Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  "I have to tell you, Chief," Susan continued. "I have to question the Gov on this one. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do. Care to share, now that we're almost there?"

  He had been over this with them already, Susan was really asking for details. Details he didn't have. The heater sounded and Armand took the coffee out and gave it to him.

  "Search the site for things that will be useful to Mars, some technology that will help us. Scientifically or economically." He repeated to her. Gerhard hadn't had time to give them a solid mission objective, so Jung had clarified what they were supposed to do based on what Reinhardt had said.

  Susan sipped her coffee. "So, just look around, and pick up things?"

  That had been what she had asked him the last time he told her.

  "I hope there are aliens," Desmond said, smiling. The bacteriologist had been watching a lot of late night vids about aliens, UFOs, and strange lights seen from the Moon. Jung suspected that's how he spent most of his time out at the Melas station.

  Susan rolled her eyes and said something, but it was lost in the sound of Frank's voice coming through the overhead. "Flipping in ten minutes. Everyone get to your racks and strap in."

  * * *

  Jung's bladder felt like it was squished flat as the courier turned upside down and then backwards, the thrusters firing hard to shed the little ship's velocity. Snug in the webbing of his rack he gritted his teeth. For almost twenty minutes the pressure continued, then the courier flipped again for a few minutes, and then the pressure was back. When it finally let up he heard Desmond groan, from his own rack. He didn't think any of them would have survived the trip without the meds to keep their bones and muscles healthy.

  "Alright, ladies and gentlemen," Frank said from the overhead. "Ganymede Control has us plotted for the Landing Zone. I expect we'll touch down in about twenty minutes. Until then, please remain secured in your racks."

  Thirty minutes later, at a third of his Martian weight, Jung led the science team— followed by Compton's observer, now in her brace— almost bouncing into the terminal access tube. It was an odd sensation, somewhere between soreness and relief.

  A dark skinned man in an Orion uniform was waiting for them at the end of the tube. He smiled politely as they approached and extended his hand to Jung.

  "Lieutenant Governor Jung," he said. "It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Tōmas Efron, Orion Security's liaison here on Ganymede."

  "Thank you," Jung said, taking the man's hand. It was cool and dry.

  "I'm afraid we don't have time for full introductions," Efron went on. "Misses Reinhardt has asked me to get you to the site as soon as possible. Please leave your luggage here, I'll have everything returned to the courier, and we'll take a shuttle directly to the crater."

  Jung nodded and moved his suitcase to the side of the tube, and the others did the same. In the rear, the sergeant held a flat expression, but her eyes were a little wide.

  Efron took them past a security checkpoint with a nod to the Orion man behind the desk. They were hustled through the terminal a short ways to a side hatch marked 'Private'. The place was busier than Jung expected for a distant mining base, though the people were what he assumed would be here— miners and haulers, in their coveralls and jumpsuits with company logo patches on the sleeves and breasts.

  The private access tube led to an Orion Security shuttle. Efron made them change into vac-suits and checked to make sure everyone was seated, and holding their helmet in their laps, before he himself went to the pilot's cabin.

  As the shuttle lifted from the Landing Zone and the base spread out across the gray rock and ice below, Jung begin to feel ... tired. That was the only word he could come up with. There was a certain nervous energy pent up inside his chest— they were about to investigate a two-thousand year old alien wreck, or whatever it was— but deep down he felt a weariness that came from fighting the same battle for too long. He had supported Gerhard early on, and would continue to until the end, whenever that was and wherever it led, but over the course of the long trip, with little to do, he had begun to wonder if Mars would ever be free.

  Those thoughts sapped away some of the nervousness in his chest. Whatever they found here, would it make a difference?

