Up Against It

by M. J. Locke

  “I’m through!” she gasped. “I’m through. I’ve been reborn. Just like the birth canal, all over again.” She lay on her back beyond the bottleneck, and her light reflected on the roof of the small tunnel. All three laughed in relief.

  Amaya got out her tools and loosened the bolts that secured the maintenance panel to the mouth of the stovepipe. She took a crowbar from her kit, hooked it against the edge of the panel, and used it to brace herself against the air that rushed past her—forced the panel farther open, and tumbled into the main tunnel. Then she braced herself and slammed the bulkhead back into place. Geoff could tell she was leaning against the wall by the now-closed vent, waiting till the room repressurized. Finally she removed her helmet. “I’m in.” Then— “Shhh!” she hissed. “Quiet.”

  She stood up, tucked her helmet under her arm, and adjusted her mini-cam, mounted at her right temple. Geoff caught a glimpse of what she saw: a sudden, shadowed movement across the intersection of this small chamber’s mouth with the main passage.

  “One of the maintenance robots?”

  “It was moving too fast. And the shape and color weren’t right.”

  “Stand fast. Kam!” Geoff said, and looked up the hill. Kamal was still there, keeping watch. “Are they inside the mine?”

  “No. They’re crowded around the professor’s instrument. The mine entrance is still sealed.”

  “Could someone have gone in before we got here?”

  “They wouldn’t be able to open the lock without the code,” Kam said.

  “Unless they hacked it,” Geoff said. “Or cut through.”

  “I’m going to take a look,” Amaya whispered. Brandishing her crowbar, she cautiously rounded the corner. “Bikkuri shita!” she gasped.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she said in a disgusted tone. “It’s your damn skeletons.”

  Geoff saw: the glass skeletons had escaped containment. One cavorted here; another leapt there; a third tumbled through the air. As she approached the machine shop by the mine entrance, Geoff saw numerous others, scampering about. She whacked one with her crowbar, and it exploded. “Just like virtual golf,” she said, and whacked another.

  Two others crawled out of a large puddle at the base of the assembler fluid vat while Amaya worked. They seemed to be lasting longer than they had been at the much higher gee in Heavitown.

  “The floor is coated with glass turds,” she said. “Kuso! You and your stupid art project.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “Sorry.”

  She went over and squatted by the vat, and Geoff saw through her cam that the tank valve had a slow leak. He remembered crashing into it during his fight with Ian. Amaya patched the leak with duct tape from her utility bag. “That should do for now.”

  “If we’re going to go talk to those people down there,” Kam said, “we’d better do it now. They seem to be finished with their tests. They’re wrapping things up.”

  “What? So soon? They can’t have finished their soundings yet. Let me see!” Geoff bounded up to where Kam was in two big leaps. Kam made room for him—he bellied up to the ridge and took a look through Kam’s binocs. Sure enough, they were folding up the equipment.

  Kam was looking at him. “Geoff…”

  “What?”

  “We could just … you know…”

  “What?”

  “Let them leave.”

  Geoff said, “Kam, either they are legit, in which case they need to know sooner rather than later that this claim is taken. Or they aren’t, which would mean Professor Xuan is in deep shit, and we have to help him.”

  “So why not call the police?”

  “We will, if they’re secretly criminals. But Moriarty himself said all the paperwork’s in order. The police are as swamped as they were yesterday, and they are still going to treat us like a bunch of punks. Like they always do. Unless we have some kind of hard proof. To get that, we need Professor Xuan.”

  Kam sighed.

  “Amaya,” Geoff said, “I’m giving you access to my view. Stand by. If there’s trouble, we’ll alert you, and you know what to do.”

  “Have several spud guns loaded and primed in the lock,” she said. “Open the mine entrance only on your signal. Be prepared to shut the door behind you the instant you enter. If it comes to that.”

  “Right.”

  “In fact…” she chuckled. “I have an idea, something extra special, to go along with it.”

  “What kind of idea?”

  “You’ll see … if it turns out we need it. I’ll need a few minutes to prep,” she said. “Stand by. I’ll signal you when I’m ready.”

