by Anna Gaffey
They had found a couple of antique beer bottles (broken), some thick cables (rusting), and a crooked yellow plaque with a circular black-and-yellow design and the words fallout shelter (laughably creepy).
At a juncture marked Wabasha, Con knelt down.
“What? What is it?”
“Shhh.” He stirred his fingers in a pile of ashy debris. “Still warm. Scavs must love it down here.”
“Is this de rigueur Defense training?”
“Nah, this is just fun,” Con said. “You Science guys don’t get out much, do you?” His green eyes had turned iron dark and oddly bright, his movements slow, almost languid as he eased into a narrow crawlspace, and then reached back a hand to guide Jake in after. He was young then, twenty-two to Jake’s nineteen.
Con didn’t look much older now. He looked tired and almost defensively calm, as if he were determined to enjoy himself. And although they had nearly ten years under their belts (eight he remembered in full), years of arguing about the anachronistic memories of various historians, of chatting over comm frequencies and commtexts, of, in Jake’s case, receiving disintegrating reprints and archive-quality audiocasts of lurid pulp novels for his birthday every year without fail. Even with all this, some stupid, unnamable pause inside him prevented Jake from asking are you all right? The unnamable whatever-it-was stopped him from even indicating that he knew anything might be wrong, that he knew Con well enough. He didn’t know if it was propriety, or his unwillingness to cross an invisible line drawn by one or both of them, or just his own instincts warning him to leave the guy alone.
Con hadn’t left him alone. He’d commtexted before and after the trial, and during the six months Jake had been under detention first at his home and then at the court, Con had sent him the Historical Society circular every week. All without any mention of Icebreaker Labs, Restore, the deaths, or the endless testimonies and depositions. Even though Jake had not been completely sure of their—well, whatever it was they’d been originally, relationship-wise, he was drawn into friendship with Con all the same. It had been heavenly to open a comm tablet (first scanned, examined and grudgingly certified by Jake’s sentinels, of course) and find an innocuous missive about munitions, the grotesque grooming habits of Con’s latest bastard CO, or how it felt to pilot a class G-290 shuttle from Furbad into Jupiter’s lower atmosphere. Heavenly didn’t cover it. It was true he’d once opened one of Con’s missives and found several paragraphs of benign day-to-day shit with a single line injected, almost as an afterthought: I’m sorry about Rebecca, and you, everything. Con had never mentioned it after that, either. As if he felt he had to say it once, and then never again.
A good plant would do all of that, and more.
Jake felt like finding Carmichael and sticking an orange slice up his nose. Sure, he hadn’t shattered any illusions, but he’d dredged up all the old uncertainties Jake had entertained on many an early morning, pre or post-penitence nightmare. It was a checklist of dual interpretations: Con’s hesitancy when first contacting Jake, how easily they’d settled into a comfortable exchange, the things Con had known about Jake and their shared past, his indifference to Jake’s inability to wholly reciprocate in that regard. He could be a dedicated friend. As Carmichael had so succinctly put it, dedicated.
Con still looked terrible.
The more they talked, the more trouble Jake had keeping quiet. He wanted to reciprocate. Instinct or no instinct, doubts be damned, the possibilities be damned. Finally he couldn’t keep his mouth shut any longer. “Did your stasis cube conk out on you?”
“Huh?”
“Your—uh—” Jake gestured up at his own face.
“My uh what?”
So much for the power of body language. “You look like stale shit, all right? And no, not in the good way.”
“Thank you.” Con picked at the olives on his plate and wrinkled his nose.
“Look, I’m not saying you, you know, reek or anything, you just look—”
“It’s the chili,” Con interrupted. “Doesn’t agree with a stasis stomach.” He ate a spiral-shaped cracker in two quick chomps.
“Right.” Maybe it was just chili. Or food in general. Or work. Piloting freighters and transports was probably more stressful than Jake could imagine. Or maybe Con had been sick, though he always seemed healthy. He never seemed to be down with any of the going bugs he reported in his letters. Jake sighed, and rolled the round trunk of the bottle between his hands. “What else is new?”
