by Sayuri Ueda
“What if she kills em before making her getaway?”
“Karina won’t do anything to waste bullets. Any movement in the shuttle bay?”
“Nothing suspicious yet,” Miles said.
“Can we spare a couple of guards to help with chasing down Karina?”
“That might leave us shorthanded at the shuttle bay.”
“Maybe they’ll make their move if they see the guards moving out. We can try luring them into shuttle and apprehending them there.”
“Do you want the men to use tranquilizer guns?”
“No. Live ammo,” Shirosaki said.
Shirosaki glanced at Harding. Harding answered drily, “Be my guest.”
After emerging from the maintenance shafts, Lobe and Wolfren arrived outside Shuttle Bay 2.
No doubt there were security forces standing by inside. Whoever shot first would be the ones left standing.
“Are you sure about this?” Wolfren asked, but Lobe didn’t answer. Although they wore bulletproof suits, no amount of protection was going to save them in a close-range shootout, and a bullet to the head would surely kill them.
Lobe unstrapped the mask from his waist and tossed it to Wolfren. Wolfren scowled and put it on. After slipping on his own mask, Lobe threw a bottle filled with fentanyl against the boarding gate. Anesthetic gas billowed out of the bottle, filling the corridor. With their guns raised, they went inside the corridor only to find it empty. Arriving at the shuttle entrance, Lobe tossed another bottle inside and waited a moment before boarding the craft. There was no one on board. An eerie silence pervaded the cockpit.
Wolfren lunged at the control panel and ran his fingers deftly across the buttons. The various levels on the controls jumped to life, signaling the start of the prelaunch sequence. Just as a look of relief twitched across Wolfren’s face beneath the mask, the door blew open and an armed security squad, all masked, rushed inside.
Lobe squeezed the trigger on his submachine gun and sprayed the team with bullets. Wolfren instinctively threw himself on the floor. Protected by their environmental suits, the security squad continued their advance and returned fire. The bullets ricocheted off the walls of the cockpit.
Several bullets hit Lobe, sending him crashing against the controls on his back. The bullets penetrated clear through his bulletproof suit and buried themselves in the control panel. A hideous volume of blood splattered across the ceiling and spread over the controls, which now signaled all-green for launch. The rust-colored blood dripped below onto the mask covering Lobe’s face and formed a small pool around his body.
A security officer stood over Lobe and drilled a lethal bullet into his head.
“Wait, don’t shoot!” Wolfren shouted from the floor, his voice muffled by the mask. “I’m not a terrorist. I’m one of the station staff. This bastard forced me to bring him here. Help me, please.”
“Get your hands behind your head,” shouted the security officer.
Wolfren did as he was ordered. One of the men frisked him for weapons.
“Tell us your name.”
“Barry Wolfren.”
“Designation?”
“I’m an engineer with the maintenance department.”
The security officer restrained Wolfren in handcuffs.
“Wait a minute.” Wolfren squirmed on the floor. “I’m a victim here. Why am I being cuffed?”
“We’ll let you go if you come up clean. Just stay put.”
As Karina and Fortia continued their escape down the maintenance shaft, Lobe’s signal went silent. Karina clicked her tongue. So Lobe had failed. Just as well. No sense in both of them getting caught and being used against each other in an interrogation.
And what about Wolfren? Was he dead too? Or did he manage to beg for his life? Karina suspected it was the latter. Wolfren was a wily one. He would find some way to survive.
A security tracker jumped out into Karina and Fortia’s path.
Karina shot it down instantly.
Before they knew it, Karina and Fortia were surrounded by countless tracking devices. Realizing shooting them all would be a waste of ammunition, Karina drew Fortia closer to her. “Be very still. Don’t move.” Pressing the gun against Fortia’s temple, Karina pressed her body closer to eirs.
A sanctimonious look came over Fortia’s face. “There’s no escaping now.”
“Quiet.”
