by Isaac Stone
“I think we need to have a conversation about that,” the head told him. “Between you and me. Is there some way we can go to a private conference? Does your gunship have that ability?” The head appeared to be deep in thought.
Ash had to think for a few minutes. He was certain there was a way to do it. Just last month the ship put in for some minor repairs and upgrades. It wasn’t a big deal; there were some things that needed to be accomplished to the infrastructure of the ship. One of the things they’d discussed was a private virtual reality center for the crew on long trips. Even with the privacy areas on the ship, there were problems with the close quarters throughout the trip. Too much contact caused irritation and fatigue. It broke out on the crew. The last thing Team Omega needed was a fight between two members who had issues with each other. It was for this reason that Ash looked into the VR center.
The problem was, he couldn’t remember if he’d given the okay on its installation, as it certainly wasn’t something he would ever use. There was one member of the crew who should know. She knew about everything in regards to the finances on the gunship.
Ash found a place in the command center and came to rest. He grabbed hold of one handle and pulled himself into a cubbyhole built so he had a place to rest while in zero gravity. The Thelema was used as a customs inspection ship before he bought it for private security work. It still had some of the fittings left over from its former military life. He couldn’t get them to leave any of the heavy plasma weapons on board, but those weren’t very useful against small pirate ships or raiding parties anyway.
“Kris,” he asked her. “Did we ever have the VR chamber installed? I can’t seem to remember if we had it done the last time the ship was in the dock for repairs.” He rubbed one hand over his face and reminded himself he needed to get a shave just as soon as this was over.
“Yes, we did,” Kris told him as she looked up from the cracker. “We paid to have one installed right after you had the propulsion system relined. I thought it was a good idea since the last time we put in for a long trip things became a little testy.” She glanced over at Jack and didn’t say anything else.
She and Jack was an item for a while, but never took the arrangement to the next level. In the last year he’d been running the Omega Team as a joint stockholder operation. The last thing he needed was testosterone rage on the gunship.
“Okay then,” he told her. “How do I manage to get into the VR simulator?” Ash looked over the consoles for the right piece of new equipment.
“Piece of cake,” she told him. “Just stay in your cubby and I’ll bring you into it. Give me a few seconds to activate it through the cracker.” She turned and looked at the head. “Are you ready on your end?” The head nodded.
“Okay,” she announced, her hazel eyes looking down at the panel. “You should be going into your private conference right about….now!”
The world faded from Ash’s vision and he found himself in a large conference room. The table was long enough to seat at least twelve and made of polished wood. He reached down and felt it. The wood was smooth. This was very good VR. He’d received his money’s worth for the system. The corporate client should be pleased. Even the light overhead was soft and muted. Best of all, he could feel real gravity for the first time in months.
On the other side of the room, the door opened to the room to reveal a body. It was the one attached to the head, which so recently floated around the command center of gunship Thelema. He was a man in his forties with an exquisite suit tailored to specification. He walked into the room with a folder under one arm and sat next to Ash.
“Nice VR you have here, Ash,” the man said. He extended one hand. “Royce Grant, I don’t think we were ever formally introduced.” Ash shook the hand.
“I’m a little impressed too,” Ash told him. “Got my money’s worth with this thing.” He glanced around and noticed very real-looking sunlight that streamed in through a picture window.
“So what’s this all about?” he asked Royce. The other man smiled and handed him the folder.
Ash opened the folder and looked at a large black and white photograph of a man in his fifties. He wore an Old Earth style long coat. A hat was neatly balanced on his shaven head. The man smiled at the camera with a glee in one eye, as if he shared some deep secret with the viewer. He wasn’t too distinct, but appeared to be six feet in height. The eyes were intense. This was a man with some influence over people.
“Haddo,” Royce told him. “Simon Haddo. We’ll pay you a thousand gold planets to bring him back to us.” He waited to see the reaction in Ash’s face.
Ash looked back at him in astonishment. This was a hundred fold over any job they’d ever taken for ECA. As matter of fact, it was a thousand fold over any job for any other client. Whoever this man was, they wanted him pretty bad.
“What are the terms of the contract?” he asked him. “You don’t pay that kind of money to find a smuggler or cyber thief. This man has to have something you want no one else has.”
“He’s wanted for crimes against humanity,” Royce told him. “The bounty on this man is over the top.” He waited for another reaction from Ash.
“Still not good enough,” Ash responded. “Why don’t you have the government rangers take him out if he’s such a threat? What do you mean ‘crimes against humanity’? Just who is this guy and why have I never heard of him.” Ash leaned back in the chair, as it felt very real to him.
“You ever hear of the Ganymede Incident?” Royce asked him.
