by M. ORENDA
To ensure that this woman doesn’t leave.
That’s it, isn’t it?
Because Dr. Williams, and the other idiots here, are busy playing God.
And because they know that something might go wrong.
Niri glances at him again, and this time he’s the first to look away, struggling to keep his expression neutral because it’s got him by the throat. What are we doing? Protect her… how? Make sure it’s voluntary… why? What difference does it make that Niri thinks she wants to do this? She can’t really know, with what they’ve told her.
And Voss maybe doesn’t see the full intent of a facility like this, because it’s hidden in medical protocols that Assaulters don’t deal with, but it’s obvious they’ve put a lot of thought into containment. They don’t seem to be half as concerned with who might get in, as what might get out.
So what are the odds that Niri can get to whatever’s buried at the heart of this place, and then simply decide to have none of it? BIOSTAT wasn’t built for personal freedoms, for citizens and their rights. It was built to deal with biohazards. It was built to be a prison.
The elevator slows, sinking the last few inches to settle at the bottom of the shaft. The doors open to a white corridor, its security gate left open and waiting for them. Beyond it, he can see a clear-walled monitoring station, its control deck filled with the glow of holos and vid screens, a few skinnies in chairs, and a few tall, frail looking guards wearing black, standing in the open without helmets, weapons held loosely… ready but bored.
Very, very capable? Dr. Williams… idiot.
They get waved through. No one expects trouble.
Then a skinny comes out, puffing himself up as best he can, holding up his hand as if he’d always dreamed of doing it. “No weapons beyond this point. Lockers are over there.”
More lockers?
Logan glances through the glass of the monitoring station and catches the sight of a dozen eyes set on him from behind the consoles. Not aggressive, not edge-of-their-seat, but smooth faced and curious, enjoying the spark of excitement in an otherwise loathsome shift.
Logan glares down at Dr. Williams and finds her unapologetic, offering only a careless shrug, savoring the opportunity to be dismissive… again. “You can’t take your gun any further.”
“It’s a sidearm, a pistol. They forced me to leave everything else, including my medical ruck, in the hangar.”
“Regulations. We can’t have foreign equipment or guns, in BIOSTAT.”
“I’m supposed to be Niri’s security.”
“You can still guard her,” the woman says. “Just without a gun, because they have guns here, lots of them, so you don’t need one down there.”
The logic is, of course, flawed. And he expected nothing less.
Still, it’s not negotiable. He can see that.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, curt.
“All the rest of it too,” the guard adds. “No big suits.”
Ohhh-kay. It takes some time to remove the rest of his suit, pieces of kit, stow his sidearm, and battle rattle in large lockers made from thin metal that would dent open immediately if kicked. After it’s all in storage, he’s wearing a thin black suit, and soft boot liners, feeling far too light.
They run him through the scanners again then the rear security doors behind the monitoring station unlock, and roll back. A new hallway appears, a new elevator shining under the harsh white lights at its far end.
The hall has hatches on both sides, and it’s clear that this is where the guards live. Their infrastructure is in plain view, obvious signs marking the chow hall, the armory, and the barracks… all of it compact.
The doctor and Niri walk ahead of him, a female predator and her younger prey, and he follows along, knowing that he’s expected to remain silent as they board the second elevator… Another kill box.
“Are you hungry?” Dr. Williams asks Niri.
“No.”
“You’re excited.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll take you to BIO227 as soon as you’re ready,” the woman smiles, suddenly a loving aunt. “We’ve been told to move the process ahead as quickly as possible. You’ll be amazed. It’s so beautiful. It’s beyond description.”
“I can hear it.”
“Yes…of course, your blood carries memories of this place.”
Niri looks back at him, a slip of black hair curving lightly over her cheek, her eyes seeking his, out of amazement, or for reassurance, he doesn’t know. “I can hear it. I hear it everywhere.”
He presses his lips together, all too aware of those nozzles on the wall, and the cameras glaring down at him, and thinking---knowing---that this is not going to end well.
