Shifting Infinity (ISF-Allion Book 2)

by Patty Jansen

“This is amazing,” she said.

  “I can’t ever get enough of this. It’s worth every second you spend suiting up and wrestling with the equipment.”

  “Where is New Jakarta?”

  “Hmm.” Ari looked in the direction of Sarasvati. “It’s hard to see unless it’s in direct sunlight. Oh. There.” He pointed.

  Melati squinted into the stark brightness of the planet. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Come next to me. Follow my finger.”

  She did, and finally saw a tiny moving speck of light. She almost choked up, then. Home.

  “I hope we’ll be able to help them,” she said, her voice thick.

  “Me, too.”

  She felt no more sickness on the way back, either outside or in the hall.

  * * *

  Back in the training facility, Ari showed her how to clean out her suit and put it in storage. After that was completed, she went to another training session in the smoky tunnel. She did not get stunned today, although teaming up with Jas was awkward.

  Discussing his part of the task was even more awkward. Jas and Nysa were to be the official delegation. It was a big thing she was asking of him, and she would normally have told him the details of the plan in a more personal way.

  But because of what happened yesterday, she kept her interaction with him professional, and that pained her as well. She liked Jas as a friend.

  They discussed how they would maintain communication. Both Jas and Nysa would be fitted with a small radio that encrypted the signal with an entirely new code. That meant they had a few days at the most before the code was broken, so they would still communicate in veiled terms. Cocaro provided both of them with a list of code phrases and their meanings. They went from all sorts of nonsensical statements to more day-to-day ones. Apparently, I like carrots meant that they were about to return. Skipping in the field meant to get troops ready. The last statement was Having a good day which meant the entire opposite, that they had been captured, that the situation was bad and that there was not much hope for the mission to succeed.

  “It’s a send in the troops message,” Cocaro said. “Use it as a last resort.”

  Next she went to see Dr Chee and handed him her work PCD with all her research, papers and mindbase fragments. He took it from her with a sense of foreboding. She didn’t need to say, In case I don’t make it back.

  He nodded and sighed. “I understand.”

  “I’ve got a copy of all the relevant material. I’m taking Ormerod’s mindbase.”

  “Do you think that’s wise? If Allion captures you, they might force you to give it up.”

  “They won’t know that I have it.” She pulled the chain with the pendant from under her shirt. “This looks just like a piece of cheap jewellery, right?”

  “Yes, but I would be much happier if you left it here.”

  Melati thought about that for a while. She considered, once more, what to do about it and decided, again, that she wanted to take it, in case a comparison was needed or something else odd was going on. It was her team and her decision.

  “I’m taking it.”

  He nodded. “Good luck.”

  “Don’t be so morose. I’m coming back.”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound too convinced. And then he added, “It’s not that I think something bad will happen, but if you pull this off, there is no way that the ISF will let me keep you.”

  “Why not? I want to come back. I like it here.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She stood at the door to her little office for a while, and then noticed the corner of her prayer mat sticking out from the cupboard where she had stuffed it when getting ready for the ship move.

  That was something else she needed to do. She pulled it out and rolled it up.

  At some time in the past two days, while she had been busy, Moshi had gone back to the Correctional Department.

  Lieutenant Kool was still sore about it and, while he led Melati down the corridor to the cell at the end, complained loudly that he didn’t want him there.

  There was, she realised, a line where being a military superior crossed from being authoritative and strong into being petty and vindictive. It was important that if you wanted to advance your career, you didn’t cross this line. Lieutenant Kool clearly had no idea that this line even existed. That was why he was stuck down here where he could keep being petty and vindictive without bothering too many people.

  And when she thought about it like that, he no longer scared her.

  Moshi sat at a small desk in the cell reading what looked like some sort of manual. He had been given plain non-uniform greys to wear. When he turned to her, Melati almost gave a cry of surprise.

  “Where is your beard?”

  He ran his hand over his chin. “Beards are uncomfortable.”

  “Are they?”

  “They itch. Sit down.”

  He rose from the chair and sat down on the bed.

  Melati took the chair. “I’ve got something for you.” She handed him the rolled-up prayer mat.

  He unrolled it and looked at her. “You won’t need it?”

  “I can get a new one where I’m going. I’ve also sent you information about times and direction.”

  “Thank you.” Those words came from his heart, and made Melati’s eyes prick. Crying in his presence would never do, so she looked aside at the desk. “Is all this for your communication link?”

  “There is more to come. They’re not giving me an outside link until you’re in position and request to speak with me.”

  A bit silly, but Melati understood. “I’ll be asking you about specific places, access codes, and the hypertechs.”

  “Give my warm greetings to Fatima and Iman and Benjamun. Tell them to keep some of their brew for me if I miss the wedding.”

  “I thought true believers don’t drink.”

  He winked. “It’s a secret.”

  He seemed reasonably happy. Being given something to do would have lifted his spirits, besides having given him an opportunity to show that his experience and skills could be useful.

  Chapter 19

  * * *

  THE ENGINES ROARED and the shuttle pulled away from the hull of the Starship Felicity.

