by Alec Taylor
I was deeply shaken, haunted by the figure I had seen behind June out in the storm. The dark outline had imprinted on my eyes, so that when I closed them it was all I could see. I now understood what I had seen out in the canyon when Eli died, but I was more afraid than ever. I stared and tried to trick my brain into thinking of something else. I caught June’s gaze and noticed that she was looking at me with real concern. I forced a thin smile and tried to clear my face of all worry.
The minutes dragged by slowly, with the storm raging outside. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. We had no idea what was happening to our teammates—maybe they were fried by lightning in the first 30 seconds, ten metres from the hangar. It was the first time we had stopped in hours, and unfortunately it gave me time to reflect on the situation. We had a backup cable ready to go, but what if the first team had been fried, and the second team also failed? I suddenly wondered if we were all about to die, and I considered telling Karl to initiate the selective evacuation.
With horror, I realised that a part of me didn’t want to be evacuated.
I took some deep, slow breaths and forced myself to calm down. We still had time, and the success of our initial trip out to the power plants gave me hope that the immediate situation would be resolved. The situation with the shadow wasn’t as simple.
The minutes became an hour and then two, the oxygen level dipped below fifteen percent, and Pete and Karl started to panic. Pete was continually calling, asking what we should do. I had an almost overwhelming feeling of responsibility for the colony, and I fidgeted with frustration.
I looked up and thought: God, if you’re there, these people don’t deserve to die. Please help them.
Finally, four hours after we had left the Security room, we decided we had to send out the second team. They climbed into the harvester and we opened the hangar doors.
Just as the second harvester was passing through the doors, the main power came back on and the hangar lit up. The team stopped and backed the second harvester into the hangar. We closed the doors and I fell to my knees with relief.
Liu called and said, “Uh, so I guess that’s mission accomplished?”
“Yep,” I replied.
“Well done, Mike,” he said sincerely.
“You too, Liu,” I said.
We waited for the first team to return, which they did about half an hour later. They were absolutely exhausted; Tony could barely walk.
“I am not doing that again,” said Tony. “Next time, we’re bugging out and I’m in the chosen few.”
“You’ve earned it,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder.
When we finally got back to the Security Office, Pete said they could hear the cheers echoing from the dorms when the main lights came back on. We gathered the response team and once again stood in a circle in the middle of the room. Everyone congratulated Tony and his team.
As the congratulations died down, Pete asked, “Could you tell what caused the outage?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Tony. “We’re going to have to wait ‘til the dust settles…”
“Ugh,” I groaned. “You’ve been waiting to use that one, haven’t you?”
“…to go out and look at the other plants,” continued Tony. “But, to be honest, it looked like an explosive device took out the cable to the first plant, and I’d guess the same happened to the other two.”
Tony, June, and I looked at each other and realised we had all reached the same conclusion.
“What? What do you mean?” asked Liu.
“He means it was foul play,” I said, deadly serious. “Sabotage.”
The response team stood and stared at each other in stunned silence. I looked over at Glen to see if he was going to flip out again, but he just stared in shock.
“How can you be sure?” asked Karl eventually.
“We’ll have to wait for the storm to subside to confirm it,” I said, “but we can go back and look at the security cameras now. I bet we’ll see someone placing some kind of explosive device on all three cables. It makes sense: it was only a small break on the first cable, and yet all three went down together, at exactly the same time. They were probably synchronised with timers. And we saw some wires and piping out there in the crater.”
We stood in silence for another moment.
Finally, Pete took a big breath and said, “Well, okay, I think that’s enough excitement for one day. We can close this meeting. Let’s reconvene tomorrow for a post-incident review. I know we have a big residual issue, but well done, everyone. We saved lives today.”
“Yes. Well done, everybody,” chimed in Karl. “We are all safe and will be able to resume production as soon as the dust settles.” He smiled.
He was trying to copy Tony’s joke, but it was clear that he honestly thought the highest priority was resuming the harvest. If I had had the strength to lift my arms, I might have punched him.
The dark figure was receding to the back of my mind and being replaced by the hazy outline of a saboteur. I needed to find them quickly, before they tried to kill us all again.
16. MOLE HUNT
I wanted to start looking at the security camera footage immediately, but I found that I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. The last few hours and days suddenly hit me. I floated down the passageways toward the dorm in a kind of daze. People were out talking and laughing, and a handful said, “Hi”, but I was too tired to respond.
Tony was already there when I made it to our room. He had crashed on his bed without changing. I yanked off my outersuit and realised that I was drenched with sweat. I managed to change my undersuit before crawling into my sleeping bag and falling asleep.
My alarm went off at five the following morning. I turned it off, sat up, and then lay back down and instantly fell asleep again. A few hours later, I woke up ravenously hungry. Tony was lying on his bunk, looking up at the ceiling.
“Morning,” I said.
“Howdy,” he replied, looking over.
