by Ralph Kern
Smith leaned back and looked at me. I got the impression he was trying to read what I knew just as hard as Cheng and I were trying to read him. That was good; it showed me I was in the right ballpark. “Look, Joshua, whatever you were doing there is gone. It’s currently in chunks floating around in space, presumably with all of your friends.”
That bit at least we knew was true. Nothing had lifted from that region other than the Gish Bar shuttle. It was either a one-man facility or everyone else who had been inside was dead. I decided to take a guess that it wasn’t just Smith stationed there; there were others, too, people that he gave a damn about. It paid off. For the first time, I saw the man give a pained look.
“I can’t tell you,” Smith said weakly.
“Are you afraid of someone? We can protect you.”
“This isn’t a VR. I’m not being fucking threatened.” Smith’s voice became resolute. At least he realized now he wasn’t in a movie. People had died over whatever he had been involved in.
Cheng cut in, casually waving a hand my direction. “My friend here is from the police.” Cheng pushed off the wall and glided over to the table directly across from Smith. His voice got deeper and softer. “I am not. I don’t care if you feel threatened by anyone else. But know this: we have some very deep, dark holes that I can put you in where you will never see the light of day again. And that, Mr. Smith, is not a threat; it is simply the certain consequence of noncooperation.” Cheng maneuvered smoothly around the table and did a fine impression of squatting down in zero-g, uncomfortably close to Smith. With his mouth near Smith’s ear, he said in a dark voice, “Now tell us, what were you doing there?”
Smith pulled back and turned to looked at him. If a man could be said to be staring daggers, it was him. “Fuck you.”
Cheng straightened up and let himself float. “Just so we’re clear,” Cheng said, his voice suddenly conversational, casual, almost pleasant. It sent a cool tingle down my spine. “That offer extends to every one of your family we can find. And I promise…I’ll find them all.”
That cool tingle turned to ice. I didn’t have a problem with sending Smith down a dark hole—but his whole family? That left my skin crawling. I didn’t know how he managed it, but Smith kept his granite face firm and unbreakable. He wasn’t going to crumble—I’d have bet on that...
And I would have lost.
Smith closed his eyes and the breath went out of him, deflating his defiance. “We found something,” he said, his voice faltering. “Something under the surface….”
CHAPTER 21
HIBERNIA
“Well…shit,” I said, feeling a little overwhelmed. We were back in the office. I was gently spinning around the dark room—a habit I had discovered that, while not as satisfying as pacing back and forth, scratched the same itch.
“Shit indeed,” Cheng replied.
Smith’s story sounded like something from a VR. It was a long, rambling tale of a Red Star seismic survey having detected strange readings from under the surface of Io near Eston Mons. When someone had taken a look, they found an artifact there. Smith claimed to be on the periphery at the Eston Mons facility, little more than a lab tech. Everything was compartmentalized to hell. Whatever this artifact was or did, he didn’t have a clue. He just knew it was there.
“You think Drayton knows?” Cheng asked.
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. Sonia Drayton was the team’s Red Star rep, and everything was compartmentalized at the base, but… “It’s a fair assumption. I guess Red Star could have sent her up cold so it looks like she’s a legitimate part of the investigation. Plausible deniability and all that jazz. But we have to assume she’s playing us.”
“Agreed.” Cheng rubbed his eyes before glancing at me. I couldn’t help but view Cheng in a different way. He was back to his “casual” self, yet I had just had a stark impression of how rough he could play when called upon to do so. “Have you sent the investigation log over to her yet?”
I shook my head and gave a silent thanks that I hadn’t. The Red Star representative didn’t know what we knew at the moment. We cached what we were doing and sent files over every few hours. In our enthusiasm to question Smith, I hadn’t sent it since before questioning Prince. It was bad standard procedure, but it wound up working in our favor after what we had discovered.
“We need to keep it from her,” Cheng said.
I nodded. “Fingers crossed she hasn’t figured out what we know from our request for those Io sat-tracks. I’ll update the log that we’ve spent the last few hours debriefing the interviews we’ve done. She’ll hopefully think we’ve been slacking off, but at least she won’t know what we’ve found.” I turned another circle, hesitating to speak my next question, but it needed to be done. “Cheng, I have to ask, do you know anything about this?”
“No, but to be expected. Any one of the Big Five’s security budgets is probably higher than the EU and ours combined,” Cheng said.
That, at least, was true. The Big Five corporates had vast resources to bring to bear, including more employees than some nations had population.
My link began to ping, and I saw Vance’s ID show on my HUD. I glanced at Cheng, who gave a nod; it was coming over to him at the same time. “You taking it?” he asked.
I nodded. “Vance, how are you?”
“We have something,” Vance said without preamble. Cheng and I looked at each other.
“That’s good. I presume it’s significant stuff?”
“Could be. I’m not going to say over link, but I’m going to ask Sihota to pick you up and bring you back. We may need Cheng’s skills. You got anything there?”
I looked at Cheng who gave a slight shake of his head. I was in agreement. “No, we’ve had a long chat this morning. We think the people here on Hibernia are a dead end. We’re happy to come back.”
