Juno Rising (ISF-Allion)

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Juno Rising (ISF-Allion) Page 15

by Patty Jansen


  “I don’t record anything. I am not a traitor, sir. I don’t know what I did, but I would not betray my comrades.” Of that, he was certain. He saw a couple of men sitting on a bench opposite him. They were in the cabin on a truck which bounced over rough terrain. He had to hold onto loops hanging from the ceiling. The other men—were they colleagues?—looked familiar but he couldn’t remember their names. Or what they were doing there. Or where they were. But they had been friends. Fabio did not hurt friends.

  “So you did not fail to listen to your commander’s orders when he told you to stay away from the plains settlements north of Johnson on Mars?”

  “I don’t know if I did, sir.” He did remember the man in uniform, before he absconded from Dayol Mining. Had he been a military spy working at Dayol?

  “You did not visit the ISF’s base at Johnson under a fabricated reason? You did not tell lies about your plans for the next day even though it was base policy to always fill in a book of intended movements?” His eyes were penetrating.

  “I don’t remember, sir.”

  “You did not drive off in the middle of a snowstorm, and disconnect the beacon of your truck so that the base could no longer track you?”

  The snowstorm. He remembered that. And with it came another memory: the inflatable dome of a settlement tent loomed ahead, the plastic cover being whipped and groaning under the snow. It wouldn’t be long before the thing collapsed and was dragged away by the wind. Several trucks had already detached from the structure. People in overalls were trying to undo the coupling to the access tube. A couple of faces showed behind the truck’s fogged window. Children’s faces.

  “Get out,” he screamed even though they could never hear him yelling inside his suit. “Get out, before the tent blows away!” Even if they could, they probably couldn’t understand him. In all these settlements people spoke in an ancient dialect.

  He said to Banparra, “There were children’s lives at risk.”

  “So you do remember.”

  “Bits of it.” But as he said that, other things came back: ISF had wanted to free up water resources on Mars. There were huge frozen reservoirs underground. Mars was low on nitrogen. They had directed a nitrogen-rich comet at the ice caps of Mars’ north pole.

  But the ice on Mars was always mixed with carbon dioxide. The geologists called it clathrate. A more apt term was soda water. When it melted suddenly, it would blow and snow out; they knew that. They did not warn the nearby settlements.

  The reservoir’s spout turned into a massive snowstorm, and he had gone out to rescue the settlers. Against orders. Yes, they were Allion supporters, but they were civilians and had nothing to do with the conflict that was going on between ISF and Allion.

  He met Banparra’s eyes and said slowly, “The only thing I did was try to save civilians who were in the way of the water when it would come out.”

  “You had orders.”

  “They were civilians, who had prospected the desert for at least two generations.” He saw the wizened faces, the people towering over him. He must have gotten some of them to safety.

  “Those people were dangerous rebels, hiding themselves amongst civilians like the cowards they are. Most of your so-called civilians were aggregates anyway. Not people.”

  He remembered aggregates, those people who had bones of steel and hardened polymers, whose skin doubled as pressure suit. Yes, those people who’d been fixing the trucks didn’t wear suits. On Mars.

  “You went into their hideouts. They could have read your implants. These were Allion people. What the fuck were you thinking, Velazquez?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “There’s not much point in asking him, sir.” Hansen said. “They’ve taken out his implant and fried him. He won’t recover those memories—ever.”

  “Who has them?”

  “Headquarters, I presume.”

  Banparra snorted. “And what else have they put inside his head so that he can pull the same trick with us?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  Hansen pressed a button on the control screen in the back of the cupboard.

  Fabio sensed the current going through a split second before everything in his vision turned white. A sharp jolt of pain went through his head.

  He might have screamed, his body may have turned rigid or may have convulsed—he didn’t know. He was carried on a maelstrom of pain. The room vanished before him, and he was . . . nowhere.

  “Careful, he’s no use to us dead.”

  Hansen slid the dial back and the feeling eased a bit. Fabio managed a moan.

  Lines danced over the monitor’s screen and an image of a human head appeared.

  Banparra said something but Fabio didn’t understand any of it.

  For what seemed like an eternity, he lay stiff and motionless on the examination table. Then Hansen flicked the machine off and the stiffness disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  Hansen yanked the sticky pads off his back. The plaster pulled at his skin hard enough to leave a mark, but it was nothing compared to the pain of the electric current.

  “Get dressed,” Hansen said.

  Fabio clambered stiffly off the examination table. His legs were still shaky and he wasn’t certain that they would support him enough to let go of the edge of the table. He put on his shirt with trembling hands, half-leaning against the table.

  Banparra and Hansen were looking at the monitor. Rows of text scrolled over the screen. Mindbase files. Fabio had seen them often enough.