  Like him, Gerhard, was an idealist. Neither one of them would have become a politician if they were realists— especially a Martian politician. For years he had wondered at Modi's aim for Mars, where were his policies leading, and Gerhard had been telling him for years that it was simple greed. Modi had no long term agenda for Mars other than to suck it dry, and so far he had done exactly what Gerhard had said. It just seemed unrealistic to him. A healthy, growing Martian economy was a profitable one. Not just for Martians, but for Earth businesses, and even Modi and the UN Council.

  For Jung, it didn't seem like simple greed. It was tyranny, oppression, for no reason that he could discern.

  He closed his eyes briefly, listening to the sounds of the science team talk— Susan's voice the largest. When he opened them again he looked out the shuttle window, and strangely, in the reflection of the glass, he saw sergeant Jenkins looking at him. He ignored her and looked up at Jupiter. It was a swirl of color, hanging in the black. Down below was Ganymede, colorless, cold. An odd thought came to mind— his youngest daughter would love a picture of him with Jupiter overhead.

  The shuttle banked and flew over the rim of a crater, then began to drop. From the overhead Efron told them to hold on, and a few moments later the shuttle touched lightly down. Out of the window there was an emergency dome. Two figures in vac-suits were walking across the dirt and ice toward it, with a large crate between them.

  Efron came into the passenger module.

  "Please put on your helmets," he told them. "We're going directly to the warehouse."

  Efron cycled them through the shuttle's airlock one at a time, telling them not to go anywhere. Jung came out, pausing on the shuttle steps briefly to look up at the black sky. It made him nauseous. He looked back down, and took careful steps on the metal rungs until his boots rested firmly on the surface. The sergeant had gone before him, and now stood watching him from a few of meters away, beside a run of metal poles and cable that led to the dome. He supposed she thought that this was observing. She had certainly done a lot of it, watching him. He made it to the makeshift railing and turned to see Susan slowly coming out of the airlock.

  They waited, all of them with one hand on the railing, while Efron cycled through the airlock and took the lead to the dome. The scientists chattered across the open channel as they walked the thirty meters on slippery ground.

  As Efron had said, the dome was a warehouse. Inside, the team took off their helmets and looked around at the stacked crates and equipment. It smelled like burnt carbon, and it was cold. Two men in vac-suits were making room for another crate. Reinhardt came around a stack, carrying a large tablet in her hand.

  "Lieutenant Governor Jung, it's good to meet you," she said. She looked pale and tired, but she gave him a brief smile. "Welcome to Pandora's Box."

  He shook her gloved hand. "Pandora's Box?"

  By her expression Jung thought she might be vaguely amused at her own choice of words. "I say that," she continued. "Because we don't really know what we have here. It all looks familiar, but that just raises more questions."

  "What do you mean?" Susan asked.

  Reinhardt walked to a stack covered with a canvas tarp. She pulled it back, revealing ... corpses ... sealed in clear plastic. They were wearing clothes ... uniforms. Jung felt his eyebrows rise as he realized they were human.

  "Oh," Desmond said with a note of disappointment in his voice. "Not aliens, time travelers."

  33 - Tetsuya

  Obsession was a game for the young. Someone once said that.

  Secured in the webbing of his rack aboard the UNTA courier Tetsuya's stomach reminded him of that observation. The sleek little ship had been in hard deceleration for the past three hours, on its final approach
to Ganymede. Every bone in his body felt like lead and every organ a pancake. Counting the trip from Earth to Butte this was his second time in spaceflight. The transport had been more conscious of its passengers, not so with the courier. Speed was everything. And the fact that the pilot and co-pilot were both Korean compounded the issue— the belief that everything had to be done right now was a racial ideology.

  Tetsuya had known the courier was docked at Butte before going to Bratton's office and requesting permission to chase down Middleton and his crew at Ganymede. Bratton had watched him from behind steepled fingers as he explained that Misaki Iriyama had first-hand experience with the pirates that attacked both the Pendleton and the Sadie, and Middleton was not only guilty of falsifying official UN documents, by omitting in his report that he had rescued Iriyama from the severely damaged pirate ship, but evidence suggested that he also attacked and destroyed a freighter— without provocation— at the edge of the Belt. The Chief Superintendent's response had been ... surreal.

