Old Ironsides

by Dean Crawford

  Viggo bit his lip and then cast his glowing red eye at Foxx. ‘Who got iced?’

  ‘Arwen Minter and another man, as yet unidentified,’ Foxx said.

  Viggo seemed to crack and rubbed his temples viciously with his normal hand, the other metallic one rapping its fingers across the steel table top between them.

  ‘I din’ kill nobody,’ he repeated.

  ‘Then prove it,’ Foxx snarled, ‘else I get bored and walk out of here with two homicides solved and your name down for the fast bus to Tethys Gaol.’

  Viggo glared at her, his half-human expression a volatile fusion of rage and fear just as Foxx had hoped. Fear fuelled desperation, and desperate men could be led to perform desperate acts. Tethys, a moon of Saturn, was also home to the most feared gaol in the solar system, a violent and semi-abandoned outpost on a moon barely a thousand kilometres in diameter. Even worse than the Seven Circles of Hell, its location close to the big planet’s famous rings amid clouds of orbital debris meant that the only ships capable of reaching and leaving the gaol without breaching their hulls were designated CSS vessels. There was no other way in or out of the gaol but military escort and any prisoner sent there knew it.

  Viggo hesitated for a moment longer and then he sighed heavily.

  ‘I din’ have nothing to do with the drones. Minter showed up with them a couple months back, stashed them behind the couch in that apartment.’

  ‘Which you started showing up in at about the same time,’ Vasquez pointed out. ‘That won’t sound good in front of the court, Viggo.’

  ‘I needed a place to stay!’ Viggo snapped. ‘Minter was the local runner, we knew each other, he had the room. I din’ ask no questions about the drones.’

  ‘But you knew they were there,’ Foxx said. ‘You must’ve been curious?’

  ‘Curious,’ Viggo chuckled bitterly. ‘More like afraid. Minter kept getting the damned things out and showing them to me, threatened to switch one on and send it after me if I breathed a word about ‘em. I couldn’t wait to see the back of the damned things.’

  ‘Where was Minter taking them?’ Vasquez asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Viggo said, and when Foxx and Vasquez glared at him he raised his voice. ‘I don’t know! Minter had a deal cut with some other crew, people I don’t know. Only thing he said was that he needed to deliver the drones soon, that they were important somehow.’

  Foxx’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

  ‘What about down on the surface?’ she asked. ‘Did Minter ever get down there while you were staying with him?’

  Viggo looked at her and Vasquez in turn. ‘You don’t got me down as no talker, you understan’? Word gets out, I’ll be dead before moonrise.’

  ‘You’ll be in Tethys if you don’t talk,’ Vasquez pointed out. ‘Tough break, kid.’

  Viggo closed his one natural eye, the other remaining red and unblinking.

  ‘Minter had some friend down on the surface,’ he admitted finally. ‘Dude could go down there whenever he wanted, could go pretty much any place in fact. I know that he managed to smuggle a dozen of those drone things down to the surface, ‘cause he came back the next day without ‘em.’

  Foxx leaned closer, watching Viggo’s face intently for any sign of deception.

  ‘You got any idea who the connection was?’

  Viggo’s brow furrowed as though he was trying to remember. ‘Some medical dude, a doctor or somethin’. I didn’t see nobody, but Minter talked to him on data link now and again, and he got something from the guy that he plugged into one o’ those drones.’

  Vasquez pushed off the wall, his arms still folded. ‘DNA,’ he said to Foxx.

  Foxx nodded, watching Viggo intently.

  ‘Viggo, what you’re telling us now could dramatically affect your sentence,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything and I’ll do what I can to keep you out of Tethys.’

  Viggo looked again at Vasquez before he replied.

  ‘He said it was something to do with CSS Titan but that’s all I know man, I swear.’

  Foxx looked up at Vasquez.

  ‘It’s the ship,’ she said. ‘Get everything we’ve uncovered so far about Titan and its connection to this case set up in the office, okay?’

  Vasquez nodded and made for the interview room door as Foxx turned back to Viggo.