Vance gave a pause. She would know the one thing we wouldn’t do is assume that no one knew anything. “Okay. I’ll see you back at Arcas City.”
“See you there. Hey, Vance? You uploaded your investigation logs yet?”
“Yes, of course.”
Damn her thoroughness, but I styled it out. “Good. We’ll have a look on the way over.”
***
“Who is that?” Sihota asked as the resigned-looking Smith buckled into one of the seats of the Icarus.
“He’s someone we need to talk to back at Concorde,” I said, shaking my head to forestall any other questions.
“Very well.” Sihota took our hint. “Prepare for departure.”
Before long, Sihota took the Icarus back out into space, burning hard for the distant moon of Calisto.
CHAPTER 22
CALISTO
If Arcas City looked good from outside, inside it was spectacular. It looked like an old Mediterranean town: white buildings with sills full of flowers and covered by flat roofs, blended tastefully into a modern city with the tall high-rise buildings hugging the side of the crater. The old-town neighborhoods were raised above the crater floor, clustered around the crater wall, encircling the agricultural fields and grassy parkland that stretched for kilometers. All this lay in stark contrast to the vista overhead. Through the dome over us, Jupiter loomed above as though it might crash down on us.
“Who is that?” Vance repeated Sihota’s question, pointing at Smith, who was with Cheng walking a few meters ahead.
I gave a slight shake of my head. There would be time enough to fill her in later. Right now, I was curious about how much she knew. “What’s been happening on Io, Vance?”
She looked at me blankly for a moment before facing forward, and we continued walking down the quaint cobbled street toward the building Frampton and she had been using. “I’m guessing your trip was a little more productive than you made out.”
“You could say that,” I said, my voice still low. “So you going to tell me what you know about this Io incident or not?” We’d found out one of our number was probably a mole. Time
to see if anyone else was.
“As far as I’m concerned, what happened to the damn moon is what we’re here to find out,” Vance said, a frown creasing her forehead. “But that’s not what you’re asking, is it?”
“No, Joan, it’s not. What I’m asking is, does the CIS know what had been going down on that moon?”
“Layton, I don’t have a damn clue.” Vance grabbed my arm, slowing us down. “Now stop playing games. What did you find?”
I quickly summed up Smith’s story of something under the surface to her. She stopped, watching Smith and Cheng moving ahead.
“An artifact? What kind of artifact?” she whispered.
“He either doesn’t know or isn’t telling us. It gets better. The Eston Mons base? It’s Red Star.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Drayton?” she hissed, grabbing my upper arm firmly. “She’s been playing us?”
I shrugged. “She could be legit or she could be a plant.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if she knew jack shit. If the corporates work anything like us, they could be giving her the mushroom treatment: keeping her in the dark and feeding her on shit. Their whole operation could be completely compartmentalized.” We resumed walking toward Vance’s building. “An artifact?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Yes, but whose? We have a log of every mission that’s ever gone there, which, before the research stations got set up, was not very many.”
“All he knows is that it was buried deep. The Eston Mons base was a long way underground, buried in a piece of relatively stable bedrock.”
We had reached the doorway of the large office building that Cheng and Smith had already gone through. Vance stopped. “I’ve been in this game for more years than I care to count,” she said thoughtfully, “and that means I’m not overly given to grand conspiracy theories.” Vance glanced around before dropping her voice even lower and leaning toward me. “But he’s talking about an alien artifact here, isn’t he?”
I took a deep breath. It was one thing to think it, quite another to say it. I didn’t want to sound like I was nuts. “He certainly seems to think so…if he’s not giving us a load of crap, that is.”
“What did he tell you about it?”
“Not much.” I shrugged again. “Just that it’s old, very old, and big. He doesn’t think it’s human, but no one has expressly said that to him. He was just a lab rat. He customized computer programs for the lab equipment. He never even saw what samples went in the equipment for analysis.”
“Clearly, we need to ask him a few more pointed questions.”
“You think?” I said a little more sarcastically than I intended. “This isn’t something Cheng or I expected when he started singing to us. Our interview plan didn’t exactly cover ancient alien artifacts.”
“You two did well to get as far as you did,” Vance smiled. “What gave you the link?”
“Some fellow was cooking up moonshine in a neighboring base. Smith went on booze runs and got caught in the base during the incident.”
“Glad to see their operational security didn’t extended to the crew getting shitfaced.” Vance shook her head in mock dismay. “Although, I’m saying that like our guys have never gone on booze cruises either. The stories I could tell you about Tijuana...”
The door slid open as we approached, and we walked into the modern interior of the local JAS station. Vance nodded to the young JAS officer staffing the front desk and then led me into the room that had been reserved for her and Frampton.
I saw Frampton at another desk with the thousand-yard stare of someone deeply engrossed in their implants.
“Hey, Dexter,” I called over to him. “Wake up.”
He gave a grunt, and his eyes snapped into focus. He squinted over at me. “Hello, Layton. Yeah, I’m good, thanks. Yourself?”
