Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  “Do you think there was foul play?” Her face lit up a bit, as if that idea excited her.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “I . . . well . . . that’s the conspiracy part I mentioned. I think Schultz knows more than he told the military. He has to.”

  I pulled up the report on my device and found Schultz’s statement. It only took me thirty seconds to read. He didn’t mention being first on the scene of the disappearance. All he said was that when he arrived, everybody was already gone. “Did you ever question him about that?” I asked.

  “No way. I’m not accusing a guy who carries a gun for a living of lying.”

  “Right. Of course not. Let’s go back to my original question. Was there anything special about that particular team?”

  “Xyla’s team? I’m not sure. She was working on something with the hominiverts. She’d mentioned that it would help us move them out of areas we wanted to develop.”

  “What can you tell me about that?”

  She frowned. “Not much. It was hush-hush, and it’s not my area of expertise, so I wasn’t involved. She told me it was big, but that’s about it.”

  “Was she working on that the day she disappeared?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” she said. “Hey, you can’t tell anybody about the research, okay? They’ll know it came from me.”

  I mimed zipping my lips. “I won’t say a word.”

  “Okay, good.” She paused, as if debating what to say. “You think this was intentional. I can tell by your questions.”

  “Not necessarily—”

  “You do. Who? Who would do this?”

  I had to regain control of the interview. “Who do you think would do it?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “The eco-protectionists. They’d do anything to keep us from developing the planet, and if Xyla had a breakthrough that would move us in that direction, well . . . it would make sense that they’d want to stop her.”

  That she’d come to the same potential conclusion as I did wasn’t surprising. EPV clearly had the motive. What I couldn’t see was the means. Schultz might have been on their payroll, but one guy taking on a team of six and making them disappear didn’t make a great theory. Regardless, Eddleston couldn’t help anymore with that, and I didn’t want to drag her in any deeper than I already had. “I really appreciate you sharing your honest thoughts. I have some questions about EPV myself, and I promise I’m going to give them a hard look.”

  “Thanks.” She finished her drink, and I downed mine as well. We shared contact information and I had Mac and Ganos escort her back to her quarters. I poured another drink and offered one to Fader, who refused.

  “What do you think, sir?”

  “EPV was already a suspect, so not much changes there. I want to talk to Li again and ask her about Schultz. That will piss off Caliber, but that’s a good thing. The more I can pressure them, the more they’ll have to react. They’re hiding something, and I want to know why.”

  “Roger, sir. You want me to set that up?”

  “No, I’ll handle that. The Caliber lawyers are going to be obstinate, so I might as well get involved right away. Besides, I have something else I want you to work.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fader opened a screen on her device to take notes.

  I took a deep swig. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Why’s that, sir?”

  “I think we need to go see the site where Redstone disappeared.”

  To her credit, Fader didn’t overreact, though her face and shoulders tensed. “Mac’s going to be the one who doesn’t like it.” She wasn’t wrong about Mac. “What’s your purpose, sir?”

  “As I was talking to Eddleston, I found that I couldn’t put the picture together in my head.”

  “There’s video of the entire location, sir. And for what there isn’t, we can task a drone to get some. Since the information is available from easier means, my recommendation is that we do not need to leave the dome.”

  I had to admit, having Fader around as a sounding board and voice of reason was starting to grow on me. She had a point, and I honestly had to consider it. I had to be sure I wasn’t acting out of frustration or from some hidden desire to get back into the field. I wouldn’t be the first person to fall prey to that kind of seduction. More to Fader’s credit, she didn’t interrupt me as I thought about it. She’d made her case and stopped pushing.

  “That’s a good point. I’ll ask the military for a drone recon first. I don’t know if it will be enough though—Eddleston mentioned a guy cutting through the jungle, and that they didn’t search immediately for bodies. I don’t know if a drone will give me an appreciation for that, but it won’t hurt to try.”

  “I’ll let Mac know a mission outside is a possibility so he can start planning.”

  I laughed. “And so he can have time to swear about it and calm down before we actually go.”

  “That too. I’ll call the military in the morning to set up the drone flight. If they push back, I’ll let you know.”

  “Great.”

  I shook my head once she left. I kept doing it. All I had to do was accept the military report and let it go. I’d officially questioned people at Caliber. I’d talked to the military and I didn’t suspect a cover-up. I could write up that I hadn’t found anything new, pretend that the bomb was unrelated, get on a ship and go home. Nobody would even question it. Instead I was going to keep digging. Apparently, I’d never learn.

  Chapter Nine

  I called on Caliber’s lawyers again, this time with a specific question: What had happened to Schultz and Ortega? Lawyer One got back to me quickly, which made me think that word had come from higher to help me, but when I asked him, he still hadn’t heard anything. Schultz and Ortega had both been sent away. The lawyer insinuated that it was for misconduct about a month ago, but he refused to tell me what the misconduct was because it wasn’t germane to my investigation and there were privacy issues. I didn’t buy it, but I didn’t have leverage at the moment, so moved on to another angle.

