by Mark Budz
“What others?” João? Isabelle? The two gangstas, Balta and Oscar? Have they been arrested as well?
The rose agent pauses, comes to a sudden stop in front of him. “Was it your idea to infect Lejandra, or Doña Celia’s?”
“She was already sick when I got there.”
“That’s not what Lejandra claims. In a written, signed statement, she asserts that she was a victim. An unwitting pawn you took advantage of to further your radical political agenda.”
“She was dying.”
“Is that why you targeted her? Decided to infect her? Because she was going to die anyway?”
“I just told you. She was already infected.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know.”
The rose agent walks behind him. Stands there, a silent threat waiting to pounce. “Who else is involved in the conspiracy?”
“No one.” Again, it comes out completely wrong—sounds as if he’s implicating himself.
“You admit it was all your idea?”
“No.”
“Then you must have been taking orders. Carrying out instructions from higher up.”
Dazed and confused, weary, L. Mariachi closes his eyes, prays for sleep to rush in and drown him.
Behind him, the rose agent claps his hands again. L. Mariachi flinches.
“How long have you been a member of the ICLU?” the rose agent demands, close enough to tickle the hairs in L. Mariachi’s left ear.
L. Mariachi shakes his head to get away from the hot rancorous breath. “Never.” One-word responses seem the safest. If he refuses to speak at all it will appear that he’s not cooperating and the BEAN agents will tighten the screws. Give them a little and the treatment might not be as harsh.
“What can you tell me about Mymercia?”
“Who?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it. You can’t be that stupid.”
“Yes.” He’s not proud. He gave up whatever ego he had years ago. Sacrificed it for his fifteen minutes of fame.
“You’re lying.” The rose agent claps his hands three times in rapid succession at the base of L. Mariachi’s skull.
L. Mariachi jerks. His jaw clamps tight and he bites his lower lip, tastes blood. “No.” A crimson thread of saliva dribbles down his chin.
“What a worthless shithole.” The agent’s rueful exhalation caresses the hair along the nape of L. Mariachi’s neck, as sensual as a chupacabra moving in to suck not blood from him but information. “Do you think they give a rat’s ass what happens to you? Hell no! You’re expendable!”
The story of his life.
“Asshole! You received a message from the Kuiper belt, an encrypted datasquirt during the ceremony. That’s who’s really trying to sabotage the Front Range ecotectural system, isn’t it? Why? What do they want? Who is helping them? When and where do they plan to strike next?”
Out of the corner of his eye, L. Mariachi catches a glimpse of the agent squeezing his hands into fists. He’s pumping himself up, building toward a tantrum. No telling how far he’ll go, or what might happen if he loses control and goes off—shoots his wad in a violent outburst.
“Answer me, you worthless fuck!” Flecks of spit shower L. Mariachi’s head and shoulders. “You sphincter-licking, cum-sucking faggot of a whore!”
“I’ve never been to the Kuiper belt.” The saliva on his chin cools as it dries. “I don’t know anyone there. Lo siento.” Sorry.
“Bullshit!” The agent karate kicks the legs of the stool. “Fuck!” He’s in all-out rant mode, frothing over with full-blown Bad Cop angst.
L. Mariachi spills forward. Does a face plant on the floor drain, which smells of piss and the watery, soup-thin diarrhea he recently drizzled out. His mouth is swollen. It feels as if a leech has anchored itself to his face and is gorging itself, getting fatter by the second. If this keeps up, in a couple of hours it will burst.
Insect Aside and Fertile Liza are laughing at him. He can hear them, but he can’t see them. His view is obstructed by the livid face of the agent looming above him. Veins squirm on the man’s forehead and temples, hemorrhoidal, varicose with rage.
And pain. The motherfucker is hopping on one foot. Like maybe he busted a toe during his Bruce Lee impersonation. He dances with gritted teeth, spins in a circle as he holds his foot.
