by Patty Jansen
They decided that, after Iman and the others came back and confirmed that the Allion guards had combed the B sector and had not found anything. They had overheard that Allion knew there were two people involved, that they had come over the outside of the station and that the ISF ship was responsible for it. So while Allion was still looking, their attention was temporarily diverted away from the B sector.
The hypertechs didn’t say what, if anything, had happened to the shuttle or the crew and no one referred to Jas and Nysa at all.
Ari hadn’t yet heard anything from the Felicity, so Melati helped prepare for the operation. Unlike Ari, she had no specific useful tech knowledge, but Ari had assigned her the dubious quality of being not half-bad with a gun, so a young hypertech named Gusamo provided her with one of those odd models. He gave her a quick instruction.
“How did you get these?” she wanted to know.
“We made them here. Could never get all the parts, so we produced some of our own.”
She felt the weapon in her hand. Could still feel the sensation of the charge going off. There had been no sound in space, but she knew the sound that the gun made at discharge and every time she thought of the fight on the outside of the station, her mind filled in that sound where it belonged anyway.
So all she was good for tonight was killing people.
That was disturbing.
Killing people so that other people could stay alive. And if the people were sensible, they would not need to be killed; although, so far, their interaction with Allion had not been promising.
Iman said that she would be in charge of a small group of fighters, but when he introduced her to them, they were all disturbingly young, and their faces were so serious.
She met Ari’s eyes. She would have said that this sort of thing would be his job, but it wasn’t and never had been. Ari was the tech support crew. He was not, and had never been, particularly good with a gun.
So she took her young charges aside and provided them with the rundown of the two instruction sessions that Milo had given her. Stay together, make a sweep of a passage while you go through, stuff that they probably knew already.
But they listened politely and if they thought she was nuts, they said nothing. Melati hoped fervently that the operation could be completed without the need for armed action.
“You two have to put this on.” Fatima came from behind carrying two sets of dark overalls and boots. “There are helmets and gear over there. You’re much too visible. We’ll bring breathing apparatus and oxygen canisters in case they try to smoke us out. Your visor will display environment quality parameters.” She pushed the overalls in Melati’s hands.
Ari met Melati’s eyes. Dress up as a hypertech? But they’d dressed up as hypertechs before, and the helmets and visors that made them so despised in the B sector were also very handy for concealing identity.
Melati took the gear and remembered the smell inside the helmet. “I’ll need bigger size overalls, because I’m not taking off my body armour.”
She did, however, take off the upper layer of her uniform and then strapped the armour on over that.
Fatima found her bigger size overalls, which she put on over the armour. Phew. At least she would not be cold anymore.
Then Iman explained how to use the info display on the inside of the visor. “You control it with your eyes. Look to the bottom and the display will come up. You select menu choices by looking at them and then dragging them to the side of the screen.”
Melati tried it, but it clearly required a bit of skill to get it right.
When they were all dressed up, she and Ari distributed the tools and electronic gear that they needed for the job. Melati, already carrying two guns and a pouch with batteries, ended up with the hardware: wires, plastic sheets to make protective housing, cutters, spare boards and two wire-threaders. Those were two long pieces of flexible metal that were too stiff to roll up but too flexible to tie across her back. She was sure that they would be annoying to carry in a fight or if they had to run.
Finally, they were ready and Melati followed others out of the den.
But there was some sort of disturbance in the big storage room.
The refugees were all in a panic. A number of the men stood near the door, looking into the corridor. Mothers were collecting their children and people were carrying around all sorts of items to hide them or clean them up.
One of the hypertechs went to talk with them in Neo-Korean. Melati didn’t understand what they said, but the fear was evident in their faces. The hypertech put his hands on a woman’s shoulders. He patted the heads of her children. He tapped at the gun at his side.
They nodded and retreated.
“They’re part of our guards,” Iman said. “We give them things so that they will warn us if there is any trouble coming our way.”
“Uncle and the people upstairs seem to have very little to do with them.”
“The people upstairs are too stupid to survive.”
“Hey, you’re talking about my relatives.”
“And about mine. They’re still too stupid. All they talk about is their damn food, gossip and if they’re women, they talk about ghosts.”
“And chickens,” Melati said.
Iman turned to her.
She was sure that if she could see his face, it would display a puzzled look. “They talk about their chickens.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Yeah, that, too.”
A moment of understanding passed between them.
These refugees didn’t even have chickens. They had no possessions and lived in the storerooms and dirty apartments that used to house businesses.
She felt sick at seeing the poor state of their clothing and the fact that some lived in their little cubicles without furniture with large families that included old people and babies. And the fact that her family accused them of stealing from an empty apartment upstairs where clearly no one lived but that had to remain empty because of “ghosts”. Heaven forbid, her family could be infuriating sometimes. More than anything else, the barang-barang needed to break with that eternal “victim” mentality.
The hypertech came back to the group. He spoke with Iman, but his voice was so heavily accented and was so distorted through the voice box that Melati didn’t have a clue what he said.
