I thought for a second. “No . . . but there used to be.”
Eve squinted her eyes.
“There used to be a colony on Drieus eight years ago, but it got wiped out by a storm.” The conversation I’d had with Sebastian streamed back into my mind.
“Then it probably came from there, and it’s just been bouncing around in the nebula all this time.”
“But didn’t Mr. Katz say that it was a clear day?” I asked.
“Yeah, so?”
“So maybe it’s the real deal.”
“—— —— —- ——- —- ———- —- ————- ——- SOS —- —— ———— colony ——— ca—- -ra— ——, —— ———— ————— Mars. Pr———- kind ——- ——————— — ——— ————- danger. ——- tha- ———————- the freight— ———————— antid—— —- —- —— ————- all frequency bands ——— ———.”
“We’ve got to play this for Mr. Katz when he gets back.”
“Aaron . . .” She brought her hand up to her mouth and glanced up at the bridge. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
“What do you mean?”
“The station’s only a few hundred thousand kilometers away from here and has a receiver that’s twenty times more powerful than this one. So if we’re hearing it here, they’ve been hearing it,” said Eve.
“So it wouldn’t matter.”
“For them it wouldn’t. For us . . .” Again she looked over at the pilot, who was still slumped in his seat. “Most instructors lock the controls, but Katz is new. We weren’t even supposed to have the comm on. We weren’t supposed to have heard that.”
Eve and I were playing chess when the Sacagawea returned.
“It looks like she’s got you on the ropes, man,” Daries said to me as he leaned over the board.
“Which is right where I want her to think she has me.”
Daries gave my head a pat. “I love your optimism, but at some point one has to ask oneself, does the—”
“Right about now,” Eve interrupted as she slid her rook into F8. “Checkmate.”
“Oooh. That rook looked so innocent all the way across the board, talkin’ with them there pawns, and then wham!”
“Did you guys bring back any loot?” asked Eve.
“Oh, you know, the usual suspects: copper, gold, silver, titanium, lithium, stromide. But more importantly, we brought back Mr. Katz.”
Eve and I turned toward the instructor.
“Yes, that one-in-thirty-thousand roll came up for me, but fortunately Simon was quick on the draw with the S-tape,” Mr. Katz explained, appearing slightly shaken as he typed into a lightpanel beside us.
Daries wrapped his arm around Simon’s shoulder. “You’re a hero, man. You saved the motherfriggin’ day. Mr. Katz was way out there. You were way out there, weren’t you, Mr. Katz?”
“I was within standard range, but if you’re asking if I was on the upper boundary, then yes, I suppose I was,” he said, not looking up.
“See, I told ya. He’s a hero.”
“We’ll see where that gets me,” muttered Simon, peering at Eve for a moment or two before turning away.
Pretending not to notice, she asked, “But you’re okay, Mr. Katz?”
Mr. Katz looked down at his abdomen and legs and then back at us, extending his arms palms-up in presentation. “Quite,” he said, clearly not wanting to dwell on the issue. “Now, are there any other questions before we debrief?”
I traded glances with Eve.
“All right then, let’s start.”
“Actually, I have a question, Mr. Katz,” I began, nervous but determined. “I know that we’re doing a lot of instructive missions to the moon and to this asteroid, since we have it nearby, but do we ever go down to the planet?”
“You mean Drieus? You wouldn’t want to: Perpetual lightning storms. Even stronger communication interference from the nebula. Monsoon rains for days on end . . .”
“When’s the last time a shuttle was sent down there to have a look?”
“We don’t need to have a look, Mr. Sheridan,” he said, stepping away from one lightpanel and moving toward another. Seeming preoccupied, tapping his finger against a back of a headrest. “Our meteorological instruments paint a perfectly clear picture.”
The pilot’s voice broke in over the intercom. “Mr. Katz, there’s a priority message for you. It’ll be in and out, but I think I can mostly get it.”
“I’ll be right there,” said Mr. Katz, and then he turned to us. “While I’m gone, start reflecting on what happened outside—what went right, what could’ve gone better, what you learned. And take it seriously, because Dr. Mitchel’s making the debriefing worth ten percent of your group score.”
After the door closed a few seconds later, Eve leaned over to me. “I think we should try to delete the audio logs all the way up to this call.”
“But they’re transmitted wirelessly,” I said.
“Hopefully the nebula interference took care of that. Clearly it wasn’t strong enough to keep everything from coming in, but the station and any colony would have much bigger transmitters than we do, so I bet it prevented the logs from getting out.”
“What are you whisperin’ about over there?” Daries asked.
“Oh, Eve was just telling me what a sexy beast she thinks you are.”
Daries turned and gave Simon a wink. “Well, carry on.”
“But how are we going to delete the files?” I asked, again in a whisper.
“By hacking into the Pulsar’s computer. You can do that, right?”
“Why would you think I’d be able to do that?”
“Well, you seem to know your way around the con—”
“No . . . but I know someone who does.”
“Fingers,” I said as soon as we were back at the station.
“Aaron, my man! Haven’t seen you around too much lately, and who’s this lovely lady you have with you? I’m sure she doesn’t have anything to do with why you’ve been MIA.”