  It took me almost ten minutes to get Lawyer One to set me up with another meeting with the security guard, Li. I refused to meet at their office, citing my schedule and a subsequent meeting. I’m sure he didn’t believe me, but it kept me from having to mention being monitored out loud, which let everybody save face. I needed to have her on my own turf. Letting someone hear my questions to Li would give away too much about my suspicion regarding Schultz.

  Li was my height, with an athletic build, and she stood in the door to my suite almost at the position of attention. Mac sat at the end of the table, to my right, and I asked Li to sit across from me. I’d asked Mac to stay because Fader was out trying to coordinate drone surveillance.

  “You’re ex-military, aren’t you?” I asked, trying to make her more comfortable.

  “Yes, sir. Eight years.”

  “You miss it?”

  “I miss the people, sir.” She spoke in short, clipped syllables, and I got the impression that she just wanted this over with, so I decided to curtail the small talk.

  “Yeah, me too.” I really did. When I missed it at all, it was always the people. “I just had a couple of follow-up questions from our meeting the other day, if that’s okay.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were paired with another security person on the mission, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you remember who that was?”

  “Schultz, sir.”

  “Was he with you the whole time?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That didn’t match Eddleston’s story, but it could have been an oversight. I gave her another chance. “When you first heard the shots, I assume you loaded your team up in the vehicle. Schultz was with you then?”

  “Oh. No, sir. He went on foot.”

  “How did you know that he was doing that?”

  “He told me over the headset, sir. Security personnel have our own net.”

&n
bsp; “Did you find anything odd about that?”

  “No, sir.”

  I waited for her to add something to that, letting it hang until the silence got awkward, but she seemed determined not to give me anything. “What kind of guy was Schultz?” I asked, finally giving up. “Did he know his stuff?”

  “I don’t know, sir. He seemed fine.”

  “He didn’t have any issues with the company?”

  “We weren’t close, sir.”

  I tried several other versions of the same questions, but no matter what I asked, I got the same clipped answers. I couldn’t say for sure that someone had rehearsed her, but I’d have bet a lot of money that she’d been directed not to say anything. It seemed pointless to continue, so I ended the interview.

  “Well, that was useful,” I said to Mac, once she left.

  Fader gave me more bad news when she returned, informing me that we wouldn’t get a drone flight. It took me a minute to understand that it wasn’t about us—the law banned all drone flights on Eccasis. Which seemed ridiculous. Fader researched it and found it was tied to an environmental protest—courtesy of our good friends at EPV—regarding some sort of moth. Apparently, drones impacted their migration or something. Fader gave me the reference document, but life is too short to read forty pages of bureaucratic nonsense.

  What made it more bullshit was that I’d seen someone launch a small drone with my own eyes. I sent Oxendine a message about that, and she acknowledged that corporations routinely violated the rules, but she didn’t. I’d asked her why, if she knew that, she didn’t do anything to stop them. After she told me to do something anatomically impossible to myself, she explained that enforcement of that law fell on a civilian agency that reported to the governor, not the military. It wasn’t security.

  With no drone flight and with satellite video obscured by the jungle, we made plans to do it the old-fashioned way. It took a full day to set up the mission. The military didn’t exactly try to stop us, but they didn’t go out of their way to make things happen, either. I think Oxendine might have been hoping that I’d come to my senses and drop the idea, but she couldn’t really tell me no unless she had a strong reason, so I pushed on.

  My team made use of the time. Ganos kept digging into systems to see what she could find. I specifically had her look for real-time communication regarding my outside mission. Once we’d told the military, it was no longer a secret, so I wanted to see what sort of changes it might cause in local patterns. Because the camera hack during the bombing came from the military, I had to believe that somebody inside the headquarters might have reason to leak information. If EPV had done something to sabotage Redstone’s mission—though I still couldn’t figure out how they could have—and EPV had also been behind the bombing, it stood to reason that they might come after my mission as well.

  Ganos informed me that EPV’s communications security was “a total joke” and that she could read anything Dante Farric put on the net. None of it even mentioned our mission, which I took as a good sign. She was still hesitant to go after Caliber, which I understood. At some point I was probably going to have to tell her to do it anyway, but for now I asked her to dig up whatever she could on Schultz, his background, why he’d left, and any potential ties he might have had to EPV.

  The morning of the mission, Mac, Fader, and I joined three soldiers at their vehicle, which was a six-wheeled version of a GOAT—a personnel carrier. A tall, dark-skinned master sergeant named Williams greeted me with a crisp salute when I arrived. I returned it but told him he didn’t need to do that.

  “Roger that, sir,” he said, without a trace of emotion in it.

  “It’s just us?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. We’re good. Minimum out-the-gate mission is three soldiers, which we’ve got. Plus, your man there looks like he knows how to use that Bitch he’s carrying. But we won’t need it.”

  “Got it.” Mac also carried a black duffel bag with two more rifles as well as a few other goodies. I had him keep everything hidden until we left the dome—let anyone who saw us leaving see just the four weapons. Unlike Williams, I didn’t hold any illusions. I wanted to see the terrain, but I was also setting us out as bait. If I was going to go fishing, I wanted to have some surprises planned. “You know the mission?”

