Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7)

by Niall Teasdale

  Fox grinned and set off toward the lobby. ‘Darn tootin’.’

  ~~~

  There were a couple of levels of habitation on Prokhorov Station. The Jin Shu preferred the higher one, closer to the spine where there was a little less gravity. Not all of them had full-time housing there and many of them shared rooms between several crews who did their best to avoid being on the station at the same time, but they had their own distinct area of the station’s housing known as the Rat House which was generally avoided by other residents.

  Tam and his small unit ran patrols through the area on a regular basis, just to make sure things were going as they should, but it was rare that there was any real trouble. An occasional fight was broken up. Very rarely, there was a theft: the Jin Shu had a big thing about personal property.

  Many of them, they were a fairly male group, had a thing for a pretty girl. There were whistles and shouts. A few of the men wanted to know what Fox was doing hanging around with a couple of Lensmen. She was not quite dressed like a Jin Shu girl, but she certainly was not dressed like a cop of any colour. If she had to, she could leave her guardians back and talk to people as one civilian chatting to another, but she did not know Jin Shu culture well enough to play one and so had no intention to try. On the other hand, they were mostly men, and men often opened up more to a display of cleavage.

  First stop, however, was the home of William and Martha Tam, Michael’s parents. It was a standard, two-person housing module behind a metal door, hidden away amid the warren of the Rat House. Someone had painted a Chinese character on the door in black which, Fox figured, would be read as ‘Tam.’ The corridor was clean, but the walls were covered in paintings. It was likely the station’s authorities viewed it as graffiti, but the locals thought of it as murals. Fox tended to the latter view, and it was noticeable that the paint did not look new and it was still there, so the authorities did not care or were letting the metal rats have their way.

  The door opened about two seconds after Michael pressed the button beside it to reveal a woman who was, presumably, Martha Tam. She had the compact, almost stocky, build of a spacer, but her figure was still good. Maybe ‘voluptuous’ was the right word, and the leather vest and skirt combo she was wearing did little to hide what was underneath. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, which indicated more than anything that she did not go out in a ship very often where she had to don a helmet. Green eyes sat in a clearly Caucasian face, likely European: pretty, but with quite a strong Roman nose and a solid jawline. But she opened up with a stream of rapid-fire Chinese as soon as she saw her son, and then stalled when she spotted Fox and Jason.

  ‘Māma,’ Michael said, ‘this is Captain Deveraux, not my immediate superior but a high-ranking officer in the UNTPP, and Miss Tara Meridian. They would like to speak to bàba.’ He was being very formal, and he looked a little embarrassed. Possibly he thought one of them might have understood whatever his mother had said.

  Martha switched to English without skipping a beat. ‘You should have called ahead, Michael. I’d have tidied up a little. There’s no trouble, is there? George has not gone and got drunk again, has he?’ Fox could not quite place the accent, but it had a Latin edge: French or Italian lost in the mists of time. There was not much of France or Italy left worth living in, so it was unsurprising to find someone of that heritage in space.

  ‘I assure you, Mrs Tam,’ Jason said, ‘that I would not be here for such an event. We have need of your husband’s wisdom, nothing more.’

  On a sharp bark, Martha looked over her shoulder. ‘You here that, old man? This charmer thinks you’ve got wisdom to share.’ She looked back. ‘French accent? Canadian?’

  ‘Canadian. My father was French.’

  Martha nodded. ‘Italian mother here, but you’d better come in.’ She stepped aside to let them past, but her eyes skated more over Fox than Jason or her son. Fox ignored the appraisal and stepped through into the Tams’ home.

  It was… not much, but it was certainly a home. From a rough guess, Fox was looking at a lounge/kitchen with doors off at the back leading to a bedroom and a bathroom. The kitchen, such as it was, was off to the left and seemed to consist of a fridge, a small worktop, and some sort of combi-oven. There was a fairly large sofa in the lounge, large enough that someone could sleep on it if necessary, and a chair which was occupied by Michael’s father. There were various decorations on the wall, all of them real and all of them either Chinese landscapes or photographs which had probably been taken from a ship in space. The place was v-tagged, and William shut off a news channel from the only one they seemed to be using when the visitors walked in.

