by Patty Jansen
But he could do nothing except follow her, because he had no doubt that anything he did or said would be reported. She took him to the big room with the workstations where he had been yesterday. There, Major Doric waited in the office.
She gave him a terminal, and set him to work on huge datasets and comparing images and collating them. Plotting orbits. Calculating composition. There were many datasets and the work became automatic, the skills needed still his. Yes, he had worked on mining and exploration before.
There was a name that kept bugging him: Dayol Mining. His workstation had access to the registered ships’ database. He searched by company name and found that they were a medium-sized mining venture in the asteroid belt. Head offices on Ceres. The company’s CEO was someone by the name of Dorian Salazas.
Another piece of the puzzle that was his life, but he had no idea where it fitted, or if it was important. The name meant nothing to him.
But this data fit in with his previous experience. Once he found a suitable chunk of ice, a company like Dayol Mining would be called in to go out and divert the comet or asteroid. If Fabio could determine a handy asteroid from which to mine the water, which could be diverted to Io in less than six solars, which seemed ridiculously short. Normal mining contracts ran for years or more, like the case of that asteroid with a high content of ammonia ice that a company had smashed—
—into the northern ice cap of Mars—
—by order of the Martian Board, which was the Martian civilian division of the International Space Force under the command of a man named Preston—
And another chunk of memories fell into place.
Fabio had started with Dayol Mining after the asteroid had already been diverted. He had read, in horror, that no civilians had been informed of the impending impact on their doorstep. His superior said that it was a matter for the local authorities.
But they, when he investigated, didn’t seem to care. One official said that the only people who lived there were nomadic project workers who lived in trucks and moved in teams. They would be able to get out, he said.
“But can’t they at least be told?” Fabio remembered asking.
His only response was a blank stare.
Throughout the parts that he remembered about his life, Fabio had cared about the underdog, and he cared that a big asteroid was coming down on these people’s doorstep, and especially because domed communities were nearby and he learned that a conference was even planned at the time of the impact and that nobody knew anything about it. The meeting was of a political nature.
The nomadic settlements in the area belonged to the company Allion. They owned a lot of these very nimble mining units that crawled over Mars’ ice cap like harvester ants, scraping ice and turning it into pure water, hydrogen and oxygen for industry and fuel, and who did this while their community and families lived in blow-up tents with entire farms on the back of a flatbed truck.
He had tried to contact those people personally, but it had been very hard.
He remembered talking to a man on a crackling connection, barely hearing the words. Who had this person been?
He remembered being called into the superior officer’s room.
“You are forbidden to interfere with the local population,” he had said. “This is not in our mission statement.”
“But there are lives in danger.”
Something bothered him about those memories. Why was he working with a commercial company and answering to someone from the International Space Force? That man had worn Major’s stripes.
So Fabio had done what he did best: he had made himself scarce and gone to Mars.
Jaykadia
* * *
“YOU WANT TO—WHAT?”
Governor of the Council Of Four, Anise-Leontine Law had a loud voice that often made Jaykadia cringe no matter what she said.
Jaykadia always turned the volume down on the speakers when she spoke to her aunt, but even so, the words came through like a blast that made Jaykadia cower like a naughty child.
“I think it’s only fair,” she said, but it was already more than clear that her aunt did not like her idea. Which was strange, because hadn’t her aunt highlighted that ISF might be talking up the military exercise for political purposes?
“My dear niece, these are high-ranking, highly trained soldiers we’re talking about. You don’t play games with them.”
“They play games with us.”
“Yes, but that is different. For all that they play politics, they keep the peace in this area, and you young ones undervalue that.”
“I can’t see who is going to disrupt the peace that they need to protect us from. It’s an exercise, against a hypothetical enemy! Just so they can show off their skills and intimidate us. We’ve never had any interest in fighting wars, and I think ISF can get a little carried away with how much protection we need from an invisible enemy that is yet to materialise. You’ve said this yourself. I don’t understand—”
“You can’t withhold access to the maintenance buildings that they have requested.”
“Why not? No one has moved in yet. It’s just a way to let us talk to the delegation. They want their sheds? Let us talk to the delegation. They can solve that in two seconds flat.”
“No.”
“But do we need to let them walk all over us?”
“Don’t worry, they will talk.”
“Do I then have to wait patiently like a good girl until they deign to allow Thalia to contact us?”
“At this point, yes. The four of them are deep into ISF territory, a place none of us have visited before. The force will be nervous. They may not want certain information to come out. They’re a military base.”
“And the military is just playing stupid with us. If they were serious about cooperation, they’d allow us to talk to the delegation and get on with it. It’s not as if they won’t talk about their visit when they come back, so unless they’ve witnessed something they shouldn’t have, I can’t see the point of not allowing them to talk to us.”