  * * *

  It was getting late and Jane was exhausted. She called Sean to take him up on the offer of a place to stay.

  “Very good,” he said. “Just head right over. I’m working late tonight, but I’ll let Lisa know you’re coming.”

  On the way up there, she stopped at Charles and Rowan’s place to pick up Xuan’s and her belongings. They lived only a level up from Deirdre and Sal, so Jane decided to stop by her friends’ place while she was nearby.

  Dee entered the room, tying her robe. Jane already knew, but she asked, “Is Sal…?”

  “Gone.” Dee shrugged. “Don’t know where he is. Don’t care. I’ve kicked him out. I’m done.”

  Jane sat down across from her. “So. How can I help?”

  Dee sat, too, and gave her a penetrating look. “From what I’m hearing, you have enough to deal with right now, Jane. Don’t worry about me. Frankly, I’m relieved. Trying to make that marriage work, it was killing me. Just killing me. I love him, you know? We’ve been through a lot together. He’s not a perfect husband, but I never doubted his love for me. But he’s a terrible father. He’s … just … too broken. And nobody hits my boys. Nobody.” Her fist balled and a muscle jumped in her jaw.

  Jane said, “Sean told me what happened.”

  “So, I have to get my finances in order, and I have to mourn my son. My Carl.” She pressed a fist against her mouth, and Jane watched her struggle against her grief. “But I’ll be all right. Eventually.” She leaned back with a sigh. “Truth to tell, I feel relieved it’s over.”

  “Dee…” Jane said slowly. She had had a thought. She had already given away one of her berths on the Sisyphus, and she wasn’t about to use the other without Xuan. Dee’s family was from the moon. “Ever wanted to return home?”

  She explained her situation. Dee looked thoughtful. “That’s incredibly generous of you, Jane. But Wednesday? its awfully sudden…”

  “I’m sure I can wrangle a ticket for you to use whenever it’s convenient. Just let me know and I will sign it over to you.”

  “I’ll think it over. Thank you, Jane. You’ve been a good friend.”

  They made their good-byes and Jane left. Despite Carl’s death, despite everything, she realized she felt better about Dee and her situation than she had in a very long time.

  * * *

  Next Jane headed over to Sean and Lisa’s place in Design Plaza, near the city’s administrative offices. The neighborhood was only a couple of levels below the Hub. Lisa greeted her at the door, floating barefoot in her robe, smelling of perfumed lotion. Her long, wavy hair, black shot through with white, was damp and bobbed about her face.

  “I’m sorry to get in so late,” Jane said, but Lisa wouldn’t hear any apology. She showed her the spare room and bathroom. Extra towel rolls and soaps hung in the air, still settling from Lisa’s preparations. Lisa offered to make her cocoa while she unpacked.

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t let me disturb your evening routine.”

  “Will Xuan be arriving tonight?” Lisa asked.

  “He should be. But I’ll be glad to let him in. You go on to bed.”

  “All right, then. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen.”

  Once she had bathed and dressed in her pajamas, Jane nestled in the hammock and took a look at Masahiro’s latest set of e-mails. He had foun
d numerous bootleg videos of the Uraniaville location. As he had warned her, several of them had crude avatars or other changes inserted into them. But it didn’t matter. Because six of them, created by different people in different parts of the world, showed that Nathan Glease and Andrew Mills had encountered Ivan Kovak in the plaza near the kiosk.

  As Ivan walked away from the kiosk with the groceries and the little girl, Glease and Mills had approached him from behind. He turned, and at first seemed calm, but after Glease spoke, Kovak maneuvered his daughter behind him. He drew himself up taller, thrust out his chest, and spoke, jabbing a finger at Glease. Glease said something else, with a glance at Mills, who loomed over Kovak imposingly; Kovak said something brief, scooped up the child, and stalked away.

  What a piece of work you are, Grease, Jane thought. She sat back, twiddling a lock of hair. The date of the videos was the eighteenth of March—one month and ten days ago—only a few days before his family left him. Did this recording show a falling-out among conspirators? Or did it show a man confronted with a past he thought he had escaped?