  “We’ve got the coordinates, sir, and we got some general parameters. But as far as I’m concerned, the mission’s whatever you tell me it is.” He was the kind of no-bullshit noncom that I’d always loved when I served. Guys like him made me miss it.

  “Should be simple,” I said. “I just need to see the ground. Get a feel for things out there. I’ll probably want to visit the two secondary locations too.” I wanted to see where the attack happened, but I also wanted to see where Eddleston’s team—especially Schultz—had been in relation. I’d seen it on a map but being there might show me something different.

  “Roger that, sir. We’ve got your suits. My soldiers will help you get them on properly.”

  “How are they? The suits?” I asked.

  “Not bad. Way better than the older model, which was stiff. These are super flexible, but they won’t tear. They will puncture though, so be careful of that. A suit breach won’t kill you immediately—a human can survive about twelve hours out there—but with all the meds they pump into you if you get exposed, you’ll almost wish you were dead.”

  That sounded horrible. “Good to know.”

  He picked up a helmet and rotated it as he spoke. “The helmets are pretty low tech. They’ve got great sight lines, but no heads-up. This version was designed for exploring, not combat. The military versions are modified with a tracking system that allows us to use guided bullets, so at least there’s that.”

  “How much does the lack of tech in the helmet hold you back?” I asked. It seemed like a strange place to cut back on tech.

  “Not at all. The stuff that’s dangerous out here wouldn’t show up on a heads-up display anyway.”

  That jibed with what Eddleston had told me, so I took it as truth. We suited up, which took a few minutes, making sure of our seals and that we all had the right mix of oxygen. I tried a few stretches to get a feel for the suit and found that I could move naturally, almost like walking around in street clothes and a helmet. The wide bubble of the faceplate allowed full vision, and while it wouldn’t stop a bullet, it felt like it would take a pretty good thump without cracking.

  Williams checked the entire team a second time and we loaded up. The master sergeant rode next to the driver, which left the three of us in the back with the third member of his team. The vehicle had a gunner’s hatch up top, but nobody occupied it. Each side of the vehicle had three long, rectangular windows, and when I tapped on one I estimated it as about two centimeters of armo-glass. That would stop a bullet, but still allowed us to get a decent view. A flat screen at the front of the crew compartment showed a forward view, and the soldier with us showed me how to use the joystick to rotate it. I hadn’t seen that feature in a military vehicle before. Usually in the back, you were just a passenger. You went where the vehicle took you and you got out when ordered.

  “Why do we have this?” I asked.

  “We carry scientists sometimes,” said the soldier. “They always want to see what’s going on, and this keeps us from having to dismount every twenty meters. It’s got a zoom function, too.”

  “That’s convenient. I wish I’d had one of these on every mission.”

  “It’s a pain in the ass, sir. People in back start thinking they’re in charge and trying to drive.”

  I laughed at the not-so-subtle hint. Soldiers had a universal distaste for being told what to do by people looking at a screen, unless that person really knew what they were doing. “I won’t do that.”

  We moved out slowly, maintaining the fifteen-kilometer-per-hour rate allowed inside the dome, and then stopped for several minutes when we reached the gate until someone came over, opened Williams’s door, and took his tablet that had ou
r authentication on it. They returned it several minutes later.

  I keyed my comm. “Is it always this secure on the way out of the dome?”

  “It is when you take the military gate, sir. It’s always staffed, and if your digital pass doesn’t check out when they call Ops, you don’t leave.”

  “So theoretically we know everybody who is outside the gate at all times.”

  “Not even close, sir. The corporations run the commercial gates. Basically, anyone can have their own exit if they’re willing to pay for it and keep it up to code. It’s not cheap, since the rules for the airlocks are one thing that everybody takes seriously, but the companies control their own access in and out.”

  That seemed like a poor way to do business. “So it’s a free-for-all.”

  “Yes, sir. But in truth, we’d need a lot more manpower to operate all the gates that this place needs, and we don’t have it. We do random inspections to make sure that people aren’t bringing in stuff that they shouldn’t, but that’s about it.”

  That confirmed Oxendine’s reported lack of resources, but it sounded like a recipe for smuggling. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so outlandish that a bomb got through. That reminded me—certainly the military had tracked down the source of the explosives by now. I sent a message to Fader’s device asking her to check up on it once we got back.

  Outside the dome we drove about a hundred meters down a paved road before it turned to dirt. Bright green grass grew to the sides, but only a few centimeters tall, probably trimmed to keep the heavy vegetation away from the dome. After about four hundred meters we reached the jungle where the vegetation grew so thick along and over the road that it resembled a multihued green tunnel. The video feed adjusted to accommodate the lower light coming through the triple canopy, and I was immediately glad that we came. Pictures didn’t do the jungle justice. In most places dense growth came right to the side of the road, if not actually encroaching on it. In other places it opened a bit with clearings large enough to park a vehicle or two. Small trails led off the main one at random intervals, and we passed one full-size track that branched from ours in a vee.