Con looked relieved, and Jake wanted to kick him, just a little. “I’ve been hearing things. Rumors.”
“Is this the one about the scavengers releasing a new strain of…” Jake stopped himself, and lowered his voice. “Leech? That’s one of the freshest ones we’ve got out here. And not for lack of trying, you know we’re the hub for news.”
Con shifted restlessly. “Come on. You know. The upper brass at Defense isn’t talking. Their aides aren’t talking. And Science is pissed as hell. There’s something real going on. Possibly to do with Leech.”
Unlike Jake’s, his voice had risen steadily and Leech shot out high and clear like a volley above the partygoers’ heads. A nearby canoodling couple paused in their devouring of each other and stared at them.
Shit. Jake offered them a bland grin. He took Con’s arm and pulled him back beside one of the oversized viewscreens, on which a heavy-lidded Dracula mouthed at his victim’s neck. “You do get that this isn’t the best place to talk about something potentially, er, sensitive.”
“Sensitive?” Con spread his hands. “It’s a party. No one’s listening.”
“Sure, not until you start howling about conspiracies and Defense.”
“That wasn’t howling. Ease, will you?” Con pulled his arm out of Jake’s hand. “I didn’t say much.”
“I know I’m a pariah in most Science circles, but I still have contacts, I still have people who’d tell me if anything real—”
“I never said you didn’t. Ease already, Jake.”
“Oh, thanks. Look, we’re reasonably removed from civilization out here, but you still can’t just start blabbing something like that. People’ll get confused or worried, and most of them are already stewed, and then I have to tell Carmichael why our drunk newts are all freaking out, which I’d rather not have to do just because, well, no one wants to hear the L-word, least of all me. Okay?”
“You said it.” Con looked around them. “Calm down.”
“You calm down, you’re the one coming across as a mad pestilent-eyed scav–”
“Mad pestilent…what? All right.” Con crossed his arms, scowling. “Damn it. All right, wiseass. All five of your new pathologists? The ones I just flew out here today? Recalled.”
“—telling me to calm down. Hah.” Jake sniffed, and replayed Con’s final words. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait, what?”
Con raised a hand. “By Director Osakwe herself.”
Jake sputtered, misfired, and blazed into life. “But that’s impossible. They can’t just recall station placements without going through the proper channels, all of which involve first contacting a station’s Science team—damn it, Silverman. We’ve been waiting for Silverman for months.”
“Recalled and reassigned,” Con said. His eyes betrayed a slight smugness. “We’re staying here a couple of days. Pending the investigation results. Then I’ll get the official order to refuel and redirect the Harmon. The directive came through just as I hit the halfway point. Not through the public transmission line. Encrypted.”
Jake blinked. His vision was starting to blur, just the tiniest bit. Mother. Fucker. “Well, that certainly…no. I don’t believe that. Science wouldn’t do that, not just to mess with me.”
“Maybe not. But after all the bullshit, Jake, all these years—”
A wailing scream split the air. The bottle slipped out of Jake’s hands and clanked to the floor, the sound swallowed by the party chatter. He looked up to see the vampire victim on the screen clutching at
her bloodied pale neck, smearing pulpy red over her chest and chin and cheeks. It was farcical, and it somehow steadied him. Had anyone ever believed such bright, false effects?
Jake knelt down and fumbled for his bottle, which, unnoticed and underfoot, had leaked most of its contents onto the already sticky floor. Con waited, his expression flickering from smug sympathy to something blank and unreadable. He looked Jake over with disconcerting scrutiny before turning his gaze on the crowd around them. From Jake’s perspective, no one had noticed a thing.
“It’s not just about you.” Con lowered his voice. “There’s some people I know who still work at Defense, and between the way they’re acting, and me just watching shipping traffic and orders for a while, well…whatever’s happening, it’s going down in Beda. At Marathon.”
“Marathon?” Marathon, again. Gunaji. Undisclosable. His senses had been right. But what did Con know about it? “What’s Marathon?”
