by Jim Graham
The controller reflected on the first day of his existence. He remembered the terror of his confinement and the isolation that followed.
‘Of course it is,’ he replied. ‘Brigat deserves to die for the misery he has caused me. If the Revelationists or old age do not get him, then somehow I will.’
The AI did not like where the controller was going with his thoughts. It tried to distract him.
‘For now, though, perhaps the deep sleep will help you pass the time,’ it suggested.
The controller agreed. At least it wouldn’t hurt. I might as well be in a deep sleep, anyway. All I have at present is thought. I miss the sensation of movement, the pain of existence … things I have yet to do, to be, to feel.
He brooded for a while then issued a series of orders:
‘Slave, send out an SOS.’
The AI endorsed the order and the slave dispatched a subspace distress signal in the direction of the Harvester’s home galaxy. Even so, it would take an exceedingly long time to find its mark.
‘Done,’ the AI confirmed.
‘Thank you, AI. Begin the dimension-drive recalculations and dumb us down. Wake me if anything changes.’
‘Certainly.’
As the power drained away, the controller distracted himself, imagining ways in which his original-self could die. Then something gave him cause for hope. He caught sight of an outlier among the data, something the AI and slave routine would have ignored:
Humans!
Of course! They were in this part of this galaxy now.
The capricious nature of humans cheered him a little. He should factor this in; perhaps he should try to imagine a few less obvious scenarios that the AI could not.
As the final non-essential systems shut down, the controller drifted into a deep sleep, leaving the slave to secure their cargo and run the software rebuild under the watchful eye of the AI.
Seven Sol years?
Well, maybe not.
Part Two
Rock and a Hard Place
5
Prebos
2210
The corridor was dark: Rolf had vandalised the overhead lights and the security camera during the previous shift. The only rays of light came from the two emergency exit signs at each end of the corridor; both of them glowing a fiery red.
He looked up and down to make sure he was alone, and then placed the clone-key over an electronic lock. It clicked, and disengaged with a loud thud.
Standing motionless, he listened, allowing the sound to die away before opening the door. All he could hear was the hum of the overhead air-conditioning unit. He was alone, still.
Slowly, Rolf pushed the door back into a small room filled with metal racks, stacked from floor-to-ceiling with communication and sensor recording equipment. He stepped inside and pushed the door to, calling up the neuralnet for the room’s schematics. Scanning the air a foot from his face, he aligned the schematic with the reality surrounding him, focusing on an area to the left of the door, close to the floor at the back of the room. He was searching for the units that controlled the research department fire monitors, the accommodation security cameras, and the Deep Mines communication units. They lay together in the same space, and ought to be easy to replace—almost as easy as they should be to knock out.
He knelt and reached into a small bag slung around his waist, pulling out two plastic-wrapped puttylike substances, which in his guise as a late-shift sanitation engineer he had lifted from the R&D lab. He unpicked the wrapping of each and kneaded the two pieces into a single long string, then linked the three units, using the putty’s adhesive properties to fix it in place.
It began to feel warm. Good. The reaction had started. Nothing could stop it now, not even the fire-retardant gases that were certainly to flood the room once the surge began. He glanced at his graf. He had around a minute to get clear.
He stood in readiness to leave, happy his job was done. Once it blew he could go home again. Although he had not been on Prebos for long, he was already feeling claustrophobic. He had arrived with a group of out-of-system grunts six weeks ago but, thankfully, he would be out of here soon.
In the distance, a door swung back on its hinges then flapped back and forth, clipping its twin. Rolf spun around to look at the comms room door, listening to the sound of geckos sticking to lino and the swish of coverall legs rubbing against each other.
Shit!
He looked back at the putty, placing a hand over it to feel the heat building to critical.
Fark!
He then looked up at the fire-nozzles above his head.
Damn!
A shadow fell across the underside of the door, and then stopped. The door opened a fraction, slowly, cautiously.
‘Any one there?’ a man’s voice asked.
Rolf crouched down low, ready to spring into whoever entered the room.
