Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  Pollard had his full attention now, and Tetsuya was so intent on the screen that Velásquez surprised him when he blurted, "Sir, you know all we have is an outline, a skeleton, of how this will all work, we're not ready ..."

  Long held up his hand and Velásquez clamped his mouth shut, his jaw muscles working.

  Gurbert added weight to the decision with comments in engineering jargon and nodding at Pollard in agreement. But Tetsuya had stopped paying attention ... and so had most of the room. Why announce this now? If Velásquez didn't have a plan in place it would just give the miners and haulers time to stew.

  Long turned the screen off as Pollard wrapped up with assurances that the Butte cosmic family would get through this 'together', and when he did Tetsuya thought every detective in the room spoke at once. Velásquez and O'Hara were both out of their seats.

  "First thing!" Long yelled, holding up his hand. When it quieted and the two detectives were seated he continued. "When dealing with the public we do not say anything beyond what Pollard said in his speech. TA will follow up with more bulletins about the new pass system. We need to assure everyone ..."

  "It needs to be delayed," Velásquez interrupted. "We need to have a plan in place."

  "Sir, you're looking at a possible riot," Tetsuya said. "We need something to show them, don't give them time to think about it."

  Long's face was red and he was beginning to sweat. He shook his head and said loudly, "We can't. This is happening." Then he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. "The Chief Superintendent and the UNSEC Company Commander both spoke with Gurbert, his concerns are real. He's not being used as a prop to support the plan to issue passes. At 0900 tomorrow morning Control will begin to call for volunteer departures. If they don't get thirty-five ships off the docking arms by 1500 then it will become mandatory for vessels that have been docked for more than three weeks to undock and move out of the traffic lanes."

  Everyone was quiet now.

  "UNSEC will be in full force on the terminal level. Our officers will keep to the upper levels and lifts, and the patrol cruiser in orbit will persuade ships to depart when requested. Velásquez, you will have a complete plan on my desk by morning. Now that's all! Dismissed!"

  Long stalked out of the room, the hatch stuck open behind him. Tetsuya got up and followed him even as Velásquez stood and kicked his chair. He passed Bingbing on his way out, her big eyes followed him as he ducked through the hatch.

  He had to lengthen his stride to catch up with Long.

  "Sir ... sir, wait."

  Long stopped and rounded on Tetsuya, his mouth a flat line and one eyebrow raised. Tetsuya lowered his voice. "Sir, we have to delay this. Velásquez needs help with creating the new protocol."

  The other man smiled at him. "What, Takahashi, can't handle being back in Criminal Investigations? You want back in TA?"

  He wasn't sure how to react. It made no sense for the man to needle him. In his silence Long continued. "I wish I could make that happen. But, the Chief Superintendent wants you on those piracy cases." He shrugged. "So ..."

  As detectives filed out of the breakroom behind him as Tetsuya stood and watched Long walk away with the feeling that he would never understand the man.

  * * *

  Tetsuya stepped into the office. He had stopped for a coffee before returning and now he found Baldwin explaining the announcement to George and Falk, who had not made it to the meeting in time. They were both leaning back in their seats, looking at her with the same incredulous expression.

  As he sat down and logged in his desk Falk looked at him and said, "Lieutenant, you've got to do something about this. Talk to Long ... you're a Superintendent, he'll have to listen to you."

  "I have, and no he doesn't."

  "Well, what are we supposed to do?" That was George. He was sitting with his arms folded across this chest, and that incredulous expression now aimed at Tetsuya.

  He glanced up from his desk to look at him. "Our jobs."

  "I thought you were the Samurai," Baldwin snickered and dropped in her seat. "Why don't you go in Bratton's office and tell him how it's gonna be?"

  An allusion to the inquest that Tetsuya exposed his previous supervisors to. He felt heat rising in his face. Itsumi said that anger didn't look well on him, she meant that it made his already ugly face unbearable to look at. "I said I talked to Long. Now it's over, we do our jobs."