DUST
BIOSTAT STATION
HANGAR LEVEL
MARS DATE: DAY 25, MONTH 12/24, YEAR 2225
The hangar’s comm deck is tight, a narrow corner littered with computers, clipboards, and coffee mugs. Gojo has dressed down to fit into some skinny’s chair, unloaded some of his kit, and is now grimacing into a holo screen, scrolling through menus with a quick skim of his gloved fingers. His helmet is off, like all the rest of them because the hangar is cold, and the air is thin, but human friendly.
He shakes his head, black hair pulled into a topknot, sweat glossing his forehead. “Petra’s locator unit couldn’t have powered down. There would be log entry for that, as well as for malfunction, or shut down. But it looks like the signal just phased out, meaning faded to nothing, with no sign of trouble.”
“Interference?” Voss asks.
“Yes, sir,” Gojo says without looking up. “Like jamming.”
Wyatt groans, shifts his weight. “Or the storm, or just rolling slowly into a poor signal area. That can phase out signal.”
“No.” Gojo pulls up different satellite windows, adjusting frames, and scrolling back through time with a slide control. “These are SAT images. They were tagged and encrypted, so extremely hard to access---and we don’t technically have the clearance---so it took a little improvisation. I found an image of her here, at the last point we can see before the storm moves in. She was in a track, coming out of New Beijing, but clearly on the open plain, a flat stretch of terrain that does not get monitored.”
Voss leans forward, catching the grainy thermal outline of a box moving over sand, riding a plume of dust. Where were you going?
“This is all we got before the satellite passed over, and the next image is no good because the dust kicked up.” Gojo pulls the image down and adjusts the coordinates, magnifying it until another blurry object appears. “But you can see here---right here---these are two ships, old delta-wing transports, pretty big, and clearly on an intercept course with Petra’s track. Hard to tell because Red Filter satellites, even the restricted ones, aren’t monitoring for older weapons, but the thermal images of the ships here, and here---and sticking out from under the fuselage there, and there---those look like rockets, and maybe guns. It’s hard to see, like I said, but it’s there.”
Rockets, guns…
Voss stares at it, at this infuriating blur, as if he’s going to catch some detail that Gojo didn’t, something that makes this all go away. But there’s nothing else there. He’s staring into the past, at what already happened, and he’s powerless.
“Get someone out there,” he says, his voice tight. “Have New Beijing dispatch a security team.”
“The storm, sir. No one’s going to fly right now.”
“Then have them send a search vehicle.”
“Visibility is nil.”
“Let me make this easier for you. I don’t care what you have to tell them. I don’t care who you have to threaten, or what you have to threaten them with. You get a team out there.”
Gojo holds his gaze, then nods, as if he understands the depth of it now, even if he didn’t before. “Yes, sir.”
“I want to know the minute we have anything, an image, anything.”
“Roger that.”
“And m
ake sure we have a way to talk to Logan. I want an open channel. I want to know what’s going on down there.”
“Sir.”
Voss backs out of the small space, needing to be out of it. He crosses back into the hangar, away from the others. Experience throws it in his face, images of her dead, dying, hurt, because he knows exactly what that looks like. For a moment, it takes his breath, and he crouches down on his ankles, hands between his knees, and bows his head, waiting for it to clear.
Not a comms malfunction, not simply the wrong moment…
It’s visceral. Someone attacked her, ruthlessly, violently, when he didn’t have eyes on her, when he was somewhere else, doing something else. And now he’s stuck here, knife twisting in his gut, blind and unable to help.
Where are you? Why didn’t you tell me you were heading out into the open? Why didn’t you call me when you knew they were coming?
Because they were jamming her signal.
It sparks anger, too hot, too close to rage. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry, brother,” Wyatt says, close enough, but still keeping a respectful distance. “She’s gotta be alive though.”
Voss considers it, focusing his gaze across the dark length of the hangar, as if he can see into the storm beyond the blast doors. “Maybe.”
“She’s worth more alive.”
