by Patty Jansen
She asked him, “Did you come here to tell me something?”
“Yeah, and also I was worried that you weren’t at dinner.”
“I forgot the time. Did you discover anything?”
“I’m not sure what I discovered, actually. While I was out there with the big ships in the afternoon shift, I fired off some communication to the station.”
“On your shift? Using your service radio? Are you even supposed to do that?”
He shrugged. “It’s just the same as when I do it from the rec room, except I don’t have an audience of off-duty personnel.” Normally he contacted the station through a simple radio that he had built himself. It came in a black plastic box that he had scavenged from the stores when the ship part that had been the original occupant of the box had been used and the container was to be recycled. He had cut holes for buttons and dials to operate the radio. He would drag this thing, together with headphones adapted from an old set discarded by a pilot, to the rec area where the crew had been provided with the luxury of a window. “Also, the reception is crap there, and I don’t like the guys watching everything I do. There is always someone in the rec room and you never know what they report to whom.”
“So you use your shift time instead, for unauthorised communication?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Melati.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“Yes, you do. You have that disapproving look on your face.”
“I just worry about your getting caught doing something that your supervisors are not going to like, that’s all.” Or worse, Dolchova.
“Well, I won’t be getting caught for this time, because there was no reply. Normally the hypertechs are pretty good and there is always someone listening. I was a bit annoyed that they weren’t. You know, I make the effort to find a job that takes me outside the ship, legally, ma’am soldier, and no one is there to listen to me. So I swept the receiver over the rest of the station instead. And I intercepted a message.”
Melati frowned. “A message? From the hypertechs?”
He shook his head. “It came from station command. C sector. It was in some funny language and I had no idea what it meant.”
“Centrasian.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. It was heavily encrypted and directed out-system, you know, the part where there may or may not be a shadow satellite with bullet probe capabilities.” Melati didn’t quite understand why ISF command were vague about the existence, or not, of this satellite.
“Did you show it to anyone?”
“Of course I did. Me and the techies spent much of the afternoon trying to break the message which we couldn’t, and then someone suggested checking if the shuttle we captured had any software to decode it.”
“I’m guessing it did.”
“Yes. The message is a call for help.”
“Not directed at us, I presume?” She felt cold. Moshi had asked for help.
“I wouldn’t think so, but no other Allion ships are in the system.” There had been some earlier into the siege, but they were chased out. “Maybe it was just a general broadcast.”
“What sort of help are they asking?”
“They’re asking for tech help. They’re saying that the station’s recycling plant is running a consistent oxygen deficit.”
What? She gave him a sharp look. “And they can’t fix it themselves?”
But it fitted with what she had seen in Moshi’s memories. She told Ari about it in a few sentences. “How hard can it be to run the recycling and agriculture plants? That’s just basic operational stuff. Follow the manual. Whatever you do, don’t vent it into space. What is so hard about it? What is their problem?”
He shrugged. “I would say not too hard, unless you’re dealing with major civil unrest or a massive failure of multiple systems.”
“Sabotage? They’re blaming Bassanti for wrecking the command room, even if they’ve had ten months to fix it. We’ve seen no sign of unrest.”
But Melati saw images of ethereal forms floating through the corridor. Blowing up the power substations, cutting off power in major sections of the station, stopping the hypertechs starting up their own operations. She shivered.
Ghosts? People in the lab would have a laughing fit if she told them.
Ari said, “Whatever is happening inside, if they can’t stabilise the ecosystem, they’ll have a few weeks at most.”
She met Ari’s eyes. “Do you have any idea if the hypertechs ever managed to get their own recycling plant operating?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t even have a clue that they were trying. The hypertechs never speak about that kind of stuff.”
“Do you think Cocaro or Dolchova know about this?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Sometimes I wonder if they care. The only ones at risk are the enemy and a bunch of small brown people who hardly have the voice to complain.”
She met Ari’s eyes, and the expression in his face reflected her mood: grim and serious. It was always the same: the only civilians who mattered in the eyes of ISF were those who had money.
“We should do something.”
She nodded.
“I’ve been trying to think about what we can do.”
“It would require a lot of planning.”
“This is not something that I’ve started thinking about recently, Melati. Every time I’m out there, and I see the station floating past, I wonder if they can see us and I wonder what would happen if I could fly one of these big ships and go there.”
“Those ships are too big. You would never get there, because they’d shoot. But I’ve wondered sometimes what would happen if you could launch yourself at the station in a rescue pod or something small enough that they wouldn’t detect.”
“A rescue pod? That’s crazy. You don’t have much steering control in those things.”
She shrugged. “Not saying it would work. But maybe it would if you got a patrol to launch you from somewhere closer to the station.”
“What good would that achieve if you were alone?”
“You could bring spyware.”
“But you’d never get out again.”
“Probably not.”
And that was where all these plans failed: trying to get enough people into the station to do enough damage. Trying to get the Fleet people to see that the civilians needed help right now and that no one else was going to give it. She sighed. “I want this horrible Sep Kerakis person gone. He’s cruel, even to his own people.”