Karina was still for a moment. After hearing a metallic ping nearby, she immediately grabbed the mask strapped to her waist and slipped it over her nose and mouth with one hand. Fortia tried to wriggle free and suddenly realized ey could not move.
Fortia slumped limply to the floor, as if eir bones had turned liquid.
Karina forcibly pulled Fortia to eir feet. But Fortia, already groggy from the gas, could barely hang on to Karina to keep emself upright.
Soon security guards appeared from out of the haze. They were fully armed, faces covered by protective masks and data goggles. They emerged from the gas cloud and flanked Karina and Fortia from both sides.
Karina pressed her back against the wall, clutching Fortia in one arm.
The security guards surrounded them in a hemispherical formation.
“Put down your weapon and let the hostage go,” said one guard. “Do as we say, and no one gets hurt.”
Karina said nothing and kept the barrel of the gun pointed at Fortia’s head.
“I repeat. Let the hostage go.”
Suddenly, Karina threw Fortia to the left. As Fortia staggered into the arms of the security guards, Karina pointed the gun in the opposite direction and shot at the guards on the right. One guard took a bullet in the forehead and toppled backward. One bullet pierced another guard’s fiber-reinforced goggles. The blood gushed from between his eyes. Just as a guard pushed Fortia aside and aimed his gun at Karina’s head, Shiohara restrained him from behind. The guard pulled the trigger and hit Karina in the left leg. Even as she crumpled to the ground, she whirled around and squeezed the trigger. The bullet ricocheted off the wall and hit Fortia in the back.
Another man jumped over the fallen guards and punched Karina to the ground just as she was staggering to her feet.
The security guards piled on top of Karina, disarmed her, and pushed her face down on the ground. Although she tried to resist, she let out a cry when a foot came down on her wounded leg. Karina gritted her teeth in agony and tried to keep the spasms from overtaking her entire body.
Shiohara applied pressure to Fortia’s wound with both hands, shouting for someone to get her some bandages. Fortia was conscious, eir face twisted in considerable pain. “Your inefficiency astonishes me,” ey said.
“Don’t talk. Your wound isn’t fatal, but you’re still bleeding.”
“How about ‘don’t worry’ or ‘you’ll be just fine’?” Fortia said faintly.
“Please, you have to stop talking.”
After restraining Karina’s hands behind her head, the guards moved off. Karina lay on the floor, a moan escaping her clenched teeth.
“I don’t believe it,” muttered one of the guards. “She took out both men in two shots.”
“Somebody get her some help!” shouted Shiohara. “Our orders are to bring her back alive. Where the hell are you aiming?”
8
AFTER WOLFREN WAS apprehended from the shuttle, he was taken into custody and held inside a room in the residential district.
When Arino entered, Wolfren looked in his direction but otherwise sat calmly in a chair showing no sign of resistance.
His hands, restrained by handcuffs, rested on his lap.
Arino stood over Wolfren and began, “Your name inside the special district was Tenebrae until five years ago you when renounced your standing as a Round. After having your bigender attributes surgically removed, you are now biologically male and identify as male. You have, at present, no partner. Am I right so far?”
Wolfren nodded.
“Why were you aiding the terrorists?”
<
br /> “I wanted my freedom.”
“Freedom—from what?”
“From this place.” Wolfren smiled crookedly. “More than a few Rounds want to fix their sex. If you plead your case well enough to Fortia, ey’ll put in a request to Kline for the surgery. To reconstruct a unisex body like a Monaural. A man or woman—whichever you choose. But becoming unisex doesn’t give you the liberty to leave Jupiter-I. We aren’t able to travel to the planets thanks to an agreement between the station and the Planetary Bioethics Association. Emigration to Mars or Earth is regarded as some kind of biohazard.”
“You were born a Round—why would you want to fix your sex? There must be disadvantages to being unigender.”
“Is that how you feel—that gender distinctions are an inconvenience? Do bigender Rounds really represent a human ideal? Are the Rounds wrong to want to become unigender? Are they wrong to want to freely choose their gender and sexuality?”