The door swung open a little further.
Come on, bud, step inside!
A pencil light crossed the floor. The unexpected visitor craned his neck to peer further into the room. His large silhouette now filled the doorframe.
He was close enough.
Rolf launched at the man’s midsection, ramming hard. He heard a gasp as they bounced off the corridor’s far wall, but that was it. Rolf aimed an elbow at a fleshy face, instead catching it on the temple. The body went limp and slipped to the floor.
‘Are you sure he’s still alive? He looks decidedly dead to me,’ Station Supervisor Translow asked, standing just outside the communication room as two station medics pushed the body into the corridor on an airbed.
Dr Angelino pulled off his mask.
‘Yes, sir, he’s alive, but only just. It’s harder to say whether he was lucky or not. Aside from the surge, he’s been without oxygen for around five-six minutes. There might not be much to send back to his family.’
‘OK. Is it safe to enter?’
‘Yes. Gases are normal, though I can’t speak for the electrical equipment.’
‘We’ll handle that, thanks. We’ll speak later.’
Translow turned his attention back to the damaged room. He stepped inside, careful not to touch anything.
The room was a mess. On the left of the room, a section of racking had blown an inch or two back into the wall. Opposite, the front panelling of some equipment was buckled, the units surrounding them slightly scorched but still in one piece.
It was the result of a controlled explosion, he was sure of it. Low velocity, but focused; not high-grade explosives, possibly homemade. The smell was familiar, but he could not quite figure out from where. He would let the lads in R&D work that out.
For now, he had a badly injured and possibly brain dead ex-worker of Trevon origin and some damaged communications gear. On the face of it, it had been an unsuccessful attempt to disrupt the station. An incompetent attempt.
Which meant it was a job well done. And with a local on his way to the Medical centre, it had an additional and unexpected upside.
That will please Corporate.
6
Scat stood by the airlock, waiting on his supervisor, Gavin Pierce.
‘You ready?’ he asked.
‘In a sec,’ Pierce replied. He was struggling to establish an airtight seal between his helmet and suit. Scat could hear him over the suit’s comms, cursing the quartermaster for being such a tight-fisted son of a bookkeeping whore.
Overhead, the temporary shelter’s air filters continued to rattle as the two of them prepared to step out onto the vast and mostly empty Plains of Xenin. This was “Belt Walking” time; the time each Earth-day when teams like theirs checked on the “Pigs” which had been shovelling Prebos dirt non-stop for the past five years, interrupted only by breakdowns and programmed refits. After that, they would walk the mineral transfer belts under a weak and distant sun, over a flat landscape torn by hundreds of deep, crisscrossing Pig tracks that stretched to a silver-grey horizon.
To early-day spac
efarers, Prebos had been of little interest. It was a disappointing place, no more than a frigid, loose-crusted obstacle on the journey to Trevon. The total absence of water made Prebos unsuitable for permanent settlement, and yet it was rough-line surveyed, added to maps, given a name and earmarked for a more detailed study,
Now, 35 years after man’s first visit, Prebos had become a place of significance.
Earth’s desperate need for climate-repairing minerals had elevated Prebos from a little-used emergency refuelling station at the far reaches of Grecos’ gravitational influence to one of the most attractive mining sites in the human universe, and the jewel in the Lynthax Corporation’s crown. Nonetheless, Lynthax ran it on a shoestring, as with all their other operations—optimised for maximum bang for minimum buck.
Finally, Pierce’s helmet locked shut, and he appeared confident enough to give Scat a thick-gloved thumbs-up.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ he muttered.
They rotated through the airlock and stepped out onto the fines. Scat told their fully loaded husky to follow at the trail. It waited for them to take a few paces before falling in behind. First stop would be the shovel itself. The 130000-ton slab-sided, locally assembled Pig 3, named for its production number and the ancient practice of sniffing out truffles on Earth.
‘They showed up, then,’ Scat noted, as they stopped to watch engineers clambering over its sides. They had reported plenty of problems overnight, so perhaps it was not so surprising the engineers were already at work.