Suddenly, I remembered the saboteur and sat up.
“The power is still on,” I said. “Any news from Security?”
“No news. Mike, that was madness yesterday, and I don’t mean what you and I did. You saw that damage. Someone in the colony did that. Someone very dangerous. I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but we’re all gonna die.”
He was exaggerating to be funny, but I could tell he was genuinely concerned.
“Thanks, mate. Appreciate the pep talk. Don’t worry, I’m on it.”
I got up, quickly showered, grabbed some breakfast to go, and went to the office. Pete and Glen were already there and the screens were showing the outside cameras. The images were already lighter than the previous day. Visibility was still low, but there was a red glow and the dust was no longer driving horizontally—it was falling gently.
“We have a problem,” said Pete. “The camera footage for the last few hours before the storm has been erased.”
“You’re joking,” I replied, my eyes wide.
“No. All of the cameras between the inner colony and the power plants have been wiped.”
“So that’s it, then?” asked Glen.
“Not a chance,” I replied, between gritted teeth. This was my domain—I was going to hunt down the saboteur. I was fully refreshed, energised by my sleep and completely focused on a new, singular objective. I didn’t care that the footage was missing.
“What do you think?” Pete asked me.
“I guarantee there’ll be other ways of finding the person who did this.”
“Well, okay then,” said Pete. “Find them.”
Pete was clearly concerned by the sabotage and committed to the investigation. It contrasted with his drive to close the Imani investigation—but then, he had been convinced we had already found the killer in that case, and this new threat put us all in jeopardy. I wasn’t so sure about Eli’s guilt and I briefly wondered about the timing of this second major incident, only a few months later.
But then, I couldn’t think of any link, and I had trouble imagining a motive that would drive both events—perhaps pure sociopathy, but Imani’s death seemed far too calculated and targeted.
I sat down at the main screen and opened the video archive.
“It’s gone, believe me,” said Glen.
“Huh?” I replied. “Oh, the timing might be useful.”
“God, you’re arrogant,” he said.
“What?” I said, perplexed.
“Glen,” said Pete. “He’s just doing his job. It’s what cops do.”
Glen gave a condescending laugh and turned away. He touched his screen and it showed the picture of earth from the spaceport above Australia—we were receiving transmissions again. I briefly wondered what his problem was and then remembered his behaviour the previous day. Perhaps he was embarrassed, I thought, and possibly annoyed that he hadn’t played a role in restoring power.
“Somebody is covering their tracks,” I said. “I’m going to head out to have a look at the other cables.”
I walked out to the hangar and bumped into Tony in the staging area. His team were already out at the power plants, so I asked him to call me when he got there, then I went back to the office.
I paused the video footage at the first moment after the missing recording and sat staring at the blank screen, trying to imagine the events of those hours. Someone had placed some kind of explosive on the cables, with timers. They had had access to chemicals, or maybe they had tampered with a small Tobler engine. No, I thought, that would be too risky; that could have created a much bigger explosion. No, they weren’t trying to kill us all instantly; they were trying to take out the power plants, to force a shutdown, to hurt us or eventually kill us slowly. Something about that didn’t make sense and I briefly wondered if it had been a diversion. Had something else happened while we were dealing with the power outage?
I turned back to the missing footage. Did they turn the cameras off before they placed the explosives, or was the footage erased later, I wondered? I was about to call Liu to find out, when Tony called my suit phone.
“Hey Tony, that was fast,” I said as I answered his call inside my visor.
“Yeah, driving is a lot faster when you can see a little. It’s still pretty choked out here, though.”
“What have you found?”
“Well, they’re full of dust now, but it looks like three identical explosions above the three cables. We’ve found pieces of pipe and wire in the other two places. You’re definitely looking for a bomber.”
I looked around and saw that both Pete and Glen were looking at me, wondering what Tony was saying.
I relayed to them, “We’re definitely looking for a bomber.”
“I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting,” said Tony.
“No, wait,” I said. “Record lots of footage and bag all the pieces. Try not to wipe anything. We might get lucky and score a print.”
“Righto,” he replied and hung up.
I looked back at the screen and remembered that I had been going to call Liu.
“Mike, what’s happening?” asked Liu as he answered.
“We’re missing some video footage,” I replied, “and I’m wondering if you can figure out how we lost it. And hopefully who erased it.”
“Fine, I’ll try.”
I gave him the locations of the cameras and the times, and he promised to let me know if he found anything. I stared at the blank image on my screen again, trying to think of new angles to explore.
“How about the transmitters?” said Pete from behind me. “Look for suits, just like you did when Imani died.”
“Great,” I said and turned back to my screen, then suddenly remembered the missing suits during lockdown. “Oh, no. We had fifty missing suit transmitters before the storm.”
“Damn it,” said Pete.
I ran the location check at a time in the middle of the missing video footage and found that around 50 suits still had not been transmitting. Almost none of the owners had bothered to fix them, even with the threat of a major storm outside and a personal request from Security. I noticed Glen’s name was still on the list.
