness and the smell really wasn’t helping. “Do you feel all right?”
“Yes.”
Another couple of soft young voices also said that yes, they felt all right. Lucky them. Most constructs did not suffer zero-gravity sickness.
Another violent lurch, this to the right.
Melati hung on tight and concentrated on a point ahead, trying to calm her queasy stomach. Gradually the sideways pressure settled and vanished. Gravity returned.
The lights came back on. The boys were all seated around her, hugging each other. Shan sat on Ari’s lap. A crewman came with a tray of packaged crew rations, but Melati wasn’t hungry. She should probably leave Ari and Budiman here and go and find Dr Chee, but she was so tired. She lay down on her side, stroking Esse’s hair.
The floor was hard and cold; but she hadn’t slept for a whole day, and she drifted into blissful oblivion.
* * *
It seemed barely a second later when someone shook her shoulder. “Melati.”
Melati jerked up and looked around. Something weighed her legs down, which proved to be Simo, fast asleep, heavy and warm. The other boys lay around him in a sleeping tangle of arms and legs. Ari and Budiman sat on top of the transport webbing playing a game with another barang-barang youth.
The person who had woken her was Christine, silhouetted against the ceiling light.
“Anything the matter?” Her mouth felt dry. She was afraid of making too much noise and waking the boys.
“You’re summoned to the Command Room,” Christine said. Then she looked at the sleeping boys. “I’ll stay with them.”
What? And then another thought. “Go to the Command Room like this?” She still wore the black hypertech suit over her dirty and bloodied sari. She stank of sweat.
Christine grinned and lifted her arm, where she held Melati’s uniform, including the horrible dress jacket.
Melati extricated herself from Simo, stumbled to her feet, overbalanced and almost fell.
“Less gravity than the station. It takes a bit of getting used to,” Christine said.
Like Jas on Ganymede.
Melati took the uniform and went to change and freshen up in a bathroom that, with its heavy-duty soap dispensers, looked like it was normally used by tech crew.
As she looked at herself in the mirror—pale-faced and tired—she realised that she had left not just her home and family, but that all her important possessions, including her family’s heirlooms, were still in her apartment at the station.
God, her family shrine, and Pak. He would be wondering where she was, wondering why she didn’t come to prayer. On this ship, how would she even know what times to pray and which way to face?
Her eyes stung but she forced down her emotions. She had to be strong for her boys, for Ari, for everyone who needed her.
On her way to the upper deck, she met several soldiers who met her eyes with expressions she couldn’t place. What had she done to warrant this order? Disobeyed StatOp rules? Tick. Broken into their database? Tick. Failed to wait for approval from a supervisor before investigating the mindbase exchange? Tick.
The Command Centre was in a different part of the ship, fortunately well-labelled, because Melati would have gotten lost in the unfamiliar warren of narrow and busy corridors. There were screens on every wall, and voices coming out of every room, giving localities, speed, scan data, talking about hostiles and occupation and other words of war.
She went into the door that said Command Centre Office and came into a cramped room where Marius Vorcak sat at a workstation that seemed too small for his lanky form. Screens on the wall showed the activity on the ship’s bridge.
Vorcak squinted at her. “You are. . . ?”
“Melati Hermann Rudiyanto. I was ordered to come here.”
His face lit up. “Ah, yes. Go in.”
He pressed a button and a door in the wall behind him opened to reveal a slightly larger room where Base Commander Sandy Cocaro was seated behind her desk. She gestured. “Come in.”
Melati did, feeling hot and cold at the same time.
The commander’s office in the ship was not nearly as luxurious or large as that on the base. The room was carpeted and painted light blue. Apart from the desk, there was a small recess with couches built in, also blue, and a table, all bolted to the floor. Melati sat down facing Cocaro on the bench with her back straight against the rear wall of the cabin. She clamped her hands between her knees.
Cocaro placed her elbows on the desk and brought her hands together so that the fingertips touched.
“Miss Rudiyanto, do you have any idea why you’re here?” Her voice sounded grave.
“I defied orders,” Melati said, looking at the carpet. “I asked my supervisor’s permission to request material from the station databases, and I didn’t wait for the permission to come through. I also shared knowledge and data with two Taurus Army enforcers and recruited my nephew to get me data I wasn’t entitled to have—” And it was all for nothing, because they’d lost the station anyway and now all the barang-barang still in the B sector were in danger.
“Is that what you think?” There was an unusual tone in her voice.
Melati raised her head.
“I called you here to thank you,” Cocaro said.
“Thank me? I don’t deserve—”
“It was because of your diligent observations that we were able to cut the clandestine link out of the base and stop the spread of the virus. Thanks to you, we avoided the self-destruction of the base. Thanks to your diligence, we even found the virus. Evacuating the base may seem a drastic step, and the situation on the station is far from ideal, but it could easily have been so much worse.”