  William was a little shorter than his wife, maybe five foot four, and slim, but wiry. Like his wife, he had slim legs: they had both probably spent more time developing their arms and shoulders. He looked a lot like his son, but without the slight drift that his wife had added into the mix and with more grey in his hair. Fox figured he had to be first-generation Jin Shu, one of the earliest to run off into space from China in the hopes of making their fortune. The life had aged him: you didn’t spend long hours working in a dangerous, uncomfortable environment without paying for it and the Jin Shu rarely had the cash to pay for antiaging treatments.

  ‘Sit down, won’t you?’ Martha said. ‘I’ll get a chair from–’

  ‘Please, Mrs Tam,’ Fox said, ‘sit with your son. I’ll stand.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘It’s less than half a gravity here and my legs don’t get tired. Ever.’

  ‘Oh,’ William said, looking up at the tall woman in the unsubtle outfit. ‘So, you are that Tara Meridian.’ His accent was Chinese. Hong Kong, Fox thought. It was also submerged by a lot of time, but less so than his wife’s.

  ‘Call me Fox,’ Fox replied with a smile. ‘I kind of dragged your son over here. I’m trying to find out more about the ghost ships.’

  William waved a hand dismissively. ‘Stupid spacer superstition.’

  ‘Like space whales.’

  ‘Just like space whales.’

  ‘Except that ships keep falling out of the sky and more than a few are Jin Shu. I was in Luna City this morning, looking at what’s left of one, streaked down the side of Shackleton Crater like someone had squashed a bug down a window. That’s no way for men to die. There’s something out there. Something is either causing crews to go crazy or it’s sabotaging ships, and they’ve got evidence from two of the crashes that suggests the crews were working to avoid the collision. The crew that hit the Moon were alive and trying to stay that way.’

  William frowned, but Martha spoke from her seat on the sofa beside her son. ‘Back in the spring, when the rumours started up, there were some ships that went missing. Crews that went out and never came back. No sign of wreckage that anyone found. No explosions detected by the station or anyone else. Salvage ships can run into trouble. Everyone knows the risk. Usually, the dead are found and brought back, but these ships… They vanished. Just vanished. Best bet was they’re still heading out into the black. Rumours say they met a ghost ship and paid for it.’ She looked across at her husband. ‘One or two might be down to the crew going off the edge, but this was more than that, William.’

  Her husband gave a grunt. ‘Yes. True enough. This time, all the “sightings” come third-hand, or in these messages from dead crews. No one I know has seen one. No one even knows someone who’s seen one.’ His frown deepened. ‘I’ve seen some weird things on radar when we’ve scanned some junk. A blip that’s there on one pass and gone the next.’

  ‘Might happen with stealth tech on a hull,’ Fox said.

  ‘Nothing much ever shows up on visual. Not when we’re in full sun and so was the spot where the blip was.’

  ‘Adaptive camouflage. I have a combat suit that would let me walk right up to you and bop you on the nose, if I was careful. It’s not so complex to make a ship hard to see in space. It’s the infrared that’s hard to hide.’

  William nodded.
His frown did not lessen. ‘Heard about some weird thermal indicators on passives. People spotting something hot for a second or two, sometimes longer, and then it vanishes and they can’t pick it up on visuals or radar. Now, could be a fusion reactor powered up for a short time, but a drive wouldn’t cool off that fast.’

  ‘Fusion reactor powering an ion drive. Lousy acceleration, but they don’t run hot. Lowers the thermal signature and they run for ages.’

  The old scavenger’s frown shifted toward a slight grin. ‘You’re taking all the mystery out of an old myth, girl.’

  ‘Because I don’t think it’s a myth, Mister Tam. I think, this time anyway, the ships are real and someone’s using them to cause trouble. They’re causing trouble for big companies like the one I work for. They’re making stock prices go down and making people reconsider their holidays at the Tranquillity Spa. But the real trouble, the real problem, is that they’re killing people. I’m not even sure what the death toll is so far, but it’s in the hundreds. I mean to stop them. So does the UNTPP.’

  ‘But we need to locate them,’ Jason said. ‘They have to be coming from somewhere. They have to have a base of operation. If we can find that, we can put an end to this.’

  There was a moment of silence and then, ‘Talk to Garth Swimmer.’

  Michael groaned. ‘Swimmer? Really, bàba?’

  ‘He was spouting off about some sensor readings he took. He was out after an old geosync, high orbit. He’s young and foolish, but he said he spotted something hot, plotted it for a couple of minutes before it went off. Said it was heading out. Maybe he’s still got the sensor data.’

  ‘Where do we find him?’ Fox asked.

  Michael gave a contemptuous grunt and got to his feet. ‘This time of night, we’ll go trawl the bars ’til we find him.’