  ‘Tell me, Viggo, what was in that drug you sprayed at me, back on the south side?’

  Viggo frowned. ‘Nothin’ man, it was just Shiver. I had a capsule and I hosed you down hopin’ it might get me away. Worked, too.’

  The door to the interview room opened and Nathan burst in and approached the table.

  ‘Why did Arwin Minter want me dead?!’ Nathan snapped.

  Foxx jumped up in alarm but Viggo shrieked and hurled himself backward and away from Nathan as though the Grim Reaper himself had walked into the room. Viggo’s restraint chains locked taut as he tried to get away and he shrieked again.

  ‘Get him away from me!’

  Nathan stopped short in surprise as Foxx saw tears of fear spring from Viggo’s eyes, the man trembling as he tried to pull his bionic arm out of the unyielding chains.

  ‘What’s gotten into you?’ Foxx asked, approaching the convict.

  ‘Man, get him outta here,’ Viggo hissed fearfully. ‘That’s the mark, the guy Minter was after. He’s the guy Minter programmed the drones to kill. That’s him!’

  Foxx glanced briefly at Nathan before speaking. ‘We know, but we don’t know why Minter did that.’

  Viggo swallowed his fear and spoke in a tremulous voice.

  ‘The plague,’ he said, his real and bionic eyes both locked on Nathan. ‘He’s the plague.’

  ***

  XXV

  Proteus Four Mining Station,

  Neptune

  ‘You’re off, Bones.’

  Fletcher Reece lumbered into the operational control room of the mining station five minutes early for his shift, his big shoulders rolling as he leaned on a control panel and surveyed a series of displays monitoring the status of the entire orbiting station.

  His colleague, Victor “Bones” Collier, a wiry man somewhat older with drawn features that gave him a vaguely skeletal look, dragged himself out of his seat and gestured to the panels.

  ‘Nothing much to report,’ he informed Fletcher. ‘Bots five and seven are in atmospheric orbit and seventy per cent full. Six and eight are ready to take their place during the switch-over, which will happen within an hour. All systems are reporting stable.’

  Fletcher nodded, familiarizing himself with the current status and fuel loads of the mining craft that even now were deep inside Neptune’s violent atmosphere collecting vast quantities of hydrogen and methane that would be sold back on earth in a few months’ time. Neptune’s immense, baleful blue orb was visible outside through the viewing panels, the planet seventeen times more massive than Earth.

  Bones strolled past him with a slightly bow-legged gait typical of the long-duration Neptune miner, the extra gravity a burden that they all shared out here on this lonely outpost. With Bones weary after a long monitoring shift and with little to discuss but for the hourly operational report and hand-over, he wandered off to get some much needed sleep as Fletcher sat down at the control panel and did his best to make himself comfortable.

  The Proteus station had been built two hundred years before Fletcher had been born, constructed in a much wider orbit around Neptune that afforded it permanent exposure to the distant sun’s solar glare and thus the power from solar panels. Back then, space travel was still a seriously hazardous venture and there were none of the modern technologies available like mass drives and other stuff that Fletcher didn’t really understand but sorely missed right now.

  Essentially two massive tubes locked together in geostationary orbit around Neptune’s tremendous equator, Proteus Station contained a living quarters and control center mounted at one end of the starboard tube. Virtually the entire rest of the station was given ove
r to massive storage tanks and compressors designed to take gases from Neptune’s atmosphere and crush them into liquid form. Those tanks were then routinely collected every four months by cargo ships from Earth and other far-flung corners of the solar system and at the same time the monitoring crews were changed. Four months on, two months off, the standard work routine.

  Fletcher rested his boots up on the control panel as he leaned back in his seat and attempted to spread his weight a little. Because of the relatively limited technology available when Proteus had been built there had been no means to reduce the gravity experienced by the crews as they worked. Thus, the planet’s mass exerted a force of gravity far in excess of that of Earth, and even at its orbital height gravity was close to twice that of Fletcher’s home planet. Fletcher dealt with this via a careful diet, routine cardiovascular exercise while at home on Earth and considerable weight-lifting to build up his muscles between deployments. Miners like Bones, on the other hand, seemed to prefer maintaining a body weight so low that the prolonged rotations on Proteus produced minimal short-term discomfort. The bow-legged gait told of the damage to his knees over the decades, however.

