by Patty Jansen
Fabio shrugged, which was a very good gesture in a situation where he had no idea what to say for best effect. He felt like he was in a crowd where everybody knew where to go next, except he didn’t.
“It’s not going to make anyone happy,” Thalia said. “The Council Of Four will be very pissed off if Io is found to bypass their services.”
Fabio met her eyes, dark and sharp, but said nothing about nano-bombs.
“I agree,” Paul said. “It would be easier if the Io bases just cooperated and signed that agreement so we could resume the supply of ice from Europa, but they’re too stubborn. The COF laws require openness. For the safety of all citizens, but especially against the growing threat of another war breaking out, we demand that all bases declare what they’re doing and where. But Io refuses, citing military security. And that is rubbish, since we’re all people, space colonists, and we can’t afford to start fighting each other. So Io has become isolated and now not even their military friends on Earth want to help them.”
Jun said, “Starting to look like a North Korea kind of situation, isn’t it?” It was the first time he’d said more than a few words.
Paul looked at him in an irritated way. “For once, speak in terms that don’t show off how smart you are. Give a body a chance to understand what you’re talking about.”
“North Korea, a small country on Earth that two centuries ago stubbornly held onto its ideology, only to starve its people. Only when the borders finally came down did the first foreign soldiers find the extent of suffering by both soldiers and civilians. In space, such a situation would be much worse. Without outside resources, these bases will die.”
This was followed by a silence.
But damn, the youngster was right, and Fabio wasn’t sure if ISF cared. In fact, something about his jumbled-up memories about Mars told him that they probably didn’t, and they might be ready to cut their losses and Banparra knew this so he cosied up to the locals.
Paul said, “I think the real risk is that the base command at Io will jump sideways. If ISF headquarters keeps tightening the screws on Banparra and keeps isolating him from the COF, then he may associate with other elements, and heaven knows we’ve already faced this situation once in relation to Calico Base, when they were infested with spies. Banparra was welcomed by COF as a hardliner to clean things up, but I’m not sure if all the troops here are under his full control. In fact, going by our experience, I’m pretty sure they are not.”
“Yeah,” Sol said, his voice dark.
A brief silence. Fabio thought of the jostling between Research and the rest of the base. Disagreements between the base and Doric. Different orders, different security systems.
A kitchen hand had come into the dining hall with a steam mop on his back, and started to clean the floor.
Jun said, “We may as well name the beast. You think Banparra is in with Allion?”
Paul nodded. “That scum never goes away.”
Thalia whirled at him. “I don’t get why you keep circulating those stories. Allion is gone from the system. They have no interest in playing petty local politics. They were into big projects and long-term goals. Why would they hang around here if everyone is infighting and there is all of space to be explored?”
“I suggest that you don’t underestimate their vindictiveness,” Paul said.
“Oh, come on, give me proof.” She spread her hands. “Why are we even talking about this? Why are you Ganymedeans so damn suspicious? When they were here, Allion was a commercial partner. We bought their stuff. They bought ours. They are not mysterious evil forces or mythical ghosts. They are gone.”
“Can I say something?” The soldier with the steam mop had stopped at the table on his way to the serving area.
Everyone looked at him, and he blushed.
“Well, I just overheard what you were saying about Allion, but I don’t think you know all of it. There are definitely ghost ships in the area. We’ve had quite a few reports recently.”
Sol raised one eyebrow over the rim of his drink. “I thought those were well and truly relegated to the realm of imagination.”
“With due respect, sir, I’ve seen the data and believe there is some merit in them.”
“You think so? How?” Thalia’s voice sounded disbelieving.
The kitchen hand blushed again. His young face looked very inexperienced. Guess Doric hadn’t subjected him to her need to know speech.
“I’ve seen the scans. They clearly show something moving in the system. There’s a very faint signature of an engine. It’s about the right size for a ship. Some infrared scans match up with the visible ones, that’s always a good sign. Don’t you agree they are likely to be Allion ships? No other commercial company I know is still in operation in this area, or at least not independently, in space. Fenosa has fully retreated to on-surface contracts. They work mostly for the families. Some of the families have ships, but they’re mining barges, often robotic boats whose behaviour can be fully predicted. These ships—”
Paul said, “If they are ships. Sorry, but I’ve seen the blobs of light that you call ships. You can watch them all over the fear-mongering networks.”
“I think they are.” The man sounded more confident. “Anyway, these ships move independently. They’re not in orbit. They’re not in radio contact. The only entity we have no control over in the system is Allion, in their base, floating down there in the clouds. And they haven’t been up for years, not that I’ve heard at least.”