  ~~~

  There were not that many bars on Prokhorov Station. It was a big place, but a lot of it was communications equipment, hangar facilities, fabrication systems… Maximum occupancy was a little over twelve hundred people. They got transients adding to that: passengers taking a stop on the way between Earth and Moon, scavengers who stopped off for a meal, maybe some sex, and a lot of drink before getting right back on their ships and heading out. So, there were bars, but not huge numbers of them, and some of those bars catered more to Jin Shu than others.

  Fox strutted into one of them, The Carbonite Rat, with the easy stride of someone who knew exactly what she wanted and where it could be found. She was taking it alone because, as Michael Tam had said, the occupants were unlikely to be pleased to see a couple of UNTPP officers walk in. Fox did not look like a UNTPP officer, though some might have detected cop, depending on how observant they were. Maybe on how much they had to hide too.

  It was the third place they had tried and Tam had admitted that it was probably one of the more likely establishments they would find Swimmer in, but he had hoped not to have to try the Rat. The place was a bit of a dive; Fox could tell that as soon as she walked in. It had probably never been refurbished where a lot of the commercial section of the station had businesses come and go, their facilities ripped out or replaced. Metal tables were bolted to the floor. Bench seats were likewise clamped down. That was probably bitter experience learned long ago. The bar was unclad metal with an array of optics behind it and a metal cage which probably ensured that the products remained mostly intact if a fight broke out. The Rat was one place where fights had to be broken up on a relatively regular basis.

  ‘Mister Swimmer is propping up the end of the bar,’ Kit said inside Fox’s head. ‘Your right.’ A helpful rectangle appeared in Fox’s sensorium to mark the position, just in case the direction was not enough, and Kit added in a few extra details in text.

  ‘I saw him,’ Fox replied silently, but she took in the data while she made her way to the bar. ‘Charmer, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Or should I say no. Exactly the opposite. Thirty-two counts of drunk and disorderly, four minor narcotics offences, seven cases of assault, and two accusations of sexual assault, though neither of those went as far as an arrest.’

  ‘Jin Shu wouldn’t press charges for that. If he’d gone further, yes. They draw lines a bit further up the scale than other cultures, but they still draw them.’ Fox settled against the bar and examined the optics. She was standing right behind Swimmer, who was busy recounting the story of how he had got this close to pulling in an intact GPS block II-A satellite that he could have sold to a collector for a total mint…

  The bartender started walking toward Fox and she spoke before he arrived. ‘I’ll take a beer. Whatever you’ve got on tap. And give me a shot of bourbon to take away the taste of the bullshit being served up on my right.’

  Beside her, the conversation went something like, ‘I’m tellin’ you, this thing was gleamin’ in the sunlight like a juicy, black– Whatdafuck’d you say, bitch?’

  Fox did not even look at Swimmer. ‘All the block twos, every variant, were decommissioned and scrapped two decades ago. Space Command wanted the space freed up because every bugger was putting up navigation systems and it was getting crowded. Block twos had gold shielding. They weren’t black. That story’s as much a pile of shit as you spotting a ghost ship.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Swimmer asked.

  ‘I never said you were a liar. I implied you were a liar…’

  ‘Is provoking the man really a productive use of your time?’ Kit asked.

  ‘That depends…’

  ‘If you wasn’t a lady… Anyway, I got proof I saw something! I got sensor logs!’

  Fox turned to him and smiled. ‘First of all, excellent, that’s just what I wanted to hear. Second, I am no lady, Mister Swimmer.’

