by Patty Jansen
For years, Vega had felt the joy, frustration and anger of these women while they went about their normal lives. With the same nanometrics strain, she had tracked all three of them, never interfering with their lives.
Once the dendromer molecules had been prepared, the procedure of inserting nanometrics in the blood stream was simple.
Often the receiver experienced a gradual change in character afterwards. They became more idealistic, with a heightened sense of what was fair treatment. They became less likely to follow orders.
Thalia Hasegawa had never been terribly interested in human rights before. After all, why should someone from such a rich family care about the poor sods who signed up for service?
Before the accident, Jaykadia Law had been a vapid creature, caring more about material goods than her parents. Now she had developed a good relationship with her aunt and her dearest wish was to be liked by as many of her workers as possible.
And Katarina Doric, she had taken a bit of convincing. She was a very strong character indeed.
ISF had offered her honourable discharge with full retention of her salary. She had not wanted to re-enlist in the military after she recovered. She had married and had asked for a civilian job. But gradually, she had seen that the ones who could make the most difference were the ones who could stay hidden within the structures that were the cause of their grief and those who made changes from within. So she had re-enlisted because part of the ISF culture sickened her. It was about jobs for the boys and getting your fingers into as many pots as possible. That was not the force she loved and respected, and her new placing gave her the opportunity to change it from within.
Chapter 15
* * *
THE ENGINE STARTED UP with a flashing of lights on the truck’s control panel.
Katarina pushed her hood down and affixed an earpiece to her ear. She typed in codes that would ensure the opening of the main airlock.
Green lights flickered.
With a jolt, the truck started moving. Kat turned on the surrounding viewscreens and suddenly Fabio had the illusion of sitting in a glass cubicle.
There was no activity in the docking area, and light was low, glinting off the sides of trucks and packaging crates.
They passed several rust-streaked posts and the wall of the hall, also streaked with rust. Kat typed on the screen and listened on her earpiece.
The airlock worked painfully slowly. First, the inner door opened and Thalia drove the truck through. No one said anything while the inner door closed and the air was sucked out. Then the outer door opened a crack. Fabio expected the wan sunlight or red-hued Jupiter-shine to come in, but the widening crack between the doors remained dark.
Crap. It was the time of the midday eclipse when for two hours, Io moved in the huge shadow of Jupiter.
The door continued opening to pitch darkness. Fabio couldn’t even see stars. In the glow of the truck’s headlights, small sparkles of light twinkled like falling snow in reverse. Sulphur dioxide sublimating back into the air in the relative warmth of the headlights. The ground was covered in fine white dust from the snowed-out atmosphere.
“We’re out,” Kat said, her voice soft.
No one said anything for fear of being heard.
The rear viewscreen showed the view of the lit airlock narrowing as the doors closed. The only light came from the headlights outside and a tiny green light above the truck’s airlock door.
Katarina gunned the engine and, within a minute, they were bouncing over the rubber road, much rougher at this speed. She studied a map, and after a while turned into a side road, which was unpaved and much rougher. The going was slow, with the only light provided by the truck’s headlights. It was so dark it was scary.
Fabio wondered how long it would be before it got light again.
“Now, tell us why you are so valuable to ISF,” Katarina said.
“I don’t know,” Fabio said. It was getting cold in this damned truck.
“That’s what politicians always say,” Katarina said. “We are not politicians and we won’t fall for that.”
“I really don’t know.”
“Then why is there a special order against your name not to kill you?”
“I said I don’t know. You can read my files, I can’t. I don’t remember. Why did you come in to interfere with my medical anyway?”
“Because there is a special order against my name, too. Because I applied to have you on my team and they granted me my wish. Because if anyone has a special note against their name, it usually means that someone will try to make their life difficult and you might not actually get to Research. Because I thought you were going to be a messenger or an ally. But you’re not. You did something on Mars.”
“All I remember is that I learned that ISF was sending an asteroid to strike Mars, and I learned that the area of impact was going to be fairly close to Johnson base. I asked about the civilians in that area and I was told not to interfere.”
“Yes, that applied to me, too,” Katarina said.
“I applied for my leave and went to warn those people. I saved a lot of them when the asteroid hit, and after the hit, because of the snow . . .”
She nodded.
Fabio couldn’t see her face.
“Then I tried to take the people to Johnson, but we found the base in disarray. One of the domes was broken. First I thought that this was from the weight of snow, but—”
Another memory flooded back.
He remembered coming back to the dome after the full effect of the impact had rolled over the area. Johnson had been covered in a thick layer of snow, but the resulting wind and shockwave had kept the tops of the domes clear. So he’d been surprised when he came in leading all those women and children, finding the pressure lost, people dead and dying on the ground.
Were the domes breached through the shockwaves?
Surely one of the domes was still intact?
