by Patty Jansen
“Seven and a bit.”
“—At worst, they’ll destroy the station with everyone in it.”
“And you volunteered to come here knowing that?”
“I could hardly stand by watching them coldly decide the fate of our families, could I?”
Ari spread his hands, opened his mouth, and let his hands sink again. “And you call me crazy?”
Melati turned to the refugees. “We don’t have much time. You and you!” She pointed to a couple of young guys. “Go upstairs and tell the people there to come with us, too. We’re going to the docks.”
One of the boys looked puzzled, but Ari said, “I’ll sort them out.”
He ran into the stairwell and the two young guys followed him.
Melati continued with the group of refugees through JeJe. She got them to knock on every door and get the people to come out. There were all manner of people, men and women. There were the old grandmothers and grandfathers, taking shuffling steps. There was a young woman cradling a blanket from which a tiny wrinkled red-skinned hand protruded. There were mothers with scores of children. Did everyone at New Pyongyang have such large families?
The crowd swelled the further she went. Coming past the lift foyer, Ari joined them, with a big group of barang-barang.
A young woman called out, “Melati! Melati, our saviour.”
That was embarrassing.
They came to the sector entrance and the huge fire door that shut the sector off from the rest of the station. A single Allion guard stood there, but he took one look at the advancing crowd and Melati and Ari with the guns and he backed away from his position, his hands up.
“Open the door,” Melati said.
The man bowed and kept whimpering inside his helmet.
That was pretty useless. “Open it, Ari.”
“Not sure that I know how.” Ari climbed the few steps to the little platform where the controls were. He stuck his gun in his belt and fiddled with the panel. “It requires a pass code. It may take me a while.”
“Ari, the default setting of the door is open. I didn’t say ‘Don’t damage it.’ I said, ‘Open it.’ ”
“Oh, right.” He grinned, pulled out his gun and fired at the panel. The control panel turned into a blackened mess. The lights above the door started flashing. Slowly the mechanism rattled into place. As soon as the door opened a crack, a breeze of air came in carrying a stale smell.
Melati raised her voice. “Anyone who has a mask and air, put it on. If you don’t, don’t run if you don’t have to. Let the others assist you.”
She shut the helmet’s visor and turned on the control in the helmet. She put a call through to Fatima. “Where are you? We could use your help.”
Fatima’s voice came through a bout of static. “Where are you? There are alarms going off everywhere.”
“We’ve just opened the fire door. We’re evacuating, going to the docks.”
“All right, we’ll meet you in the BC block.”
The door was now open far enough that the first people could duck under it.
“Hurry up,” Melati said. She had no doubt that this civil disobedience would be recorded somewhere and they’d soon have to deal with aggregates who wouldn’t be pushed aside or killed as easily as the ones they met so far.
“Stay together on the other side. Anyone who has a weapon at the front or sides of the group.”
The door went up and up and the stream of people getting through became a flood.
It was dark on the other side. People exclaimed about the state of the place.
“Even worse than when StatOp still looked after it,” a man said.
A few others laughed.
“Whatever happened to all those enforcers?” a woman asked.
The column started moving. Melati stayed towards the back to look after the stragglers. There was a New Pyongyang refugee man who was so old and bent that he could only walk very slowly. Two barang-barang girls—Melati heard that their names were Susanti and Vera—found a trolley in one of the shops. He sat on it, and they pushed him.
Several people, too, grew short of breath with the poor air quality in this part of the station. Two of them joined the old man on the trolley. Also the woman with the tiny, tiny baby who had trouble walking. She held up two fingers.
“Two days old?” she asked.
“No,” an older woman next to her said, likely her mother or an auntie. “Two hours. First child.”
Good grief.
Melati wondered and worried where the Allion guards were and when they’d run into them.
But the only other people they saw were the hypertechs, who waited in a side passage. There were about fifty or so in the group.
“Why didn’t you bring all of the hypertechs?” Melati asked.
“We have to defend the den,” Fatima said.
“Against what? What is there to defend when big ships of war are firing at the station from outside? Tell them to get everyone out. We’ll have to shut the door between the docks and the BC block, and anyone left on the other side may not be able to join us. I expect trouble to hit soon.”
The group of people narrowed out even further when they hit the narrower passage from the BC block to the docks.
And there they stopped, because there was some sort of hold-up at the front.
Stuck in the middle of the group, Melati couldn’t see why they had stopped. She shouldn’t have let herself get lost in the middle of the group, but she’d been busy looking after the vulnerable people. She wondered where Ari was.
“Please excuse me, I have to get through.”
People made a path for her. When she had wrestled a good distance forward, the news reached her: apparently they had stopped because there was a man with a gun in the hall.
That man also, no doubt having heard the ruckus made by hundreds of people trying to be quiet, had not shot at any of those people. That thought gave her hope.
Indeed when she came to the front, she was most pleased to see the man wearing a white uniform.