  Bratton hadn't been interested in the details of the case and had given Tetsuya's reasons for wanting to go only courtesy attention. His only question was how Tetsuya intended to get to Ganymede, as the department didn't have a ship and pilot at its disposal to take him there. Long, who had been standing next to Bratton's desk with his arms folded, watching Tetsuya, realized that he was thinking of the courier and called O'Hara to find out its route. Ganymede was in fact its next destination. All that remained was for Bratton to make a call to the Regional TA office and request that Tetsuya be included as a passenger.

  He had expected a fight, but instead, Tetsuya left the office with the distinct impression that he had fallen into some sort of trap. His suspicions of Bratton putting him in charge of Criminal Investigations for some political purpose were not gone, but immersed under the complexities of the Pendleton case ... and Misaki Iriyama. Bratton was not a mystery he could solve.

  When he explained to Itsumi that he was leaving— that night in fact, because the courier had a schedule to keep— her reaction had been just as odd as Bratton's. She had simply asked how long she should pack his bags for. It wasn't until he was boarding the courier— looking back at the silent figure of his wife standing at the docking arm checkpoint— that he realized she thought his trip had something to do with finding Kaori. She completely missed his explanation of tracking down a criminal at Ganymede Base. He wasn't sure what to do with the revelation. If he called her and explained that he was not going in search of Kaori she might have a breakdown. Yet, when he returned without Kaori ... well, he didn't know which scenario would be worse.

  Tetsuya thought about those things as the weight of living in a physical universe crushed him. No matter how much he attempted to use the importance of the case as justification for leaving Criminal Investigations back in the hands of Baldwin, and leaving his wife alone, this was obsession ... although something kept whispering that what he was really seeking was closure. The Pendleton case was no longer about the Pendletons, or even piracy. It had grown into something more, and at its heart was Misaki Iriyama. He had questions that needed answers— why was someone covering her tracks? Editing communication logs, altering black box data, why did Middleton risk imprisonment by falsifying his report with a lie of omission? There was no doubt in his mind that Middleton and his mechanic found her aboard the pirate ship. They had brought her back to the Sadie— regardless of how impossible it was to create fake crew manifests. Perhaps answering those questions would provide that sense of closure he desired.

  The overhead speaker chimed and the pilot announced that they were about to flip. Somehow knowing that the torture was nearing its end made it easier to endure.

  He was the ship's only passenger. The little courier could fit four persons total, two to a cabin. The pilot and co-pilot were accustomed to their own spaces, as evidenced by some of the co-pilot's paraphernalia still in the cabin that Tetsuya was using. With Tetsuya's presence he was forced to share the cabin across the corridor with the pilot. It was not something that endeared him to the two men. Apparently, actual passengers were very rare. The courier had a small cargo hold that was used for expedited shipments for government offices on ore drop-off stations around the Belt and out-system. On occasion the Regional TA office leased their couriers for commercial use, as it was in this case. Apex Mining had paid a hefty fee to have delivered whatever was in the cargo hold to Ganymede Base.

  The world turned upside down for a full three seconds and then his organs seemed to inflate back to their normal size. The pressure was gone and he could breathe again. He felt tired. As the ship leveled out the pilot announced it was safe to unstrap, and the first thing Tetsuya did was remove the urine bottle, then he fumbled around in the microgravity on his way to the bathroom, or head, or whatever they called it on-board a ship.

  Back in the cabin, feeling like Atlas after he set the world down, he made sure his bags were in order. The screen on the bulkhead showed Apex Mining's Ganymede Base, its sprawling metal complex and the golden bulge of its dome, alien and intrusive on the moon's dirty rock and ice surface. The camera caught two mining ships, bulky with canisters, hovering near the refinery.

