Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  The men had pillows and blankets, and a hypertech was passing around containers with rice.

  This was not a random protest; these men without IDs had deliberately left the B sector under the cover of being part of the funeral. Harto had planned for these people to be here, using Rina’s death to make a point. She felt sick.

  “And you think that by creating fights, you’ll get your way?” Uncle said. “The enforcers punish us.”

  “Then we punish them back. There are a lot more of us than there are of them.”

  “That is the stupidest thing I’ve heard,” Melati said. “Have your way about the war. Go ahead and believe the war isn’t real. New Pyongyang is real, and we don’t want to go the same way.”

  Uncle gently grabbed her arm and pulled her away. “Come. We’re wasting our time here.”

  Melati let herself be guided away, keeping an eye on Harto who watched her, his hands on his hips.

  Once they were out of the hall, Wahid came to walk next to Melati.

  “I’m sorry that this turned into a political fight,” he said. “It’s not right, given the situation. Your cousin deserves more respect than that.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You did well in preventing worse.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what we’ll come to if that man ends up in the council. You know, the StatOp council does not suffer idiots. You can’t go there unwilling to listen. Because they won’t listen to you if you do.” His old face looked worried. Melati had never heard him say anything negative about Harto before. “You did well in bringing those two soldiers. I think it stopped things from getting worse.”

  “You think so?” Melati glanced over her shoulders at the two guards. Maybe if you looked at it from Wahid’s position.

  “I’m certain. No one wants to be seen stirring up unrest in front of ISF witnesses. Most people haven’t a clue how to talk to ISF.”

  They walked in silence for a bit, surrounded by others discussing what Harto wanted, why he associated with hypertechs other than the two who were his sons, wondering what the hypertechs wanted other than to hack into StatOp systems and why they suddenly showed an interest in politics where they had never done so before.

  Finally, when everyone crowded to get into Uncle’s rumak, Wahid said to her, “If you want to talk about . . . things, you know where I am.”

  Melati nodded, wondering how the word that she might stand against Harto had gotten out. Uncle, probably.

  Inside the rumak, Auntie Dewi had cooked up a feast. People brought their gifts to the family. Melati nodded and smiled and said thank you at the right time, but she felt mortally tired.

  Also, after his brief appearance at the funeral, Ari had disappeared again. She worried about him. He hadn’t seemed himself since that night when he came to her apartment with the gecko.

  Melati excused herself as soon as she could to make her way back to her unit. There, she thanked the two guards.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Desi said, and smiled.

  Melati wondered if Cocaro had foreseen this situation or if Jao, with all his comm equipment, had collected enough data to make them happy about the trip.

  After assuring them that she did not need an escort to work the next day, she went inside and closed the door behind her.

  Tea. And prayer. And being alone with Pak.

  She was so tired.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  IN HER DREAMS, Melati ran down the corridor towards her apartment. A mob of people followed her, shouting and throwing things and calling her a traitor. However fast she ran, she never made any progress. The floor under her feet moved like a treadmill. A door opened ahead and a ghost floated out, a wraith-like figure carrying two knives. He didn’t look like Pak but in the dream she knew it was Pak. He yelled at her, Why did you let her go?

  Melati woke up more tired than she’d been going to sleep.

  After a few bites of stale biscuits, the type miners took when they went out—God, how long had they been in her pantry?—she found that Desi and Jao had ignored her orders and were waiting outside, to the curiosity of some of her little cousins who peeped around the corner of a door, giggling.

  Both guards greeted her with sincere faces and fell into step next to her. The cousins ran inside calling their mother. Two hansip members stood next to the stairs trying very hard to ignore the guards.

  Melati was almost glad when they left the B sector.

  Small groups of weary-faced refugees still trudged along the cordoned-off path, one woman dragging a screaming child, while arguing with a sullen-faced teenage boy.

  Whatever miners queued up for jobs—and there was less than half the usual crowd—looked on in silence, standing in groups with hands in the pockets of their overalls. A New Hyderabad merchant was peddling the best high-energy snacks you’ve ever tasted from a tray that looked suspiciously like the lid of a packaging crate. They were little plastic bags with brown grains inside. Probably illegal wares for which he’d paid good money and which were worthless now that he couldn’t leave the station without a thorough inspection.

  Melati wondered if the protesters were still in the hall, but Harto’s amplified voice was audible long before she arrived there.

  Barang-barang had no rights, he shouted. This was the time to do something about it, stand up and demand a greater say in the way stations were run.

  The protesters still camped where they had been yesterday. The area cordoned off with ropes had grown. All chairs were occupied, and more refugees sat or lay on the floor. They looked bewildered and tired.

  Tier 2 people from all the stations should band together and form an association, Harto was saying while walking between the protesters and occasionally stepping over legs.

  He wore a small headpiece with a microphone and his words boomed through the hall. Dotted throughout the crowd of protesters were people in black with insectoid masks, some bristling with equipment, signalling to each other like sound technicians setting up for a concert.

