by Patty Jansen
Or maybe he was seeing things.
But his plan to try to see the delegation wasn’t going to work out today. With all these people here, he couldn’t pretend to walk in the wrong direction in order to see the delegation, not even while he was carrying a towel. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to Thalia anyway. Just checking they were all right, he guessed. Checking out that they hadn’t been locked in their room for all that time. On the other hand, the COF delegation definitely didn’t fit in the keep your head down section.
So he stood in the shower cubicle without turning the water on, rubbed his hair with the towel—which acquired a few smudges of grey dust—and left again. By now, there was a queue outside the door. People were talking and joking and laughing, but none of them spoke to Fabio, so he went to his room until a kitchen hand wearing an apron came to bring him dinner.
While the door was open, a group of people in clean base uniforms walked past, giving him strange who’s-that-geezer-that-he-requires-personal-service looks.
“When can I go up to the mess hall?” he asked the kitchen hand, not really sure if that was what he wanted. Meeting people seemed to draw him into situations that his superiors found undesirable.
The man said, “Not my decision. You’ll have to check with Doric.”
“I’ll do that, then.”
He took the tray inside and sat eating his dinner while watching some sort of stupid show, not really taking anything in, but mulling over the shards of his shattered memories and wondering where all the pieces went.
In the end, he couldn’t stand not knowing, so he rummaged in his desk drawer and found a few sheets of plasti-paper. He butchered a sheet into little pieces using the knife from the dinner tray—which was extremely blunt—and wrote events that he could remember on each piece.
A bird in the sky.
Lying on a treatment table in the hospital, likely on the interplanetary.
Driving through pink snow.
Working for Dayol mining and deciding to go to Mars to warn people.
Walking out of a corridor into a courtyard, wearing a pressure suit, while people without suits lay dead on the ground.
Talking to Sanchez.
He spread the pieces on the ground. The bird didn’t fit with the other pieces and he moved it aside. The rest seemed to be connected.
Sanchez was last. That had to be just before he went on the interplanetary, but he had no recollection of how or when he’d boarded.
That left the other three pieces.
Working for Dayol Mining seemed to be the start of the trouble, because that’s when he’d decided to go to Mars.
The snow—was that before or after the dead bodies? It could have been caused by the impact of an icy object with the planet, so likely the snow was after the dead bodies.
But why had he been out in the field driving around—
—With families and children in the back of the truck?—
—Who spoke a language he didn’t recognise—
—And who were mostly dark-skinned—
—And didn’t wear uniforms?
Those must have been the nomads he rescued.
He remembered arriving in a big hall and being locked out of a large section of Johnson Base because there was an event going on with many people in attendance.
On the other hand—he’d had little trouble getting the truck so that must have been when he went to visit the nomads. . . .
This was giving him a headache.
One major question remained: why did all of this make him a spy? And if so, what was he spying for?
*
Over the next few days, Fabio went over all of Major Doric’s datasets. He worked hard, and even remembered which programs to use and how to use them and how to interpret the results. Apparently the wipe job had been less blunt than he’d assumed.
After three days, he’d identified a few possible chunks of ice. He went to see Major Doric with his conclusions. She sat quietly, nodding while he pointed out the possible comet candidates for capture and diversion. He hadn’t done costings yet, but she didn’t seem too concerned about it. One unnamed comet was fairly close, but not moving very fast. Another was further out. Yet another would need a huge correction to bring it into the right orbit but it would move quite fast.
“I think it is time to start discussing this with possible mining corporations. I presume you will not be using any located in the Jovian system.”
She nodded. “We have people on standby.”
“From Ceres?” He wondered if Dayol Mining had regular contracts for the Space Force bases.
She shook her head. “These are people from the Saturnian system.”
“You’ll probably only need a contractor for one comet. That should keep you happy for a while.”
“I want you to calculate arrival times, costings and yield of all elements for all three.”
“So that you can make a choice?”
“No. All three.”
Fabio frowned. “You don’t need that much water. Your population is small and the bases are closed systems. It would be a waste of time and money to—”
“I want you to do costings and yields for all three.” There was an edge to her voice.
“Understood, ma’am.”
Fabio went back to work. It seemed Thalia had been right about her suspicions and there was indeed something else going on at the base.
Those trucks he’d seen vanish over the horizon might contain machinery that might need cooling, or turbines that used steam power, or they might be for hydrogen fuel production. Or something else that couldn’t see the light of day, and they had placed this installation at the only point where satellites couldn’t easily see: directly at the subjovian point, where Jupiter’s radiation glare interfered too much with equipment. Where satellites didn’t orbit for that reason.