“And you said you had contacts.” Con brushed a piece of tickertape from Jake’s shoulder.
“No one ever told me about anything going on in the Beda system. I know about Furbad and the move on Tau Ceti Two and Petel Eight and Ujarak’s petition for 3H-21HM, as yet unnamed. There’re only five colonized planets on the books right now, and two official requests for colonial consideration. Including us. Selas. 1H-24HM, rather. Although we’re not quite—we’re still testing the surface. And if there were any others publicly acknowledged, I’d know it.” Jake swallowed the rest. Technically it wasn’t confidential information, but Carmichael’s careful policy of No ’Fo Till We Know had become mildly contagious. He glowered at Con. “So what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re breaking top-level encrypted messages on a whim, then? And you don’t know? Come on, what have they got out there? A research facility? Something top secret and completely ethical, I’m sure.”
Con looked away and sipped his drink.
He knew something, absolutely. Maybe Carmichael’s Internal Auditor suspicions were on the mark. Would a retired Defense pilot know anything about encryption, or breaking military encryption? Or the people in Defense who used encryption? There were all sorts of nooks and crannies in Defense, places for every type of skill. There were researchers, networkers, special cleanup teams for outside the Domes, covert ops, exploratory recon soldiers, and Jake was going to drive himself nuts if he started picturing Con creeping up behind a scav hovel with a knife in his teeth. But in that case, why wouldn’t they just include Con on the message? If it was a lie, Con had made it too easy to pick apart.
“They can’t just take my scientists.” Jake’s voice sounded small and petulant, even to himself. “There are rules. Why the hell would they need pathologists, anyway?”
“Marathon isn’t a research facility.” Con leaned close, and Jake tried to look nonchalant. “It’s a planet. Habitable. But that’s not why Science is creaming itself.”
“It is? They are?” Jake didn’t know anything anymore. “Why?”
“There was mention of stuff that shouldn’t be out there. Since the planet hasn’t been mapped yet. Stuff like evidence of advanced life. Transmissions.”
“Transmissions. Of what, exactly?” Con’s breath was hot against his ear, and Jake tried not to analyze whether it felt familiar or not.
“The language isn’t too far off from standard UW,” Con muttered. “But the data stream language?”
“Yes?”
“Earth standard. Broadcasting in old-time, standard, and something more advanced.”
“But they can date the degradation of the message, so?”
“A few thousand years old, at least. Maybe less. Maybe more.”
Jake whistled through his teeth. That old, and they’d been able to narrow it? Impressive. “Okay. Fine, that’s special. How big is the operation?”
“Tiny. They’ve only one ship investigating so far. Very secretive. They want to look for signs of indigenous life from orbit first…”
Jake could contribute that information. “The Gunaji. Rations freighter, my ass.”
Con shrugged, his gaze slanted off to the side, and he crossed his arms tighter than a straitjacket. Jake thought he could see the Con he’d forgotten, the Con from ten years ago and maybe even further back, the Connor he must’ve been long before they’d met: stubborn and smart-assed, sure, but intense, focused, earnest when he tried to get serious. It was both comforting and unnerving, especially in reaction to the idea of a newly discovered hospitable planet. “What else do you know?”
“I caught another message, but it wasn’t about Marathon.”
“Your passengers must adore traveling with you. Do you read every comm that comes in?”
“Just the ones that concern the people that I—that I know.”
Jake mulled that one over. So Con was looking out for him. Which included regular commtexts, breaking encrypted Science Division Head messages, and scanning random passenger comms. It was touching, a little creepy, and a lot worrisome that Con thought Jake needed someone in his corner. It suggested Jake wasn’t nearly paranoid enough. “What did it say? The other message.”
“It was brief. Something about a pickup here on the station.”
“A pickup.”
“The recipient was supposed to get something. Bring it back to Earth.” Con was quiet for a moment. “They called it Restore.”
Jake choked mid-swig.
“That’s obvious, I think.”