  Either way, it provided conclusive proof of a link between Kovak and the mob. Either the Ogilvies had paid for someone to hack Upside-Down’s servers, Down on Earth, and/or someone within Upside-Down was dirty. Because only the bootlegs made within fourteen hours and ten minutes of the time and date stamped on the video showed the meeting. All recordings made after that showed only Kovak and his daughter leaving the kiosk—just as the official, laundered versions had.

  She called Aaron on a line secured with her newfound privacy technology. He responded instantly. “What do you have?”

  “I’m transmitting two sets of files,” she said, typing inwave as she spoke. “The first are the official ‘Stroiders’ copies, requested through our local library, of the tampered videos. The second set are several bootlegged videos made by ‘Stroiders’ viewers back on Earth.” She clicked Send. “I’ve flagged the important ones to watch. The bootlegs made within two hours and ten minutes of release back on Earth show Ivan Kovak meeting with Nathan Glease and his muscle, Mills. The rest do not. This gives you everything you need to connect Ogilvie & Sons to the destruction of the ice, and to Marty’s murder.”

  Aaron’s eyes widened as she spoke. “God is merciful! I’ll call Jerry Fitzpatrick. We’ll have those two behind bars in no time.” He lifted a hand to disconnect, but paused. “Thank you for this.”

  She started to say “I’m doing it for Marty,” but realized that that was not the whole story. I don’t know if I can ever completely forgive you, Aaron, she thought. But I’m going to try. “You’re welcome.”

  26

  Xuan directed two of the hired hands to break down and load the equipment, while Jesse radioed Mills in the cockpit. “Sir, I’m going to call in to request a spot in the landing queue for when we arrive.”

  “Fine—go ahead,” Mills said, in a bored tone. Xuan heard the staticky clicks that meant Jesse had switched over to a different channel. A moment later he came back on the comm. “Professor, Stores Chief Moriarty is on frequency one oh six point oh for you,” he said. Xuan switched over.

  “Ngo Minh Xuan here.”

  “Xuan, this is Sean. I just got off the phone with Commissioner Navio. Lisa and I would like to offer you two a place to stay.”

  Xuan winced at the mention of Jane’s name. “That would be lovely. Thank you for the invitation. We’ll be headed back shortly.”

  “Good. Just come straight to our place. I’m beaming you the address.”

  They made their good-byes, and Xuan signed off, heart pounding hard.

  He might still be able to bluff his way out of this. He started up the ramp, acting as if nothing was wrong, though the open cargo door loomed like the barrel of a weapon. By the time he reached the top, Mills stood there, holding a large pipe wrench in both hands.

  “Gentlemen, I believe we have been hosed. No, no—leave those there,” he said. The hired hands were carrying Xuan’s bags and cartons up into the ship. “I think the good professor and I need to have a little talk.”

  Mills put an arm across Xuan’s shoulders, gripped him by the air intake lines at his helmet. “Professor No, the Stores chief just referred to Commissioner Jane. Am I to understand that Jane Navio is your wife?”

  It’s bad enough you are a thug, Xuan thought, the least you could do is get my name right. “That is correct. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I’ll just tell you why. I have a sensitive bullshit detector, and I’ve been smelling something off about you. I’m willing to bet that your wife sent you here to fuck with us.” He jerked Xuan by the air lines. Xuan’s feet flew out from under him. Mills set him down again, still holding on to him. “I’m willing to bet that you screwed with the results of your test to make us think this rock has less ice than it does.”

  Xuan summoned indignation. “No, sir. Your assumption is not correct. I am head of the Astrogeology Department at Phocaea U. Check it for yourself; my bio is on the university’s wavesite under faculty. You asked for someone on short notice. All the grad students were already assigned to other duties. I have no idea who you people are or what you are doing, other than surveying a potential ice claim, nor do I know why my wife’s name should matter to you.”

  Mills chuckled. “Ah, I see. He has no idea who we are, gentlemen. Let me set you straight. We are the new bosses in town, and we don’t like people like you and your wife getting in our way.”

  “The last thing I want is to get in your way. I just want to do my job.”

  “Maybe he’s telling the truth, sir,” Jesse said.

