by Patty Jansen
The foil bag was handed around, providing everyone with a handful of crisps of uncertain origin produced by the recycler. Munchies was one of the more polite names for them. They tasted surprisingly good.
The room filled with the sound of crunching.
For some reason Melati glanced at the clock and realised it was only a few minutes from prayer time. Her mat was under her desk in the lab. She’d taken it there with the intention to carry it back and forth. She hadn’t done it once. Those were uncomfortable thoughts, making her feel guilty about her family and culture, but to be honest even when she was still at the station, she had rarely observed prayer times. It was just too hard if you worked with people who had different customs.
She looked at Karmee. “You said you had a data dump from the refugee’s ship?”
“Yes, but given the station’s history, we kept it in isolation, for security reasons.”
“Sure. We’re happy that we’ve done the same with the prisoner. Has anyone looked at the data?”
“Not yet. Security had a really busy day today. They had to isolate a section of the docks and then the correctional department. Do you expect anything interesting? It will just have flight data and we already have those.”
“It should also have some dockside data from the station.”
Jocelyn frowned. “Yeah, it should.”
“Can you access those data?”
“What? From here? Now?” It was her off-shift, and Jocelyn came from a family with a long military tradition and they were pretty clued up on rules.
“The station is dying.”
She shrugged grudgingly, rose and found her PCD. She came back to the others, sat on the ground and took a big handful of munchies from the bag, which she ate while balancing the PCD on her crossed legs and flicking through login screens. Crumbs went everywhere.
“Here,” she said while crunching her way through another bite.
Melati took the device from her and blew off the crumbs.
The screen was full of a block of text mostly in code. Melati put a munchie in her mouth and chewed while she tried to decipher it.
Sengkia looked over her shoulder. “That’s the docking information.” She pointed to the top of the page. “This here is what the ship sends, and the station responds with this block of lines here. They send climate information, and status of the surrounding docks. There should be information here about where to contact the authorities and which formalities need to be completed for various levels of clearance.” She frowned at the screen. “Hmmm, there should be more information about open or closed trades.”
Melati passed the screen to Sengkia, seeing as this involved her daily job. Sengkia scrolled through the information. Her lips moved at times and she pointed at the screen, and then scrolled back up.
“Does it make any sense to you?” Melati asked after a while.
“Yes, but it’s really not very good. The temperature fluctuates a lot. The air quality, too. Sometimes it’s almost bad enough to justify a warning. There is no power to half the dockside a lot of the time. They haven’t had a reason to run the docks at full power, because there have been no ships, but in that case the systems would be sending regular sleep codes, that all is fine but the machines are in power-saver mode. I’m not seeing any of those codes. This is a mess. I don’t even know how you can let things deteriorate to that point.”
Melati nodded. This backed up what Moshi had seen. It also backed up the message intercepted by Ari.
She explained that from Moshi’s memories, it seemed that the hypertechs had failed in cutting the B sector off from the main recycling plants.
Sengkia spread her hands. “Why would the station command stop them doing that?”
“Obviously because they don’t like the workers being autonomous,” Karmee said in the condescending tone she often used on Sengkia, whom she privately confessed was the most naïve person she had ever met.
“But this will kill them.”
Karmee snorted. “Do you think they care?”
“Then why don’t we do anything? We’ve got warships out here.”
Melati said, “That’s the big question, isn’t it?”
“But that’s . . . barbaric. If these were ISF soldiers, we would never be sitting here waiting.”
“That, exactly, is my point.” Melati met Sengkia’s eyes and, for the first time since coming to share the cabin, saw true understanding in them.
Chapter 9
* * *
MELATI OBEYED Dr Chee’s orders and went to bed, but not without checking her PCD. Maybe Ari had heard something more from the hypertechs. But there weren’t any messages.
Still, she took a good amount of time to fall asleep. Her mind churned with worry. While she lay here in her safe bed, Uncle, Grandma and the Aunties might be fighting the battle of their lives. She kept seeing images of space battles and shoot-outs in smoky corridors. And Fatima trying to fix the electrical substation. A brave woman with less training and less equipment than Melati had. The image of Fatima filled her with shame. She had often called the hypertechs selfish, but right now she felt that she was the selfish one.
The room was still pitch dark when Melati woke up with a shock. Something was beeping with the intensity of a general alarm, but it wasn’t the general alarm or any of the tones that warned the crew when the engines were about to make a burn. It was also not her PCD, although that showed a flashing beacon that there had been a call. She normally turned the sound off at night, so would not have reacted to it. This racket came from the control panel at the door, where lights were flashing.
She stumbled from the bed and hit the green button. Which shut the thing up.
Silence. Phew.
Sengkia stirred and went hmmm in the top bunk.
The screen was still flashing. Melati had to stare for a few seconds to wait for her eyes to focus against the glare of the light.
It was a message from Lieutenant Kool.
Lieutenant Rudiyanto, your presence is required immediately in the Correctional Department.
Her heart jumped.