  Swimmer had been drinking, probably a lot, and his impulse control was impaired, probably a lot. ‘Fuckin’ cop!’ He swung at her, and she let him. His knuckles slammed into her jaw hard enough, she thought, to put down a lot of men. ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ Swimmer shrieked. ‘I think I broke my fuckin’ hand!’

  ‘Your masturbatory technique is duly noted, Garth,’ Fox said, grabbing the front of his leather jacket. ‘I want that sensor data, I want the nav data that goes with it, and I want it now. Please and thank you.’

  ~~~

  Outside the bar, Jason and Michael Tam watched what was unfolding within on virtual screens hooked into the internal security cameras. Tam winced as Swimmer punched Fox in the face, though whether it was worry over Fox or pity for Swimmer was not entirely clear.

  ‘That’s some woman you’ve got there, Captain,’ Tam said as Fox began dragging Swimmer toward the door by his lapels.

  ‘Oh, Sergeant, if only you knew…’

  ~~~

  It was pushing midnight when Fox preceded Jason into his rooms, but she had a swing to her hips. ‘Not bad,’ she said as she walked, slipping her jacket from her shoulders. ‘We got the data and what there is of Swimmer’s story. Your guys will plot it out and attempt to work out a course…’ She tossed her jacket onto a chair and turned around. ‘Not a bad day’s work.’

  Jason smiled. ‘Not bad at all, mon chère.’ He was probably not talking about the work. Her full breasts were on full view through the mesh teddy, her nipples trying to press through in a manner suggesting that Fox was not entirely thinking of the work either. He was still not entirely used to the purple-metal barbell piercing in her navel, but he had to admit that playing with it had some interesting effects. ‘They will run the data tonight. When do you have to leave?’

  There was a hint of a plaintive edge to the question and Fox heard it echoed in her reply. ‘I’m booked on an eight a.m. shuttle, though I could delay if something comes up.’

  ‘Something is already coming up, but I do not think it is sufficient cause to stay on the station longer.’

  Fox smirked. ‘At least we don’t have to waste time on excessive foreplay.’

  He walked to her and snaked an arm around her waist to pull her to him. His other hand lifted to
stroke a thumb across a nipple as it pushed itself through the mesh of her teddy. Fox let out a tiny gasp as the sensation hit her. ‘Ah, mon chère, but I enjoy the excessive foreplay.’

  Their lips met, a brief brush which deepened rapidly as neither seemed ready to take it slow. With the first contact, the hunger had deepened; as the kiss deepened, the hunger turned to need. Fox hitched her skirt up around her hips and, with a bounce, wrapped her thighs around his hips. In half-gravity, he could lift her without too much trouble and, as her hands returned to running over the smooth plastic surface of his suit, he carried her through into the bedroom, dropped her on the edge of the bed, following her down, pushed up to grind himself against her, and she moaned, cried out, fell into the sudden explosion of pleasure.

  She had not been ready for the way his body had pushed hers into climax so easily. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had to have been thinking of this since she got on the shuttle in Luna City, winding herself up with the subconscious desire. When she became fully conscious again, she was fully aware of his mouth on her breast, teeth grazing her nipple. He had pulled her teddy down to get to the sensitive skin and, apparently, to the stud in her navel, because his touch was sending the weird, butterflies-in-her-stomach sensation coursing through her. The butterflies always seemed to have better places to be, fluttering down to stir other sensations in far more sensitive areas. When his fingers entered her and his mouth began to slide down over her stomach toward the heat building once more in her core, she knew she was not going to hold back the tide for long, and did not care. He would take her, drive her up, and up, and up, and over.

  As she fell over the edge once more, light burning behind her eyes as her mind dissolved into pleasure, Fox heard Jason’s voice, though she was not entirely sure it was really sounding in her ears. It felt as though it was in her mind, or pulsing up from her core.

  ‘Je t’aime… Je t’aime…’

  17th August.

  Fox did not open her eyes immediately. She lay in the silence, the dark, and the warm feeling of having Jason’s arms wrapped around her waist. Then she pulled up information displays and checked her charge level and the status of her backup. The latter was a local update tonight since she did not have external storage to use, but it had completed and was good. Her batteries were another matter, but she would move shortly and plug in for an hour before Jason got up.