Arino couldn’t offer a response.
Wolfren had a point. If Wolfren lived in a world where only Rounds existed, bigenderism would have been an unquestionable and inalienable concept. However, Jupiter-I was a research station inhabited by both Rounds and Monaurals, where the Rounds necessarily observed the lives of those possessing only one sex. That the knowledge of a unigender existence would have an effect on the Round psyche wasn’t all that difficult to imagine.
Many of the Rounds grew fascinated with and yearned for a Monaural lifestyle, just as Arino felt his concept of gender and sexuality challenged by the Rounds’ existence. The Rounds were not lab animals, after all, but intelligent beings, and it was only inevitable that curiosity would eventually get the better of them.
“I was born a Round but hated Round society,” Wolfren continued. “The future of the Rounds is completely preordained and predictable. I have no interest in seeing the edge of the universe. I wanted to live on the planets. All I wanted was to be a man and test my limits in a society where no one knows anything about my lineage.”
“Mars and Earth aren’t nearly as great as you make them out to be. They’re ugly and chaotic worlds.”
“You lie. If that were true, why are all the staff so happy to go on leave to Mars? Why are they so overjoyed to end their time here and go back to Earth? If the edge of the universe was really all that wonderful, everyone would want to go there without having to create the Rounds to go on their behalf.”
Arino could not speak.
“There are former Rounds among the station staff working as research assistants to Monaurals. I’m one of them, only as an engineer. But I wanted to leave this place—not because I was being treated unfairly at work or experiencing unbearable discrimination. But I always felt, however imperceptibly, that everyone reacted differently toward me. They all knew that…I used to be a bigender. In that sense, I would always be a bigender as long as I stayed here. I can never be solely male. And that’s because your gender is determined by the perceptions of others. Whenever the Monaural staff went back to their homes on Earth and Mars, I was reminded that I’m not an average human. That I’m a Round even after the surgery. That I’m not a Monaural. I wanted to see Mars. Visit Earth. But interplanetary travel is forbidden. For as long as I live, I can never leave this station. That’s why I hacked into the interplanetary network and searched, for years, for some way to get off the station. Then I found the Vessel of Life—an organization perpetrating acts of terrorism in the name of the sanctity of life. I thought they’d be useful. I agreed to help them in exchange for a counterfeit family register and interplanetary passport. And why not? It was obvious I wasn’t going to get off the station through legal channels. Terrorists or not, I had to use whatever resources were available to me. They happened to be looking for someone on the inside to help them, so they were only too happy to oblige.”
“Didn’t you think about the genocide you’d be complicit in, all in exchange for your freedom?”
“Genocide? That would never happen. You have security all over this station. I didn’t think for one second that the terrorists would succeed. But they would create an opportunity to escape. That was the window of opportunity I was looking for. Even if Karina had failed to infiltrate the station, I was going to use the commotion as a cover to get off the station. Whether the Rounds would be wiped out was a simple matter of chance. Besides, what allegiance could I feel for a community I was trying to leave behind?” Wolfren looked Arino dead in the eye. “You think I’m wrong? Is it so wrong for a Round like me to want his freedom?”
“It’s the method I’ve got a problem with. You’ve put the entire station at risk.”
“Really. So then I should have gone on enduring the life I’d been living? Lying to myself, killing a part of who I am?”
Arino couldn’t answer.
But Wolfren wasn’t expecting an answer. Arino’s silence was answer enough.
“I always wondered if the Rounds were destined for space. Or if we’re really just lab animals for the Monaurals, creatures to suck dry of all our acquired data so they could adapt their own bodies and venture beyond Jupiter themselves. If the Monaurals will always be the first to see the frontier, while we remain biological machines made for no other purpose than to output experimental data. Maybe you can ask Kline when you see her. What do the Monaurals really want with us? Are we just tools of space exploration to them? Or partners in a new age?”
“Just tell me one thing, Wolfren. What was the agent that was dispersed in the special district? Or maybe you know how to treat the symptoms. Anything you can tell me.”