Chapter 8
* * *
BY THE TIME Melati came into the canteen, dinnertime was already so far gone that the late dinner shift had finished cleaning up and had gone to their dorms. The new shift was just arriving and preparing to cook breakfast for the next round. A construct man was wheeling a giant vat of what appeared to be dough through the kitchen aisle. From deeper within the kitchen came the sound of laughter and the clanging of pots.
Melati drew a packaged meal from the dispenser against the wall at the back of the servery. She should really stop forgetting to go to dinner because the main meals were free and these were not. It was bland and boring fare, too. She took her tray into the mostly empty canteen and found a spot at the hard metal seats.
She ate quickly, burning her mouth a couple of times on the hot soup.
Two tables down sat a bunch of flight crew, four men, still in their flight suits. They spoke in so much jargon that they might as well be speaking another language. Melati listened while she ate. They seemed to be discussing their recent patrols. The Felicity was responsible for patrolling the exclusion zone that ISF had instated around the station. Those patrols were the source of most of the information that was available about the station. The pilots ran various scans and measured the station’s temperature and activity of equipment. They were laughing about skirting the SDM—Safe Distance Mileage—parameters for the station.
She wondered how they determined which was a safe distance to stay away from
the station. Technically, in space, there was no “out of reach” for things like missiles, but since the station’s ammunition was not being replenished because of the siege, there was a line beyond which the chance that they’d hit the target was too small to waste valuable ammunition.
The men burst into a bout of laughter. Like most ISF flight crew, they were natural born, probably came from the Council Of Four, the power network of the settlements on Jupiter’s largest moons, were rich and privileged and saw their work as nothing more than a job, forgetting that actual people lived inside the station.
Melati finished her meal and rose to deposit the tray and containers in the washing and recycling chutes. The pilots were still chatting in their jargon-filled language, and as she was about to leave the room, one of them briefly met Melati’s eyes. His gaze went first to the Fleet badge on her chest.
God, how she hated the on-board politics that tore the ship’s crew into two rigid camps. The first thing you did when meeting a new person was to check if they were Force or Fleet, and based on that you could decide how friendly to be to them and what secrets and tips to share.
But, looking at these men, each of them in control of a deadly machine of war, she felt like she could not be any more different. But maybe she could use them.
She went up to their table. “Excuse me.”
They all turned around.
One said, “Hey, aren’t you that New Jakarta girl?”
Melati bristled. She wasn’t a girl. And why did people always define by her background or skin colour instead of her position? She’d been a member of Fleet for ten months, for crying out loud.
Another caught her eyes He was well-groomed, with short dark hair that was stiff and straight and stood from his head like a fuzzy carpet. His skin was faintly coloured. He had prominent cheekbones and eyes like those of the New Pyongyang people. But his irises were grey. His badge said Flight Lieutenant First Class Hasegawa. She’d been right. He was from the influential Hasegawa family that controlled civilian mining operations on Europa.
He said, “Was there something I can help you with?”
His mates laughed again, and she could almost feel the sexual nature of their mirth.
God, how she hated these men and their inflated sense of self-importance. “Only if you’re nice.”
More laughter. “We’re all super nice,” one of his mates said.
“Well then, I guess you could tell me if you could take me to the station if I asked.”
The laughter died. Faces turned serious.
“You—what?” Hasegawa asked.
They all stared at her.
“That’s far too dangerous for such a pretty girl,” one of the others said. His hair was blond and his nametag said Morton.
“It’s hypothetical, if you understand big words like that.”
“Oooer,” Morton laughed, but he didn’t sound entirely comfortable.
Hasegawa was giving her the “you’re too pretty for this tough talk” stare.
“Hypothetically,” she repeated. “If I wanted to go to the station in a rescue pod, could you launch me with enough accuracy that I’d use minimal fuel to get there?”
“I could,” Hasegawa said, “but you’d be detected and shot before you could get to a hatch.”
“I have it on good authority that the power to the hull is often off, and if there’s no power, they can’t detect us, right?”
“I suppose . . .” Hasegawa frowned.
“She’s right, the power is off a fair bit,” said the third man with a badge that said Flight Lieutenant First Class Doherty.
“That would mean the hatches wouldn’t work either,” said Hasegawa.
Morton said, “Look, what’s this crazy scheme? We’d have to get so close that we’d have SDM alarms blaring at us long before we’d get close enough to launch a pod.”
“Hypothetical,” Hasegawa reminded him. “SDM alarms are ours. They’re just that: proximity alarms. We can turn them off.”
“But Dolchova would never . . .”
Doherty rolled his eyes. “Hypothetical, Morton. It’s a game. This pretty girl isn’t really going to hurl herself at an enemy station in a little tin can, is she?”
There was a short silence as he and Hasegawa both looked at Melati. Are you?
“Dolchova would never approve it,” Melati said.
“Nope.” Morton said, with a sense of finality.
“Why, actually, are you asking this?” Hasegawa asked.