  Harto’s rant seemed to be addressed to the refugees rather than his own people, but they just sat staring passively into the distance, their faces empty. As far as she knew, the majority of the tier 2 of New Pyongyang spoke only Neo-Korean.

  When Harto spotted Melati, he made a snide remark about lack of trust, but if he was hoping for another confrontation, he was out of luck.

  * * *

  When Melati came into the CAU wake up room, Dr Chee had Socrates Finlay sitting up in bed. His eyes were open, but he had the same distant look in his eyes that was common to the constructs immediately after waking up.

  Melati stopped at his side. “How are you feeling?”

  “Hey, aren’t you the brown gal from the office?” He squinted. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m not Rina.” If she sounded peevish, then that was fine by her. No one except other tier 2 was allowed to call her brown.

  He peered at her, his white and bushy eyebrows furrowing. “But you—”

  “I’m not Rina. Rina is dead. We had her funeral yesterday.”

  He frowned more deeply. “But you . . . there are two of you?”

  “Rina is my cousin. I’m Melati.” She had to restrain herself from shouting at him.

  “He’s still very confused,” Dr Chee said from his office. “It will be a while before he’ll be back to normal.”

  Melati left the bedside and went into Dr Chee’s office. He sat at his desk, working at the screen and muttering. He hit a key with unnecessary force, and glanced up at Melati. “Damn computer again.”

  “What is it doing this time?”

  “It’s so goddamn slow. I let the coefficient analysis run all through C shift, and it still hadn’t finished by the time I came in.”

  Did that mean he’d worked both A and B shifts? “But it normally takes less than an hour.”

  He snorted. “Yes. I’ve had Rosalie in here three times in as many days and even she can’t
figure out what’s going on.”

  Melati shrugged. The lab’s computers were there to be used and if they didn’t work, you got someone to fix them; that’s as far as her knowledge went. She shut the door behind her.

  Dr Chee turned away from his screen, facing her. “How are you, after yesterday?”

  Melati dropped into her usual chair. “The same way you normally feel when a young person is killed, and people use the funeral as a political rally.”

  A flicker of disturbance crossed his face. “I heard about that group. Are they still in the hall?”

  Melati nodded.

  Worries about the station going the same way as New Pyongyang didn’t need to be spoken; they showed on his face.

  After a silence, Melati asked, “How are all the other people we took from the mindbase exchange?”

  “Fine. They’ve all gone back.”

  “Has he been awake long?” she asked, glancing at the door.

  “Not that long,” Dr Chee said. “We got him here and warmed him up all right, but I had some trouble finding his mindbase.”

  “But you found it.” She felt guilty. Looking for all these people’s case data and mindbases must have been a major undertaking. “Did you contact the nurses?”

  “Yes, I managed to get two of them to come. That was the easy part. All those people’s data were on the mindbase exchange system, where they should be. Some are still in transit, waiting for the next incoming probe. I let the nurses take care of them, and I finally found this particular one in the outgoing queue for the bullet probe. There was no incoming.”

  His eyes met hers. They were normally a rich brown, but in this low light, they had darkened to black with little spots of reflected light in them. He looked worn out, his skin pale, with dark circles under his eyes.

  “That would have meant his death,” Melati said, her voice soft. Or something very close to death. She had heard of a depository on Europa for biologically living bodies where the mindbase had become lost. It was an awful place, controlled mainly by lawyers who decided who had the right to a body. It was not so much a problem in ISF, because everyone who signed up also signed a clause that gave the med staff the right to do whatever was needed to return a soldier’s function—including installing a completely new mindbase—but it was so much harder with civilians.

  “It sure would. This is a criminal offense, and by putting him in storage, someone obviously didn’t want us to find out that they’d knocked him off until they were well clear of the station.”

  Clear of the station? “All outbound—and inbound—flights are subject to intense checks. No one is going anywhere.”

  He gave a wry chuckle. “Yes, someone will be getting very nervous out there.”

  Many people were getting nervous in the station. “How long do you think he was in the storage?”

  “About a day or two, no more. The probe log shows his mindbase being entered there at B1:32 two days ago.”

  She had visited in the afternoon, which meant that she was probably the last person to have seen him, save the two uniformed men who had gone into the office after her.

  Enforcers.

  “Have you asked Socrates how he ended up in his position?”

  “I have but he’s not well enough yet to remember much.”

  Really? He looked pretty alert to her. “I’ll ask him something to jog his memory, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  She went into the main room where Socrates sat on the bed. Dr Chee followed her.

  Socrates had been watching something on a pocket screen, which he put away. He sat up straight. As if he expects trouble.

  “Do you remember anything about how you ended up in that cubicle? Who put you there and why?”

  He gave her a suspicious look. “They already asked me that. Who do you work for?”

  “Putting you in a cell without your consent and sending your mindbase away without an exchange is a criminal offense and we will need to know who is responsible.”