  “Let me handle this,” Mills snapped. “Professor, have you ever seen what this”—he swung the wrench—“does to a faceplate in a vacuum?”

  Xuan saw in Mills’s gaze that he wanted Xuan to defy him. He was looking for an excuse to kill him. The sun was down now, but with his augmented vision, Xuan could see clearly. Five armed men were at the base of the ramp, and Mills, a man nearly twice his size, had a firm grip on his air hoses. If he tried to leap away, Mills would smash his faceplate, or wrench his lines out. And even if he could escape, where would he go? He only had a few hours’ worth of air, and didn’t know the codes to the mine locks, or if the mine was even habitable anymore.

  I won’t survive this, he thought. He wished he had thirty seconds out-of-time so he could send Jane a note. Tell her how much she meant to him. Tell her to tell the kids good-bye.

  Buy time, he thought. “Might I point out that I would be more useful to you prior to exposure to vacuum than I would be afterward, if my wife is indeed obstructing your efforts?”

  Mills eyed him, swinging his wrench back and forth, back and forth. Then he shrugged and lowered the wrench. “You have a point. Oh well.”

  He gave Xuan a sudden, vicious shove. Xuan tumbled into space. He flailed, and slowly settled to land in a crouch at the base of the ramp. “You want to stay on my good side,” Mills said, “then rerun your test.”

  Xuan came back to his feet. He had already removed the bolt from the pendulum wire—the bolt that had shortened the pendulum and made the gravitometer lie about the rock’s density. Mills would kill him if he tried to reinstall it. But they were going to anyway. He might as well try. He directed Jesse and the others to take the equipment back to the location where he had done the testing earlier.

  As they neared the spot, two rocketbikers came out from behind the equipment racks at high speed. They had a net stretched between them. Mills saw them and shouted, but too late—two of the hired hands got caught in the net. Xuan’s night vision allowed him to see them just in time to push himself out of the way. The net swooped past. He saw that Jesse and another of the guards had leapt out of the way. In his radio headset, a young man shouted, “Professor Xuan—run!”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He leapt up and out, off the mine tailings and over the shuttle—with a kick off its top fin, to launch himself higher—and arced toward the bikes, which were hau
ling a bouncing load of arms, legs, and asses off into the distance. The two unbound mercenaries stumbled after them, shooting. As Xuan sank beyond the shuttle, he looked back: Mills had pulled his gun. Xuan of course heard nothing, but a bullet nicked the top fin, just missing him, and blew up. Exploding bullets: nasty. The mist that dispersed after the explosion suggested they might also contain a biotoxin. Then the shuttle blocked Mills from view.

  Xuan landed in a crouch, and started bounding away from the two guards. The bikers had jettisoned their net and were skidding in an arc back toward the shuttle as Jesse and the two hired hands, still enmeshed, tumbled away across the landscape. The bikers shot a new net between them just before they reached the two mercenaries still standing, and scooped them up. The bikers turned in unison, sped up the launch ramp—soared into the sky—jettisoned the net, fired their thrusters in reverse. The two netted men went flying into orbit and the bikers dropped back onto the surface.

  Mills had emerged from around the ship. He landed … flailed … fell … stood again. He pointed his weapon at Xuan.

  “Freeze where you are, No!” Mills still mispronounced it. Infuriating.

  As Mills shouted, one of the bikers stopped beside Xuan, throwing a fountain of spinning gravel up. “Care for a lift, Professor?”

  Xuan thought he recognized the young man’s face through his faceplate, but he wasn’t sure. He batted the gravel aside, swung onto the bike, and grabbed hold. The other biker surged past, straight at Mills. Mills’s shots went wide, as he dodged and fell in a slow, wide arc. By the time Xuan and his driver passed Mills, he was back to his feet and shooting again—Xuan could tell from the gun’s recoil. An exploding bullet hit the bike just behind his seat, blowing a hole as big as two bunched fists. Xuan was nearly thrown off by the impact. The bike swerved. More mist spread. Xuan hoped that vacuum destroyed whatever was in those bullets. His driver got it under control—the rockets flared and the bike leaped forward—Xuan hung on for dear life.