He led the group through empty corridors, cumbersome as it was to walk for long distances in suits designed to do in situ maintenance work.
Then they entered a small dome that had housed a public open space. Snow covered the ground, benches and planter boxes, and the palms and plants had all frozen.
A group of people came in from the other side, and by the patches on their suits, Fabio knew that they were ISF troops. The patrol leader carried a considerable weapon, a VF-class handheld cannon—model C3 or something similar—and Fabio remembered wondering why he’d be carrying a weapon like that into what was essentially a rescue situation. The rest of the patrol fanned out over the dome.
And then they noticed Fabio and his group.
Even though Fabio’s suit had no connection to the soldiers’, he sensed that “oh, fuck” moment as the troops stood and stared at them.
Two of the men raised weapons at the group of women and children. Fabio could barely believe his eyes.
He said to Katarina, in a low voice, “I saw troops firing at the survivors.”
“Wait—you saw ISF personnel firing at civilians?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone try to stop them?”
“Who could stop them? I should have, but I’m skinny and I’ve never held a position where I would be allowed to take a weapon off the base. I was a coward, but I didn’t want to be shot. So I ran. Sorry, I’m not sure what happened then or where the people I rescued went, or whether any of them got away. At some point I must have run into someone I knew or we couldn’t go any further or . . .” He searched his memory but came up with nothing. That part had been a big hole where, clearly, some interaction with ISF was supposed to go.
But the soldiers had shot women and children. He remembered that.
Katarina nodded. “These were Allion people and they were witnesses. They had no vested interest in ISF and were not supposed to live to tell the tale. Some people in command call you the cause of the greatest fuck-up in military history. I struggled to see why, but now I understand
. No one was supposed to live to tell the tale. Because of you, a fair number of people did. Some, within ISF, they could control, but others they could not. Some, even within ISF, they can’t control anymore. We’re sick to death of what this organisation has done in our name without our knowledge. Whoever decided to use the talks between ISF and Allion at Johnson as an excuse to wipe out Allion is a criminal, and I would like to demonstrate that ISF is nothing like that.”
“I am proud of you,” Paul said. He placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders from behind.
“Which is not a position that’s going to make us very popular at Io,” Fabio said.
“No, because that’s the position of Sanchez, and he is the real enemy to many of these people.”
“Wait—I discovered something when I was in the other part of the base.”
He told them about the conversation he had overheard about the alien object coming towards the system.
Katarina Doric was silent through all of it and still didn’t say anything when he had finished.
“I had heard rumours of this,” she said finally. “I heard this from someone who judged it a crackpot theory.”
“Wouldn’t you know this, working in astronomy?” Thalia asked.
“Astronomy is a very big field, especially in the military. We are in what they call applied astronomy, that data would come in from defensive astronomy—which is only a small department—or exploration astronomy, depending on where this object was first discovered.”
“Is it true, though, or just another smokescreen to justify the activities of certain people?”
“I don’t know. We can only get the answers once we’re out of here safely.”
Then she spent some time fiddling with the communication equipment. Thalia and Sol composed a message to the Council Of Four assembly that Katarina sent, using the truck’s long-range capability.
“Mind you, none of this is secret, so they will know where we are and will come after us as soon as they get a fix on the origin of the communication.”
Fabio wondered whether they would make it to the shelter.
Jaykadia
* * *
“YOU HAVE HEARD THIS—WHERE?”
Jaykadia’s aunt had initially been annoyed to have been called out of a meeting, but that expression changed the moment Jaykadia had told her of the object she had seen on the screen.
Encouraged by her aunt’s interest, she continued, “I thought it was part of the exercise, but I went to dig around a bit, and there has been talk of this object amongst amateur astronomers for a while, with a lot of speculation about what it could be.”
“So it’s real.”
“It would appear so. I read one discussion where they spoke extensively about the possibilities. It’s a point of light. It’s coming in our direction. It’s in interstellar space and currently just outside the solar system. It’s moving very fast but has slowed down considerably, from a considerable fraction of light speed when they first discovered it to barely ten percent now. It’s not moving in a direction that objects are known to move, and there is nothing out there that would cause an object to lose speed in the direction it’s moving. Most importantly, because the light shows up in the visible spectrum, the prevailing opinion is that it’s the output of an engine braking, and the only type of engine that produces that much visible light is one that uses antimatter. No known human technology has antimatter engines, or can propel a ship at those speeds, so this is why the alien ship possibility is the most commonly suggested.”
“Hmmm.” Her aunt raised her hand to her mouth. “Are they suggesting that people knew about this for a long time, yet no one has gone public with it?”
“I don’t know about that, but I definitely think that the occupation of my maintenance sheds has something to do with this. I’ve kept a close eye on what they’re doing, as you suggested, and it seems they’re setting up a nerve centre for a major operation. I’ve also looked into satellite data and it seems they’re building a launch installation on Io, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s why we haven’t been allowed to speak to the delegation.”