“What the…?” I turned to look at Glen.
“It’s fixed now,” he said, bowing his head and looking sheepish.
I analysed the 50 transmitters to see when they had stopped working. Most of them had disconnected around the same time, a few weeks earlier, but there had also been a steady trickle since. I wondered if there had been a grapevine discussion about privacy around that time, which was gradually spreading across the colony.
We need to change the rules about how we use the information, I thought, and make some promises about privacy to the colony.
I answered a call from Liu and said, “Please tell me you’ve found something.”
“Well, yes, but you’re not going to like it. I found a program in the system to pause the cameras for the missing-time window and then automatically start them again. The problem is the program was loaded and executed by Imani, just a day before the cameras turned off.”
“Imani?”
“Obviously she’s not reaching out from beyond the grave,” said Liu. “Somebody used her biometric signature to log on to the system and run the program.”
“How could they do that?” I asked. “They’d need a unique biological identifier, like her face, or fingerprint, or retina.”
“Her identifiers are probably all over the colony.”
“Damn it, Liu,” I said. “It was too easy for the bomber to conceal their tracks.”
“The system was built to customise the user experience, not for security,” said Liu. “Um. Listen, Mike. I need to tell you something. You know I came in the first fleet, with Imani, right?”
“Yeah?”
“She and I, we were together for a while, in that first year.”
“Oh, okay.” I wondered where this was going.
“I liked her more than she liked me,” said Liu. “I got over it after we broke up. I just wanted to let you know, because her identifiers could still be in my room, too. We’re looking for a mole now and I guess everyone is a suspect.”
“Your suit transmitter was working,” I replied.
“Huh?”
“Thanks for telling me. I appreciate it; it was the right thing to do. But I’m quite confident you had nothing to do with this. For a few reasons, including your location during the blackout.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah, well, obviously I didn’t have anything to do with it. I just thought you should know.”
“Thanks, Liu. And thanks for finding the program. I don’t suppose there’s any other way of finding out who wrote it?”
“No…hmm…maybe.”
“Okay, well, let me know.”
I went to Imani’s old office, the Organic Manufacturing Lab. Vivian was there and working despite the storm outside.
“Has anyone been using Imani’s old screen?” I asked.
“No, nobody. I don’t know why, but we’ve all been avoiding it. Out of respect, maybe, or just because it feels a bit weird,” replied Vivian.
It occurred to me that the person with the best access to Imani’s identifiers would have been Vivian. However, she didn’t seem nervous about my questioning, and my instincts said she was innocent. I decided to tell her about the sabotage—if she was responsible I thought she would give it away in her body language.
“Listen, Vivian, someone deliberately damaged the power plants.”
“No!” she said, her eyes wide with fear.
“Yes. It was sabotage.”
She sat down on a stool beside one of the workbenches and stared at the ground, shaking her head.
“It gets worse, Vivian. They’ve been cleverly covering their tracks. They turned off the security cameras while they installed the explosive devices. And they used Imani’s login to access the system.”
She quickly looked up and asked, “What? How could they do that?”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is, apparently.”
“Oh my God, that’s so strange.”
I could see her thinking it through and suddenly comprehension flashed across her face.
“Hold on,” she said. “We’re all in danger!”
“Yes, I think so, but maybe not right now. Their plan failed and we’re on heightened alert. I doubt they’ll try anything like that again, at least not for a while. But we need to catch them as soon as possible. I’m wondering who would have access to Imani’s prints, or her retina?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. A lot of people, I suppose?”
“I’m afraid that’s right.”
“Anyone with a good picture of her face would have a high-resolution image of her eyes. Her fingerprints are everywhere.”
“Have you wiped down the lab lately? Would you have cleaned Imani’s screen?”
“We clean the benches and the equipment but leave the screens to the owners. Nobody has been using Imani’s screen. Her prints will be all over it.”
*
A couple of days later, the storm was over and the haze was slowly returning to normal. Tony and his team had temporarily reconnected all the power plants and were working on a more secure and permanent way of protecting the cables. June’s team had replaced the missing passage that had blown out in the storm, and repaired the damage. We would later find the missing section half-buried in the dust hundreds of kilometres away.
Back in the office, I was picking up a strange vibe from Glen. I thought he would recover from the incident and return to his usual passive ways, but instead he remained openly hostile toward me and even occasionally toward Pete. He seemed to be on a knife’s edge. For the first day or two, he wouldn’t even accept that the explosions were deliberate.
“It was probably just a really unlucky three-way lightning strike,” he said, among other outlandish explanations.
I suspected that he had post-traumatic stress and I tried to be calm and patient with him. That was also Pete’s response—he was unflinchingly positive and supportive of Glen, even when he was downright disrespectful. We showed Glen the recovered pieces of wire and metal, which he looked at with horror.