Erebus

by Ralph Kern

  Giselle recapped some of the reports she’d heard. Io, the fifth moon out from Jupiter, had been struck by one of the huge Alcubierre liners that connected the worlds of the solar system. That was what had caused the explosion and spike of EM that had shut down half the system in Sol. Each one was miles long and could travel at half the speed of light. But moons were small, and space was big. I somehow doubted it was an accident.

  Pictures of Io inundated the news channels, and they weren’t pretty. It looked like someone had taken a massive bite out of the moon. What looked like red-hot lava was hemorrhaging out of the wound. When I’d arrived back to civilization at Rotterdam airport, the moon was all anyone could talk about. The news shows were full of talking heads who didn’t have a clue about what had actually gone on. Stations and news feeds put up all kinds of impressive-looking graphics and holos that the studios had knocked together in short order to show the devastation.

  The Io event was all people could talk about, but not with fear in their voices. That’s what happened when a disaster hit a faraway place. People got concerned, yes, but Io was a long way away. The public of Earth wasn’t scared—yet. Whether that continued to be true depended on what happened next.

  “I’m just about to go into a meeting about it,” Giselle said as I lowered myself gingerly onto the seat at my desk and leaned back. The fake leather chair creaked alarmingly. “I’m expecting to find out more then. Meanwhile, Wade has asked for a case conference on the Sahelia job.”

  “Great, fine. When?” I said, trying to drum some enthusiasm into my voice. It was difficult. Ahead of me was the desk Dev usually used. It was clear, of course, as office etiquette dictated. But the crowded office felt somehow empty without my keen young protégé there.

  “This afternoon. For some reason, she seems a little pissed off?”

  “Pissed off how? Biting and sarcastic or fuming and full of rage?” I asked.

  “Biting and sarcastic.”

  “That’s just normal.” I managed a smile.

  “Either way, she’ll be here at 1400 hours.”

  No rest for the wicked, I guess.

  ***

  The conference room was about as advanced as War Crimes got. It had state-of-the-art communications equipment…from ten years ago. It even had a water dispenser and coffee machine.

  Wade and I were seated at the table, a mass of paperwork on the touch-screen surface of the conference table. Wade was the prosecutor assigned to the Sahelia case. She was good at what she did. I’d worked with her a few times before, but I got the distinct impression that if she listed her hobbies, being argumentative would be right at the top of the list.

  “I really wish you hadn’t ERPed Kumba,” she said. “The judges don’t trust it, and the juries don’t like it.”

  “He wasn’t exactly falling over himself to tell us where his friends were, Becky.” I said. “Would you rather I got the information out of him some other way? I’m sure I could have gotten their location just as quickly.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me. I actually liked her, but sometimes she made me feel like a school boy who wasn’t quite paying attention in class.

  “I’m sure you would have. Well, what’s done is done. We’ll have to work with it. You’ll have to give a further statement justifying the ERP in more depth, though. Your single-page statement doesn’t quite cover all the necessity criteria.” Her lips curled in a frown as she gestured at the screen showing my brief account of why using one of the most intrusive questioning techniques we had at our disposal had been necessary.

  “It was good enough for Judge Thompsen, and you know what he’s like.” I tried to keep the plaintive tone from my voice.

  “Thomsen granted an emergency court order, having been woken up at three in the morning by a combination of strange lights in the sky and The Hague banging on his door. What you have here is not exactly enough to fight off a defense counsel who has all the time in the world to pick things apart. I don’t want to lose Kumba through some bloody technicality.” She gestured at me, sending me a document over link. “Read this; it’s the Salah case. It’s the one where they tried to nail down the principles of use of ERPing. Write a further statement and make sure you can cover everything in it. If you don’t, you’re going to have a tough time in the box.”

  “I’m sure Thompsen felt very inconvenienced by the whole thing,” I said, gritting my teeth.

  “Layton,” Wade said, her voice softening, “I know what happened out there. I know you think I’m being picky, but I promise, it’s because I want to ensure these bastards are nailed to the wall.

  “I know, Becky,” I said, slightly mollified. I filed the document away. I was sure it would provide thrilling bedtime reading.

  ***

  As we left the conference room, I saw Giselle waiting outside. I excused myself as Wade walked on toward the exit. She was here often enough that she often complained it was her second home and she could make her own way out.