“Because they have unilaterally decided that an alien ship—or whatever it is—is hostile and therefore requires no consultation with us for them to shoot it out of the sky? Because clearly, if this is a ship, they plan no negotiation with it, and not only that, they plan to blow it up in or near our system, where we may be harmed by any fallout.”
“I’ve never heard them say any of those things.”
“No, but I can read between the lines. I think I shall cut my meeting short today and will request to speak with Preston as soon as possible. Thank you for letting me know about this.”
“What do you want me to do about the people in my maintenance sheds?”
“What would you want to do?”
“Kick them out, obviously, because many of my engineers are very unhappy. I am unhappy. They treat me like I’m a child, circumventing questions, and every time I see those people I get this Shouldn’t you be with your mother? look. We are spending a lot more time and money on maintenance, and some of our crawlers can’t go out at all, because we can’t maintain them properly, or we don’t have anywhere for them to unload their harvest. Meanwhile, Preston has broken our trust—”
“That’s it—trust. He has betrayed our trust. We are resilient and we’re not crazy. We run commercial companies and commerce is a game of give and take. Sometimes you give more than you take, sometimes it’s the other way around. But we are only prepared to play that game under the understanding of mutual trust.”
Her aunt signed off, because she had a meeting to get back to, and Jaykadia stared unseeing at her screen.
Some would suggest that mutual trust had been broken after Mars.
There were many rumours about what happened, and few looked good for ISF, but for the practical people of the Outer System, having principles and objections was not a smart way to survive.
When you lived out here, you did what was necessary and got the supplies you needed, even if some of those supplies came from less reputable sources, because you had no other options.
That time was coming to an end.
What would you like to do? her aunt had asked.
She wanted them out of her sheds, and, failing that, she wanted to have an end date for this exercise, and if they couldn’t give her one because it wasn’t an exercise, she wanted formal declarations about what happened and what events led to the necessity of building weapons and why the population was told nothing about this.
But, oh, she knew Preston was a master in diversion and he would find something that justified his actions, hoping to bog down discussions in irrelevant minutiae while he continued doing exactly as he wanted.
He’d say, I’ll meet you next week, not because he wanted to be formal and pretend to be well-prepared, but to buy himself another week of inaction in which he didn’t have to move his troops.
It was infuriating.
And she was frankly pissed off that the military was playing games. Not only had they played games with her, but now they were playing games with everyone. Hell, if this really was an alien intruder, then everyone should know about it. Everyone in ISF would know about it.
So, back to that question, what was she going to do?
Her aunt had asked a taunting question in return, and that question, What would you like to do? almost sounded like an invitation.
Do whatever I’ve told you not to do, I’ll pretend I didn’t see it.
Do something rash, and we’ll fix it up later.
You’re young and prone to make hasty decisions. Go for it.
She could march off to the maintenance sheds and tell the ISF troops to get out, but they’d just laugh in her face. What was she to them? Just a young pretty face who happened to have inherited this company. Who didn’t—at the heart of it—know what she was doing. Who wasn’t part of the established elite, even if she came from the right fa
mily. People merely tolerated her as owner of Ganymede Mining. But listen to her, no, not even her own senior management would do that.
With exception of the workers. Maybe they just liked her because of the amusement factor, because they could see her trying so hard to fit the mould of the grey-faced men, trying to do things their way.
Maybe they just liked her because none of the other executives ever came to the suiting hall and never attempted to hear their concerns in person.
Whatever was the case, those people would do as she asked. And they were the ones with their fingers on the switches. They were the ones who opened doors—and shut them, because they knew how to do it—which the executives didn’t—and because someone told them to do it. They operated huge lumbering mining crawlers. They controlled the fuel distribution and the power plant.
She had tried to be a good little girl and not upset anyone.
She was through with that.
If ISF could have an “exercise”, she could have a “technical malfunction”. Let’s see how serious Preston was about this exercise, especially the timeliness of it. If it was really about this approaching ship or object, they would be on a strict time schedule, and any hitch would send him into her office immediately.
Chapter 16
* * *
THE TRUCK BOUNCED OVER the uneven terrain.
It was so rough and noisy inside the cabin that no one spoke except a few occasional words, and even those needed to be shouted.
Fabio was tired. He couldn’t remember when he last slept well. He kept drifting off, but the road was so bumpy that every time he dozed off, his head would connect painfully with a metal support strut next to his seat.
And when he closed his eyes, shards of memories crowded his mind.
Arriving at Johnson on Mars, and receiving an angry message from his superior officer. I have informed the local authorities that you will not be allowed to travel outside the settlement, both for the sake of your safety and that of others.