  Melati grabbed the armrests of the seat that no longer supported her. On the viewscreen in front of her, the rotating hull of the Felicity passed by, a hard vacuum-scarred metal surface, pitted from impact with micrometeorites. She closed her eyes.

  They had received extensive briefs about the flight, and from her crash-course in zero-g training with Ari, knew she had about twenty minutes before she was going to spew, and she hadn’t eaten in anticipation.

  Ari glanced at her, his expression concerned. How come he always got away without sickness?

  Melati focused on the chair in front of her. Jas sat there, next to Nysa. Both of them had been created for work in space and likewise suffered no sickness. Lucky them.

  Jas appeared to have buried his disagreement with Joshaya Hasegawa, and neither of the two men had mentioned the disagreement since.

  Joshaya was certainly in his element, pulling the shuttle out of the Felicity’s orbit. On the screen, the full might of the ship became more impressive as more and more of it filled the screen. Soon, though, it would disappear into the darkness. The Felicity had no external lights and the hull was dark grey, designed to absorb rather than reflect light. The ship shifted to the top left hand corner of the screen, giving the impression that the shuttle looked at it from above, but the concepts of above and below were horribly skewed. Never having worked in the mining crews, Melati found it a profoundly uncomfortable sensation.

  Then the shuttle turned and the ship rotated out of view to be replaced with a view of space and stars. The lights from the controls silvered the front of Milo’s suit, his face and hair. He sat, like all of them, strapped in, holding a helmet on his lap and the mouthpiece of the breathing apparatus dangling down the front of his chest. H
is gloved hands that held the helmet were oddly relaxed. He catered for frontline troops. He had been shot at and had dodged explosions.

  For a long time no one said anything. Melati focused on Milo’s hands. The twenty minutes were up and she hadn’t spewed yet. She looked over her shoulder.

  Kya and Majoa sat behind her. The bluish light reflected little dots in Majoa’s eyes. She looked at Melati. A ghost of a smile played over her lips.

  Then the level of light in the cabin increased as Sarasvati’s brilliant blue rings slid into vision, sharp-edged in the airless void. The sunlight made abrupt shadows, casting half of the planet in deep darkness.

  Then Joshaya said, “Contact. New Jakarta station requests identity confirmation. I hand over to the communicator.”

  Kya put on her earpiece. She was doing something on the screen in front of her, but Melati couldn’t see what.

  After a while, Kya said, “They’re giving us an approach vector. I’m copying it to the navigation hub.”

  Joshaya replied, “Received.”

  The engines made a short burn, creating a temporary illusion of returning gravity. More of the planet slid into the viewscreen, now appearing to be upside down.

  Then: the first glimpse of the station, a huge wheel-shaped construction with a central core. A much smaller ring sat on top with docking and unloading rigs for the mining ships. All the spots were empty. The location of those ships—and there had been five—was one of the great mysteries of the New Jakarta siege. That and the fate of two thousand Taurus Army constructs.

  The ISF ring was gone from the station, of course.

  A line of white lights marked the widest periphery of the station from which the tethers still trailed. There were only four. One of them must have become detached and entangled or flown off into space.

  “They’re directing us to the docking area.”

  In her mind, Melati could see the docks as they used to be, always full of activity. The office of the mindbase exchange was there, where Rina worked before she was killed.

  Most likely the ship would be directed to use one of the soft dock tubes that used to be for the mining ships before the docking ring was built. From there to the B sector wasn’t far.

  Joshaya was now typing something on his comm screen.

  Closer they came, and closer still. The outer hull had large signs on the outside, in white paint on black background. Huge letters said A, B, C and D. She presumed the Allion occupiers lived in the A sector. Maybe the Taurus Army constructs were still there—she hoped so, for the sake of Jas. All his brothers had been left behind on the station.

  The B sector was the residential quarters for the worker population, the C sector administrative and the D sector was for the heavy mining plants. They were flying over that part now. Melati could see the heavy-duty unloading tubes that had unloaded the crushed ice or dirt directly from the mining ships and transported it into the processing plants. Though they’d hardly been used since the docking ring was built, they probably all still operated, and they were highly automated.

  They crested the top of the habitat ring, now in clear view of the docking area. Two ships hung on the external docking tubes. Of course they had known that these ships were there, but if there were any images of this area, and Melati was sure that the Felicity had them, she had never seen them. Maybe images of Allion ships and weaponry were only shared on a need-to-know basis. Hasegawa would need to know; she did not.

  “Wow, look at that,” Ari said.

  He had in his room a large display screen that showed all the different type of ISF craft. These looked nothing like that. They were blocky and oddly-shaped things, none of them with a shape that looked like a shuttle. A streamlined design wasn’t necessary in space, of course, but ISF craft usually stuck with the classic shapes, if only to make it easier to distinguish items with independent engine capacity from those without.