“There are many points. For one, they haven’t actually refused contact.”
“No, but they sure have stonewalled our attempts to contact them.”
“They may do this for the protection of the base. ISF itself is in turmoil, and most of us expect the section from the Outer System to break away from Earth. There are many security reasons that would sway their decision.”
“And now you’re taking their side!”
“I am not, I assure you. But ISF is an organisation that you do not want to anger. Despite my agreement with some of your points.”
“They were your points to start off with.”
“I have enough experience with these military types to know that they don’t compromise, they never apologise, and they never go back on their word. If they have it in their mind to have these armies in your warehouse, they will have them whether you give permission or not. They have also promised to guarantee the safety of our delegation. That promise is not taken lightly.”
“But why then did Preston make a show of coming to me and asking for permission?”
“Because this whole cooperation with the Council Of Four is only show. It is really the council of three and the fourth one is a little off to the side and doesn’t quite belong there. They don’t like when other people meddle in their affairs. They are a dangerous organisation pretending to be friendly. It’s never been any different.”
“But then what am I supposed to do? I have to bend over backwards for them, while they hold my friend hostage?”
“We can only wait. Believe me, it’s the best option. And meanwhile, attempt not to use hostile language, like hostage, because no one is being kept hostage until it is clear that they are. There may be many reasons why we haven’t heard from the delegation. There are none for you to go back on your word that they could use the sheds.”
Jaykadia signed off.
She slammed both hands on the table so loudl
y that Clarence came in to enquire if there was something she needed.
She was tempted to say, Yes, a drink. Or better still, Yes, a space ship so I can check on my friend.
What did this arrogant oaf of a Banparra think he was doing, withholding communication from a group of people who had come into the base under the banner of increased openness?
Thalia was a friend. What was the point of having friends if they didn’t come to your aid?
A little voice inside her said, You haven’t spoken for years.
True, but she had no other friends.
Being a company executive in a company full of older people, mostly men, was lonely and boring.
She had never had so much fun as she had with Kat and Thalia during her university years. Company people were grey-faced, mouse-like accountants. Prim and proper office workers, miners with big hands and oafy smiles who tapped their dirty hands to their helmets and said ma’am when she passed them in the hallways. Workers’ unions who invited her to come to their lunch breaks to ask them about things that frustrated them, and who then told her, very politely, about the computer system that had too much downtime and the room where the air was always too stuffy to work. Engineers who showed her plans and then went on to explain as if she were a toddler, forgetting that she was also an engineer.
She glanced up at the portrait of her father on the wall. His death had come as a shock.
People said his poor health had been made worse by the fact that she had nearly died in the accident and spent so long in hospital, forcing him to continue to work longer than he had planned.
But the truth was, she had a very different character than he did. When he walked into the room, people noticed. When she walked into a room, people had to be told to stand at attention.
She didn’t want that sort of relationship.
She wanted to walk into the worker’s suiting room and laugh with them. She wanted them to feel comfortable enough to tell her what they really thought, swear words and all. And now she was going to have to ask them to move all mining equipment outside and do their maintenance while wearing pressure suits.
She had already heard rumblings about it, but nobody dared protest, including herself.
It was ridiculous.
She had not become the youngest executive of a mining company ever to sit there and do exactly what the older people said. It could well be that her aunt was right, and it could be that she was wrong, but things had always been done in the way aunt said.
And maybe this was why there was such an uneasy situation, because nobody had ever been willing to stand up to the bully that was ISF, nobody had ever questioned the news releases that they gave, even though half the time they did not produce much evidence for anything they said. ISF had the equipment; they controlled what they saw and how it was interpreted.
And dammit, Thalia was her friend. She wasn’t going to sit here and wait while her friend was kept hostage.
Not only that, but ISF had also taken the freedom of another friend, Kat a few years ago.
She had not spoken to either of them for years, but that didn’t mean that they were not important to her.
She crossed the room to the door.
“I’m going out,” she said to Clarence, who gave her a surprised look. From the cupboard next to the door, she took a suit liner and pulled it over her clothes.
Several people gave her strange looks while she made her way from the office complex to the big hall where the residential section of the settlement met the industrial section.
The hall functioned as gateway between the offices, living areas and the mine. Workers could drop off their laundry, and grab fast food for breakfast or lunch.
Because Jaykadia had drawn the hood of the liner over her head, most people didn’t pay her any attention.
Via a set of double doors, she let herself into the worker’s suit-up area. One shift had just ended and the next shift was getting ready to go out, while the mining trucks were undergoing refuelling.
The sound of talk and laughter filled the room. The air smelled of oil, sweat and that special stuffy smell that often dominated poorly ventilated closed environments.
