Juno Rising (ISF-Allion)

by Patty Jansen

  “I can’t answer that either.”

  “Can’t you? This is an exercise, right? Exercises go on for a limited time. I only want to know when I can have my maintenance halls back.”

  “I’m afraid you will have to ask Preston.”

  Jaykadia was not going to get any answers from him.

  On their way back through the access tube, she asked, “Did you see how that woman hit the screen when she knew that we were looking.”

  “I did,” Haigh said.

  “What were they looking at?”

  “Some sort of approaching ship, my guess.”

  A cold feeling went over her. “This is an exercise, right?”

  But he couldn’t answer that.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  ONCE DORIC WAS GONE, Hansen tossed Fabio his clothes.

  Banparra said, “Take him and his sorry arse back to his dungeon and lock the door. I don’t want to see his creepy face here anymore.”

  Hansen jerked his head at the door. Fabio awkwardly jammed his feet into his shoes and half-stumbled after him into the corridor. As he passed Banparra, the man grabbed him by the front of his shirt.

  “Keep your nose out of base politics.” From close up, his skin was uneven and pockmarked with acne scars. “I don’t like you, Velazquez. I don’t like the sneaky look of you and I don’t like your file, or the girly, poofy look on your face. You’re a dishonest, creepy guy and the sooner I have you off the base, the better.”

  He released his grip suddenly, making Fabio stumble. Hansen steadied him with a hand whose fingernails bit into the soft skin on the underside of his arm.

  He dragged Fabio along the corridor, muttering, “Arsehole.”

  Fabio was feeling weak all of a sudden. He badly needed to pee.

  Hansen’s fingertips trailed over Fabio’s upper arm, where a bruised spot marked the place of the implant under his skin. “What do you have here?”

  “Don’t know,” Fabio said, but his voice came out as a croak.

  He pinched the skin. “Too small to be a transmitter. In the wrong place to be a memory implant. It could be a tracking device. Who put it there?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.” He was exhausted and felt closer to tears than he dared admit.

  “There is far too much that you conveniently don’t know. Don’t think you’re off the hook now. We’re going to subject you to a full investigation. Wait, we’ll go back. I’ll cut this thing out.” He pulled Fabio back to the treatment room.

  “I don’t know anything. They wiped me.”

  A deep fear took hold of him. In the last few days, he had started to remember more and more things, and, to be honest, they did not look good for ISF. Failing to warn civilians of a major impact, failing to care for the lives of nomadic communities, sweeping under the carpet that they had—

  He was back in the collapsed dome inside Johnson base on Mars. A couple of armed men burst out of a door on the opposite side of the hall, wearing masks and full pressure suits, shooting at civilians, shooting at the transparent cover of the dome. Cracks grew across the sky.

  Well, damn. Had he actually seen that?

  Soldiers had killed those people and caused dome failure?

  “Can we stop here for a moment?” He motioned his head at the bathroom they had just passed.

  “What—oh. Better be quick.” Hansen released his arm.

  Fabio pushed the door open and stumbled into the cubicle, but once he was there he found that needing to pee was not the same as actually being able to do it. Not in the stiffened state his muscles were in.

  He ran his hand over his upper arm, where the tiny implant still itched under the skin. What was in it? How would it give him away? If it was a tracker, would it have told Banparra where he had been on his first night here?

  It was important, he knew.

  He had no idea how it had evaded his earlier scan.

  He pinched the skin at the spot where the implant sat. There was only one option: he would have to get rid of it. He scratched at the skin, feeling the bump, which was fairly shallow, just underneath the skin. If he had a knife or something, he could cut it out. But he had no knife.

  The bathroom was sterile and held only wet wipes in a dispenser—which had no parts that could be removed—and the usual toilet things. Not even a cleaning brush.

  His pockets were empty. Hansen had removed his belt, and his shoes had no buckles. He pulled out the small washbasin, but there was nothing that came off or unscrewed. In between looking for something, he squeezed the bump like a massive pimple. If he squeezed hard enough, the lump showed up as a bit of white. It moved under the skin. If he could just cut it, the thing would come out by itself.

  Damn, he didn’t have anything sharp.

  He could just reach it . . . with his teeth. He bent down and clamped the fold of skin between his front teeth. It hurt like hell but left only red teeth-shaped marks on the skin.

  There was no way he could do this. Those stories of people cutting their arms and doctors operating on themselves were all bullshit. No one could do that.

  There was a knock on the door. “Are you all right in there?” Hansen.

  He leaned against the wall, staring at the ceiling. Sweat collected on his upper lip.

  He had to do this.

  Damn.

  He bent his head and clamped the skin between his teeth. He bit as hard as he could.

  Damn it hurt and it was not easy. He pulled at the skin, chewing and biting.

  His mouth filled with blood. The tiny implant lay on his tongue. He spat it out in his hand, a little white thing.

  A wave of dizziness overwhelmed him. Damn, he was going to spew.

  He leaned against the cubicle door, looking up at the ceiling. A ceiling vent blew cold air onto his skin.