Fabio continued to work, hunched over his screen. He was developing a headache and his lips were raw from the incredibly dry air. He also had this feeling that he was losing hair because every time the screen went black he could see hair stuck on it by static electricity, never mind that he wiped it clean every time. He rubbed his hand through his hair, and studied his palm, but all those hairs seemed firmly attached. Then he rubbed his face, but he’d shaved this morning, and his beard was not really worth mentioning anyway. Then his arms, and he dislodged a couple of the longer hairs from the back of his forearms.
What the. . . ?
He pulled at the hairs. A small bundle of them came loose. Well, that was really strange—
“I take it that you’re Lt. Velazquez?”
Fabio jumped. He hadn’t heard the man come up behind him. Worse, the man was not alone. He’d come with two companions, and while the man, whose badge said Zanetti, looked like an officer in a senior position, the other two looked like thugs.
“It’s about your medical.”
Crap. The small cocoon of safety he had built around him in the last few days broke apart. The big black hole in his mind opened up, sucking him into a vortex of panic that constricted his chest. “What about it?”
“Hansen needs to see you.”
“I’m very busy here,” he managed to say. His mouth was dry. “I thought you were from different divisions.”
“I’ve spoken to Hansen, and he has asked that you see him. You are going and that is an order.”
Thalia
* * *
TIME WAS ENDLESS if you couldn’t see daylight and if you were cooped up in a small apartment with three people you didn’t particularly like.
Three days went past, in which the delegation didn’t leave the apartment and had no contact with anyone in a senior position.
By the end of those three days, Thalia was just as livid as Paul.
The command sent a message and gave as excuse that the group was in quarantine, and it needed to be established that they did not bring diseases into the base.
“When that guy came and let us out,
we should have run,” Sol said, his voice dark.
Thalia agreed, although she had no idea where they could have run to.
Prometheus was a long way away, and it was also a military base. None of them were pilots, so they couldn’t “borrow” any of the shuttles. And they had no contact off-planet, so they couldn’t warn anyone from outside.
“But why do they treat us like this?” Sol asked. “Why allow us to come all this way and then not allow us to do what we’ve come to do?”
“It’s still about that medicine, isn’t it?” Jun said.
“It’s about my wife,” Paul said.
Sol shook his head. “I think it’s more political. Something has happened in the council and we don’t even know what it is. We probably won’t know until we get home.”
Thalia said, “We might as well go home. Why haven’t they put us on a ship already? If they don’t want us here, why keep us here?”
But ultimately, no one had an answer, much as Jun thought it was because of his medicines and Paul thought it was about his wife, Kat, who had been one of Thalia’s friends when they all hung out together.
Thalia replied to the base command’s message asking that, since they were not welcome at the base and all meetings have been cancelled they should be sent home.
There was nothing to do while waiting for the reply.
It now made sense that the door had been locked. It remained locked except when the private came to deliver food.
Paul and Jun got into devising plans to overwhelm the man and run out.
“But we don’t have access to the main base, we need a truck, and access to the shuttles is only via the main base. We couldn’t get in there without being noticed.”
They were only jokes, but Thalia couldn’t help but consider these plans more seriously.
Moreover, she couldn’t imagine that the Council Of Four would keep quiet about this incident. Governor Law was not someone who would take no for an answer and she would demand, not impolitely but insistently, that she’d be told about the issues that kept the delegation here. Even if the group themselves never got to hear this. She would also not stand for the continued detention.
But there was nothing to do except wait. There was no reply from Base Command about being allowed to leave. What was more, a lot of the information channels were cut off. Jun could no longer access the outside cameras. The news also cut off halfway through the day, and there was nothing left to do except sleep and annoy each other.
And damn it, Paul had changed so much. He’d gotten old and cranky and complained about everything. She told him, minus the old and cranky part.
“No, it’s you who have changed. All three of you, since you had that accident. You were constantly in each other’s pockets. After you came out of the hospital, there was none of that. It was all about making your own career.”
“Well, nearly dying in an accident gives you a perspective on life.”
But in a way he was right. That trip in the truck outside Ganymede City had been the pinnacle of their friendship and things had never been the same since. Jaykadia had felt responsible because she had been driving the truck. Kat got all funny about her military career. Of course she was in the military before—that’s what her family did—but she had been talking about finding a job elsewhere because she was unhappy with the way people were treated and with some of the opinions of senior officers. And all of a sudden she just turned around and re-signed for a long-term contract. After she got married.
Thalia had got into political life, because she felt compelled to do so. All the ideas they’d talked about as friends had gone out the window as both Kat and Jaykadia did exactly what their families wanted them to do.
Someone made a sound at the door to the apartment.
Everyone looked at the door. It was not time for dinner yet.
The light on the panel flashed and a moment later the door opened, letting in an officer who Thalia had never seen before.