  “How’d that go?” Giselle asked as she opened the door to the conference room again and gestured me back inside. We stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. The view was nice from up here. The office block may have been old and tired, but the gardeners still put a lot of effort into looking after the grassy square and fountains below.

  I shrugged. “The usual for a meeting with Becky. I’ve come away with a to-do list as long as my arm.”

  Giselle nodded and gave a distracted smile as she gazed out over the view.

  “And your meeting?” I prompted.

  “Do you think one of the case builders can handle the rest of the Sahelia job?” she finally asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s evidence gathering now. We’re going to be spending a good long time building a solid prosecution so no one drops through the net. Mostly that’s just admin, but hey, that’s part of my job.”

  “I have another one for you, an interesting one.” Interesting…a warning bell went off in the back of my mind. The I word was a curse in law enforcement, along with the Q word…never tell a cop it looks like a quiet night. I tried not to let my apprehension show on my face. “You’re the closest of the team leaders to being available. Tao is still out in Siberia digging up war graves, Libby is stuck in Mexico, and Francine is on maternity. That leaves you.”

  We were perpetually short-staffed. It wasn’t unusual to juggle personnel to free people up, but still, she had a look on her face that showed this might be a bit more than that. Bottom line—I could bitch and whine and get ordered to do the job or smile and accept it. Either way, it was coming to me.

  I sighed. “Okay, what have you got?”

  She turned away from the window and gestured at the wall screen. A picture of the wreckage of Io appeared. A glowing, blood-red cloud leaked out of a huge hole on the surface. I was starting to get why she had that look on her face now.

  “I’ve just come out of a long meeting with a lot of people who were wearing dark suits. This wasn’t an accident,” she said.

  “Is that confirmed?” It didn’t surprise me. What were the odds of something going so majorly wrong? I’m no astrophysicist, but I knew not only was space big, but things moved damn fast up there. The odds must have been on par with shooting a bullet out of the sky.

  “As good as. There is a whole side to this thing that the media hasn’t reported on. All major powers have fallen over themselves to slap D-notices or their equivalents on this, but that will only buy a few extra hours before the rest of the story breaks.”

  I gave a low whistle. EU D-notices, American media restriction requests, Chinese information requirements—every nation had a different name for them. All of them had one goal in mind: the emergency restriction of information. They were so rarely used that I couldn’t think of when the last one was. They were never designed for censorship; the solar system was too leaky a place. The American Media Restriction Act, a whiplash reaction to a bunch of high-profile security leaks throughout the twenty-first centur
y, had been seen as a gross violation of their Constitution and was repealed after many years of both philosophical debate and outright protest.

  Ideally, the government was the people’s servant, not the other way around, but in the wake of those intelligence leaks, nations had decided on a compromise. Sometimes those in power had a need to keep secrets for reasons of security or when it wasn’t in the public’s best interest to know. The check was that governments were obligated by law to keep information restrictions to the minimum time frame possible and then explain why it was necessary, in full, to the public afterward. Besides, in the modern day, it was very difficult to keep secrets for any length of time. I was guessing this information restriction was a reaction to something unprecedented—Io.

  “So why don’t we think this was an accident?”

  Giselle gestured over to the table, and I lowered myself into a chair. “Watch,” she said as she played a video. The image of Io was replaced by a picture of space, the orange and white banded Jupiter in the background. I got the impression this footage was taken by some observation satellite. Suddenly, a flash of light washed out the screen. When it receded, the camera focused on the source, a huge, lumbering Alcubierre liner. It must have just arrived.

  The A-drive liners were massive spacecraft, not the biggest ever built, but still, they were the size of small cities. They were mostly gantries, storage tanks, cargo containers, and carriers of smaller ships hitching lifts around the solar system. At the rear, I could see the huge ring that was the magical A-drive that enabled the ship to reach half the speed of light.

  “Jupiter Control, Jupiter Control, this is Magellan A—heavy. We have arrived in Jupiter space.” This must be a recording of the actual transmissions between this Magellan and Jupiter Control.

  “Good morning, Magellan. We have your transponder strength five. Welcome to Jupiter space.”

  “Thank you, and good morning to you, too, Jupiter Control. We are dumping heat. I have one-three-four cargo containers, five-seven storage tanks, and one-two hitchhikers onboard and ready to disembark.”