  There was no point. He was caught like a rabbit in a trap. Hansen knew that he had the implant; there was nowhere to hide it. If he swallowed it, they would wait until it came out either end. If he flushed it down the toilet, they would find it in the tanks. They would see, and record, everything that happened to him. He should have taken it out when he first noticed it. He should have . . .

  There was no point in doing any of this.

  He pulled a tissue out of the dispenser and wiped his face.

  That ceiling vent was really quite big. He wondered if he could fit—

  Voices in the corridor. Hansen was talking to a man in the corridor and their voices were clearly audible through the thin walls of the cubicle.

  “I’m not sure, but one reason could be that he has defensive nanometrics. I know that’s no longer done, because of health problems, but we’re dealing with a less-than-normal person. He’s a chameleon, and a very successful one at that. For one, how has he managed to enter this top-level security facility while his identity doesn’t check out? Yes, it does, as far back as two years ago. He only joined us two years ago, and there is no record of Fabio Velazquez before that.”

  Fabio climbed onto the toilet bowl, but he couldn’t reach the ceiling. He stepped onto the paper holder—

  —Crack!

  The whole thing broke off the wall, spreading tissue paper everywhere. Fabio just managed to stop himself falling into the toilet bowl.

  He listened, heart thudding.

  The men in the corridor continued to talk. “Anyway, here is a list of known identities that he’s used. It’s far from complete. I’d be extremely careful of him, because one of his nicknames is ‘Escape Artist’.”

  “I guess we know about that already. Do you think the amnesia is genuine?”

  “Yes, I do. If the special branch got hold of him—and they have—they would have pretty much tried to destroy him without killing him—oh, for fuck’s sake, what’s the idiot doing?”

  The door to the bathrooms flung open.

  “Velazquez, come out!”

  Shit.

  Fabio grabbed a handful of tissue paper from the floor
and wiped his bleeding arm. He succeeded in smearing blood over his skin. He licked the palm of his hand and tried to wash the blood off that way.

  “Hurry up!”

  The cubicle door rattled.

  What was he going to do with the implant? In his pocket? No, Hansen would find it.

  Nothing for it. He put it in his mouth and swallowed.

  Then he pulled on his shirt—damn, there was blood on it—and opened the door.

  One look, and Hansen’s face turned to thunder. “Fuck it, what have you done, idiot?”

  He yanked Fabio by his arm. Saw the raw and bleeding wound.

  “You fucking schlemiel! Where is it?”

  Fabio nodded at the toilet door.

  Hansen walked in—

  And Fabio yanked himself loose, slammed the door of the cubicle shut and ran out of the bathroom, into the corridor. He turned right, because that gave him the longest clear run and he ran faster than he had imagined he could. Hansen yelled behind him, “Stop him! Stop him!”

  Fabio turned a corner into a stairwell. He went up, taking the steps two at a time. He came out into another corridor, with a lower ceiling.

  Someone came up into the stairwell behind him. He ran to the left. As suspected, there was another toilet block. This one was much bigger, with toilets and showers. He went in and shut himself into a cubicle. As with the one downstairs, there were vents in the ceiling, and because the ceiling was much lower, he could reach it when he stood on the toilet’s flush box. He pulled the grate out. The vent went up for a very short distance and then turned horizontal. He put the grate sideways against the wall, and then inserted his hands into the opening to heave himself up. Wow, there was a lot of space up there.

  No, wait. He unlocked the door to the cubicle.

  He pulled himself up into the hole, wormed around so his head faced the opening, leaned back out, grabbed the grate and pulled it in position again.

  He waited, calming his breath.

  The door to the bathroom opened. Someone came in.

  “No, not in here either,” he said.

  Fabio didn’t recognise the voice. Shit. He’d left a drop of blood on the floor and a smear on the wall.

  The man went around the entire room, banging open all the cubicles, but he didn’t notice the drop or the smear and left again. Phew.

  He waited, listening to the sounds from elsewhere in the base. Yelling. Footsteps. People going up and down the stairs. The light in the bathroom flicked off.

  Fabio lay quietly, waiting for the noise to die down. It was so dark that he couldn’t see anything except purple blotches dancing in his vision.

  He still needed to pee.

  Katarina

  * * *

  KATARINA HAD TO GET OUT of Calico.

  Following months of frustration in her work, when repeated requests for assistance were ignored, problems were coming to a head.

  After that ridiculous episode suggesting that she had nanometrics, they had taken her back to Research. In her position, with her rank, they couldn’t reprimand her more severely than that without a proper process, and they knew it. People were watching her, from both sides. They knew she was loyal to the Sarajevo ideal: that ISF’s function was to facilitate human exploration and settlement, not dictate it. Definitely not kill off anyone they didn’t like. The Outer System Division knew it was on notice. Improve your record of treating your staff or feel the consequences. Space was big, but other people had survived Mars and knew something fishy was going on, and together they could piece all the events into a coherent picture that wouldn’t look good for ISF at all.

  That they planned to slam an asteroid into the north pole of Mars. That happened quite regularly, but in this case, none of the civilian people were warned, and what was worse, they even suggested a nearby dome as venue for a peace meeting. Why had ISF sent no real heavyweights to the meeting?

