by Patty Jansen
Uncle spread his hands in resignation. The defeated, exhausted expression on his face chilled Melati. Seriously, would Allion have killed all the tier 1 enforcers, not just the twenty-three who were on board that ship?
“What about any of us?” she asked.
“Some were killed,” Auntie Gema said. “They became ghosts, too.”
Grandma said, “Sister, your obsession with macabre stories is tiring.”
“That’s because it’s true. This place is full of ghosts.”
“You don’t know.”
“But the ghosts . . .”
“You’re not a dukun. You don’t know.”
While the old ladies bickered, Melati asked Uncle, “Is that true?”
He shrugged, and didn’t meet her eyes. “Killed, taken away probably, we don’t know. We can’t go anywhere because the doors are always closed. Sometimes, the blueshirts come in, talk their rubbish at us, blah, blah, blah, can’t understand what they’re saying. Sometimes they jam us all into the gym, close the door and then they get one of the hypertechs to say that they’ve locked the door and put bad gas in the air. And then they’ll release smoke. And we can’t get out. They watch us through their cameras. There’s people who panic and do stupid things, like trying to hit the blueshirts and kick open the door. Sometimes, those people get taken away. We don’t see them again, so people are scared and they stay inside so that when the blueshirts come they won’t be caught. People don’t come out to eat here much anymore. But enough about all this bad news. Tell us who escaped with you.”
Melati mentioned the names of others who had fled at the same time as her and Ari. “But none of those people are still with us. The Felicity is a military ship, and all civilians disembarked at New Hyderabad.”
He laughed a big belly laugh. “You’ve changed so much. See? You even talk the whiteshirt talk.” He seemed a little disappointed with the names she mentioned, but Auntie Dewi said, “Utami will be happy that her son is alive.”
Utami was Harto’s wife, and young Budiman was their son.
“What about Wahid?” Melati asked.
“He was one of those who protested at the treatment by the blueshirts. They took him away and we never saw him again.”
“That’s disgusting. What would they want with him? Wahid is an old man.”
“These are people without faith and without morals.”
Chapter 23
* * *
UNCLE MADE A BIG PAN of nasi goreng. Melati had wanted gado-gado, but he had no eggs.
“It’s no good without eggs.” He had no krupuk either, and he was getting low on trassi udang, and complained that they would soon have to start eating canteen food.
“What happened to the chickens?”
“The passages aren’t heated anymore, so all that we couldn’t catch died. We only have room to hide a few, so the eggs are very dear.”
“I don’t understand what Allion actually wants to do with the station.”
Uncle shook his head. “You probably understand more than we do. We rarely see them, especially the ones who are in the StatOp command centre. They just sit there and send us their silly messages in gibberish as if we can understand what they’re saying. We’re not allowed to work, and that’s not good for the people. The young ones are restless and unhappy. It was sort of all right when there was still enough food and everything, but everything is breaking down and running out. There will be more trouble if this keeps up.”
Ari said, “I’d have thought that anyone who takes possession of a mining station would at least use it for something.”
Uncle shrugged. He was using the spatula to scrape rice off the side of the pan. “You tell me. I wouldn’t know.”
“What about Allion not getting the recycling under control?” Melati asked.
Uncle spread his hands, holding a spatula in his right hand. A glob of rice fell off. “What about it? They complain, saying it was all Bassanti’s fault, but it seems to me the problems are with this Kerakis guy. He doesn’t know how to run a station. I don’t know what’s going on. We’ve got enough problems to worry about without taking on theirs. Here, take that to Grandma for me.”
He handed her a plate and Melati went into the living room. This was one place where very little had changed in the past ten months, except she noticed that Uncle had taken some items from the shrine in her old living room.
“We didn’t want our family’s possessions to be stolen by the slitty-eyes from downstairs,” Auntie Dewi said. “They stole enough of our possessions already.”
Melati gave Grandma her plate, then went to the shelf that held her incense burners and the little bronze vase with faded silk flowers. She picked up that photo of herself and Rina, Pak and Uncle. That had been such a happy time, with all the cousins together, her parents still alive, and the station free of political struggles. She could barely believe how much things had changed. If she had told her little self back then that thirty years later she’d be a Lieutenant on one of the massive ISF ships, she wouldn’t have believed it. All she wanted back then was to be a pretty princess. “I’ll be taking this,” she said, clutching the picture to her chest, her voice thick with emotion.
For a while everyone was quiet while they ate. Uncle apologised for having poor tea, but Melati didn’t think that the strange metallic taste was due to the quality of the tea. It was the water. Ari had noticed the same. He rose and went to the sink, where he drew a pocket analysing kit from inside his jacket. He took a few drops from the tap to fill the tiny tube and popped it into the machine. After a few seconds, he pulled a face. “They shouldn’t be drinking this,” he said, too soft for anyone to hear, and because he stood in the kitchen, Melati was the only one who could see his lips move through the door opening from where she sat in the living room.
Melati put the tea down.