“Oh, there we have the mythical cloud bases again.” Thalia rolled her eyes. “I really don’t understand why these rumours keep persisting. A ship of the size you suggest would leave a signature. It would be a flashing beacon of electromagnetic radiation. Everything on board a ship uses electronics. Same with a base in the cloud tops of Jupiter. That at some point Allion had ships which could dive down to that level doesn’t mean that they’re down there still. Ships of that calibre, like the Thor series or the Morgana leave a whole furrow of signatures we can pick up. Their engines, for starters, would be a flashing beacon in some frequencies, depending on the energy source. If—as rumours have it—they used antimatter engines, they would spit out visible light. Seriously. Has anyone seen any new stars in the firmament lately?” She breathed in through flaring nostrils.
“They’d have shielding.”
“Oh yeah, and now we’re in the realm of magic.” She snorted. “No ship that we know can move without leaving some signature. No base exists without emitting a crapload of radiation that we can detect. This is becoming the busiest section of space after the Earth-Moon route. You cannot hide in space. Everything you do sends a big, flashing signal that screams here I am.”
There was a brief angry silence, in which the kitchen hand shrugged and went back to mopping. The cook returned with a trolley that contained a couple of trays, which he proceeded to set out in front of everyone in the group, including Fabio.
Paul lifted the cover off and pulled a face. Base food was obviously not up to his standards.
Fabio agreed with what Thalia had said. If you wanted to hide somewhere, the best place was somewhere amongst lots of other people that generated lots of noise. Open space was a very bad place to hide.
For a while, everyone ate. The mash was bland, but filling. The water was cold, and even in this dryness, a bit of humidity condensed onto the outside of the glass. Fabio wasn’t hungry, but he drank with deep gulps.
“Anyway,” Paul rose from the table, his plate still half full. “We’re digressing, and it’s been a long day. I’m going to bed.”
Sol and Jun rose as well, but Thalia said, “I’ll come later.”
Katarina
* * *
IN A ROOM IN THE RESIDENTIAL part of the Research base, Major Katarina Doric sat at her desk writing the old-fashioned way: with a pen on a sheet of plasti-paper. It was very old-fashioned indeed. It had been years since she had written anything by hand, since most communication was electronic
and much of it went through scans, voice recognition and thought sensors. Her handwriting was clumsy and reminded her of having to learn to write at school. Not in a good way.
But she needed to send this message.
This morning in the arrival hall with that oaf of a new guy, she’d done her best to hide her surprise: her husband was here.
What he was doing here and how he had managed to get into the delegation from the Council Of Four was a mystery. As far as she knew, he wasn’t interested in politics and he wasn’t the easiest person to get on with, prone to mercurial outbursts, during which he would shout at her and she would shout at him and the neighbours would come to check if anyone had been killed.
And then they’d make up and cry and say they didn’t mean it like that. Kat had thought of leaving the shambles of a marriage many times, but the fact was that he was the only one who had ever cared for her in times of need.
Having been “promoted” to Io marked a time of dire need for her. He hadn’t been able to speak to her for years, and he still hadn’t abandoned her.
He was a migrant because all his family lived on Earth. He could just as easily have gone back to his family after declaring the rocky marriage over.
No one would ever have explained to him what had happened to her when he’d come home from his work as engineer, finding her gone, no matter how much he’d bugged ISF for information about her whereabouts—and he would have.
They would have stonewalled him all the way.
Classified information.
She will contact you when she can.
But he was still faithful to her, even if he might have thought that she was dead.
He was as faithful to her as he’d been back when she’d been in an accident and had spent time in the hospital with a broken pelvis, learning to walk again.
He’d helped her walk along the railings, crying in pain all the way. He’d helped her walk her first steps unaided, and when she came out, he’d asked her to marry him, knowing that she would spend long times away from home.
This morning, he’d looked old and tired and cranky, and his hair showed patches of grey that hadn’t been there before.
He hadn’t seen her, and that was just as well, because it looked like there was some sort of problem with one of the delegation’s papers, and now she heard that the delegation was confined to their rooms and she had to be oh so careful that nobody found out that she knew that he was here. Or that they realised that he was her husband.
Therefore she resorted to this clumsy way of communicating: handwriting. It was untraceable, and once you destroyed a letter, it was truly gone.
How was she going to get it to him?
She needed to write only a few sentences: where to find the information about who had sent the asteroid into the Mars dome, and who had ordered the senseless killing of many civilians afterwards—all in the name of security. She needed Paul to send that proof to Sarajevo, or failing that, to Ganymede City, or failing that, just to give it to the rest of the delegation, who would take it to Ganymede City, and there it would be brought to the Council Of Four, and ISF—or at least the Outer System Division with Preston at its head—would come out looking very bad indeed.
And hopefully that could happen before she got shot, and before Banparra had flooded the place with troops, and before any war broke out—real or simulated—between the two divisions of ISF or between ISF and the Council Of Four, because something was afoot that was not covered by the excuse exercise.