He turned to her. “Come with me please.”
Were they finally being released from this prison?
“Do we need to bring our bags?” Thalia asked. Oh, the hope of being let out of this prison was so high.
“No. Just you.”
“What about—”
“I can’t answer any questions. I have my orders to bring you. Leave your stuff here.”
“What for? We’re all part of the delegation.”
“I can’t answer that.”
Thalia had no choice. She didn’t like this one bit, but she was sure that if she made a fuss, there would be even more trouble. She told herself that most likely the officer hadn’t been told why she needed to come, because that was not his job.
She got her jacket—because it was cold in some of the rooms—and followed the man out the door.
The last person in the delegation she saw was Sol, and his eyes met hers before the door slid shut again. He gave a tiny nod.
The officer took her to the end of the corridor, up the lift to the access point of this part of the base. Via an access tube they went into a truck.
Thalia asked questions, but the officer did not respond with more than no or yes.
Yes, they were going to the main base.
No, the officer did not know exactly what it was about.
No, it had nothing to do with the Council Of Four.
Yes, there was some sort of problem with the information that they had entered on their entry forms.
Yes, that concerned only her, and not the rest of the team.
She wondered why they had made such a fuss over Jun’s medicines. That issue still hadn’t been resolved.
The officer did not know whether, when she answered all the questions, they would be allowed to leave. “That is not for me to say. The base command will make a decision about that.”
“But you do realise that all of this looks really bad in the eyes of all the people, especially those of the Council Of Four, who are watching every step of our visit here?”
“I am just following my orders.”
And so it went on for most of the journey. By the time they got to the yellow plain, she had become sick of it.
They sat in uneasy silence while he drove the truck, getting closer and closer to the copper domes of the base.
Once they were inside, a couple of different officers were waiting just inside the airlock. They took over from her minder.
They took her down a low-ceilinged corridor into another part of the base.
It seemed to be part of the hospital. From what she understood, newly arriving troops had to come here to have blood samples taken, and have themselves cleared of disease.
The four of them had undertaken this procedure while still at Ganymede. Maybe there was a problem with communication?
But she also remembered the red flashing screen when she came in. What did that mean?
Thalia was told to sit on a row of hard plastic chairs inside a room that was full of bandages and shelves full of equipment. There was a treatment table in the room, and a few monitors and other things that looked far too familiar stood at the end of the table.
Not long after she had sat down, a man in medical scrubs arrived. The tag on the shirt said Hansen.
“Get on the table, please,” he said. He did not look at her or take any kind of other interest in her.
“Can I ask why I’m here?”
“We need to do some tests.”
Well, duh. “I had all those tests done before I left. Was there anything wrong with them?”
There was that niggle in her mind.
After the accident, she had spent far too much time in hospital and knew far too much of the things they did there. This sort of uneasy silence by medical officers was never a good sign.
There was nothing wrong with her, was there? On the other hand why would the military care about her health? They certainly wouldn’t test her for any of the diseases that came with having been knocked out and havi
ng had to take vast quantities of radiation medicine. She had already been tested for infectious diseases. What else was there to test?
But Hansen seemed impatient, so she could do nothing else except the thing he asked her. The four of them had no power here, even less now that they were separated, and it was stupid to let herself be separated, but again she could do nothing about it. The Council Of Four had no jurisdiction in the military bases; civilian laws did not apply.
Once she had taken off her shoes and climbed onto the treatment table, Hansen rolled a piece of scanning equipment next to the table. He slotted a couple of bendable strips into the rails on the side of the table so that she lay in a tunnel.
Memories came back to her.
In the hospital there had been an elderly female doctor called Dr Crawford. She had white elfin hair that she wore in a bun at the back of her head. She was tall, slightly stooped and very thin. Her hands, like spiders, would deftly poke and prod and insert needles and drips.
It had been through her that Thalia had survived the accident at all, but every time she saw the doctor, a deep fear crept over her, because every time the doctor spoke to her, she mentioned some other part of Thalia’s body that had been damaged, or another painful treatment that would be necessary.
It was only because of Dr Crawford that she was still alive and not needing to use a wheelchair. It was only because of Dr Crawford that she had any kind of career at all. Without the doctor, she would have lived as a vegetable in one of the homes where, sadly, so many of the mineworkers ended up as result of terrible accidents.
Hansen used the scanner that rolled over the arches over her body.
An image appeared on the screen next to her. It showed all the parts of the body, and a network of bright white lines expanded continuously.
“What are those?” she asked.
“These are your blood vessels.”
Thalia didn’t understand. Why should they show up like that? Normally you would have to drink some sort of fluid in order for organs show up like that on a scan.