Below the engineers, a lone figure was walking slowly alongside; a shadowy shape in the dust cloud. Behind him a battered wide-tracked plains cruiser followed the repair team at a glacial pace.
Scat was in the mood to tease.
‘Saving pennies?’ he asked over the common frequency, of no one in particular and knowing the answer.
‘Belt duty again, eh, Scat?’ It was Marvin Cade, the station’s senior engineer. Scat recognised the voice, even over the throat mike. ‘Is Pierce with you?’
Scat nodded a big-helmet nod, resisting the temptation to let on he was on suicide watch. Admin was probably playing it cautious with Pierce. The real nut-jobs were doped-up and allocated office jobs. Anyway, Pierce was his immediate supervisor and Scat understood the long-term values of loyalty and discretion.
‘Yep, and I’ve just been getting the whole nine-yards on worker’s rights. How long’ll you be running alongside?’
Scat tried to imagine the athletic, grey haired and soon-to-be middle-aged man to whom he was talking. All he saw was a grey, fines-covered suit.
‘Not long. Almost done; came out when you two were tucked up in bed.’ Marvin paused as he brushed fines from the screen on his wrist-mounted graf; a company issued general reader and functions device. ‘Corporate wants to up the claw rate on the Amesont production: the three-month forward contract has gone ballistic. Trouble is this beggar needs an upgrade before it can be flogged’. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the Pig.
It was a risk worth taking.
Amesont was a universally rare mineral used to clean out heavy metals from old industrial plants and to leach pollutants from fresh water reservoirs, but Prebos was covered in the stuff. Even in a dull market, it was a hugely profitable product. Nevertheless, Pig 3 was the oldest of all the Pigs still in use and Scat was not sure it would take a second blade.
‘Jeeze, Marvin, it’s breaking its back right now. Sure she’s OK for it?’
‘Not at all, Scat, not sure at all. I argued the toss for the whole of the first watch, but Corporate read me my contract. So, here I am.’
Scat looked up the sides of the slowly moving mining machine and found what it was he needed to see just as his comms channel lost its link for a second. It was an old suit. It always did that when he held his head back.
‘—long to go now though. I’m rotating back to Trevon in a couple of weeks,’ Marvin continued as the link returned.
Scat could see Pierce was already in the communications cabin and knew he ought not to hang back for too long. Still, Marvin had some news and no one on Prebos ignored the news.
‘What was that, boss? You’re rotating?’
‘Yep. Gonna see my April at long last. Then I’m gonna rut like a ferret in springtime. We’re long overdue kids of our own’
‘Jeeze! It’s been two years for you already, eh?’
Scat did not work directly for Marvin; he was not Scat’s department boss so he did not interact with him much, though he knew him enough to like the guy. Marvin was very informal, quite affable. The sort you could go to if you wanted a balanced opinion, or needed guidance.
‘The calendar doesn’t lie, Scat,’ Marvin replied.
‘Bonus?’
‘You can be sure of it. A big ’un! I'll be sinking a basement into that rock on Trevon deep enough to house the next six generations of Cades.’
Outdoor living was still a little risky on Trevon. Although certified as terraformed, its icy weather systems were still a little unpredictable. Yet it was better than Earth. At least the ecosystem was on the up. Scat had enjoyed the four days on Trevon where Lynthax had processed him for his flight to Prebos.
‘Still testing potent, then?’ Scat asked.
‘Not sure. The medical’s not until the last week. Better be …’
‘Webb went home sterile.’
‘Rumour was he was sterile on arrival, Scat. Don’t stir me up. I’m going home, and I’m happy.’
‘Just saying is all,’ Scat replied. ‘You’ve taken a few rads in your time here. Bound to have an effect on something: if not your balls then maybe ...’ Scat knocked his helmet twice.
Marvin pretended to scold him.
‘Be silent, young man! Go hold Pierce’s hand. And don’t be late for the relocation briefing’.