God, there were so many ingredients for a disaster in the Correctional Department. The prisoner with a badly damaged mindbase. Lieutenant Kool with his rigid attitude. A malicious worm.
Melati rummaged in her cupboard for her clothes using the low light from the PCD which she set on the tiny desk at the end of the bed. Although she tried not to make too much noise for the sake of the others, she was sure that all of them had woken up.
“What’s going on?” Karmee whispered while Melati was doing up the buttons of her shirt.
“Something about the prisoner,” Melati replied. By God, she hoped that he was still alive and no one had done anything stupid.
“You want me to come?”
Melati was going to say no, but it might be good to have at least one person there who had a basic understanding of B3, and getting Ari out of bed quickly would be a stretch.
Karmee rolled out of bed, wearing only her underwear. She stepped into her overalls, pulled them up, put her arms in and did up the zip. She grabbed her shoes from the bottom shelf of her compartment in the cupboard and stuffed her feet in. “Ready.”
While she slept, a good number of her curls had escaped her ponytail and stood around her head in a fuzzy while halo. Karmee was the last one to worry about her appearance.
Melati opened the door to the cabin. The lights in the corridor had dimmed to simulate night. This happened in periods of low activity, and her presence and Karmee’s automatically increased the light output.
They walked quickly through the corridor to the lift foyer. Melati clamped her hands around herself, trying to stop the nervous shivering. She still felt sick and shaky from having woken up so suddenly. She really, really wondered what was so urgent that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning.
A loud clang somewhere on the lower floors reverberated in the lift shaft.
Melati and Karmee frowned at e
ach other.
“What the hell was that?” Karmee said.
She held her PCD to the lift panel and typed a code. The diagnostics appeared on the screen—the advantages of being tech crew. The light on the lift button changed from green to red.
“Hmmm. Someone pressed the emergency brake.”
“What level is the lift on now?” Melati speak through clenched jaws to stop her teeth chattering.
“The bottom.”
While they ran towards the stairs, Melati played all sorts of horror scenarios through her mind. Moshi had somehow woken up and Lieutenant Kool had tormented him until he’d snapped. She remembered the scene of chaos in the lab when Jas had returned in a construct boy’s body. They had learned from that episode, and she should heed that lesson.
“Wait here,” Melati said. “I need to get something.”
She didn’t check if Karmee stopped, but she ran up, taking the steps two at a time, to the CAU, entered the lab, where she punched a code into the control panel of the security cabinet next to the door. The cabinet clicked open. Melati grabbed the tranquiliser gun from its bracket, then ran to her office and grabbed the PCD with Moshi’s mindbase file.
She took the stairs all the way down this time, and Karmee followed from where she had indeed been waiting. A couple of guards met them one flight from the very bottom level. They both held their guns, eying the door into the correctional department. They were constructs, Pfitzingers both, and looked similar enough to be from the same cohort, although Melati couldn’t see their tags.
“What’s going on?” Melati asked.
“The prisoner escaped, ma’am. He’s running around in the corridor, completely off his rocker, in the nude and bleeding, smashing up everything.”
“Escaped? From his cell? How?” In the distance she heard thunks of metal hitting metal.
“No one knows how he got out. First we heard about it was when the alarms went off.”
“Yeah,” his colleague said. “He got out of his handcuffs and all.”
“Are you sure it’s him?” Last night, he’d been at risk of dying. Unlikely to wake up, Dr Chee said. He had even put him on a low level sedative so that this wouldn’t happen.
“Didn’t see him except on the security cameras, but there was no one else in the cells. Don’t know who else it would have been.”
True. “Where is Lieutenant Kool?” The words violent terminal failure came to her mind.
“At the main entrance on the other side. Wait, I’ll let him know that you’re here.” He punched something on his PCD. The light from the screen lit the tag on his uniform. He was a Pfitzinger 231, from the stock that was usually selected to become close-range fighters and sharpshooters. Of course. The first thing to do when there was trouble was send in the riot squad, right? Even when the trouble was caused by a single, very ill man.
Melati continued down the stairs. She put her ear to the closed door, but heard nothing. “Can I go in?” If her hunch was correct, then he needed urgent care.
“Door is locked. I’d advise against it.”
“Is he armed?”
“He had a drip stand that he’s using to smash everything up.”
“No weapons?”
He scowled at her in a way that she took as a negative.
“I have a tranquiliser gun here. I need to be fairly close to him to use it.”
The man eyed the gun with a suspicious look.
“I’ll come,” Karmee said. “I’m not afraid of a man in the nude.”
The Pfitzinger snorted. “I need to ask permission to let anyone in.”
Karmee rolled her eyes. “Then do ask for permission. Urgently.”
He held his hand up to a panel next to the door. It clicked open in response to the chip implanted in his palm. He folded away the cover to access the control panel underneath. The screen showed a layout of the ward with all the cells and Lieutenant Kool’s office.
Lieutenant Kool’s voice blasted out of a loudspeaker on the panel. “Any sign of him, Keo?”