  Where, though?

  And another piece of the puzzle fell into his mind.

  He’d been in a room with a lot of workstations. He’d been sitting in a wheelchair and there was something heavy and itchy on his head, like he was wearing an inside-out pincushion on his head.

  Two technicians were pointing at the screen and talking in low voices about things to remove and add, occasionally casting a glance in his direction. As if they were talking about a computer they were programming rather than a human being.

  Where did that piece go in the scheme of things? After he’d seen Sanchez?

  “Doesn’t look like there is anything unnatural here,” Hansen said.

  “They wiped me,” Fabio said more to himself than anyone else.

  “We’ll be the judge of that.” His voice carried a shut-up tone.

  “What are we going to do with you?” Banparra said, stroking his chin. “I don’t want you on my base. They may say that you’ve been treated, but I don’t believe anything Headquarters says, especially not when it’s part of something they send to my base without my asking—”

  The door to the room opened, and a woman’s voice said, “What the hell are you doing with my employee?”

  Katarina Doric.

  The Watcher

  * * *

  “YOU SEE, TAURA, ISF doesn’t know how to use nanometrics,” Vega said.

  She was standing in front of the window overlooking the white cloud tops. Jupiter’s distinctive patterns were only visible from a great distance. When you were as close as the orbiting base, all the clouds were white, misty and fluffy.

  “They try mechanical things. Sure, you can charge them and they will hold information. Oh, the wonder! Turn a person into a data storage device. But the long-term retention rate is rubbish because the particles move in the bloodstream, even if they don’t always move much. But as soon as they move, they interfere with each other and mess up the memories. You can make nanometrics release chemicals. Oh, the wonder! You can change their mood, their nature, their eye colour, even their gender. You have created the perfect spy. Except the molecules move, and they interact, and the spy is loyal only to one thing: survival of the human species. People with nanometrics make for really bad spies but very good ethical workers. They will always stand up for the oppressed.”

  “That doesn’t help us get the guy.”

  “No, I understand that you want to use engineering and bru
te force.”

  “Well, we only have one chance, and time is short. We need those codes.”

  “Sure, but once we give away our position, we need to be ready to abandon the base.”

  It was still astonishing that years after Mars, Juno Station remained undiscovered. Nobody knew that it was even possible to live on the tops of the clouds of Jupiter. Only Allion’s wellships, the Thor series and the Morgana, which had sadly been lost to ISF, could ever go down to the outer layers of the planet—to harvest Helium—and Juno had been a small unknown harvesting station before becoming the refuge of the Allion people who could reach it and who had survived the great purging. Sheltered by Jupiter’s immense radiation and the fact that no one thought to look for the base, it sat in low orbit and scooted over the cloud tops at a crazy speed. But they were also located right next to the most militarised zone of the system, and once someone knew it was there, the bases on Io would have no issue or problem taking them down.

  They had one chance, and by that time, the population of Juno, numbering fifteen thousand, had to be elsewhere.

  Taura understood that, for sure, but it did not dampen her impatience. “So, is this nano-stuff getting to any kind of point soon?”

  “Yes, because with nanotech is how we’re going to get our target. I know you’re keen to fly missions and use weapons, but I think we’ll get plenty of opportunity for that later.”

  “We’re just sitting here and doing nothing!” She spread her hands and turned away from the window. “I can’t stand this airy-fairy stuff anymore. I want proof that something is happening.”

  “It is. ISF have captured the delegation because of some technicality. They’re getting angry because they get no responses to their questions. Our man is going to feel some kind of kinship with them. He spoke to them before, and even if one of the mindshards put him in a difficult spot, he will feel responsible for getting them out of their confinement.”

  “I’m glad you’re so sure.”

  “I am, because that is what he does, and has done, repeatedly. He’s a chameleon. In ISF’s eyes, he’s broken, but they don’t understand that in a situation where he hears about something unfair, he will always choose the underdog. That’s how he first got into contact with Priya and presumably why she trusted him enough to carry the information. He had no personal need to come to the ice fields north of Johnson to warn our communities that ISF was about to drop an asteroid into their home. And it’s that ability we’ll use.”

  “Seems like a very risky way of doing it, seeing that all we need is the implant that’s about this big.” Taura held her thumb and index finger a finger’s width apart. “So, what, he’s going to bust his own backside out of there, because he feels compelled to free these people he doesn’t even know—”

  “—Two of whom are my mindshards.”

  “That may be, but you can’t communicate with them. How do you know they will be happy to go along with this crazy character? They’re not our people at all.”

  “Trust me. They’re Laura Crawford’s. She knew what she was doing. All of them already exhibit clear signs that they’re not happy and that they know vile and unsavoury things were done and continue to be done in the name of eradicating us.”