  “Er . . . yes, I understand. I—I don’t remember, though.”

  The hesitation in his voice was enough. He was lying. “Surely, you remember something. That afternoon, when I came to the office, two enforcers came to see you after I left. I saw them go inside. What did they ask you?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. Did anyone come to my office?”

  “I did. You remember me.”

  He blinked at her. “You’re not Rina. I don’t know your name.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have known it anyway. I’m Rina’s cousin. I came to see Rina, but she wasn’t in. You weren’t in either, but the computer was on and the system open, as if you left in a hurry. You came back, were nervous, said that Rina had gone home sick—which was a lie, because she wasn’t at home. No one in the family knew where she was. When I left, two enforcers went into your office. One heavy-set, like a bodybuilder, the other tall and slender, like someone who grew up in low-gravity.”

  “I don’t remember any of that.”

  Dr Chee came to stand next to her. “Maybe we should call the enforcers to check who these men were so that they can clarify their side of the story. Maybe you’ll remember then.”

  Socrates took in a sharp breath.

  “You don’t want that?” Melati prompted. “Why would you not want to talk to enforcers? Did they possibly come to quiz you on something untoward you’d done?”

  “I am an honest man!” Too desperate.

  “Maybe you could explain, because the longer you keep silent about what really happened, the more people are going to suspect that you’re hiding something. You disappeared, Rina disappeared at the same time. You almost died. Rina is dead. What did you do? Sell something, or provide free access to the New Hyderabad mafia? Maybe—” Her mind churned. “—maybe they were so desperate to get some criminal off the station that they thought to use the mindbase exchange? Maybe you offered to do it for a substantial payment? Is that it? And maybe they threatened to kill you if you went to the enforcers, but the enforcers found out anyway, and came to your office, and maybe you gave them some information that led to the lockdown of the station, and maybe you were so scared to either face the enforcers or the New Hyderabad mafia that you hid inside one of the cubicles.” Never mind that he would probably have done a better job at storing himself than that. “Maybe the enforcers got impatient with you and decided to take you out of the picture without killing you.”

  His eyes widened. He licked his lips, looked at the door, and licked his lips again. “It had nothing to do with enforcers.”

  “Yet they were in your office. There was perhaps half an hour between my seeing the enforcers enter your office, and your mindbase being logged for transport on the bullet probe. It takes our fast computers at least ten minutes to read a mindbase. I cannot imagine the older equipment at the mindbase exchange doing it much quicker than that. Either those men knocked you out and put you in storage, or they or you let in someone else who did it soon after. You can tell us which of these things is true, or we can find out, but we will find out.”

  He looked at her, his throat working. He blinked a few times.

  Then he whispered, “They’ll kill me.”

  “They almost did, yes. I’m guessing they killed Rina. But here you are under ISF protection.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “ISF protection? I understand that very well. It’s the best protection you can get around here.”

  “They will get me anywhere.” His voice was a mere whisper. His eyes were unfocused and drops of sweat pearled on his forehead. “You think you’re safe behind your firewall, and I tell you, these criminals have already breached it.”

  “All right, enlighten us, then,” Dr Chee said while sitting down on the edge of the bed. It looked like he was a quiet listener, but Melati was sure he was recording the conversation.

  Socrates let a long silence lapse before he started speaking. “A few days ago, a man ca
me into my office. He looked like tier 2, dark skin, short beard. He was probably a bit taller than most tier 2, but not so much that I thought him odd—”

  “Except that most barang-barang men don’t have beards.” Melati could see where this was going. New Hyderabad smugglers. By God, how had they become so sophisticated?

  “Some do,” Socrates said.

  “Thin ones only.”

  “Never mind the beards, keep talking,” Dr Chee said. Being of Chinese ancestry, he didn’t have much of a beard either.

  “The man offered me a very large sum of money to fix something for him. You see . . .” Socrates looked down at his hands, folded on the blanket. “I needed money, because I had started a business in New Pyongyang and it was wiped out by the continuing conflict there. I had debts coming out of my ears—”

  “How did this man know about that?”

  Socrates shrugged. “Gossip, perhaps? Could be so many ways. They would only have had to check the damage reports from New Pyongyang and target people whose business interests were destroyed.”

  “We can find out who queried this information. A lot of the total damage bill is publicly available information,” Dr Chee said.

  “Anyway,” Socrates continued. “I needed money, and he was . . . quite persuasive.”

  “Was he armed?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. It was simple, he said. He only wanted to know which person on-station had received the mindbase of a swap request from Ganymede.”

  And again that cold feeling. This had something to do with her cohort.

  Dr Chee asked, “And had you received a request from Ganymede?”

  He nodded. “There was a scientist. Rina had dealt with it. I’d seen it, and I remembered thinking that it was odd, but I presumed he wanted to visit for mining interests. We get people like that sometimes.”

  A scientist. Another fact that checked out.