“Fucking shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He repeats the refrain a few times, interrupting it with a chorus of shits every few beats. This goes on for a while. Eventually, the histrionics die down and the rose agent hobbles over to L. Mariachi.
The gabacho clearly wants to dropkick him, but he seems to be having a hard time figuring out exactly how to do that without inflicting further injury on himself. In the end he settles for a well placed gob of phlegm, and then limps toward the door. At the last minute, almost as an afterthought, he turns to snap his fingers at L. Mariachi and flip him off all in one gesture.
End of interrogation.
“What can you tell me about ‘SoulR Byrne’?”
L. Mariachi blinks. Sees the expectant face of a young woman leaning in toward him from the inside of his wraparounds. She looks familiar. A face out of memory, but blurred. Dreamlike. Like their surroundings . . . a café in Mexico City, not far from the ap he lived in during his Daily Bred days.
“Well? . . .” the woman prompts. She’s doing a short infobyte for a blog she posts on a popular netzine. Digit Alice. He agreed to talk to her. Promote the band, lay the groundwork for the next offering of Daily Bred.
Except the interview never happened. She canceled as soon as he lost the use of his hand. Which means he’s hallucinating, replaying events from the past, fantasizing about what might have been.
“What do you want to know?” he hears himself say.
“What does it mean?” She consults her eyescreens. “I mean, does ‘fine’ly’ stand for ‘finely’ or ‘finally’?”
“Sí.”
“In other words, it’s a double entendre.”
L. Mariachi smiles, gives a cryptic shrug for the benefit of the flitcam buzzing in front of him.
“What about ‘fore_gone’? Why the underscore?”
“Why not?”
“Does it have a double meaning, too?”
“Everything in life,” he says, “can be taken in more than one way.”
The interviewer scribbles a quick note before continuing to the next question. “There seems to be a direct correlation between the sun and the soul. Are you trying to say that sun embodies the soul? Or that the soul is like the sun?”
“Yes.”
“Who is SoulR Byrne?”
“Anyone who’s in pain,” he says.
“Is it a real person?”
“That depends on your definition of real. We’ve all lost something, or someone, we care about.”
“Is that what prompted you to write the song? How it came about?”
“My direct experience, you mean?”
“Yes. Is that something you’d care to share with us?”
L. Mariachi squirms, uncomfortable with the question. The interview has turned personal. Is dangerously close to becoming an exposé. Something doesn’t feel right, in the machined recesses of his mind.
“Num Nut,” he says. “Is that you?”
25
DAMAGE CONTROL
The quarantine zone is pure chaos. The greenhouse cylinders and vats are hardsealed, locked vault tight. The hexcell outside the air lock is a hodgepodge of activity. It’s impossible to tell what any single worker is doing. Everybody is scurrying around in complete disarray. Like her thoughts. Totally Brownian, jostling this way and that.
Xophia. The ICLU shuttle. It’s supposed to arrive in less than four hours. Is it on time? What happens if it shows up early? What if it can’t dock?
“Where are Ephraim and the others?” Fola asks Pheidoh. She scans the mayhem on her eyescreens, looking for a familiar face. Since getting word about the accident, she
hasn’t been able to get in touch with her tuplet, or anyone else for that matter. The entire station has gone incommunicado. Even Villaz, her doctor, is unavailable.
“They’re rounding up Intensive Care Modules.” The IA’s voice stretches thin over her cochlear imps.
She watches a tuplet wrestle an ICM into the hexcell and position it against a carbyne support frame bristling with chemical and electrical jacks. The injured workers can’t be brought into the station for treatment so the ICMs have to be taken to them. The frame is also fitted with a miniature propulsion unit for maneuvering in case the magnetic flux lines don’t provide enough control.
A taut breath hisses between Fola’s lips. “What’s the condition of the workers who were on the shuttle?”
“About what you’d expect after five minutes of hard vacuum.”