“The Allion guards have come back to conduct another sweep of the entire B sector,” Iman said for her and Ari’s benefit. “They started upstairs but are about to come down.”
“Shit,” Ari said.
That was followed by an intense silence, and Melati gave him a disapproving stare. Not that he could tell with her helmet on.
Anyway, he seemed oblivious. Of course, he had his helmet on, too, so she couldn’t be sure.
Iman went on. “These people don’t understand what the guards are looking for, so they think that it’s stolen goods, and almost everything they own can be defined as ‘stolen’. But they have nowhere to hide their stuff either. They’re afraid to lose everything they have for a second time in ten months.”
“What did the hypertech guy tell them?”
“Oh, he was talking to them about our joining process.”
“Joining?”
“They see us walking around freely doing something constructive. They see Allion mostly leaving us alone, they want to join us, like Soong over here and the others.”
“Do you accept many people? Can anyone join?”
“If they’re of good character and are willing to pray with us.”
Melati had always wondered why, with his liking of gadgets, Ari wasn’t a member. Now she saw why: the fact that he was sekong and used to wear nail polish and make-up obviously put him out of the running. It also explained Fatima’s cool attitude to him. That and his language.
Unmarried, regularly visiting a prayer room, caring for older relatives, turning up on time for work made Melati a possible prospect. Ari was obviously beyond redemption.
Why did peopl
e have to judge each other like this?
* * *
Changing the chips and rerouting the power boxes was neither hard nor time-consuming, especially since Fatima and Iman had already done a lot of preparation.
The hard part was avoiding the guards, and that was the task of Melati and her band of teenagers, who took their task very seriously. She sent them out to ensure the route ahead was safe, because with everyone carrying the gear, running would be awkward, especially in the thick layers of suits that they had to wear for walking through the unheated service passages.
They started by rerouting the tether arrays. The plan was to appropriate the power output of two tethers. Fatima said that, according to their calculations, one tether should provide enough power for the sector, but it was safer to divert two, in case something went wrong.
Melati was impressed. The young hypertechs really knew what they were doing.
While this work was going on, Melati and her teenagers stood guard, and the whole process was disturbingly uneventful.
When it was done, they went to the recycling plant, a large, low-ceilinged room where machines hummed, where metal arms stirred huge vats and where it smelled vaguely of rotten fruit.
“This place gives me nightmares,” Ari said.
The Taurus Army enforcers would give young boys duty in here when they’d been caught doing something illegal. Back then Ari often joked that there would be no recycling if it wasn’t for him.
The room’s single attendant on duty, a barang-barang woman of middle age, was clearly familiar with the plan. She smiled at the hypertech army marching into her domain, and shut down the operation of some machines so that the hypertechs could do their jobs.
This was another chilling thing: in the past, a job like hers would haven been performed by a Taurus Army enforcer and that made Melati wonder what had happened to the two thousand Taurus Army people on the station that no one seemed to care about.
The hypertechs powered down all the machines: the tank that slowly rotated to ferment organic rubbish, and the oven that melted the plasti-resin to be used as a basis for most recyclable extrusion products. Tanks stopped sloshing, water stopped running over beds of beads and the air purifier stopped humming.
In the eerie silence, Ari disconnected all the computers and erased all the process modules. Fatima opened the panels against the back wall and took out a series of command chips and replaced them with the ones Melati and Ari had brought. It took about fifteen minutes to reinstall the new calibration software on all the machines.
They turned everything back on.
Lights went green, air started bubbling through aeration vats, the giant tanks started rotating.
Phew.
A little cheer went up amongst the hypertechs. Not too loud because they still had to make it back safely.
The plant’s attendant had already gone back to work.
“We’ve been trying to do this for months,” Iman said. “It’s amazing what clean software can do.”
“Yeah,” Fatima said. “Every time we got to the restart stage, something would go funny—”
“Shh,” one of the hypertechs said.
They listened.
Somewhere in the station, people were shouting.
“Sounds like trouble,” someone said.
Someone else said, “My scan shows that there is a group of people moving this way down Jalan Nusatera. Could it be them?”
“Sounds like the shouting is downstairs.”
Melati went outside and called in her boys. They were meant to warn of danger, not fight. They came inside the room, wide-eyed.
“I’ll go and check if we can get out at the lower level,” Iman said.
Melati said that she’d come.
The part of the recycling plant that contained the large vats spanned two floors. Iman led the way down the narrow stairs that circled around the outside of one of the vats and came out in a danky room that held spare parts and cleaning gear for the plant: buckets, brooms, mops, rakes and the giant squeegees that were used to skim the foam off the sides of the tanks.
There was also another door into the rest of the station. It came out at the very end of JeJe where the bars were. Iman peered through a crack in the door and shut it again almost immediately. “There’s guards out there searching people.”
“They’ll probably come in here, too. As will the ones upstairs.”