“Yeah.” Jake coughed through a spasm of drink and endured some less-than-helpful back patting before he recovered enough to bat Con’s arm away. This was beyond gossip. This was impossible. “Who received the message? Did they respond?”
Con shrugged.
“How can you not know? You’re breaking encryption. Surely—”
“We have a Common area on the Harmon.” Con looked evasive. “You can create a generic guest account for comms, if you know what you’re doing. The recipient account was one of those.”
“Well, they can’t get any Restore. It’s not here. It’s not anywhere. As evidenced a score of times over.”
It would be hard to recover any shred of Restore, serum strain 42A, the Great Yellow Hope of immune system restoration experiments, let alone the research. It had been deemed so virulent and antithetical that, after the trial exhibition, the Science teams had ceremoniously destroyed the samples, the backups, and all the research memory gems, including archives, in accordance with the wishes of the Governance Board, the Science division, and the general populace. They had also destroyed the bodies. According to the logs, Jake had killed thirteen Defense officers, nine scientists from his own team, and Rebecca, who had volunteered for the procedure, all with less than 50 milliliters of Restore. And then he had tried to hide it.
Prelim tests had looked good. Jake had read through his erased activities during the court proceedings. The immune system had supposedly regenerated in the petri dishes, in mice, in rats, in pigs. Human prelim clinicals were then approved and scheduled, although he didn’t remember doing it. People he didn’t remember working with had testified for the prosecution.
The men had died first. The women took longer, a minute or so. Rebecca took ninety seconds. Of all their faces, hers was the only one he recognized while dreaming, both in forced penitence and natural sleep.
The worst of it was that the memory should have been burned into him—
screams
twitching limbs
FIRST DO NO HARM
yellow eyes
bloody hands smearing the floor
blood slippy under his feet
—but while his imagination and the chip were happy to provide, Jake couldn’t recall with clarity anything from that day of the first human testing, or his work on the serum in general, much less his knowledge of pathology and immunology. At first it had been quite the joke during the trial. ACCUSED SCIENCE DIVISION MURDERER CLAIMS “I DON’T REMEMBER,” ran one commtracker headline. THIRD COURT
REPORTER CITES LAUGHTER AS CULPRIT FOR TRANSCRIPTION MISTAKES, OVERTIME. Science spent plenty of time and funds to “help” him remember, and the Court had ruled in favor of administering Clarify memory-assistance serum on the stand, in an attempt to get some kind of testimony out of him. Ultimately, all attempts were unsuccessful (according to the transcript, his goofy-lipped Clarified “testimony” had only consisted of more I don’t remembers), and with the evidence available, the Court found him guilty of deliberately frying his own memory. Which he also didn’t remember doing.
To be fair, no one had a greater motive. Jake had been the leader of the project, and he had gone ahead with an accelerated testing schedule despite the opinions of his colleagues, whose input he couldn’t remember, could only see by their logged lab hours in the court-appropriated records. None of them had been there the morning of the accident. He also could not produce a shred of documentation to back up the approved declaration for human testing, apart from a corrupted file found among Rebecca Jeong’s personal effects. Quite out of character with his previous studies, which overflowed with paperwork. The limbic modulation equipment had his prints on it, and his credentials were logged in the system at the time of use.
If Jake had been serving on the Court, he would have convicted himself.
He’d spent most of the years in the Bends feverishly studying geology, biology, physics, chemistry, historical texts, and Earth folklore; anything but genetics and path, his former specialties. When he’d arrived on Selas Station, he’d found an unfamiliar brown synth-leather satchel packed into his belongings. It surprised him that his mother had managed to ship it without impediment. During the trial, the UW Gov Board and Defense had watched his family nearly as closely as they’d corralled him, particularly his mother, since Rebecca had supposedly contacted Angelica immediately before the testing. They’d let up somewhat after his father’s death, after they realized that the years-long lack of contact between Angelica and Jake wasn’t a ruse or a phase. Still, he presumed the Gov Board would have searched anything sent by her.
A flat card written in his mother’s strong, sloping hand accompanied the package.