  The overhead speaker chimed and the pilot said, "Lieutenant, we're in a standby orbit, waiting for clearance from security. These Orion guys sometimes like to give us grief. Just be ready to strap back in when I give the word."

  Orion was the private security firm that Apex hired to protect the base. Any cop knew who they were, because you would eventually end up dealing with them for one reason or another. They were part of a security conglomerate with enough money and manpower to build their own patrol ships or support a private army. They did everything from providing personal bodyguards to the children of the wealthy to guarding corporate assets.

  They also had enough clout— and high value clients— to occasionally snub their nose at UN offices, like the TA. It was twenty minutes before they were cleared to land.

  When Tetsuya exited the courier's vestibule and entered the docking access tube he immediately noticed the green and white of Orion's uniforms at the security checkpoint. Stretched thin because of the rising piracy incidents and the disaster at Harmony dome, Ganymede Base was left without a UNSEC presence. It was the reason that Apex hired Orion— and there were a lot of those green and white uniforms throughout the docking tube.

  Tetsuya walked to the desk at the checkpoint and the guard behind it gave him a friendly enough smile and nodded to the retinal scanner. When he put his eyes to it and it beeped the guard nodded again and Tetsuya walked past three more guards in flak vests and carrying stun batons and pistols. Private security companies were not allowed to equip their people with assault class weapons, but Tetsuya knew that the pistols on their hips were standard issue for the UNPF.

  He stood with a dozen others on the tram platform. Most of them miners, by the logos on their coveralls. The enclosed spaces of concrete and metal, the coveralls— six months on Butte had made him familiar with all of it ... yet, standing there he felt out of place. He didn't think it was the change in gravity, or the smell of the filtered air. Perhaps it was the absence of Itsumi. But, as a detective he had worked with task forces in other cities and collaborated on investigations with other agencies that required him to be away from home for extended times. And while he had missed Itsumi, he had never felt ... estranged.

  The arrival of the tram pulled him back into focus.

  He had a plan on how to confront Middleton ... and Misaki. It involved cornering them before they had a chance to run. It was a fragile plan, born of his obsession for closure and discovering who Misaki Iriyama really was. He had come to the conclusion that the two things— closure, and Misaki— were synonymous.

  The tram deposited him and the miners at a terminal that was not so unlike the terminal level on Butte. The difference being that the dome encompassed more open space and there was a golden cast to the lights overhead. And it was less humid. Butte's air clung
to you.

  Ganymede Base was built around the ore drop-off station concept, in essence it was a small, self-contained city— with the added benefits of a refinery and factory that made it more self-sufficient. Parts to repair ships could be manufactured or retooled here, instead of waiting for them to arrive from Earth. Fuel for those same ships could be refined and stored in tanks just outside the refinery. The base was built to support long term mining operations between Ganymede and Jupiter.

  Standing on the terminal platform Tetsuya looked around at the eateries, rows of permafab office buildings, and concrete streets. It wasn't as crowded as Butte, not yet, but he could envision it easily enough.

  Pulling his handcomm from his pocket he logged into the local network and called up the dome's map. He found the Orbital and Docking Control Center and headed in that direction.

  The newness of the place stood out in contrast to the worn surfaces of Butte. The air had a tang to it, the smell of polymers. The permafab buildings were clean, and the sidewalks still scuff free.

  Control was a square, three-story building located inside a gated administrative complex. Tetsuya counted no less than five men in Orion uniforms and wearing riot gear around the main entrance. The smooth-faced, beefy guard that took his retinal scan asked him to wait a moment while he called someone from inside the guard shack.

  As a UN Police Officer, with one foot in Criminal Investigations and the other in the Transit Authority, Tetsuya supposed he could have just told the guard to open the gate and get out of the way, but Control's chief administrator was expecting him, and it cost him nothing to wait the few moments for the guard to make the call.

  "You're expected, lieutenant," the guard told him, stepping out of the guard shack and pressing the button to open the gate.