  The shuttle matched speed with the station so that they hovered over the station’s outer hull. She was pushed into her seat. Kya turned the side view camera so that Melati and Ari could study the area to the right that they would have to walk across. Ari was recording notes and taking pictures. The three dimensional representation of the station was open on his PCD screen. Occasionally, he would trace a red line across the surface, changing his mind about which route to take. The start of the B sector was visible in the distance, with a large yellow B painted on the hull.

  Melati felt like she had to do something, but the team seemed to have everything under control.

  Hasegawa would occasionally say something into his mouthpiece. Pilots’ jargon, it seemed, had largely survived the split into Allion and ISF tech.

  Or maybe they shared much more than everyone thought. Moshi was a civilian just like the people in New Jakarta, who could not help being in ISF space. Majoa was the same, born in Allion space, having been taken to ISF when she was little. People did move across. The war was not impersonal and the other side were not monsters.

  But while she sat there, she wasn’t sure that not being monsters was any easier than battling monsters that you could shoot without worrying that innocent people got caught up.

  “Crew, prepare for docking,” Joshaya said.

  They were coming ever closer now; the station was now visible outside the side window and people in the station would certainly be able to determine the number of people in the craft.

  Joshaya had also engaged the IR scanning device. It superimposed hot spots over the visual image of the station. According to what Melati had seen, the docking area with the tubes that they would use and the internal facility were mostly empty and cold. The spots were grey at best, and they didn’t seem to have recognisable shapes.

  Then Joshaya said, “They’re asking us to identify the tags of the people who will go inside the station.”

  Jas and Nysa went to the front to let Joshaya scan their tags. Again, neither Jas nor Joshaya showed the slightest sign that anything had happened yesterday.

  “Acknowledged,” Kya said. “They’re allowing us to dock.”

  Melati was home.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  THE SHIP SHOOK with the clangs of grappling arms.

  “We’re in,” Hasegawa said.

  Melati forced her breathing to calm down. At least her stomach settled.

  Hasegawa pushed down the earpiece. “Their party will come on board soon to check our numbers.” That was part of the agreement that Cocaro had negotiated. Up until then, they needed to look like regular crewmembers. He disarmed the door.

  Now that moving around was safe, Ari went to the cupboard at the back of the cabin and took out one box. He clipped the lid off, tipped the gecko onto his hand and pressed it against his PCD. Then he transferred it to the wall next to the door. It ran up to the ceiling, as if thinking indignant gecko-thoughts.

  Melati went to sit next to Kya and pretended to look at one of the screens. But she didn’t even register what was on the screen. Inside, her heart was hammering.

  They waited. There were further bumps and thumps against the outer hull and the sounds of clips being attached and the whining of tools.

  Nobody spoke. Everyone kept glancing at the door.

  Finally the green light showed at the door panel.

  Somebody knocked.

  Nysa rose first and opened the inner airlock door. The gecko ran into the airlock along the ceiling.

  The little window in the outer airlock door showed a square of the inside of an access tube. She opened the locks on the outer door. A moment later, a woman came in. She was so tall that she almost hit her head on the top of the doorframe. Her dark skin wasn’t dark enough for her to be an aggregate, and unlike aggregates that Melati had seen, she had hair, if the elaborate work of art with little plaits and coloured beads was indeed natural hair. The longest beaded strands hung well over her shoulder. Her eyes were brown and expressive, her nose strangely broad and flat, her lips big and full. Wow. Melat
i felt tiny, ugly and boring in comparison.

  She wore a dark navy uniform that fitted her snugly, with a broad belt on which hung a gun and several other implements that looked like weapons, most of them to shock, stun or electrocute someone: a metal stick with a handle that had a little control panel, a roll of wire, also attached to a handle and a power pack, and something in a sheath that looked like a knife. The body armour that covered her top was not nearly as clunky as that worn by Jas and Nysa. It was made from some sort of grey material with the Allion symbol of the two blue interlocking circles in the middle of the chest.

  “Who are the two people coming?” Her heavily-accented Standard rattled with unfriendliness.

  “Me and him,” Nysa said, gesturing at Jas.

  The woman turned her attention to Jas. An expression of distaste crossed her face. Because he was a man? Because he was a construct? She didn’t seem to have had a similar reaction to Nysa.

  “You’re ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Outside,” she said.

  Jas picked up his tool kit—which she insisted on inspecting—and joined Nysa at the door. Two more Allion guards joined them and then they were gone.

  A couple of other heavily-armed guards now appeared in the doorway. All of them were in dark blue, with the same symbol on their chest. There had to be at least ten or twelve, but it was hard to count, because most remained in the access tube and they looked very much alike. At least four were women, dark-skinned sinuous creatures similar to the one who had already entered. The single man with the group was an aggregate: his skin deep black, his head bald, his eyes metallic and golden. He gave Melati a cold look that made her shiver.

  Three of them entered the ship and made a quick inspection of the interior of the shuttle.

  Hasegawa remained very still, his face unemotional. A muscle twitched in his jaw. Oh, no, he didn’t like this one bit.

  One of the guards held a stick-like device that she passed over walls and fittings. It was attached to a little screen that showed a wriggly line that jumped in reaction to certain substances. Melati had no idea what it was for.