  Baldwin snorted but started flipping through files on her desk, and after a moment her eyes narrowed to focus on whatever she was reading. He told Falk and George to go finish what they were doing before they were called back for the meeting. They might already be finished, but they left without a word. Schindler busied himself on a call, and the office settled into relative calm.

  There was a message from the Registrar's office waiting for him and he opened it. It was the official response for his request for access to the Sadie's flight plan and crew data. Bratton had signed off on it and with all the I's dotted and T's crossed it had been approved. The message provided a key that would grant him temporary network access to the files. He linked his desk into the Registrar's network and settled in to read.

  Captain Middleton and his crew; ship's mechanic Haydon James, pilot Yuri Petrov, and engineering apprentice Misaki Iriyama, disembarked and passed Butte's security checkpoint weeks after the attack on the Pendleton took place. Less than two hours later they passed back through the checkpoint and boarded their ship. Middleton filed a flight plan to the Moon. Which made perfect sense. They would have come here to drop their full canisters, but as no hauler crews were leaving the station for fear of piracy Middleton would have had no recourse but to deliver the canisters to the Apex plant himself. Weeks later, Middleton and Misaki both passed the checkpoint at Harmony dome. As he studied the scan records he felt something catch in his throat. They were at Harmony the hour that the Apex plant exploded and the dome was destroyed.

  Tetsuya licked his lips and stared at the record. Kaori had been there at the same time. He knew the exact time she passed the dome's checkpoint without having to look at the blazing red numbers of the CTB alert that was sent to him now almost three months ago.

  A coincidence, and nothing more, he told himself. After a moment he read on.

  On the day of the explosion Misaki scanned through the checkpoint at Osaka dome. Having miraculously escaped the dome's decompression and destruction. There was an associated entry that the Registrar's office linked to the file ... Misaki had signed a visitation log at the dome's hospital, but Tetsuya was suddenly finding it difficult to concentrate. His chest was thudding.

  He got up from his desk, slowly— taking a long, quiet breath. Schindler looked up from his own files, briefly. Baldwin didn't. Leaving the office he closed the hatch and walked toward the end of the tunnel, toward Bratton's office. It was quiet there, less foot traffic. Leaning against the wall he took deep breaths.

  Ben's death had been hard. Harder for the widow and seven year old daughter he left behind, who thankfully had remained on Earth because Ben's tour at Harmony dome was scheduled to last just three months. But, Tetsuya had mourned with them. Kaori ... was a different story. It felt like his chest was going to burst. Blood was rushing in his ears and he felt dizzy. Misaki Iriyama had somehow lived through the destruction of Harmony dome. But what about Kaori?

  All he had was an alert that she scanned in the checkpoint, the dome blew, and nothing else. For weeks ... nothing else. No messages and no more alerts that he was hiding from his wife.

  One parent's daughter lives. One parent's daughter dies.

  Maybe he should just accept that. Stop obsessing over the Iriyama woman because he sees something of Kaori in her, and tell his wife that their daughter was at Harmony ... when it blew up.

  Tetsuya's heart began to slow, the beating no longer a hammer against his ribcage. He steadied himself and went back to the office and took his seat at his desk. For the rest of the day he reviewed reports and a
ttended to the flow of bureaucracy that went with being a public servant. At the end of the day he sent his team home, and as he was leaving the office, there in the tunnel as the hatch closed, he suddenly realized something. He had been so distracted by the odd occurrence of Misaki and Kaori both being in the same place at the same time that a minor detail in the crew manifest slipped his mind— Misaki transferred aboard the Sadie two years prior to the pirate attack on the Pendleton. He had found the lie.

  14 - Yuri

  Yuri waited in the galley. On his wedding day he had been marginally more nervous than he was now, it was like electricity was coming up from his loins and surging into his lungs and heart. Like full body RLS. Part of it was sobriety, he knew, but not all of it.