Iman nodded, his expression grave.
They went back upstairs, and were informed that the guards on the scan had come closer.
“We’re trapped,” Fatima said.
Even in a dire situation, there was no swearing. They sat on the ground between two tanks. The group numbered fourteen and Melati was by far the oldest. They had a few guns between them, but no one made any mention of using them.
“We wait patiently,” Fatima told the youngsters. “If they come in here, I will speak to them and answer their questions—”
“They will come in here,” Melati interrupted. “They’re looking for us. We can’t just be passive and wait until they come and find us. In a situation like this, you must take advantage of the element of surprise, and you’ll only get that once: when they come in not expecting us to be here. We must take action as soon as they open that door.”
“Taking action means shooting everyone?” Fatima glared at her and Melati glared back.
And in that silence, Ari said, “Shit,” and, judging by the way Fatima turned away from him, in one syllable destroyed any good points he was ever going to get with her.
“What’s up?” Melati asked him. For crying out loud, she was getting extremely annoyed with the hypertech obsession with good behaviour.
Ari showed her the screen of his PCD. It displayed a secure link sign and message from Dolchova.
Nothing heard from Hawk or Duck. We have issued Allion with an ultimatum. Expires 8 pm tonight. Expect fireworks. Evacuate if possible.
At that moment, the door to the recycling plant opened.
Melati didn’t even think twice. The weapon was in her hand before she thought about it.
She fired.
Twice. Three times. Four times, however many uniformed figures she saw entering the room.
Someone at the door fired as well. Not at her, but at the control panel of the recycling plant. The whole thing exploded.
People were screaming and running away. Something was on fire, spreading smoke through the room. No, wait; it was a smoke bomb.
“Everyone find a safe spot!” She pushed the mask over her mouth.
They didn’t have to be told twice, especially the teenagers. Ari had pressed himself against the wall.
For a moment, it was quiet. The light had gone off in the room, the control panel was still issuing smoke—that same panel where they had just replaced the chips, probably damaged beyond repair now. Had they known this and was this why they had come in here?
Then there were footsteps in the corridor. A male voice shouted in Centrasian.
A pair of booted feet appeared underneath the smoke.
Melati raised the run and aimed.
Ari looked at her, his eyes wide.
She pressed the release.
A flash tore through the room and engulfed the figure that was still shrouded in the mist. He went down.
Silence.
“Come,” Melati said to Ari.
He climbed out from in between the tangle of hypertechs, still huddled between the tanks. Fatima looked up at her, fear in her eyes.
Melati led him into the passage, having to step over arms and legs. There were at least six or seven soldiers, and strangely, she felt unemotional when looking at them. As Milo had said, in the game of war, it was shoot or be shot.
They ran.
Chapter 29
* * *
“SERIOUSLY, MELATI, what did they feed you up there in the CAU? You just went pew-pew-pew and you must have hit five or six guys and you didn’t even flinch.”
&nbs
p; “Shut up and run.” She had pulled the visor down. The inside display gave her the metrics of her own body: temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption.
“Go away,” she muttered at the annoying characters that cluttered her vision with useless information.
They came to the lift foyer. Ari ran to the lift, but Melati told him, “Too dangerous. Let’s take the stairs.” Her voice sounded muffled inside the helmet.
So they ran a bit further and entered the stairwell.
“What are we doing now anyway?” Ari asked behind her.
“Abandoning all caution.”
“Tell me something new.”
They got to the bottom of the stairs, where a group of New Pyongyang refugees had gathered. There were at least twenty, mostly men, and they shrank back when Melati and Ari came to the bottom of the stairs, guns in hand.
“If you like your freedom, help us now,” Melati said.
“Help, how?” one of the men asked.
“Stop the guards when they come down the stairs. Then demand that they open the fire door. Then go to the docks and wait until a ship comes to pick you up.”
She had no idea if there was going to be a ship, if ISF had the decency to send one, but if the people weren’t waiting when a ship arrived, no one would leave the station before Dolchova’s “fireworks”.
Several of the men looked into the stairwell.
“I see no one coming,” one said. “Is anyone up there?”
“Well . . .” That’s because you shot them all said a little voice in her head, but she couldn’t be sure about that.
Also—screw asking them to be her guards. These people, any civilians on board the station, were more important than her mission or anything else.
She raised her voice. “Change of plan. Come with us instead! We’re going to the docks.”
“Are you crazy?” Ari asked.
“Dolchova and the other captains are preparing to take action. Surely they’ll be decent enough to send ships before, you know, shooting at the station?”
His eyes went wide. “She only said there was an ultimatum—”
“What do you think ultimatums are for? Ari, I sat in their meetings and heard them talk. Fleet is into conservative warfare. They shoot from a great distance so that they don’t endanger themselves. She was talking about evacuating the station and venting it. At best, Allion will capitulate before the shooting starts, but if they haven’t done that so far, I can’t see them doing it in the next eight hours—”