Hypoxia. Loss of blood pressure. Possible embolism in arterial blood. Fola puts a hand to her throat. Imagines her brain gasping for oxygen and her blood boiling inside her veins. The Tiresias ecotecture, and the colonists, have been gengineered for low pressure. Around 1 psi—or 50 Torr. So lung rupture and embolism aren’t a concern. The workers have also got extra reserves of dissolved oxygen they can draw on after the oxygen in their blood is used up. Enough to remain conscious for a couple of minutes tops. After that, all bets are off.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “Hard vacuum?”
“They weren’t suited up when the pod failed,” Pheidoh says.
That seems crazy, in an emergency situation.
“With only a limited number of biosuits,” the datahound explains, “the decision was made to leave behind all of the available suits for the workers who are still on Mymercia. That way, if things got worse they would have backups to see them through until they could pod up.”
It would be a different story if they’d been softwired to the warm-blooded plants. The plants would be able to support them remotely, send them extra oxygen and antifreeze so they could live up to fifteen or twenty minutes in space without a biosuit.
“How many made it?” There must be some survivors or they wouldn’t be rushing to put together the ICMs.
“Eleven. But they need medical treatment to get them stabilized. Kerusa managed to get the shuttle docked. It’s fully pressurized now, and oxygenated.”
Fola’s chest constricts. There’s only one outside air lock to the quarantined tower. With the pod docked, there is no way the ICLU shuttle can dock.
“How did the pod rupture?” she asks.
“Preliminary data indicates that one of the high-pressure propellant sacs may have burst as the pod was getting ready to dock.”
Leading to sudden decompression . . .
She spots Alphonse. He’s helping attach an ICM to a support frame that’s being assembled on the far side of the hexcell. His face is closed down, expressionless. Something is wrong, beyond the grim situation.
She signs open a message window, pings him. “You okay?”
He starts, comes out of himself.
“What’s wrong?” she presses.
He sighs. “I guess there’s no way you would have heard.”
“Heard what?”
“Ephraim.”
Something dislodges inside of Fola and threatens to work its way loose. She hugs herself. “What about him?”
“He’s missing.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was in the quarantine zone just before the accident,” Pheidoh tells her when Alphonse doesn’t respond. “He’s offline. So far, his IA hasn’t been able to reestablish contact.”
Fola’s jaw aches. “What was he doing?” She can’t help wondering if it had to do with the inbound shuttle, and a dank dread invades her. Her breath feels cold in her lungs.
Alphonse fits a socket wrench over a bolt. “Troubleshooting a failed sensor array in one of the vats.”
The sensors monitor everything from heat load and air pressure to radiation levels and torsional stress. “Was anyone with him?”
“No, everyone else had already left the quarantine area.” Alphonse twists hard on the bolt he’s tightening. “He was heading out at the time of the accident.”
“According to his IA,” Pheidoh says, “Ephraim was wearing a suit. That will help.”
Fola shifts her attention from Alphonse to the greenhouse vats, distorted through the fish-eye window in the hatch. “Has anyone gone in? To check on him?”
“No.” Alphonse’s fingers slip from the wrench handle. He swears, squeezes his hand into a fist. “Kerusa refuses to let anyone else into the QZ. That’s why the ICMs are remote-op. He doesn’t want to put anyone else in danger.”
“How are you going to get the injured workers hooked up to the ICMs?” The modules are small enough to fit in the docking bay. But wiring people into the individual pods is another story.
“That’s the tricky part. Kerusa’s gambling that one or more of the workers will be able to help, once the ICMs are in place.”
“What if no one is?”
“We have to wait until the next shuttle from Mymercia arrives.”
“How long will that take?”
Alphonse jerks his head to one side. “Too long.”
“The evacuation has been put on hold,” Pheidoh informs her, “until the remaining shuttle pods have been inspected for safety.”
So it could be hours. “What if someone volunteers to go in?” she says.
“They’d be stuck there,” Alphonse says. “They wouldn’t be allowed back into the station.”