“Fucking hell, yeah. He just had a go at me with a fucking great big piece of iron from the drip stand. We’re in the emergency exit stairwell now. Door is secure. Lieutenant Rudiyanto is here, too.”
“Good. Let me talk to her.”
Melati wormed herself past the warden to the control panel. “Lieutenant Kool?”
After a crackle of static, a curse blasted through the loudspeaker.
“I hear you.” The fact that she was surrounded by military officers didn’t mean that she had to approve of their language. “What is going on, what happened?”
He laughed, not in a good way. “What’s going on? That fucking madman of yours is on the loose.”
“He’s not mine. The doc put him on a sedative so that he’d stay asleep all night. How did he wake up?”
More bad language. “It’s all because of this madman’s crazy shit. Dixon was trying to clean our system of that worm that he brought. We kept getting warnings and he needed to reset the system and restart all the department’s computers.”
Melati felt cold. “You took him off the machines?”
“No, I didn’t touch him.”
“You said you restarted the computers.”
“Yeah, we did. But we didn’t touch any of his—”
“Then you took him off the machines.”
“The whole process took five whole fucking minutes!”
“That’s five minutes too long. You should have warned Dr Chee if you were going to do that.”
“We had no orders to contact him.”
Melati rolled her eyes. Orders, orders. She swore these idiots needed orders before they could pee. “It seems to me, Lieutenant, that would have been common sense. You turn off the machines and they stop delivering sedative. The patient wakes up.”
“Five minutes!”
“Yes. It can unsettle the very precise dose needed and once the wake up process is underway, the concentration is too weak to keep him under.”
“Why didn’t we get a warning if it was that sensitive?”
“Because we were relying on common sense?”
“We are not medical personnel.”
“But you insisted on having the prisoner treated in your department.”
He didn’t answer that.
“Can you just let me in so that I can help him? This man is suffering violent terminal failure. He’ll die if he doesn’t get help.”
“That’ll be no great loss. I want him out of my department. The Repentance can do with him as they please. He’s completely nuts and nothing he says could possibly be of any value to us.”
“I think we will decide that. Please. Let. Me. In.”
“I don’t like the accusing tone in your statements, Lieutenant. I act on behalf of the safety of the ship as first priority.”
“And I don’t?”
Again, he said nothing.
“We can isolate him upstairs just as well as down here. We need him upstairs to do what we need. We have spent the last ten months shadowing the station, and he is the only person to come out alive. He’s already given us invaluable information. We need him alive. Now open the door for me. Unless you want him to smash up even more of your equipment.”
He snorted and laughed, not in a pleasant way. “If you think you can stop him, take the men in the stairwell with you. But understand that they will shoot if necessary.”
Awesome. Straight into warfare with a couple of trigger happy Pfitzingers. “Thank you.” She knew she sounded stiff.
“Keep us updated.” He returned to a business-like tone.
“Understood. I will do that.” Melati switched the receiver off. What an arsehole.
A moment later, the screen flashed with the code that identified her within ISF and “access allowed”.
Behind her, Karmee gave her the thumbs up. She loved a good wrestle. Melati fervently hoped that it wasn’t going to come to that, because she didn’t think Moshi would survive too mu
ch physical contact.
She gestured for the two Pfitzinger men to come closer.
They all bunched up at the bottom of the stairs. Of course the constructs were both much taller than she or Karmee. Like most Pfitzingers, they had narrow faces that accentuated their gangliness. Their faces looked serious.
“Let us go in first,” she told them. “I only want you to back us up when something goes wrong. We have this to knock him out.” She held up the tranquiliser. “I would prefer no live ammunition to be used unless absolutely necessary.”
There were nods all around. At least they were not going to create trouble. Fortunately, most constructs were little inclined to question their orders.
Melati put in a quick call to Dr Chee. She couldn’t see him using a gun or wrestling a prisoner to the ground, but they would certainly need him as soon as the prisoner was under control.
“Be careful,” he said, after asking her if she had the tranquiliser gun and her confirming that she did. “He is very fragile, and we might lose all of the information he has about the station or Allion.”
“I’ll try, although they’re pretty angry and impatient down here. It seems that he’s made a mess of the department.”
“I’ll be down as soon as I can. Take care.”
The warden took charge of the control panel again and surveyed the live imagery from the security cameras, rendered in infrared, because the light levels in the corridor were too low.
He muttered to himself. “Come on, come on, where is he—ah. Look here.”
Melati looked, with Karmee leaning over her shoulder. The screen displayed a red dot near the far side of the corridor, tracking the prisoner’s ID chip. “He’s at the offices.”
“The boss will not be happy if his computers get smashed,” his mate said.
“Nope, nope, nope.”
Melati clipped on her earpiece so that she could hang her PCD on the front of her uniform as a light. She tested the sound. Then she turned on the tranquiliser gun with a soft hum. “You take this.” She handed it to Karmee, who smiled at her. “Everyone ready?”