“Do you have a sec?”
“I’ve got the Tread Room in a couple, but yeah, what’s up?”
“Okay, good, because there’s this song with this killer bass line you gotta check out. Here, put these on.”
Fingers was confused but didn’t protest when Eve put the headphones over his ears.
“All I can here is whisp—”
“Cool intro, huh?” I raised my eyebrows, hoping he’d get the point without my having to say much more. “But just wait ‘till you get to the chorus.”
Slowly the confusion on Fingers’ face morphed into concentration.
“You’re right, it does have a pretty savage bass part,” he said finally, the words slow and stilted. “I’m not sure I could even come up with a better one.”
“Sure you could,” I said.
Chapter 35
I barely slept that night, the message on a loop in my head. It hadn’t sounded like it was a storm that was threatening them. There was no panic. There was no one shouting in the background. It was a complete mystery.
The next day, I reread the article in the Corinth library that Sebastian had found about the colony’s being destroyed in the storms. He was right that it was the only one about Drieus, but when I searched for the Dyalonians, the name the colonists called themselves, I found a few more. One titled “Disillusioned Group Seeks New Start” from the Twilian News Service read:
Modern interstellar life is complicated. People have to pay taxes to fund programs they don’t support, buy goods manufactured with unsound labor practices, and follow rules and laws that they find unfair. Most of us just hold our noses and soldier on, reasoning that the many benefits of interstellar society outweigh the drawbacks; but for one local group of scientists, philosophers, and activists, that compromise isn’t good enough.
Although the group elects new leadership every eleven months and randomly selects citizens to serve on vario
us operational committees, Jack Sivers is one of the group’s original members and is largely considered their central figure. Last week he sat down with our very own Menlo Faveras in a Twilian exclusive interview.
“I have a lot of respect for the Confederation and realize that they have to balance the interests of a wide range of stakeholders and won’t always be able to make rules that make sense for every culture, in every circumstance, every time,” Sivers stated. “But life’s short. And rather than say, ‘Hey, that’s good enough,’ we took a long look inward and realized that we had to take a different path.”
Sivers maintains that—despite persistent rumors—that the path is largely secular and that the group’s open to many different types of thinking. “Certainly there’s a precedent for marginalized religious groups migrating to the frontier—from the Puritans to the Mormons to the Prometheans—and while we do draw from some of that same spirit, the core principles that bind us have roots primarily in philosophy, science, and pluralism.”
Some commentators assert that what makes them unique among most groups looking for the freedom to practice their beliefs is that the Dyalonians largely want the freedom to opt out of the set of practices that are imposed de facto by the Fleet. They feel that society has become too complex, too fast, outrunning all the skills and expertise gained during evolution in the Pleistocene and Holocene periods. “Humans are built for small groups. We’re good at regulating ourselves in them. Building strong bonds. Working through challenges on the visceral local level, instead of the abstract interstellar one. Yet we kept getting lured forward by the next shiniest rock. Do that a few times and you’re fine. But keep doing it for ten thousand years and you’re in an alien environment that humans haven’t evolved to thrive in.”
It remains to be seen if the Dyalonians will be making a move, but sources say a fundraising effort is in the works, and they’re already scouting possible locations for this bold new experiment.
Four years later, Liv Saca of the Twilian News Service reported:
There has been no official word on whether Mars will be relocating its prestigious command school, Corinth Station, as has recently been circulating, but Dyalonian leaders are already expressing concern over a short-listed site that’s close to their colony. “Technically, our agreement with the Confederation didn’t include anything about orbiting structures, but we contend that this violates the spirit of the understanding, especially since our whole reason for resettling this far out was to reduce our contact and dependence on the outside,” says Dyalonian spokeswoman Jane Eckert.
For its part, Mars says it has no plans to interfere with the colonists’ autonomy or use the planet as a supply base. “We want to be left alone just as much as they do. People need to understand just how important it is that these kids don’t have any external distractions,” said Admiral Kerr, Mars’ top military official. “There’s so much to learn to become a good Fleet officer that we’re basically remaking the world for them, and it breaks the spell if they’re seeing all these reminders of home out the window.”
Previously, the Corinth academy was located on Girene in the Goldilocks Zone, a region that has developed rapidly as interstellar flight has become quicker and cheaper. Because of the increased traffic and Mars’ desire to keep the training facilities state-of-the-art, there has been talk for several years now of either retrofitting or relocating the station, but this is the first time any firm plans have come to light. While Corinth’s leadership has remained circumspect in written statements, sources indicate that Mars may begin work as early as next year.
When asked if the Dyalonians had any plans to try to block construction, Eckert was noncommittal. “Obviously, we’ll assess our options, but it’s ultimately the Fleet’s decision, and they’re certainly aware of our position.”
There were a couple others like this, but while the stories were interesting and helped me feel a certain affinity with the colonists, there were no clues about what happened once they got here. I reread the articles again and again, wanting desperately to find out more, but since there were cameras everywhere I couldn’t risk digging deeper or asking anyone else—not even Sebastian—about it.