Ari tipped the sample in the sink, dried the tube and put it back into the machine, which he put back inside the pocket of his jacket.
He came back into the living room. “Uncle, we are really going to need your help. We have to talk to the hypertechs about their plans and what they’re doing.”
“Do they have plans? They don’t come here and talk to us.”
“Is their den still where it used to be?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I don’t trust them and I don’t want to have any more to do with them than necessary.”
“Surely someone would know.”
“Why would we want to talk to the people who caused all this trouble in the first place?” Grandma asked.
“Yeah, they’re hiding from us and that’s a good thing,” Auntie Gema said. “Far too many of our good young people got sucked into that group and were lost to us behind their secrecy and their face masks.”
“What about Benjamun,” Melati said. “He’s got a rumak.”
“Not anymore, he doesn’t,” Uncle said. “He’s gone into hiding with them, because people were giving him too much trouble about letting his son join them. Look, you’d best be asking other people, because us honest folk don’t deal with the likes of them.”
And that was the last he would say about the matter. The discussion turned to Melati and Ari’s positions and jobs on the ship. A good number of neighbours and distant relatives had trickled in so that it was now quite full in the living room. Uncle had already started on a second pan of nasi goreng, and whatever ingredients he lacked didn’t affect the delicious smell. They rice, too, albeit artificial, was beautiful and dry.
It needed eggs on top, they all agreed, and some older uncles lamented how they’d never noticed how many eggs they ate until there were no more chickens.
Chickens, evidently, were the benchmark for how well the barang-barang fared, and no one was very happy if there were no chickens. But an outsider would never be able to tell, because the people were unhappy in their very laconic, relaxed way that lulled an uninformed bystander into thinking that this was the people’s normal state of mind. It took an
event of epic proportions to get the people excited and, even then, yelling and shouting and rioting was very much frowned upon.
By God, these people would all go to their deaths while worrying about their chickens.
She met Ari’s eyes across the room. He certainly looked frustrated. He’d put his tea on the table next to him and hadn’t touched it, a fact that was duly noted by Auntie Gema when coming around with the tea pot.
“You haven’t even touched your tea, young man. Come on, drink up. It will keep you healthy.”
“Well, about that . . .”
“What? Not good enough for you?”
“You really shouldn’t be drinking this. This water contains enough metals to make a person magnetic.”
Uncle scoffed. “It’s never done any of us any harm.”
“It’s not good for you in the long term.”
But they didn’t care about the long term and never had.
Melati put her empty bowl down with a thunk and rose. All of a sudden, it was silent, and everyone in the room looked at her.
“You are not listening to anything we say.”
Uncle began, “Well, I don’t know about that—”
“None of you are listening. You worry about the chickens, and the morals of the hypertechs—”
Grandma said, “That’s impossible, because they don’t have any.”
“Or the lack of their morals. None of these things are important for your survival. This station is dying. There is something wrong with the systems and recycling. The hypertechs have been trying to fix it and for some reason the communication between you and them has broken down. Rather than worrying about their secrets, you should have been helping them, and learning from them how to build things—”
“Uncle, Uncle!” The door to the apartment opened and one of the young cousins came in.
Grandma said, “Calm down a bit. Can’t you see that the adults are speaking?”
“But there are blueshirts in the sector and you said to come and warn you. There’s a lot of them, and they have big guns—”
“Shit,” Ari said.
Grandma snorted. “Now where in the name of the heavens did you learn that sort of language, young man?”
Ari ignored her. His eyes met Melati’s. “We have to get out of here.”
She nodded, checking for the guns at her belt. There was only one reason that these guards would be here, and looking for chickens wasn’t it.
“Quick, Uncle, tell us where you think the hypertech den is.”
“You can’t go out there now. They arrest everyone they catch.”
“Then we’d better not let them catch us.”
“This is no joking matter.”
“I’m not joking either. There are two dead bodies up there, and they’re going to want to know who did that.”
The young cousin’s eyes widened. He looked at Ari. “Wow, did you really shoot them with your gun?”
“I didn’t. She did.”
The cousin turned to Melati. His mouth hung open.
Uncle’s expression also finally showed that he had begun to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
“We have to go,” Melati said into the stunned silence. “You will be killed if they find us here.”
Ari had gone into the other room, found two sarongs, tied a knot in both of them and was piling items from the trolley into both.
“What are you doing?” Uncle wanted to know.
“We can’t run with the trolley, so I’m leaving it here. Put some of your kitchen stuff in it. Put it with the ISF emblem towards the wall.” He hefted his makeshift bag to his shoulder.
“Got everything?” Melati asked him, while taking the other. There were some items still on the trolley.
“That’s just vacuum gear I dumped in there.”
“Then let’s hope no one notices that working in a kitchen doesn’t require vacuum gear.”
“I’ll put it somewhere,” Uncle said.
Ari addressed those in the room. “Last chance. Tell us. Anyone. Where are the hypertechs and how do we get in? I’ve got in my pack a bunch of things that will help them, and that will save your lives. I don’t care what you think about them. I need to know where they are.”