“Unless it’s a message.”
“Wellll---” Wyatt rubs one hand over his shaved head, pressing his fingers against the back of his neck in thought. “Doesn’t take a big transport ship retrofitted with rockets to make a message out of one woman. For that, they could have snatched her anywhere. It’s not like she’s…”
“Yeah.”
“They knew to jam the locator we put on her, and then they intercepted her with three air transports, modified to accommodate weaponry---now pretty much heavy attack ships. That’s…”
Voss waits, but he knows what’s coming.
“There’s a bigger plan,” Wyatt finishes. “And the timing…”
“Niri.”
“Yeah, this bullshit.”
Voss lets out frustrated breath. “Indoctrination.”
“Indoctrination,” Wyatt repeats, as if it denotes a crime. “Whatever the hell that is. It’s what our mystery enemy is desperate to prevent, right? Those guys who keep attacking us? The guys who have already proven they would do anything to stop us? We laid low at Fort Liberty for a while, so maybe there was no opportunity, but now the moment is here, and it’s been rush rush rush since we got the green light. President Wexler wanted Niri here before the storm hit. The doc wanted her on the elevator the second we landed.”
“They knew something.”
“Of course, they did,” Wyatt insists. “Those encrypted SAT images? Someone tried to hide those, and I doubt it was Wexler. It’s the enemy, someone in his administration. Someone within their circle is helping the subversives, and they know that. They just don’t know who it is. They knew something was up, so they sent us out early, but they’re still being played from the inside. This is a trap, and Petra is their hostage. Only reason to take her like this is to get to you. Two hundred cred says they’re heading straight for us, and she’s going to come streaming in on vid any minute, roughed up, and begging us not to shoot them down because she’s on one of those gunships.”
Voss grimaces. Checkmate.
It makes sense, and it feels probable, a play like this… It’s the hit he wasn’t expecting, leaving him with only two options: compromise BIOSTAT in an attempt to get Petra back, or follow protocol and scatter those transports across red sand on their approach, killing everyone onboard.
He tries not to think of her inside the transport, and does anyway, whatever they’ve done to her, whatever they’re doing…
It’s not a hard decision though maybe it should’ve been.
He nods, draws a breath. “It’s not a suicide run. If they’re coming here, they can’t just talk their way into the hangar, detonate a bomb, kill us all, and stop the program. The facility itself is too far underground, under rock. They’d have to land here, and fight all the way down to get to Niri.”
“Via one elevator,” Wyatt adds, always in sync. “Then another, with a heavily armed monitoring station sitting in between.”
“We put BIOSTAT in lockdown…”
“And all the civilians will be secured in protected areas, behind armored doors, with independent life support.”
“Security guards will still be at risk.”
“Finally,” Wyatt scoffs. “Look at these lazy fucks.”
Voss smiles at that, for what it’s worth, and the sniper nods.
“Okay.” Voss rises from his crouch, considers the blast doors, the position of the aircraft in the bay. “Have the pilots move the skimmers. Park them close to the entrance, up against the wall to provide cover.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Gojo, and the station guards, will take position at the monitoring station below ground. Tell Gojo to leave the elevator car at the bottom of the shaft, and manually cut the power to it. No system control over the hangar elevator. I want it offline until we decide to repair it.”
“And up here? It’s just us?”
“And your recruits.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Wyatt drawls. “Because we need the only three idiots who can’t shoot for shit with us.”
“Put one on the SAW.”
Wyatt’s expression sobers. “Sir?”
“Put the SAW on the catwalk above the skimmers, protected by double rows of diamond steel plate. Have the gunner keep the enemy off the elevators while you and I extract Petra from the ship.”
Wyatt frowns at the catwalk above the hangar’s blast doors. “And the ROE? Just, basically, anything that’s not your girlfriend…”
“Kill it.”
Wyatt grins. “Who says we don’t negotiate?”
Voss doesn’t reply, and a moment passes, its meaning is understood, the memory of a dozen times when it was bad, and the potential for this to be worse.