Ultimately, I was just left melding together existing observations, discarding and recycling them into an increasingly esoteric slurry of reason. And the next day it was more confused still, but since there was nothing I could actually do I just re-covered the same ground, advancing a line of thought and then backtracking, until finally coming around to the idea that the most straightforward answer was probably right: It was just an old transmission bouncing around the nebula.
I was exhausted, and you always worry more when you’re exhausted. But the more time passed, especially after the asteroid disappeared behind Drieus a week later, the more that explanation gelled. Why would the space station ignore a distress signal? Why would the colonists keep sending out something they knew wasn’t getting through? And if there was something going on, telling the Reds wouldn’t make sense because they’d have already known if it was recent; while if it was old they’d have known we’d used the commline to get outside information, something Fingers and Castor had said they were really touchy about.
That was no good. I didn’t want to get kicked out. I didn’t even want us to get in trouble, because of what it might mean for Eve’s lab work.
So, slowly at first and then all at once, the entire transmission ordeal started seeming like a bad dream, distant and peripheral. The lights came on in the mornings like always and everyone got out of their beds and hammocks, dressed and brushed their teeth in the same familiar routines, and it felt like Eve and I could return to ours as well.
Which we needed to do, since it was hard to say how much progress we’d made on the drug trials so far. Every day counted. Every hour counted. Often, I could actually feel the seconds tick by, landing like pinpricks, and the beeps that signaled a class period ending came as increasingly dialed-in eruptions, echoing in my head long after they’d passed. They were reminders that time was stalking us, and the more we got sidetracked, the less chance we’d have of making it out.
It made every moment feel vast—a separate notch you could fully inhabit before the continuum would drag you to the next—yet so crowded with feeling that you couldn’t stay for long. The message had pushed aside what had happened between Eve and me on the Pulsar, but the rush came back stronger than ever, and even though I shouldn’t—in the Tread Room and in the Mat Room and around Fin and Rhys and Taryn and everyone else—I felt like I was in the right place.
Chapter 36
“You really should drink the rest of that,” I said, gesturing at her astralagus, ginger and H1a-infused tea. Since Kamalgia targeted the immune system first, becoming contagious once it worked its way into the respiratory tract, I was doing everything I could to help her hers.
“I’m going to, Jesus. You don’t have to freakin’ mom me.”
“Apparently I do, seeing as you won’t listen to your boy . . .” I smiled. “friend.”
She rolled her eyes. It was Saturday and we were taking a break at the Launch Bar, having just finished a twelve-hour stint in the lab.
“But have it your way.”.
“Whatever way will make you stop pestering me about my white blood cell count.”
“I asked you like once last week,” I said, pretending to be astonished.
“Three times.”
“Well, it’s a legitimate question considering your T and B cells are––”
Eve leaned over and kissed me before I could finish the sentence. “Not when the incubation period is this clearly defined. Now come on––take this, I want to show you something,” she said, handing me a Student Access Permit.
A few moments later we’d walked down a few long corridors, past the Ship Room, and into a large cylindrical junction, going farther on the rec wing than I’d been before.
“Up ahead is what they call the Membrane, a tube that connects level seven on
the Outer Ring to level seven on the Inner Ring. There are only three gaps in it on the whole station, and this is the main one.”
“What’s in the Inner Ring?” I asked.
“You’re about to find out.”
As we approached, I saw three Reds in full United Fleet of Mars—UFM—uniforms, with helmets and Pegasus rifles. They were talking together in a cluster on the side, and it made me pause. I’d witnessed regular Fleet marines in tie-ins, and dark-striped Mars security in the halls accompanying Marquardt and Admiral Kerr to Challenges, but this was the first I’d seen of Mars regulars, who were rare given that Mars didn’t have much of its own military. Even back home in New London, I’d really only seen pictures, since the Confederate Fleet handled most planetary security as well.
“Are you sure we’re supposed to be here?”
“As long as you act like it,” she said, guiding me forward with a hand on my back.
I copied how she put her permit up against the reader and then we were both through, staring down through the large Membrane windows at atmospheric storms lighting up and blinking across the planet’s surface.
We rounded a corner into a long passageway where we passed Red instructors, wrenches, tread-mounted AIs, and a few other Blues, all focused on getting to wherever it was they were going. “And I thought C Block was crowded.”
“Must be the construction. It wasn’t a third as busy last year.”
I thought she was going to say more, but we flashed our permits at another reader in front of a large white door, and suddenly I was seeing vegetation for the first time in a month—two, if you counted the time in hypersleep. I paused, tripped up by the realization that given our three-week age difference, I’d actually be younger than Verna the next time I saw her.
As soon as we took a couple steps forward, though, the thought was swallowed by foliage. Vines snaked all the way up to the rafters, extending four or five levels, packed with strawberries and raspberries and all kinds of other berries that I’d never seen before. Heads of lettuce spilled from walls that jetted up from sockets in the floor, misted by a latticework of nozzles. Grow lights slanted down from the ceiling, coating it all in a mysterious blue and orange light, reminiscent of the outer fringes of the surrounding nebula.
Lakes of Mars Page 23