  Because they intended to kill off everyone who came to it under the guise of an accident. Because some small-minded people high in command of the Outer System Division couldn’t stand to be dependent on a commercial company that they didn’t control and didn’t understand.

  And now they tried to silence everyone who took small steps to unmask their true nature.

  Katarina felt torn inside. She loved the force. But it had to eradicate this cancer. Many people here didn’t agree with Preston’s actions either, or they refused to see his nature, because acknowledging it would upset the entire world that they loved.

  Katarina fiercely wanted to believe that ISF was a good organisation, but her belief had been shaken badly by this crowd here.

  Velazquez was a sad case, his mind broken and utterly destroyed by his superiors. Thalia and Paul were another case that she was powerless to influence. They were still locked up as far as Katarina knew. Probably for a similar transgression.

  Nanometrics, ha.

  It was just an excuse to lock out people they didn’t like.

  But how could she get out of the base, preferably with Thalia and the delegation, and with the poor sod Velazquez—before he revealed irretrievably bad secrets to people who shouldn’t know those secrets.

  And with Paul.

  Silly, grumpy, utterly loyal, loveable Paul.

  Wasn’t that just like him, to wriggle his way into this delegation so that he could rescue her. The sheer pig-mindedness of him. He refused to believe that she was gone, refused to think that she might have abandoned him, refused to give up.

  Her eyes misted over. They had spent far too little of the time they’d been married together.

  She got up from her desk and paced around her room.

  And yes, it was a much bigger room than other people had, a fact which had lulled her into feeling positive about base command.

  But Banparra was just toying with people. He’d invited the delegation with the aim of neutering that line of investigation. Throw up a lot of bureaucratic obstacles as excuse for delays, and stretch the delays as long as possible while diverting attention from something else—like this exercise that was filling up the base. The exercise that was the reason for her position here, the reason that extra ice had to be imported. But he afforded her no assistants so that she had become stressed out and only focused on her job to the point of excluding everything else, including her ability to think critically.

  Nanometrics. Ridiculous.

  She paced and paced around.

  How to get out of this place without triggering suspicion?

  How to contact Sanchez about this upcoming “exercise” that, evidently, Sarajevo knew little about.

  How to let the COF assembly know that ISF was using the Io bases as a honey pot to trap critics—and maybe to repeat Mars?

  That thought chilled her.

  She had not actually given any orders for asteroids to be diverted, and maybe she should—oh no, she should definitely make sure that the work she did identifying potential candidates was not passed onto command.

  She stopped pacing and pulled out her pad.

  Banparra had already disabled her access to the research computers, but she had been distrustful enough not to keep her work there.

  She pressed delete, delete.

  Huge chunks of data vanished into nothingness. The little icon that told her how much space was available clicked up and up.

  Then a message flicked over the screen.

  You have a private message from G336584.

  What the hell?

  The fact that there was no name for the contact meant that she hadn’t communicated with this person since obtaining this particular login. The letter G at the beginning stood for Ganymede.

  She opened the message and immediately scrolled to see who it was from.

  Jaykadia Law.

  Damn it. She hadn’t heard from Jaykadia for years.

  They used to be such good friends, long ago, but a number of things had changed that. First there had been that accident with the truck that had changed their fri
endship.

  Katarina didn’t remember that much about it, but the three of them had gone for a drive and the truck had toppled into a ditch. All three of them were seriously injured and it was only because of pure luck that any of them had survived.

  But somehow, after a long period of recovery, the friendship had never been the same.

  Katarina had gotten married, and the other two had a succession of lame boyfriends. Katarina had joined the military and had been posted to Europa where her husband worked at the time.

  They’d lost contact beyond a few visits.

  Then she was posted out in the asteroid belt, and Mars happened. And when she emerged from the long dark tunnel that had her question the motives of ISF, there were still the punitive measures taken against her—life on Io, locked away from what could be termed civilisation.

  Now there was this message from Jaykadia Law.

  Pretty, successful Jaykadia, the youngest executive of a major company in the system, ever. Rich, pampered Jaykadia with her position cut out for her. Lonely Jaykadia, who could never find any man willing to serve second rank to her.

  This message to you will probably come as a surprise, but frankly, I should have contacted you much earlier. I am sorry. I know you’ve been through a rough time and I kept making excuses that you didn’t want to hear from me.

  Fact is, I miss our friendship.

  Yes, Katarina missed it, too. She missed the stupid clowning and the laughter. She also knew that time was gone and would never come back. They were adults now, with responsibilities.

  I have become increasingly worried about the activities of certain sections of ISF, the most important of which affects the fate of our delegation to Io. My aunt keeps telling me to be patient, but something doesn’t sit well with me. ISF have claimed the use of all my company’s maintenance sheds, ostensibly for an exercise, but when I went to check out the sheds, I spotted a woman looking at some approaching celestial object on the screen. When she saw I was looking at it, she quickly moved to something else. As astronomer, are you aware of anything we should know? I’m thinking in terms of protecting or potentially evacuating certain settlements. Has ISF sent any ships to sort out the Outer System Division? Is Preston preparing a reception committee? Are we seeing a repeat of events in the past?