And before any of that happened, her only and final wish would be to spend one more night in her husband’s arms.
She had been through so many military exercises.
They were always planned—not so much at a low level, but at a higher level. There would always be performance sheets circulated prior to the event. Aims, strategies and outcomes would be discussed at her level. She would be informed and would have to report on her part of the exercise, which was usually to track fleet movements and keeping fleet captains up to date with the latest in intersecting objects—bits of rock and ice that could seriously disrupt fleet operations.
She would have to give her guarantee that vital information be kept secret from the troops so as not to spoil certain surprise elements of the exercise.
This time, there was nothing.
When Mars happened, her father had a high military position, and he had later told her how no one knew that ISF was about to go into a major operation that later turned out to have been meticulously planned. They had merely been warned that there might be trouble, but the warning didn’t extend beyond the normal levels of caution applied to large gatherings of different groups of people, as the one at Johnson Base, near the north pole of Mars, where a historic meeting between ISF and “commercial interests”, but mainly Allion, was about to take place.
Her father said that all of the ISF’s planned hostile activities were hidden from him. And he was not in a position where he should have been kept out of this information.
The parallels between her current situation and his remarks were very strong right now. She was not being told things. She had been told to come here, to this secluded base where—frankly—doing any kind of astronomy was a joke.
All right, Banparra didn’t trust her, but he was not the one authorising who passed which information to whom. And he clearly trusted her enough to give her a team of computer monkeys—because he needed her and work had to be done—but she had nothing to do with the arriving troops or had even been told about them.
Ostensibly, they were here for the exercise, but, as had happened to her father all those years ago on Mars, she didn’t think that was the whole story. What, for example, was the purpose of the installation they were building on the other side of the main base?
Because of her rank, she should have been informed, even if she fell within a different division from Banparra.
She couldn’t trust anyone, not even the lame spy Sanchez may or may not have sent—seriously, what a useless piece of shit.
Sanchez had let her know that there would be instructions about information that she needed to collect, and when she heard of this person coming all the way from Earth, she had thought this was it. But the guy was an idiot. She didn’t even think that he remembered his own name, and the only way that he’d entered the base was in the same way that she had: by having been sent as a form of punitive action. What he had done was an utter mystery.
And so she wondered how genuine Sanchez had been when sending her here.
“That Preston is up to something,” he had said to her when meeting her in his office. “He has been taking matters into his own hands far too much. I need some people on the ground in the Jupiter system.”
Katarina had done some intelligence work before. Most importantly, she had worked as ISF contract astronomer in the asteroid belt, doing exactly the same thing she was doing now—flinging small celestial bodies into different orbits so that they reached those who had had plans for them. She had seen the asteroid veer off-course and had assumed that it would be corrected. The day that it had crashed into Mars remained forever etched into her memory, as did the day when her calculation of the asteroid’s trajectory had been complete. She knew the asteroid had been sent from the belt. She knew this wasn’t an accident. She knew the then-commander of the asteroid belt Preston was directly responsible, and when Sarajevo had gotten wind of her data, they had asked her to become an informant.
They needed to keep Preston in line, Sanchez said, because there were persistent rumours that the Outer System Division of the ISF was going to break off.
So he had asked her to fill a position on Io. He called it a promotion, but she knew it was a way to keep her silent and out of the way of agitators who might go to the various news sources with her discoveries.
Just then, she hadn’t wanted to think about her mercurial husband and his outbursts and his increasingly political stance. He was right about most things and wrong about how h
e dealt with them. She didn’t want him to cause a conflict in her job.
Maybe some time away on Io was just what she needed.
But staring at the wall in her room when her shift had ended only made her think and worry more. She worried that Base Command would search through her data and find the calculations she had made that proved that the wayward asteroid had been sent from their facility. She worried that they would find out that she was aligned with Sanchez and wanted to rid the force of people who thought they were a law unto themselves, like Preston, like Banparra, men who thought that “the need to survive” justified the continued need to keep the population under a warlike martial law that brushed over atrocities like Mars.
So she had erased the document with her discoveries from her military account and put it in a private account outside the military that only she could access.
She wiped her PCD of all info that would be used against her.
Command was always warning troops not to use encryption on private documents, because they’d assume that encrypted information concerned something troops shouldn’t have.
The important points in her handwritten letter were how to find this information, the hints about the passcodes—which only Paul would understand—and the information that the situation was urgent.
It was all starting to sound familiar.
Use an excuse to put a lot of people in a dome, then send an asteroid into it.
Mars.
She was disgusted that ISF had tried to blame the incident on a commercial company. What they had done with Allion was nothing short of genocide.
But nothing was keeping them from doing it again.
And if she didn’t speak up, then who would? Paul, obviously, but his voice would be stronger if she added hers.
She wanted to, very badly. More importantly, she missed him.
Chapter 6
* * *