  Mat will say yes, he told himself, floating at the edge of the table with his arms crossed over his chest and staring at the galley's hatch— as though he could will the answer from Mat when he came through. He had to say yes, this was too important ... and after what he had done for that woman, letting her hack the crew manifest, he wasn't in a position to tell Yuri no.

  Where is he?

  When the message Yuri had been waiting for finally came he double checked their current position and then called Mat. He was just waking up and said he would meet Yuri in the galley. That was ten minutes ago. For over a month time had become an abstract concept to him, but now that he had what he was looking for— literally in the palm of his hand on his handcomm— the minutes seemed to stretch. Yuri couldn't say that he had held out hope, because it had come and gone like the weather over the intervening years from when he had started looking for Ivan ... when he had made the determination to find his estranged son. From drop-off station to depot he had shown the picture of Ivan around at the bars, because that's where miners spent their time, and he knew that Ivan had joined a mining crew. He had done that in order to support his mother, after Yuri left her. Left them, a little voice never got tired of reminding him.

  Yuri was a man that had made a lot of mistakes in his life, and he had come to the conclusion that he couldn't fix them. The time for fixing things was long gone, but he did want to see Ivan and talk to him. Maybe admit his mistakes ... maybe just see him and know he was well. He wasn't under any illusions about forgiveness and reconciliation. The wounds were too deep, and the kind that changed a person's life. If Ivan knifed him on the spot he would simply have to endure. Just let me have five minutes with him, he prayed.

  Where was ...

  The hatch opened and Mat pulled himself inside. Yuri's heart jumped. "Where were you?"

  Mat's dark face frowned. "I just woke up." He pushed toward the cabinets on the bulkhead. "I need some coffee."

  Yuri hurriedly reached for the cabinets, telling him, "I will do it."

  Mat pulled himself into a seat at the table while he put the coffee drinkbox in the heater.

  "Yuri, what's this about?" Mat asked, running his hand over his eyes and short hair, rubbing the back of his neck.

  He stared at Mat, all of a sudden he didn't know where to begin.

  "Yuri?" Mat's face turned to consternation. "You called me for secret meetings and now you're making coffee for me. What is it?"

  The heater sounded and Yuri's mind seemed to snap to clarity with it. He handed Mat the coffee, and said, "I found him."

  Mat's eyes slowly widened and he froze, staring at him.

  "I ... I found Ivan," he went on. "I think. I have a good lead."

  "Yuri, that's great news," Mat told him, smiling. "What ship is he on? Have you tried to reach him?"

  Yuri shook his head. "I do not know his ship," he admitted. "But I know where he is, a lot. There is an old Shenhau fueling depot ..." He paused, his eyes directly on Mat's. Then he swallowed, "It is about seventy-six hours from our current location."

  They were passing over the inner edge of the Belt, in another hour they would be out of position for the maneuvers that Yuri had in mind to get them pointed in the right direction. As it was, it was going to take a lot of math and a lot of fuel for those maneuvers, so even as Mat's mouth opened to respond he pressed on.

  "Mat, I know we are due at Ganymede to start our contact, but please. I can get us there in time. I just want to see him ..."

  "Yuri ..."

  "You can't say no," Yuri told him, he could feel his voice shaking inside his throat. "Not after what you did for that woman, putting us all at risk. Then you brought her back aboard ..."

  "Yuri, that's enough," Mat said, his face hard.

  He stopped, feeling out of breath, his heart still beating like a rabbit's. Mat can't say no, he can't say no. I need a drink. He suddenly became afraid of contemplating what he might do if Mat said no. He wasn't a military man, like Haydon, he had been a commercial test pilot for most of his life. Taking the ship by force ...

  Mat's face suddenly softened and he said, "Why would I say no?" It was as if the pressure building inside his chest and head evaporated. Yuri physically let out a breath and he felt tears in his eyes. "This is your son, Yuri. I'm not going to say no, but I do want to talk to Haydon and Misaki, tell them what we're doing ..."

  "Misaki!" Yuri yelled. "Why? What does that woman have to do with this?"