The words struck a chord. It was twenty years ago, but Ash heard plenty of people talk about what happened. Some researcher had built a huge facility on the Jovian moon Ganymede and advertised for people to help him run psychological experiments. He was a famous professor from a university on Earth, or so the story had run. Distinguished academics responded from all over the solar system and traveled to his research facility to help him in the work. Great things were expected out of his discoveries. Human behavior was still an unknown field with too many variables. This institute would solve every one of them.
Two years after the last researcher traveled to the moon, the final transmission was received from his facility. This was before there were any permanent settlements on the other moons of Jupiter and the place was difficult to reach. The lack of transmissions was assumed to be a minor problem. The governments near it assumed there would be regular communication in a few weeks.
But they never resumed. Six months later, a combined stellar ranger force was sent to Ganymede to investigate the research station. What they found was a place full of dead people. Most were mutilated in the most horrible ways imaginable. The records of what went on inside were wiped clean. There were rumors that the people who went to the station were forced to do unspeakable things to each other. There were no survivors to interview.
The man who built and hired people for this research institute was never found. It was assumed he’d gone out on the surface of the moon and perished. Twenty years passed. His body was never located.
“The man who ran the Ganymede facility was named Simon Haddo,” Royce told him. “Now you can maybe understand why we are willing to invest so much money in his capture. This man created a miniature hell inside that place. We believe he found a way off the moon before the rangers showed up.”
“And you are willing to pay all this money to see if we can bring him back?” Ash inquired. “Alive?”
“It’s the only way we’ll pay the bonus. You bring him back intact and breathing or you don’t get paid.”
“I don’t get it. There is no profit in this. Why don’t you turn over the information you have to the governments and let them deal with it?”
Royce hesitated and didn’t say anything. A silent communication went across both of them.
“Publicity,” Ash concluded. “You want to take credit for sponsoring the hunt to bring this bastard in, don’t you? The publicity from doing it will change a lot of attitudes,
won’t they?”
“It won’t hurt our image.”
“There has to be more than just bringing him to justice,” Ash continued. “You have some other motive for capturing this man. Let me guess, you want to know where he put all the data on those nightmare experiments he ran? I could see that being a juicy tidbit for corporate psych labs. Government ones too. Haddo was supposed to have run more forbidden experiments that were never discovered. Yeah I could see the value in getting your hands on them and pretending you never knew they existed. So long as you have the data, better make use of it!”
“You view us too cynically, Ash,” Royce told him. “Haddo was very active in other fields before he went to the facility on Ganymede. The rangers found all manner of occult lore books in his private study. It seems he was trying to duplicate methods no one had attempted in almost a thousand years. If he’s been on the run, he might have cooked up some new things since then. He had a brilliant mind when it came to pulling useful information out of old alchemical manuscripts. We’d like to see if he found any new sources of energy in those twenty years.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Oh we are. He might have been the only practicing necromancer in the known universe. We want to know what he found out before he’s turned over for trial. If he cooperates, we’ll get him the best lawyer money can buy. Doubt it will do him much good, he has quite the reputation after what the rangers found on that moon.”
Ash shifted in his chair. “I have to talk this one over with the rest of my crew. It’s the arrangement we have. I can’t make important decisions in advance unless they’re in on the process.”
“I’m surprised you can accomplish anything at all.”
“Oh, I can make all the command decisions I need to once were in a combat situation or out of the dock,” Ash explained. “They want to make sure there is some input into the decision process before we blast off for parts unknown.”
Royce rose from his chair and headed back to the open door. The air even smelled of fresh carpet. This was the best VR.
“Let me know what kind of verdict you reach,” he told Ash. “We’ve several other firms in mind if you don’t want the job. This offer has an expiration measured in minutes.”
“I understand,” Ash looked up at the ceiling. “Kris, get me out of here.”
The sunlight in the room faded and he felt the soft chair drop beneath his body. Ash blinked his eyes and he was back in the command center of gunship Thelema.
3
In his twenty-six standard years, Ash has seen quite a bit.
He was from a small town on Earth, but didn’t remember much about it. When Ash was four, his parents split up and his mother moved to one of the Martian colonies on the newly terraformed world. This was after the colonial wars were long over and the syndicates no longer controlled the territory near Mons Pavonis. Ash remembered the decaying fortress on the horizon where the Zhang Republic fought it out with their rivals for control of the important piece of territory. The corporate wars followed soon after, which he did remember. The territory on Mars where he lived was divided up into various spheres of interest as the planetary governments struggled to maintain control with a populace who had little regard for what their betters wanted to accomplish.