“Hasegawa!”
He turned into her direction. The look of relief on his face was worth thousands. “Are these people all with you?” He looked haggard, unshaven.
“All civilians. We’re evacuating. We managed to repair the recycling and then Allion destroyed our work again. Did you get the news from Dolchova? What happened to Jas and Nysa?”
“So many questions, so few answers.”
He stood in front of a dockside office, and several people now came to the door. Milo, Majoa, Kya, all in their ISF uniforms, which looked so familiar and safe.
“Soon after you left, a couple of people tried to break into the shuttle from the outside. We managed to fend them off, but the shuttle is vented, the airlock is broken and we’ve had no chance to fix it.”
“You haven’t tried to use their dockside computers on the shuttle, have you?”
“We tried, but it seems like all the systems are frozen.”
Then it was maybe just as well that the shuttle was unusable at present.
“We decided to hide dockside, but we’ve barely seen anyone. Just a couple of really strange things.”
“Yeah, ones that freaked us out a lot,” Milo said.
He didn’t seem the type that was easily freaked out. “You mean equipment that seems to have a mind of its own and projection nozzles acting like they’re alive?”
“That’s a decent description of it.”
“That’s the thing that they accuse Bassanti of setting loose in the station.”
A flicker of understanding went over Majoa’s face. “It’s like this place is haunted.”
“Bah, you watch too many bad movies,” Kya said.
“That’s not a bad description of it, either,” Melati said. “This station kind of is haunted, in a modern way. We seem to be dealing with a sentient mindbase.”
“On top of everything else?” Milo asked.
“I’m betting that it is the rea
son that everything else happened,” Kya said. “Paul Ormerod fled from Ganymede to New Jakarta. He disappeared here. We were after him, but Allion was even more desperate for him. Apparently, he had made some arrangement with them and pulled out at the last moment. A copy of his mindbase may still be at the station. He may have evolved into something else.”
Melati nodded. Kya was something special indeed. Fiorellis were exceptionally intuitive, she remembered reading once. “It’s something to do with Ormerod all right.”
“It’s got me beat,” Milo said. “Give me a man with a gun to face me in an honest fight.”
Melati asked, “Did anyone hear from Jas and Nysa?”
Hasegawa shook his head. “Heard nothing, I’m afraid. We poked around a bit when it seemed safe, but couldn’t go far. The B sector is closed off by the fire door, Allion is in the C sector and the lifts to the A or D sectors aren’t operational. According to the dockside feed, they’re both powered down and only pressurised enough to maintain long-term structural integrity.”
“You’re saying there is no one in the A sector?”
“It seems so.”
God, she was glad that Jas wasn’t here to hear that. “What has happened to them?”
“Doesn’t Allion specialise in venting habitats when they find the occupants annoying?”
Mars. Melati felt sick. She was going to say that no one would do that to innocent people, but the Taurus Army was not innocent. They were an offshoot of ISF and a security force more than a combat army.
She forced herself to think of something else. “Did you hear why Dolchova give the ultimatum?”
“I can only guess that it has something to do with what happened to Jas and Nysa.”
Allion appeared to have murdered two thousand constructs, and to help them, ISF had sent them two constructs? That almost seemed too stupid for words. Surely they wouldn’t have killed the Taurus Army people because they were constructs, right? “All right. I need you to contact Dolchova again. Ask her to send ships, as many as she can muster, to pick up the civilians. I’m going to ask the hypertechs to guard this area. We as a group are going to go into the C sector to find out whatever is going on.”
“I’m asking to be exempt,” Hasegawa said. “The pilot stays with the ship.”
“Granted. Pilots in general should stay where ships are.” She smiled at him. The shuttle was crippled, but it wasn’t the only ship in dock. “Do you think you could fly an Allion vessel?”
“Oh yes,” he said with such firmness that it chilled her. What had he done in his previous engagements?
“All right then. As soon as we give the sign that it’s safe to do so, start taking out the civilians to the Felicity.”
“It may be slow at the other end because we’ll have to soft-dock in zero-g and these people won’t be used to that. The docking tubes are incompatible.”
“Start it anyway. It will be good for group morale to see that something is happening.”
He nodded. “I’m onto it.”
For the fact that he had made such a cocky impression on her, he had redeemed himself very well. Yes, Joshaya Hasegawa was a good team member.
He dipped his head. “Good luck, ma’am.”
Melati found Ari with Uncle and Grandma and the aunties. She found Fatima and Iman. She called together the rest of the group and explained what she planned to do.
“This is my assessment: Allion is making such a poor show of defending this station that I’m reasonably confident that they are not the main enemy. They are an enemy, but not the main one. They came to take over the station, and found something they didn’t know how to fight, and didn’t know how to identify. They brought none of their mindbase equipment, because they didn’t think they needed it. They are unsure how to use ours. They have been giving the illusion that they hold the station, and sending some patrols, but all these people seem to be doing is to start shooting as soon as they see someone because if we see how few of them there are, we’d overrun them. So they have retreated to a smaller, defensible area, and will probably be very ardent about defending it. They have probably taken Jas and Nysa inside with them to stop us bashing down the door.”