“Red Filter,” Wyatt says it in sing-song, making a mockery of the words. “Ain’t no struggle, nor strife, just pure enlightened souls, desperate to kill each other. You think they’re going to charge us for the damage we’re about to do to their pretty hangar?”
Voss nods, aware that he will undoubtedly be charged, by Wexler’s lawyers, and maybe Rhys Corp’s too, because twenty-two years of service is not enough to cover this bill. Risking BIOSTAT, and all its secrets, for a non-citizen, a smuggler, no less… All those presidential claps on the back won’t be worth shit, as was always the case, and he’ll be Earthbound within two months, maybe even cut loose.
Wyatt’s smile disappears, suddenly realizing where the joke has gone. “Hey, fuck them! How many years we’ve been risking our asses to protect their shit Earthbound? How many people have we lost? How many of us actually get to retire, actually see any of what they’ve offered us, med care and shit? How much money do they save when one of us dies?”
Voss doesn’t reply, knowing there are no good answers for that.
Wyatt jabs his finger toward the elevator in disgust. “How many boot kids did I repeat their promises to? How many of them died believing it? Now we can’t risk anything of theirs to save a civilian we painted a target on, for their sakes, in order to protect this business? Fuck them, sir. Dealing with shitheads is our business. We do what we do.”
Voss hears this and understands it for what it is, a brother’s unwavering support, pure got-your-back, in the face of whatever odds. “First Sergeant.”
“Sir.” Wyatt nods, expression still tight. He walks past Voss, heading toward the parked aircraft to kick his three recruits awake. “Wake up, pukes! It’s your lucky day. We’re going to hang one of you from the motherfucking rafters with a light machine gun. Excited? I know I am!”
Voss returns his gaze to the blast doors, allowing an image of that transport fighting the storm to take hold, merge possibility into reality.
<
br /> A civilian we painted a target on?
No… a civilian I painted a target on.
Bring them up the canyon, Petra. I’m here. And I’m waiting.
OPEN AIRSPACE
OPHIR CHASMA REGION
MARS DATE: DAY 25, MONTH 12/24, YEAR 2,225
The transport tilts, all engines surging, like it’s off course and trying to correct with too sharp a turn. System alarms are going, a muffled beeping from the cockpit, maybe pitch, maybe navigation, maybe comms, or maybe load, because the weight seems unbalanced, and Earthbound pirates are probably better at choosing lethal cargo than they are at packing it.
Petra swallows, only it’s hard to, and what doesn’t hurt feels numb. Voices snap back and forth in the murk, anxious words, though she can’t quite hear them. And it wouldn’t matter now if she could.
The meds are doing what they do, keeping her awake, keeping the mind going, though it blurs. But they’re doing nothing for the chill, for the shakes that make her teeth chatter, or for the heaviness pressing down on her chest, making each breath harder than the last.
It’s impossible to keep the shadows at bay, and what comes is what comes, memories that stream out of order, all the details crystalline.
Some are so random, so meaningless that it’s a miracle they were remembered at all, the flick of a silk fan, the haze of a purple sky, tiny Ada, with straight cut bangs, a big smile and a soft little nose, a whisper of breath in her ear. I love you, mama.
Tears burn, forming that hot blur that goes nowhere, causing that catch in her chest, so tight she can’t breathe. She rasps, but no sound follows, only emptiness, raw and agonizing, a vessel with nothing left.
Ada gone for years now. Clara…
Got to get control over this, wild thing. No time for being what you’re not, which is dumb, or dead. Time to put your faith in something. Time to do what’s left to do, because we both know you got the strength. Got to warn Voss, or he’s going to die. Voss is going to die.
Voss.
Still alive, still unhurt…
And now it’s those memories that are the clearest, that cool gaze of his, and the hint of his smile when she’s saying things she didn’t mean to, drinking vodka with the stars taking up the view, and no roles, or ranks, between them… the power of two in whatever equation keeps worlds spinning in chaos, with nothing lasting but what gets saved in the heart.