He never saw his mother after he turned fourteen. One day he came home from running amok with the local toughs and she was gone. All her things were packed up and removed from the house in the few hours he’d been out with his friends. He’d never had a good relationship with her. In stressful times, she’d tell him he looked just like the father he never met. His mother acted strange the week she vanished, so he expected something was worse than usual with her. It began with her calling him by a name other than “Ash”. He felt she was having one more of her episodes and prepared for the worst. However, this time she was gone when he returned.
Ash sat around the house and tried to figure out what to do for a few days until the social worker showed up. Ash asked to stay with a friend’s family, but they wouldn’t let him. So he entered the local juvenile placement program and was shuttled around from one foster home to the next. At least he never ended up in an orphanage, he would later tell himself. Ash met a few guys over the years that went into those and they came out messed up.
When he was sixteen, Ash found out he could join one of the many local militias that tried to keep the peace between the different factions in this part of Mars. They were supposed to be under the supervision of the Martian Defense Forces, itself a creation of Old Earth, but they didn’t act much different than the local gangs he ran into every day.
After a few years of hauling around impact guns and shooting at people who wouldn’t pay the “tax”, he decided there had to be a better way to earn a living. Ash found out about the new ECA corporate academy and easily passed the entrance exams. He spent the next few years as a security cadet and learned how to keep the corporate property from being attacked by all matter of bandits, drug dealers and desperate scavengers.
His big break came when he was part of a unit that destroyed a kidnapping ring outside the orbit of Phoebus. His group was killed down to the last man when they raided the kidnapper cell. He was the only survivor. The hostages were released and taken away by the local stellar ranger battalion. In the meantime, Ash discovered where they hid their ransom money. The corporation didn’t care about the lost money, they were grateful he’d eliminated a problem. So no one noticed when he came back weeks later and used the found money to make several lucrative investments.
By the time he was twenty-four, Ash had enough saved and invested to start his own security firm. The gunship Thelema was known as the Thelma by its former crew, all he needed to do was add one letter to get the Greek word for “will”. Now he was ready to find clients. Business was good and he was able to convert the company into a joint stock operation with the new hires after a bit. Everyone had a stake in the success of the Team Omega and he never had to worry about loyalty.
It was a good life for a kid who’d been abandoned by his mother barely ten years earlier. Sometimes he thought about trying to locate her, but he never put much effort into it. Or his mysterious father she never wanted to talk about. Ash had no relatives or other family on Mars, as did most of the kids in the new colonies. It was filled with the backwash of Earth and other extra-planetary settlements.
He had his choice of women when the ship was in port. Ash struck a fine figure in his brown jump suit and broad hat when he visited the bars where deals were made. He’d learned how to take care of himself when he was younger and could detect a threat before it happened. He met most of his crew at the shady parts of the ports when he docked for repairs. Ash interviewed them personally. He had a sense if they’d work out in the end or not. After a few missions, it was possible to tell whether or not someone had what it took to be member of his crew.
His gunship kept most of the technology that the government would allow. It secretly had a few more tricks than they suspected, but so far, he’d not had to use any. If ever the gunship Thelema had to use its one-time plasma torpedo, he’d lose the ship even if keeping his life. There would go his livelihood and that of his crew. So far, he hadn’t needed to use the torpedo. Or the sonic reducer, but the ship seldom entered an atmosphere. Ash was the only one who knew about the weapons of last resort, but he suspected some the others might know as well.
“So how did the meeting go?” Kris asked him as he left the VR realm. “You weren’t in there very long.” She held onto a small handle in the command center to keep from floating away.
Someday, a version of cheap, artificial gravity would be found for use on the ships that plied the great distances between the planets. Ash remembered the videos he’d watched as a kid and how the attack ships always had no one floating away from the floor. If there were ever a question about it, the brave captain would always announce she was “turning on the artificial gravity” and that would be the end of things.
“It was short and to the point,” Ash told her. “There are some things I need to let everyone know about in a general meeting. I can’t activate on what they want us to do until I have everyone’s approval.”
Kris smiled at him and went back to what she’d been doing previously. He liked her a lot, too much perhaps. Ash tried his best not to show favorites with his crew. It was always a problem when you had the people who worked close together for a long period of time. He liked to think of Team Omega, Inc., as a family business. The family he never really had as a kid. Ash had never lost anyone, so far, to death or anything else. He did everything he could to keep them together and made sure they worked in unison.
They were still making the ship ready for the trip back to the nearest port where the ECW had an office. It was the only way to be paid. Ash would dock; leave the ship, tell everyone to meet him later. Then he would make his way to the office and file a claim for the successful destruction of the pirate ship. Paperwork would be signed and forms filled out. The money would be deposited in the company account. They would have a meeting. After everyone had their share of the proceeds issued, the remainder would be banked for further use. This was usually Ester’s department. She would let them know what needed to be done on the ship, and how much money was available to get it done.