There were nods all around.
“Hasegawa is going to stay with the ship, and, as soon as we give word, is going to start moving civilians out.”
There were some nods. “He is also going to contact Dolchova and ask for more ships.”
“We as a team are going into the C sector, using their own tactics against them. You have permission to shoot at will at any enemy who shows his nose. We will not negotiate with any enemy person until we have located Jas and Nysa. We will wear armour and as many weapons and recharges as we can manage. We will wear breathing apparatus, masks, visors and tanks. Team, get ready.”
Everyone went to prepare, change or put on their gear.
Ari lingered for a bit. “You know you freak me out?”
“Like how?”
“You have really changed a lot.”
“Is that good or bad?”
He shrugged. “Uncle told me that he wanted you to stand for the StatOp council before . . .” He spread his hands. He didn’t need to fill in the details Before Harto was killed, before Allion took over, when there still was a StatOp council. “I used to think he was nuts, but I think you’d be amazing at it.”
Melati nodded, not sure what to say. If this mission had made anything clear to her, it was that she might tell everyone that she joined ISF out of duty and gratitude, but the truth was that she enjoyed military service. It gave her a sense of worth that wasn’t tied to her background, the colour of her skin, her gender or marital status. And she’d realised that after this siege was over and the Felicity decided to pull up stumps, she’d go with it. And that was a major realisation.
Chapter 30
* * *
THE TEAM GATHERED around her, most of them wearing a mishmash of ISF uniforms and hypertech gear. Milo had acquired a big Allion gun. When he noticed her looking at it, he declared, “My roommates are all Pfitzingers and they never shut up about guns.” Melati didn’t ask how he got it.
Melati knew the cohort in question. Six of them were female, and they were the most deadly of sharp shooters aboard the ship.
Ari had the PCD with the map and was to be the navigator. Hasegawa had established contact with the Felicity but they were not particularly clear on the nature of the problem with Jas and Nysa for security reasons. Melati thought it a little odd, since Dixon had established the secure channel just for this reason. It was starting to look like her suspicion that the Felicity had trouble with its systems as well was correct, but there was no point worrying about it.
The team gave Fatima and Iman strange looks. Because the ISF people were not trustworthy in the eyes of the hypertechs, Melati wasn’t supposed to give out their names, so the team had to make do with anonymous people in black with buggy face masks. That didn’t inspire a great deal of trust, so they didn’t interact much and asked no questions. Melati had gotten used to people who used voice boxes, but no one ever liked speaking to one.
These were all habits that did more harm than good, she thought. With their tech knowledge, hypertechs should be involved in rebuilding the station, but they would never be on the StatOp council for this single reason. Maybe they were so anti-establishment that they didn’t care, but it seemed like a stupid waste of knowledge and resources to her.
They went from the docks to the main hall, which lay empty and disused, a very sad incarnation of its former self. The area where the ISF ring had been detached was sealed up. The lifts that went to the now-disused docking ring for large mining vessels stood open, empty. A thick layer of dust coated all surfaces.
The air was getting poorer in here, too. Several warnings started flashing inside her visor. High CO2, SO2, low oxygen. High organics. Typical of quite deteriorated air.
They walked in a group across the hall to the C sector’s entrance. There was no one at
the checkpoint, but Melati’s neck pricked with the thought that the Allion people were probably waiting in an ambush for the group to come closer, in a highly defensible position.
“Stop,” she said.
They did. They stood just inside the entrance to the C sector, with an empty corridor ahead and the checkpoint and the hall behind them.
“Ari, look at the map. If you had to ambush us somewhere, in which position would you do it?”
“Probably over here.” He pointed at the map at the entrance to the command centre’s foyer. “They’d know that we would be making for the command centre and this is the most logical route to it.”
“Where are the fire doors?”
“There is one right here.” He pointed at the other side of the abandoned checkpoint. “The command room has its own, but if Allion forced their way in, Bassanti might have already used any protection that would give.”
“They might have fixed it.”
“They might. Plenty of other stuff they would have needed to look after first.”
Melati nodded. “Is there another route to the command centre that doesn’t involve going past this bottleneck point?”
Ari studied the map. Even when living here, they were never all that familiar with all the back ways to get into the C sector. It was the administrative centre and besides the fact that there were enforcers all over and you needed a pass to get in, none of the barang-barang had a reason to be here that required sneaking through service corridors.
Ari found a passage that ran past the back of the public health and the customs offices, but they found the way blocked by a metal grate. Milo and Ari tried to force it open, but couldn’t, and Milo fired his gun at the lock, but even the heavy Allion-made weapon couldn’t break it. There was no option except to turn back.