“Has anyone offered?”
“Sure. But Kerusa says no, he can’t afford to lose anyone else. So he’s just going to cross his fingers and hope for the best.” A single ICM drifts through the entrance to the hexcell, guided by a tuplet. “I have to go,” Alphonse says as the pod heads his way, ready to be bolted into place next to the pod he’s working on.
“How do I get to the QZ from here?” Fola says after Alphonse is gone.
The IA levels its gaze on her.
“Somebody has to be there to hook the workers up to the ICMs.” She watches the tuplet guide the pod into place on the frame.
“Fola—”
“I’m already in quarantine. I’ve already been exposed and survived.” It makes perfect sense. As a Jesuette, she had basic medical training. She’s used to working with victims. Caring for the sick and injured.
The IA switches from existential philosopher to hangdog psychologist, its brow wrinkled, its expression earnest. “Just because you survived once doesn’t mean you are immune.”
“I know what I’m getting into,” she says.
“I can’t guarantee your safety.” A double chin bunches under the information agent’s jaw as it peers at her over the tops of its wire frames. “I can’t promise you won’t get hurt.”
“That’s not the issue,” she says. “I need to do this.” Not only for Ephraim or the workers but for herself. And Xophia. “This is my decision, my choice. Besides, it might be the only chance they have.”
Pheidoh continues to stare at her over its glasses. “Kerusa will never authorize it.”
“He won’t have a choice if we don’t tell him.”
The datahound’s pupils fibrillate, go into corneal infarction. “We?”
“How else am I going to get out of here?”
Pheidoh, it seems, has a talent for opening doors.
“The functionality was built into the core code of the seed program from which I was cloned,” the IA once explained.
Thanks to the datahound’s seed IA, named Varda, the datahound has no problem unlocking her hospicell and clearing a path through the station.
“Have a healthy, happy day,” the hatch chirps.
The hospicell emergency kits are stocked with biosuit canisters. She grabs one, squirts a suit on over her loose gown, and makes her way into the central magtube. This shaft runs the length of the hexcell tower where her hospicell is located. Each tower is built out of concentric hexcell ring
s. The inner ring consists of six cells arranged in a circle. When stacked on top of each other, the rings form a hollow tube. The outer ring, which consists of twelve cells, provides structural support, additional living or work space, and three to six lightshafts sleeved to the dome at the top of the tower. She’s not sure how many towers there are, only that they stick out from the Buckyball core of the station like spines.
The greenhouse tower where the quarantine zone has been set up is on the same side of the station as the hospicell tower. The towers aren’t connected by upper-level causeways, they’re in different functional clusters, but that’s okay. It’s actually shorter to space-walk from one tower to the other than it would be to go all the way through the station.
At first she’s nervous about taking the main shaft to the top instead of a lightshaft. She keeps waiting for someone to stop her, ask what she’s doing, or where she’s going. But the tower is deserted. All available personnel have gravitated toward the quarantine zone.
At the apex of the tower, Pheidoh grants her access to the topmost hexcell ring. Normally off-limits, this ring contains the main lightdome and three satellite domes that collect energy from the solcatcher array. Two of the remaining hexcells are reserved for equipment storage. The last cell is an air lock, used by maintenance crews to access the exterior of the tower for routine support work and emergency repairs.
She finds a propulsion pack in one of the equipment lockers, slips it on, and then makes her way into the air lock.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” her IA says after performing a final diagnostic on her biosuit and pack.
Fola draws a deep breath. “Just open the hatch.” The sooner she’s past the point of no return, the better.
Outside, with nothing to hold on to, panic grips her. She slides into vertigo. The station appears to be drifting away . . . growing incrementally smaller. An optical illusion? Or some imperceptible riptide momentum that will carry her, freeze dried and vacuum packed, into space?
“You’re hyperventilating,” Pheidoh says.
Pink polka dots dapple her vision.
“Hold your breath,” the IA says. “Don’t breathe.”