  "What does she have to do with this?" Mat's voice had turned incredulous. "Yuri, she's part of this crew."

  "Yes, but she does not like me, she will convince you to say no."

  "That's not true," Mat told him. "I never thought I would say this, but you need a drink. Get one, and sit down."

  As Mat pulled his handcomm out of his pocket Yuri nodded, his stomach tight, and opened one of the cabinets. There was vodka in the back, behind the boxes of MREs.

  Fifteen minutes later they were on the Flight deck, around the plot terminal. Mat studied the course that he had lain out for the Sadie, into the Belt's edge and a hard burn to the Shenhau depot. Haydon crossed his arms over his chest, saying, "So all that bar hopping in the Belt led you to your son. I'm impressed."

  Yuri nodded, still feeling jittery. The Sadie wasn't on course for the depot, so nothing was written in stone, yet. He glanced at Misaki. The woman hovered a meter away, holding on to a handhold above a terminal seat. Those dark eyes looking at the plot impassively ... they were calculating, he knew. She glanced at him, no flicker of emotion— just those dead, dark eyes— then back to the plot.

  "Alright," Mat began. "So we're going to do this. Any objections?"

  Haydon shrugged. "This is Yuri's kid, we have to go, contract or no contract. If we miss out we can take a hauling job, if we have to. Now that we have the extra guns."

  Mat and Haydon both turned to look at Misaki. Yuri swallowed, feeling himself become angry. If she said no ... raised even the slightest concern ... Mat would call the whole thing off, he knew it.

  Her eyebrows went up as she realized they wanted her input. She wiped the sweat beading on her forehead with the sleeve of Peterson's old coveralls, then looked at Yuri and said in her quiet way, "It's your child." And for a moment— just a moment— Yuri could have sworn that he saw something like compassion in the woman's eyes.

  "Let's get strapped in," Mat said. "Yuri, it's your show."

  15 - Shultz

  If Mars was considered a desolate wasteland, then Melas Chasma was the bottom of it. Literally, Shultz thought as the shuttle left the bleak Sinai Planum and dropped past jagged, gray and rust cliffs, descending into the canyon.

  It was one of those rare occasions that he was by himself, Jung was stuck in meetings until the end of the day. On long shuttle flights they would talk shop, but with his absence Shultz found that reading reports on his handcomm wasn't the same as discussing them out loud, so he stared out the shuttle's window, watching the Martian wilderness go by.

  "Twenty minutes, sir," the pilot announced through the overhead speaker.

  Shultz readjusted himself in his seat, glanced at his handcomm in his lap, then looked back out the window.

  The Martian landscape as much a home to him was also .
.. alien. No, not alien, he corrected himself immediately. That's not the right word. It was something else, yet he couldn't deny the primal part of his brain that said the craters and odd rock formations were somehow wrong. He wanted, needed, to see green hills and blue lakes. Mars wasn't alien, it was new. New in a way that had nothing to do with geological age or cosmology. It was mankind's second chance ... a chance to do things right. And Shultz was going to be the man to make that happen. Well, I'll start the ball rolling, but I won't live to see it.

  If he and Jung could pull the colony from Modi's grip.

  Melas Chasma was formed from precipitation and in the distant past held a substantial lake. The canyon's valleys, now bone dry, were covered in layers of sediment. A competing theory was that there was a lake to the west, and the chasma was created from run off. In either case the deposits of sediment were rich in hydrated sulfates and iron oxides, and in the original scientific mission included in the colony's charter the chasma was a place of interest.

  Melas Research Station sat on the floor of the deepest valley in the chasma, almost eleven point two kilometers from the ridges of the surrounding dusty and pitted plains. The ash of ancient volcanoes covered the small collection of once golden domes and got into every crevice and joint of machinery. It was the last of the scientific research stations, kept alive by the thin legalities of the charter. The other stations, long since defunded by the UN Council's avarice, were left to erode in the wind and sand.