Melati wasn’t sure it wasn’t already worse. If nothing else, how embarrassing would it be for the ISF upper command to have to evacuate a research and support base? And there was another issue, too. “There is some alien force at work. It may come after us because have the mindbase of Paul Ormerod.”
Cocaro gave a small smile. “And we do have him, thanks to your valiant actions.”
Melati didn’t know what to say. She’d only looked for Paul because she wanted to help Jas.
“Do you realise that you will be commended for this?”
“Me?” A commendation?
She gave a lopsided smile. “The Vauxhall medal.”
What? That was one of the main military decorations. She’d done nothing military at all. “But I don’t—”
“You deserve every bit of it. I know people give you a hard time, but I enormously appreciate your work and dedication to the force, and our program. I know your family has given you a hard time, and I appreciate your dedication in the face of what they’ve put you through, and the temptations they have put in your way. I appreciate your devotion to your cohort and I appreciate your integrity. This could so easily have ended differently.”
Melati stared at her. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening.
Cocaro said, “For the next few weeks, or however long it takes, the Felicity will hang around in the system while we clear everything in the base so it’s safe to return.”
“Jao said something about decoupling.”
“If that proves necessary, yes. But I’m hoping it won’t be, also thanks to you.”
“What about the station?”
“We will clear that out, too, after we’ve dealt with the base, with the help of the Taurus Army. The Allion agents will be isolated, if they want to play the siege game. They have no supplies and no warships. They won�
�t hold out for long.”
Crippling the station with the enemy trapped inside was one of the key tactics of close-range space warfare. Better than fighting inside the station corridor by corridor. Yes, she’d heard it all before, but . . . this was her home.
Cocaro rose, walked around the desk and placed a heavy hand on Melati’s shoulder.
“You did well, Miss Rudiyanto, and we will do our best to return to the station as soon as we can with as little suffering as possible. But whatever happens, I’d like to keep you as crew for officer training.”
* * *
Melati was still dazed when she left the room. Officer training, a medal, travel. They were all things she had wanted—well, apart from the medal.
There would be some tense days as the blockage progressed, and after that, nothing would be the same. She would go for the training, and come back to the CAU in a position of leadership. The training programs needed changing. She would want to give cohorts ongoing support, even after they left the program. She would want studies on how cohorts perceived Before and if maybe their training could begin at that time. And all of those things would need to be documented in a permanent library, so that future researchers could forever draw from every little diary entry, no matter how insignificant. And she would aggressively recruit young and smart barang-barang, train them and pull them out of the cycle of self-defeating thoughts and stupid behaviour.
She went back to the boys, where more food had arrived. It was canteen stuff, usually much scoffed at by barang-barang, but everyone was quiet and ate it without complaint. Afterwards, an officer came in to organise the group into teams to be put to work.
It was time for Melati to go back to her work.
Dr Chee had set himself up in the ship’s med section, a warren of interconnected cubicles, dorms and wards. With many civilians injured in fights or still suffering from the gas attack, there were beds everywhere, and nurses going from one to the other, delivering treatment in the corridors.
Dr Chee sat at a workstation in a galley-like room with desks and cupboards on both sides. He smiled when she came in.
Melati looked around. “Where is he?”
“On my screen.”
“What—oh, Paul Ormerod?”
“Yes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Melati came to look over his shoulder. This mindbase was full of huge modified statements, and nested statements within nested statements.
“Wow. You’d get a headache just from trying to understand all that.”
“Fortunately, we’ll have a while.” He nodded at the seat next to him. “I’d like you to work on this mindbase if you can.”
Melati hesitated. “I’m not sure I can . . . Do you know I’ve been recommended for officer training?”
“I do. I recommended you, and I’d like you to work with me. I know that you’ll have to leave for a while, but do you think I’ll decode this mindbase that quickly? This is going to take a long time.”
He was right, of course. “I came to see Jas Grimshaw. Is he here?”
Dr Chee gestured at the open door on the other side of the galley-style office-store room.
Melati went through, into a ward with three beds, one of which was occupied by the man they had dragged out of the hypertech den, now cleanly washed and shaven.
As Melati came in, his eyes widened. “Rina?” His face was haunted, his expression bewildered. Then: “No, you’re Melati, the teacher.” He was thin, and his cheeks looked hollower than before.
Melati almost choked up with tears. “Rina was my cousin.”
“Where is Rina?” Then his eyes widened as he realised she’d said was.
Melati could do nothing except shake her head. She sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Where are my brothers?”
Troy, Elko and the others, still on the station. They might be dead, too. She’d lost them in that mad crowd, before the shooting and gassing started. She kept shaking her head, losing it badly. “Terrible things have happened. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any good news.” It was the only thing she could say. A tear leaked out of her eye and rolled over her cheek. She wiped it away. “I’m sorry.”