  “That doesn’t make them allies.”

  “No, but it makes them good spokespeople. They will get themselves to a position where we can pick them up unobtrusively, without having to use weapons or give away our position. We will get our prisoner and release the mindshards back into their community. They will help further our cause and they won’t even realise they’re doing it.”

  “I hope you’re right. That implant is worth more than all our lives put together.” Taura went to the door and left.

  Vega let her gaze slide over the room and the sections of the outside of the station visible through the window. She thought she was right. She hoped she was right. To consider the alternative—that ISF had suddenly developed far superior technology—was unthinkable.

  The whole operation was dicey enough. Things could go wrong so very, very quickly.

  Back in the time of the Johnson disaster, Allion had been a major force in the solar system’s space settlement. They, after all, had been the first to put a person on Mars. They had been the first to use space stations extensively.

  But ISF had been unhappy about the situation, and they had been catching up, because they could not let a company—and an egalitarian company at that—comprised of mostly women from developing countries run the show in space exploration.

  The conference at Johnson on Mars had been about sharing precious resources. ISF argued that space was a resource that belonged to all people and could not be commercially settled.

  Allion argued that they put the effort into developing the technology and therefore they should reap the greatest benefits.

  But in reality they needed each other. The environment was hostile. Doubling up on technology served no one.

  At least that was the core premise for the meeting.

  ISF had not come to talk.

  They might be represented by all countries—all rich western countries at that—but they were a military organisation.

  They simply wanted control over the bases, so that the governments of the countries on earth could exert their usual control over the populations of the poor who made up most of Allion’s workforce.

  Of course no one ever put the events on Mars in those terms. There were as many interpretations of what had happened as there were people.

  Surprisingly few things were commonly accepted knowledge:

  There had been a meeting at which Allion and ISF delegations were present.

  There was disagreement about the purpose of this meeting. Some said it had been merely a meeting of scientific minds for the exchange of information, some said Allion was desperate and asked for help because they had trouble with their settlements. Others said that it was the other way around. Others still said it was to lay a framework for what would be acceptable experimentation with humans. ISF objected to Allion’s aggregates—people with partially mechanical bodies—even if they had since started a similar program.

  Everyone agreed that there was tension at the meeting between the two factions. It was the first time either had met in official capacity—the ISF had always acted as if a lean and agile company consisting of mostly women from developing countries could not do serious science, especially not those who bought fifty-year old space junk after the decommissioning of old—and often failed—projects.

  But it had been Allion who had not been afraid or hamstrung by governments and regulations to turn this old junk into something amazing, like a ship that took the first person—a woman named Chandra Lee—to the surface of Mars.

  Allion’s scientists, trained by venerable universities but from poor countries, had nothing to lose. Cutbacks to immigration meant that they couldn’t keep working in the countries that had trained them, and their home countries were too poor to support research that they had trained to perform.

  They had nothing to lose.

  Too western to work in their home countries, or as refugees without families, or women unable to work in oppressive regimes, they’d been happy for the chance to go into space. They’d given their lives to the cause.

  Of course they moved much faster than the behemoth of government-funded space exploration.

  But ISF didn’t like it.

  Under the guise of holding a conference on the future of joint bases of Mars, they had visited and infiltrated the Allion communities. People had been too forgiving and naive. And there was the curiosity. The only men that a lot of these women knew were the aggregates, and they weren’t really men in the usual sense of the word.

  What had happened during this historic gathering?

  The only thing that people agreed on was that there had been a catastrophic breach of the dome, resulting in the deaths of thousands.

  Also that the small asteroid that hit near Johns
on had not impacted the dome, even if some reports said it had. Despite large numbers of survivors, no one knew why the dome had failed. It could have been through earth movement caused by the asteroid impact, or because the dome was not designed to be covered in the weight of snow, or because of more sinister reasons.

  In any case, having blamed Allion for the failure, ISF searched out and destroyed all Allion bases and killed all Allion members that they could find until Allion was officially dead.

  Except for Juno Station, the one that no one knew about.

  Nobody knew that Allion had survived. They had one chance to make a big impact, but they absolutely needed to save that chance for later.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  BANPARRA’S FACE WENT DARK. In one step he was at the door and shouted in her face, “What are you doing in my base?”

  She didn’t flinch. “What are you doing with my employee?” Her voice was soft and menacing.

  Banparra’s nostrils flared. “That amounts to disobedience of a superior officer. I’m reporting this to Preston’s office.”

  Doric glared at him. “Good luck with that. You need me.”

  That was amazing. Disobedience of orders from a superior was no laughing matter. And he outranked her in every way. Even if he hadn’t, the fact that he was Base Commander would have made it so. She was acting in a way that was utterly stupid, and even Fabio could see that. What was wrong with her?

 

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