  Fletcher switched one of the holopanels to an image of his wife and two daughters, all of whom were waiting for him back home in New Chicago. Three more weeks and his current rotation would come to an end once more. Because of the unsociable nature of the job and the prolonged isolation far from home the money was good, and it afforded the Reece family a high-level apartment on the more affluent east side of Chicago’s bustling urban sprawl with good views of the planet below and very little of the incessant rain that plagued his childhood home on the north side. Fletcher just wished that Orbital Mining Industries, the operators of his platform, would invest in more modern stations with better support for…

  Fletcher’s reverie was broken by an incessant beeping from the station’s proximity warning system. He frowned, leaned forward again and switched one of the glowing translucent displays across to a wide-scan of the surrounding planet. To his knowledge there wasn’t another vessel within fifty solar diameters of Neptune other than the automated mining craft sweeping through the atmosphere far below, and wouldn’t be for several days.

  To his amazement a contact blinked on the fringes of the sensor’s range. Data spilled down his screen as the computers talked to the systems aboard the rogue craft and revealed its type, velocity, range and other pertinent information.

  ‘What the…?’

  Fletcher re-read the data stream. The craft was a colonial transporter, one of many that departed the Solar System every few months or so. Colossal in size, they typically became home to a thousand individuals bound for new worlds countless light years away. Drawn perhaps by adventure, hope, dreams or the need to escape, the passengers all knew that they would be required as part of the charter of colonial endeavour to remain on or in orbit around their new home for at least five years: that was the price of the pioneer spirit in the modern age. The cost to CSS of building the huge ships was met later by the commission paid by prospectors and colonialists via whatever riches they found on dangerous new worlds far out in the cosmos.

  But this vessel’s moniker was a name that Fletcher knew well: Icarus.

  Icarus had departed Earth some twenty years previously for Epsilon Indi, some twelve light years from Earth, and had never been heard from since. Presumed lost in some catastrophic disaster, perhaps swallowed by the destination star due to navigational error, the ship was something of a mystery, an unsolved legend beloved of conspiracy theorists and other fringe lunatics.

  Fletcher switched to Proteus’s antiquated optical sensors and zoomed in on the distant craft. Even the briefest glimpse of the data stream told him that she had recently emerged from super luminal cruise, a faint trace of gravitational waves from the immense velocity still detectable spreading out from her position like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond.

  Fletcher keyed a button on his console. ‘Bones, get up here right now.’

  A moment passed before an irritated voice replied. ‘You kiddin’ me? This ain’t the time for no prank Fletcher, I…’

  ‘Get up here now!’ Fletcher almost shouted. ‘We’ve got company!’

  No reply came from Bones but Fletcher knew he would already be hurrying back up to the control room. Bones was a moody, morose and unsociable man but he was reliable as hell and knew that Fletcher wouldn’t pull him out of R&R without a damned good reason.

  Bones was back on the deck two minutes later and stared at the optical image with the same expression he wore all the time: one of grumpy disinterest.

  ‘You called me up here to look at that piece of junk?’

  ‘It’s Icarus,’ Fletcher replied.

  ‘I know what it is,’ Bones said. ‘It’s been missing for years, probably never got out of the solar system. You got any life signals?’

  ‘Data says it just jumped in here from super luminal,’ Fletcher informed him. ‘No other data and no communications other than its identity code. I’ve signalled them twice but they’re not responding.’

  Bones frowned as he peered at the craft. Essentially a vast rotating cylinder, Icarus mimicked the effect of gravity in the same way that Earth’s orbiting cities did, using centrifugal motion and with the crew living on the inside of the slowly rotating hull wall. A central core stored the ship’s supplies in zero-gravity, making moving them easy for the crew, and a single nuclear core providing a quasi-sunshine filled interior. The ingenious use of dehumidification and atmospheric recycling also produced a sort of weather, much like the hated rain on Earth’s orbital cities, that gave the crews the impression of being at home on Earth rather than cooped up on a glorified tin can for months and years on end.