They both grinned, but all they could see of each other were their bronze visors, gleaming in the starlight.
Scat climbed up the Pig’s factory ramp, withdrew it, and entered the communications cabin on the main floor.
As usual, Pierce had not applied pressure to the cabin; the noise would have been unbearable and it would have meant wasting time in the airlock. He was already upstairs, pulling CPUs from the port sidewall for their weekly check. Leaving the husky at rest on the main floor, Scat climbed the metalled steps to the mezzanine, shuffled past him and lent a hand.
To Scat they were running normally; the fibre optic cables and circuit boards were free of the fines that otherwise hung in thick clouds throughout the factory; the original cabinet seals were holding up well and the constant vibrations had not shaken anything loose.
Pierce thought so too. He was already closing the cabinet drawers. With a flick of his glove, he invited Scat to complete the job.
‘I’ll check the comms console,’ Pierce added, pointing to the units arrayed along the forward wall.
Scat watched him walk down the aisle as he thought about his next move. On a normal day it took Pierce perhaps five or 10 minutes to run through the comms checklist giving Scat just enough time to check some of the high-wearing mechanical components in the factory itself. Not today, though. He would take the suicide watch seriously, until at least he had a chance to query the assignment with Patch in the Medical Centre. Right now he would hover.
Scat was of the opinion that Administration had surely gotten it wrong; Pierce was behaving normally. It was common for Pierce to stay silent for long periods, and, when he was working, to say nothing at all for a whole shift. The job was a monotonous one, and they had worked together for weeks now. Scat just could not see anything to suggest Pierce was going “lah-lah”.
But Scat was no shrink, and he genuinely didn’t know what to watch out for. So he just needed to stay close. To be ready. For something. Anything.
After half an hour of opening and closing cabinets, Scat grew bored. He willed Pierce to finish up so they could get out of the Pig and onto the belts. Scat much preferred the sweats to the cons
tant vibration.
After what seemed an overly long time, he shuffled along the gantry and looked around Pierce’s shoulder at the comms screen. Pierce twitched as if Scat had come from nowhere.
‘I thought you were down stairs,’ Pierce said, fumbling to switch off the display while completing a personal note on his graf.
‘Got bored,’ Scat explained. ‘You finished?’
Pierce shook his head.
‘Give me a few more minutes. The data download’s a little slow. I think the AI’s feeding back on itself.’ He turned away, signalling an end to the interruption. The screen flickered blue again.
Scat knew better than to be put out by Pierce’s abruptness, but still, it rankled. He dropped gently down the stairs and tried to slump into a command chair, but, as it was a hangover from the days when people operated the Pig in their shirtsleeves, it was not designed to take the width of an outer-suit. Instead, he perched on its end and, like the husky, he waited.
‘OK! We’re done,’ Pierce announced more cheerfully as he slipped passed him on his way to the ramp. ‘Let’s walk the belts. Things to do. No time to dawdle.’
7
Pierce rushed the walk back to the station, pronouncing everything fit for purpose, and then, when they reached the breakout room in the station’s cargo bay area, he disappeared, leaving Scat to write up the belt walk report on his lonesome.
Scat did not mind. In fact, he was relieved. He would rather write up the report than continue to babysit his boss. And now they were back, Pierce was the station’s problem—they were probably knocking on his bunk door already.
By the time Scat arrived for the briefing, the normally dry briefing room air was humid, the place heaving with 400 miners in various states of undress. Some had just woken up; a few were ready to hit the hay. Others, just like him, were ready to start the second half of their 12-hour shift: in Scat’s case, in the Mineral Department’s R&D lab.
He lingered at the back hoping to catch Patch but instead caught sight of Pierce, still dressed in his sweat-stained inner-suit, his hair matted with sweat. He was sitting among half a dozen semi-familiar faces, mostly long-serving Trevon permanent residents, who were taking turns at reading the contents of his graf. None of them looked happy. One or two looked around the low-ceilinged room as though astonished by what they had read.