“That was something Karina smuggled in without my knowledge. I don’t know anything about it.”
Arino left Wolfren and headed for the control center where Shirosaki and Kline awaited his return.
After hearing the details of Wolfren’s confession from Arino, Kline sighed. “Are you telling me that was the reason why he aided the terrorists?”
Kline’s look of disappointment seemed to Arino a vivid reminder of Wolfren’s desperation.
Her belittling reaction was precisely the cause of Wolfren’s despair. Kline had failed to recognize it in all her associations with him and failed to recognize it still, even after she’d heard Wolfren confess as much.
“What will you do with Wolfren?” asked Arino.
“There’s nothing we can do. We have no laws here to try him. Wolfren was born with the understanding that he would never leave this station. Neither the courts on Mars nor on Earth have the jurisdiction to try him,” Kline said.
“I’m sure you’re not thinking of taking matters into your own hands,” Arino said, unable to completely hide his suspicion.
“The Rounds are human, no matter how they are formed. Even as a supervisor, I’m not empowered to take Wolfren’s life.”
“I see.”
“The Rounds are our good partners and the hope of humanity. There’s nothing about that statement anyone needs to be suspicious about. Tenebrae couldn’t understand that. That’s why he forsook his given name to become Barry Wolfren,” Kline said. “A shame, really. We gave him a perfect body and home, yet he fled this paradise all on his own. Suck the Rounds dry of all their acquired data and toss them away? How can he be so delusional? He has no idea just how blessed his life has been.”
The moment Arino heard that last statement, he felt an intense sympathy for Wolfren. He left Kline, however, without another word.
Kline received a message from Weil at the Europa Research Station.
“The governments on Earth and Mars and the Planetary Bioethics Association have reached a decision, Kline. They’re asking you to hold out a little longer. To try to ride out the storm yourselves as best you can until the situation reaches crisis point.”
Kline listened to Weil’s message calmly as if she’d expected this answer all along.
“You have my word, Kline. I have no intention of turning my back on Jupiter-I. If the situation turns grim, you’ll have the full support of Europa’s research
station. Hang tight, Kline. None of the staff have been affected thus far, am I right?”
In the end, that was what it came down to. If the Rounds all died, the planetary authorities would just produce some more. But if the station staff were in peril, then they would intervene directly. That was the final answer from the outside.
“We’ll have to find out the formulation of the chemical agent from Karina,” Kline informed Shirosaki. “Apply a little pressure if necessary.”
Karina was being held in a separate interrogation room. Her leg wound treated, she sat on a chair in the middle of the room with both hands cuffed behind her back.
Shirosaki and Harding entered the room with two security officers in tow, followed by Kline, then Tei.
After examining Karina, the doctor determined that the prisoner was well enough for questioning.
“You have something in there that could act like a truth serum?” Harding asked as Tei closed eir medical pack.
“We have nothing of the sort in this station,” Tei replied, shaking eir head.
“Then I guess we’ll have to make her talk.”
“Please don’t,” said Tei, interposing emself between Harding and Karina. “Let me talk to her.”
Karina looked up at the figure of Tei standing before her and smiled.
“You’re Karina Majella,” Tei said. “We’ve met once before. Kline brought you into the infirmary about five years ago with stomach pain. I remember giving you a prescription for painkillers.”
“You remember well.”
“Von Chaillot is not your real name?”
“I needed an alias to go to university. My given name is Karina, but I have no family name.”
“Like the Rounds.”
“Don’t compare me to the Rounds,” Karina said. “It’s true some people on Earth do without last names as a matter of choice or culture, but many more don’t have family names due to unfortunate circumstances of birth and upbringing.”
Tei knitted eir brows. Karina lowered her gaze and let the tension out of her shoulders. “I remember you too, Doctor. You came across as a terribly attractive man and woman simultaneously. So much so that it’s difficult to forget you. If you’re not careful, a Monaural will have his or her way with you someday.”