This was not how Uncle had taught her to behave. She fought to stay calm.
Deep breath. Look into his eyes. “I’m sorry about your brothers. I don’t know if they’re alive. I’m sorry about Rina. She’s . . .” Her mouth would no longer cooperate.
“Hey, take it easy.” A warm arm came around her shoulders.
Melati could feel him trembling. Like her, he was trying to put on a brave face. The experience of seeing his memories still shook her. Imagine what it did to him.
She put her head on his shoulder. Melati wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but the tears came back and would not be stopped.
His chest shook with a stifled sob.
There was no need for words. His emotions were so entangled with hers that she felt his pain.
For a while they sat like that, two vastly different people thrown together by circumstance. Dr Chee came in, raised his eyebrows and left again.
Then Jas cleared his throat. “What now? What am I supposed to do without my brothers? What kind of work can I do on a military ship? I can only fly mining ships.”
“Come and help me with the boys. You know them well enough and they know you. They’re disturbed. Maybe you can help some of the other cohorts as well. You can be their dad.”
“Their dad.” His eyes went vacant.
Melati didn’t ask further. Wrong remark. Maybe he was a fertile construct and had hoped to have children with Rina. His chin trembled.
“Please don’t start again, because I won’t be able to stop. Come with me. Let’s go and see the boys.” She loosened herself from his embrace.
“If it’s all right with the doc.”
“The doc says the sooner you’re out of here the better,” Dr Chee called from his workstation.
“Gee, thanks.”
Melati laughed through her tears and wiped her cheeks one last time. Then she pushed herself off the bed.
“Come on, let’s go.”
“Like this, huh?” He gestured at the surgical gown. He grinned.
Melati opened the doors to the cupboard in the room and was lucky enough to find unmarked grey overalls and some disposable underwear that wasn’t the very cheapest, itchy kind. She handed the bundle to him, but was taken aback by the intense expression on his face. “Anything wrong?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Just . . . just I should thank you. You didn’t have to do this for me. You could just have left the problem with the lab.”
Melati thought back to the moment Jas had woken up in Keb’s body and still heard his anguished voice. “No, I couldn’t. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way I am. Stupid, trying to punch above my weight and taking on the universe. Sometimes, you should just take the money if someone offers it.”
“Hey, it’s not your fault. I am very glad that you cared.” He put his hand on her arm. It was cold and sweaty. “I’ll help you now. That’s my promise.”
Another rush of emotion. “All right,” Melati said and took a deep breath. “But please stop making me cry.”
He returned a lopsided smile. “OK. I’ll try.”
A Word of Thanks
THANK YOU very much for reading Shifting Reality. The story of Melati isn’t finished here. In Shifting Infinity, both Allion and ISF try to break a long siege with increasingly desperate tactics, and Melati goes on a crazy mission to save her family. Find out where you can get Shifting Infinity here.
As author of this book, I would appreciate it very much if you could return to the place where you purchased this book and leave a review. Reviews are important to me, because they help readers decide if the book is for them.
Also be sure to put your name on my mailing list which I use exclusively to notify subscribers of new fiction.
For everything else, including my blog, backgroun
d information about my fiction, and my other books, visit my website: http://pattyjansen.com.
About the Setting
* * *
SHIFTING REALITY is set in a space station orbiting Epsilon Eridani b. The planet, which my characters call Sarasvati, is a gas giant which I have given rings, and the station’s main industry is the harvest of ice from these rings for the production of water, oxygen and fuel. The station is one of four human settlements in that solar system, three of them mining stations. These four settlements survive as communities nearly independent from each other, and fully independent from Earth, 10.5 light-years away.
Epsilon Eridani is real, and the gas giant is real. The system is also known to contain a lot of dust or asteroids. No evidence exists for (or against!) the smaller planet in the system, called Anak in this book.
The worker population of the station was sourced from the slums of Jakarta after a major disaster drove rural people into the city. In the timeline of this world, this event occurred in the late 22nd century, which makes this book set about two hundred and fifty years in the future.
The tier 2 people of New Jakarta are of Indonesian descent.
I grew up with Indonesian food. I had several family members who grew up in Indonesia and our family get-togethers would often involve huge Indonesian cook-ins, after a good deal of scouting out the best toko (= Indonesian grocery store) in town. It was not until I started reading about the country’s history for the worldbuilding of this novel, that I realised both the narrowness of my knowledge and the enormous variety in the country. Every subject you tackle becomes immensely complicated by the many ethnicities in the country. It is endlessly amusing, for example, to watch Indonesians online (no doubt some of them expats) discuss their names. They can have either a Javanese single name; two names, the second of which is a patronymic; or the posher three names, where the last name is a family name in the same manner as western last names. Going by posts in forums, many of today’s young urban and expat Indonesians are no longer familiar with the significance of their names in terms of class and/or ethnicity.