“Because I wanted to know if you could do it.”
“Of course we could. Piece of fucking cake. If we had a few other ships covering our backsides. If there was an order.” And everything in the military was always about orders. “But that doesn’t answer the question.” He frowned at her. “You wouldn’t really want to do this, would you? Because that would be lunacy.” His expression was serious.
“As I said, Dolchova wouldn’t approve it.”
“No, she wouldn’t.” But he gave her a penetrating, puzzled look.
Melati didn’t know where she was going with this issue either, except that she wanted to do something, and that somehow talking about doing something seemed a step closer to actually doing something.
With that, she finally went to the residential section two floors up. The gravity here was 1.1 g and this was where the crew slept and spent all their leisure, exercise and teaching time.
The dormitory corridors were quiet save for the occasional snatch of soft talk that drifted from an open door. Many of the dorm doors were closed. To minimise the strain on the ship’s narrow passages, shift changes were staggered and some of the crews would already be in bed. When she lived on the base, she’d heard talk about rowdiness and parties aboard the ISF ships, but if that happened anywhere, the Felicity was not that place. Dolchova would never allow that on her ship.
When Melati came into the dorm, Jocelyn and Karmee sat on the ground between the bunks. They had already returned from the ship’s nerve centre where both worked as controllers.
Jocelyn worked in central security and Karmee in flight logistics. Karmee was one of those rare constructs who had outlived all her mostly-male cohort members. At seventy years of age, she was ancient for a construct, but like with Lieutenant Kool, it was a very good idea not to say anything about that to her face. She spent more time at the gym than all her roommates combined and was lean to the point of being thin, but very strong. She wore her white hair in a bun from which curls usually dislodged themselves within five minutes.
“There she is,” said someone when Melati came in. The third roommate, Sengkia Law, unfolded her long legs from the bottom bunk and rose to her feet, flicking her curtain of sandy hair over her shoulder. Melati was always jealous of that hair. It was so straight and so smooth and soft. One of the Ganymede elite, Sengkia was Melati’s direct opposite: rich, well-educated, signed up to Fleet by choice and was given the position she wanted.
“Were you gossiping about me?” Melati asked.
“I understand you had an interesting day,” Karmee said. She turned to Melati. Her brown eyes had not lost any of their clarity with age. “I heard you met our crazy prisoner.”
“How did you know about him?”
“Everyone knows about him, dear. He’s the first person to come out of the station alive since the siege, why would we not know about him?”
“Did you see him?”
“Sure did. He was yelling religious propaganda at us all the way while we were guiding him into the docks.”
“What language did he speak?”
“Station speak, B3, of course.”
“Hang on, you understand B3?”
“A bit.” She shrugged. “I have a module, even if it’s not very good. It doesn’t contain any words for flight-related terms, so we had a lot of trouble getting him to comply with our orders before we could get him down and out of that ship. Someone should really update those modules.”
“They can’t. B3 has no word
s for those terms. They don’t need those words. None of the barang-barang ever get anywhere near a cockpit.”
“You really do have a chip on your shoulder about this, don’t you?” Sengkia said.
“Oy, there’s no need to say that,” Karmee said.
“Well, it’s true,” Sengkia said, pursing her lips.
Melati said, “You would have a chip on your shoulder, too, if you came from a group of people that had been systematically ignored and mistreated. No educational opportunities, no health care. No way of improving their lives. Oh yes, officially we can travel, but it costs more than most people will earn in their lifetimes. Think of all the chances they waste by not educating the children. Now they’re locked up in the station, and no one seems to care . . .” She had to stop because her voice threatened to crack. For ten months, they’d just sat here doing nothing while her family suffered.
“You’re here,” Sengkia said primly.
“And I am proof that this ignoring no longer happens? Look, there is a station full of my fellows, there are ten thousand of them, plus all the illegals that we don’t know about. What do you think ISF would do if ten thousand of its crew became trapped in a siege? Would they sit for ten months and do nothing? No, don’t even bother answering that.”
Melati glared at Sengkia and Sengkia glared back. She was just as stubborn and driven as Melati.
“Just stop it, you two,” Jocelyn said. She was reading on a PCD. “It says here about your prisoner: ‘A man in his mid-thirties was inside the craft. He has been taken to the correctional department for questioning.’ ”
Karmee snorted. “Questioning. You’ll probably learn more from the ship’s data dump than from that man. He is completely nuts.”
Something beeped at the back wall of the cabin. Sengkia opened a door and took out a foil packet. “Hey, guys, the munchies are here.” She sat down, elegantly folding her legs, and ripped open the packet.
Melati joined them on the floor. Ten months sharing the dorm with these three women had taught her a lot. Other people brought vastly different life experiences and viewed the world through those. Almost everyone had experienced something painful, and it didn’t really add anything to argue that her own stupidity and exploitation at the hands of the New Hyderabad mafia was any worse than Sengkia’s breakup with her husband and being forced to leave her two children behind. Sengkia was not a bad person. She just didn’t understand.