“They haven’t moved recently,” the young cousin said. Several of the adults tried to shoosh him up, but he continued, “They’re in the BC block. They’ve cut an entrance through the wall and linked up the tunnels. The entrance is in the stores right underneath the gym. I don’t know how to get in, though.”
“Thank you.” Ari ruffled his hair. He went to the door of the apartment and opened it a crack. With one eye, he peered into the corridor. “It’s clear for now. Let’s go.”
To the wide-eyed looks of relatives, he pulled out his gun. Melati did the same.
“They have changed a lot,” Auntie Dewi said.
“Shhhh.” That was Uncle.
Ari opened the door and jerked his head for Melati to follow.
They had only gone a few steps into the passage when, without warning, all the lights went off.
Chapter 24
* * *
THE PASSAGE WAS thrown into complete darkness.
Melati gasped. She could not even see her hand in front of her eyes. There was no emergency light, no glowing pinpricks in the overwhelming darkness. All the sound had stopped, too, except for the clicking and creaking of expanding metal.
Ari flicked on the light on his PCD, but it only showed a very small pool of weak light. The battery must be wearing out.
“Hang on,” Uncle’s voice came from somewhere out of that darkness. He sounded quite relaxed.
There was some rustling and then a light came on. It showed Uncle and a good number of the relatives at the door to the apartment.
None of them seemed overly concerned, but Melati’s heart was thudding.
“He’s quite early today,” Auntie Gema said. “Must be because he’s curious about you coming back.”
“He?” Melati looked around the circle of glittering eyes.
“It’s Hermann,” one of the other aunties said. “He has taken to roaming the station as he pleases. He comes to torment us by turning off the lights or turning them so high that all the fuses melt.”
Auntie Gema said, “Or he will reverse the air flow through the recycling plant and we get stuck with the stink.”
“Or turn off the heaters,” a young cousin said.
“He only did that once,” Auntie Dewi said.
Auntie Gema snorted. “How do you know he’s not doing it again? If you don’t give him what he wants—”
Melati interrupted. “What is this that you’re talking about?”
Hermann had always been a feature in JeJe, occupying that one apartment where the family had met with ill luck. Pak had sometimes come to her apartment, too, but the ghosts had never done any harm to people, let alone the station.
“Hermann got angry, because he didn’t get what he wanted,” Auntie Dewi said, self-importantly.
“Stop talking that rubbish,” Grandma called from inside the apartment. “Ghosts don’t want anything. They just are.”
“Then tell us what is the deal with Hermann? Because he has changed so much.”
“It’s because the dukun interprets the signals in a way that suits her and then takes the offerings for herself.”
Auntie Gema scoffed. “My sister did nothing like that. And besides it’s not like we can let food go to waste these days.”
“Please!” Uncle called out over their voices.
Everyone fell silent.
“Just for once, just because of Ari and Melati, just to pretend that we all get along and have our best interests at heart, stop the bickering.”
Auntie Dewi protested. “We have our best interests at heart.”
“Stop. It.”
Then, when everyone had fallen into a glowering silence, he continued, “Melati, did you want to—”
There was strange noise
that Melati had never heard before, something that creaked and clanged.
“They’re cranking open the big fire door,” a male cousin said. “Because the power is off, they have to do it by hand.”
“They must be pretty keen to get in here.”
“Let’s go,” Ari said.
“But your battery is flat.” They might become separated. They might need to talk to the ship, or to Jas and Nysa in the C sector.
“Take this,” the cousin said. He unclipped the power pack from his PCD and gave it to Ari, who exchanged it for the empty one. “Thanks.”
The strange clanging noise continued somewhere down the stairs.
Melati and Ari set off, still in darkness, but the screen from Ari’s PCD was now doing its job.
“I must return it to the guy,” Ari said. “Mine’s a dud and I would have replaced it before we came if I’d realised how bad it was.”
They went into the stairwell, Ari leading, with as little noise as they could possibly make. The storerooms underneath the gym were a really awkward spot to have a den. Melati had always thought it was somewhere else.
Had the boy even been right? She tried to establish contact with the ship while going down the stairs. The operator’s voice was very faint and kept dropping out.
“I want to know if this is the true location of the den, Moshi,” she said through the earpiece.
“There are several rooms they use, to throw off pursuers.”
“Shhh,” Ari said. He had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and was peeking into the corridor. There was the sound of voices. Melati stuck her head out next to Ari’s.
A group of people stood a bit further down the passage that used to be JeJe. They wore dark clothing and had dark skin, and were talking to a couple of people in lighter clothing.
“That’s the New Pyongyang boy who saw us earlier,” Ari whispered.
They boy was pointing at the lift foyer.
“They’re looking for us,” Melati said.
“They sure are. Bribing the people, too.”
“Bribing?”
“Didn’t you see how they were giving the boy’s mother a parcel? Food, probably.”