A man said, “Hey, there’s the boss!”
People looked, and moved aside for her, and more people looked, and a silence spread across the hall.
Jaykadia had to speak, because that’s what they expected, so she climbed onto one of the benches. “A few days ago, some of you received some communication that ISF has requested the use of our maintenance halls for a military exercise.”
A man in the audience said, “What?” and others hushed him.
“That was my reaction,” Jaykadia said. “But Vice Admiral Preston is a respected figure, and I assumed that he would not betray our trust.”
It had gone very quiet in the hall. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were on her.
“You may also be aware that the Council Of Four, led by my aunt, sent a delegation to Io. Their task was to investigate whether there is any truth to stories of the poor treatment of troops at Io, especially those who have been sent there as punitive measure. It seems that our delegation, currently at Calico Base on Io, is being prevented from communicating with us. So, on the one hand, the vice admiral expects us to comply and vacate the sheds, and on the other, he expects us to simply accept poor treatment of our delegation—”
Someone yelled, “He shouldn’t have the halls either!”
Jaykadia smiled. “I don’t know if I want to go that far, but it may be necessary. Meanwhile, I wanted all of you to know that the request to vacate the halls may be delayed while we sort this out, and that you shouldn’t be surprised if you do the work and then nothing happens for a while.”
Chapter 8
* * *
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Fabio didn’t see Thalia and the delegation again. At first, he didn’t worry. Then silence on the news services about the delegation got to him. There had been reports on the first day. Why had they stopped?
He wondered if the lack of reports about the visiting delegation meant anything or if he was getting paranoid. On second thoughts, he was probably already paranoid, so worrying about whether he was paranoid or not was likely a lost cause.
Meanwhile, more and more troops arrived in the section of the base where he was staying. They kept to themselves and didn’t speak to him other than giving him a polite greeting when meeting him in the corridor. He wondered what they were all doing here and tried to search for clues.
The arrival of new troops in this section of the base necessitated increased supplies, and one day when coming into the lift foyer, the sliding door on the other side was open, giving him a view of the train: a single cylinder-shaped carriage with doors that slid open. The space inside was big enough to stack two of the blue crates that were often used for shipping. Two people were unloading these crates.
A control panel to the side flashed, Departure in 14 minutes.
Interesting.
Fabio didn’t ask any questions.
He looked on the news every day, but there was nothing about the influx of troops either. He wanted to ask Doric about them, but he was sure it wouldn’t fit under his keep your head down order. For one, whenever extra troops were mentioned, she made it clear that she violently disagreed with their presence on the base, and she would disagree even more that overcrowding in the main base necessitated that they stayed at Research. Although she may well have volunteered one of the Research base’s empty corridors, because those corridors were easy to isolate and there would be no wayward soldiers talking to any of the regular base troops. Unless, of course, those troops were called Fabio Velasquez, who didn’t have a clue where he stood in this debate, but he cared about the COF delegates, because . . . because he did, damn it, and because lying to people and locking them up was something he could never stand.
Never mind it was the story of his life.
And he just happened to be good at opening doors.
&nbs
p; And because Thalia had said that the delegation would be here for a few weeks and he’d heard nothing since the first day, he thought that maybe he should check out how they were doing. The notion was rather strange to him. He’d not needed to care or look after anyone else since waking up from his surgery. Caring about someone was a human thing, and surely a sign that he was returning to normal, right?
So at night after his dinner had been brought, he had eaten and the tray had been picked up by his sullen minder, he left his cabin carrying a towel with the excuse to have a shower. He’d found that water allocations didn’t reset each day, so unless you wanted to shower for a few seconds every day, it was better to shower once every second day, because you had decent time to wash and shampoo your hair. And even rinse it out.
This wasn’t his shower day, but no one needed to know that. He was armed with his card and a small pocket tool that included the tiniest of screwdrivers, a tiny paint knife with a blunt tip and a bunch of worms on a datastick.
But as he walked through the corridor with the towel over his shoulder, the door at the far end opened and a large group of people came in. Mostly men, all of them wearing grey base overalls. Dirty overalls, with smudges of dust and stains of goodness-knows what. A couple carried environment suit liners over their arms.
They talked and laughed and took little notice of Fabio until they had reached the spot where he stood.
“Hey, new guy. Hurry up in the shower. All of us want to go in.”
“Yes, I’m on it.” Fabio walked quickly into the shower while all those people went into their rooms. The room next to his, the rooms opposite his, and a number of other rooms in the corridor. They left a smell of engine oil and sulphur in their wake.
What were these people doing during the time they were not in their rooms? His only guess was that they’d been in the field, possibly at the secret construction ISF was building on the other side of the base where he had seen the truck disappear behind the mountain ridge.