I gave a bemused glance at Vance, who simply shook her head in mock dismay. “I’m fine, Dexter.”
“People,” Cheng called as he entered the room. The others nodded in greeting at him. “I’ve lodged our guest in the custody suite. He should be safe there until we can put him through the ringer properly.”
“Good, Cheng, you’re here.” She sat down at an empty desk. “We better show you what we have.” She gestured at me and Cheng. A link request popped up in my periphery, and I accepted it. Around me, the room changed from a quaint but clean environment to one with images and charts plastered on every wall.
“While I was interviewing subjects from Magellan, I asked Dexter to run checks on everyone. Deep background, identity checks, biometrics—everything he could think of.”
“And something came up?” I said, already knowing the answer. Vance had asked us back for a reason.
“Yes. Obviously, security is fairly tight to even get on an elevator, but it is not exhaustive. It has gaps, and beyond a set of warning parameters, the security AIs are generally not too inquisitive.” Vance gestured at the screen and an image of a man appeared on it. The text on the bottom right identified the image as coming from the Port America space elevator. “Describe that man to me, Trent.”
“Okay,” I said, playing along with Vance’s game. “Male, obviously. Caucasian. Difficult to get a gauge on height from this angle, but let’s say around…six foot. Athletic build, short dark hair, sunglasses obscuring the eyes. Looks mid-to-late thirties, but then age has always been difficult.”
“And weight?” Vance asked.
“Difficult to gauge, but I’d say eighty kilos.”
“You really need to stop flicking between imperial and metric, Trent,” Vance said. “What would be your upper limit on him?”
“Yeah, well, different units for different things, Vance,” I said before answering her question. “But I don’t know. Not above eighty-five even if he’s nothing but muscle.”
Vance gave a grin and looked at Dexter, who took over. “Someone’s weight is pretty important on a spacecraft, obviously. They have to know it pretty accurately, which is why you put all your belongings onto a conveyer belt and go through that security scanner, which also, as it happens, is a set of scales.”
Frampton gestured at the screen again and a video image played. The man could be seen going to the security checkpoint. He placed his belongings into a little tray that went through a scanner and walked through the archway. At the moment he entered it, Frampton paused the clip and a data set of numbers appeared on the screen.
“Now this is the raw information from the security scanner. It shows fairly standard implants—HUD, a cortical stack, medical regulation, link—all the usual stuff. Now look at the weight.”
“Shit, he must really have been eating some pies,” I said. His weight came in at ninety-eight kilos.
“Quite,” Vance said. “That is Xander Frain. Two weeks ago he went for a medical checkup and his weight was seventy-seven kilos.”
I gave a low whistle. “That’s quite a gain.”
“Yes, it most certainly is. How much does Cheng weigh, do you think?”
I looked at Cheng, who responded with a bemused look. “Seventy or so?”
“A good guess. That’s what I would say, too, if I didn’t know what I know. And how much do you weigh?”
“Ninety,” Cheng said with a wry grin. Light had dawned for him.
“And why is that?” Vance asked.
“Because I have enhanced combat augmentations, subdermal armor plating, servo-assisted muscles and joints. I also have a set of electronic warfare packages and some weapon systems I’m not going to discuss,” Cheng said.
I contemplated that thought. I go to the gym a fair bit, and hoisting a twenty-kilo dumbbell was quite a chunk of weight. Cheng and Frain had the equivalent of one of them integrated into their bodies.
“So our friend here, Xander Frain,” I said, gesturing at the image of the dark-haired man on the screen, “is combat enhanced?”
“Frain isn’t, but whoever that is, is,” Frampton called from his desk.
; “You’ve lost me.”
“Frain is a contract AI consultant living in New York,” Vance said, taking over from Frampton. “He had bagged himself a six-month posting here at Arcas City working for Aerodyne. His story checks out. Based on this information, I requested our NYPD contacts search his apartment with a nano-level authorization.”
“Don’t keep us in suspense here,” I said.
“His bathtub was full of organic residue,” Vance said.
“So is mine,” I said. Not that I had any particularly gross habits, I just assumed my DNA filled the damn thing.
“Yes, but not that shows someone put you in the bath, filled it with water, and introduced nano-disassemblers that, once they’d done their job, shut themselves down. Someone quite literally pulled the plug on Frain,” Vance said.
I gave a slight look of distaste. That sounded pretty gruesome. They had liquidated the poor guy.
“That technology, as highly illegal as it is, is not completely unknown in wet work to dispose of bodies,” Vance finished.
“Nice.” I’d heard rumors of such technology but never heard of it actually being used. It suggested an advanced capability. “Besides his weight, didn’t the elevator security checks pick up anything?”
“They wouldn’t necessarily with me,” Cheng said. “As it happens, I declared my enhancements—or most of them, anyway—to customs. I can operate in stealth mode, though. It would defeat most standard scans. If he had a similar capability, he could breeze past. Quite literally, the only thing that would give him away would be his weight. That’s impossible to mask.”