  ‘It’s coming this way,’ he said finally as he looked at the craft’s trajectory.

  Fletcher glanced at the data feed and the first hint of panic began to creep into his voice.

  ‘It’s locked onto our position,’ he said.

  ‘What the hell are they doing?’ Bones uttered. ‘They can’t dock with us!’

  Icarus was probably the same length as Proteus but at least four times as massive and the mining platform was not configured to link up easily with such a huge craft, not to mention the delicate manoeuvring required to allow a docking procedure that wouldn’t see the two huge stations collide and wreck each other before spiralling into a terminal descent in Neptune’s icy, storm-tossed atmosphere.

  Fletcher scanned the data feeds as true concern twisted his guts.

  ‘They’ll be here within a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘Docking protocol is engaged – if we don’t accept it the station will just keep on going and collide with us!’

  ‘Can we alter orbit, shake them off?’

  ‘Not quickly enough,’ Fletcher lamented. ‘Proteus doesn’t have enough thrust for rapid manoeuvring. We’d never get out of their way in time.’

  Bones ran one hand through his stiff gray hair, his thin features drawn even more taut than usual. Fletcher looked at the image of his family.

  ‘We should bug out if they come within a planetary diameter,’ he said finally.

  ‘Agreed,’ Bones said, to a sigh of relief from Fletcher. ‘I owe OMI my work, not my damned life.’

  Fletcher hauled himself out of his seat and hurried across to the communications position. Although the control center had stations for ten crew, only four now operated the entire platform due to the advanced automation now available and installed by OMI some years previously. The other two crew members were in the operations room monitoring the mining bots soaring through Neptune’s atmosphere. Fletcher keyed the communications link.

  ‘Niall, Joanne, abandon the run and get up here right away, we got ourselves a big problem.’

  The reply came back almost instantly. ‘You kidding? We got almost a full load here ready to come up!’

  ‘Put them in geo-orbit outside the atmosphere and get up here, we may have to abandon the sta
tion.’

  Once again the line went silent and Fletcher knew his colleagues would already be on the move. Like the ancient sailors of old marooned upon tiny islands amid Earth’s vast oceans, nobody wanted to be left behind on a distant outpost when everybody left. The one great horror of space travel was to be left drifting to slowly freeze to death in the bitter vacuum of space.

  ‘I got a signal!’ Bones said. ‘Incoming, emergency channel!’

  Fletcher reacted immediately, freeing up the channel and looking toward a holopanel near the work station. Upon it appeared the face of a man, and Fletcher recoiled in horror. A voice reached them from the bridge deck of Icarus, a horrendous scream of pain and fear that soared through the mining platform’s control room.

  Fletcher saw the man’s face literally dissolve before him on the screen as though it were melting, flesh falling away to reveal bones stained pink with blood, eyeballs tumbling from gaping black sockets and hair spilling from his scalp, and then the rest of the signal shut off into digital static as an alarm blared across the platform. Upon the holopanel where the man’s disfigured face had been moments before was now a single, terrifying image feared not just by miners on remote outposts but by every human being alive.

  An emergency broadcast flag, consisting of two black squares and two yellow.

  ‘Yellow jack,’ Bones identified the image stiffly. ‘She’s a plague ship.’

  ***

  XXVI

  New Washington

  Nathan sat in silence in the precinct office and waited for Foxx, Vasqeuz and Allen to join him. Or rather, to observe him.

  ‘It’s not so bad, you know,’ Doctor Schmidt said as they sat together in the translucent laboratory cube, the normally neon-blue borders now scarlet red, a clear warning sign. ‘It’s just a precaution.’

  Nathan raised an eyebrow. ‘They think that I’m infected.’

  ‘You’re not infected,’ Schmidt assured him as he worked nearby. ‘I ran your plates a dozen times both before and after we thawed you out. Your blood is clean of the plague, Nathan. You’re no more infected than I am, and I can’t get the plague.’