  “That’s all received. You are cleared to off-load at your convenience on receipt of instructions,” Jupiter Control responded.

  Giselle fast-forwarded the footage. “All this is fairly routine stuff, or so I’m told. They have to dump the heat buildup from the transit, and as they do, they begin receiving instructions on some course corrections, etcetera. They give manifest details, custom’s information for the passengers, all that boring stuff.” We watched in quick time as the small ships hitchhiking on Magellan detached and darted off, the storage containers and tanks were ejected for cargo tenders to pick up. It wasn’t quite as routine as hopping on a short-haul flight to a nearby country on Earth, but not far off. “Now, this is where it gets interesting,” Giselle said as she slowed the footage again.

  “Jupiter Control, we have completed off-loading, and all cargo is clear. We are ready to embark your cargo and passengers on their arrival,” Magellan’s coms officer said in a cheery voice.

  “Your first cargo will be arriving in four-seven minutes, Magellan.”

  The ship began to rotate ponderously; the massive vessels didn’t exactly turn on a dime. “Jupiter Control, standby. Our maneuvering thrusters are firing.” The voice sounded slightly unsure but still calm.

  “That’s received, Magellan. You are maneuvering.”

  “Jupiter Control, that’s a negative. We may have a malfunction in attitude control. We are not, repeat not, under control at the moment. We are calling pan-pan, I say again, pan-pan.”

  “Magellan, we have received your pan-pan. We’ll get search and rescue on standby.”

  I mouthed at Giselle, “Pan-pan?”

  “It means they have something wrong, but it’s not an all-out emergency like with Mayday. Basically, they’re concerned.”

  The voice from Magellan came back on after a few minutes—definitely less cheery. In fact, pretty damn worried from the sound of it. “Jupiter Control, we have an uncontrolled spin-up in the A-drive. We cannot shut it down. We are going to Mayday.”

  “Magellan, we have—”

  The voice from Jupiter Control was interrupted by a third speaker on the com, an androgynous computer voice. “Jupiter Control, the Magellan will strike Io. Begin your evacuation procedures. You have thirty minutes.”

  “Magellan, say again.” Now the controller sounded pretty shaky.

  “That wasn’t us. We’re tracing now,” the flustered crewman from Magellan replied.

  For the next few minutes, I listened to an increasingly panicked exchange between the two of them before… “Jupiter Control, we have zero control of Magellan other than coms. Our crew modules are going into the automatic ejection sequence. We are completely out of control. We cannot shut down the A-drive. Repeat: we cannot shut down the A-drive. Orientation confirmed—we are pointed straight at Io.”

  “Magellan, evacuation is underway on Io. I suggest you don’t interfere with ejection sequence and get out of there!”

  “I’m sorry, Jupiter. We’ve done what we could.”

  Giselle and I watched as the tiny crew modules, in effect self-contained escape pods, blasted away from Magellan and sped out of view.

  A few minutes later, exactly half an hour after that mysterious computer voice had spoken, Magellan disappeared in a flash. The camera view changed, this time focused on the ugly, pock-marked moon of Io. It was a dirty mix of yellow and orange. I could see the gas giant Jupiter behind it, banded in reds and oranges.

  A bright light bloomed out from the side of Io, washing out the view. After a few moments, the picture came back, and I saw what happens when a miles-long spacecraft crashes into a moon at half the speed of light. It quite literally looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. If I had to guess, nearly a sixth of the moon had transformed into roiling fiery clouds. I could see what looked like cracks, which must have been huge chasms, spreading around the surface. Anyone that hadn’t evacuate or been killed by the initial impact would have been shaken to pieces by earthquakes—no, moonquakes. Nothing on the surface would have survived.

  ***

  “Alright, I suppose I’d better ask, where do War Crimes’ interests lie in this?” It had taken me a while to get over what I’d just watched. Don’t get me wrong; I’d seen some pretty grisly sights in my time, both in the Met and with War Crimes, but seeing the death of a whole world—that was new.

  “That’s still under debate at some pretty high pay grades. The fact of the matter is no one knows who handles something like this. Unprecedented isn’t the word,” Giselle said. “The military doesn’t have anything to shoot at, and the intelligence services don’t have anyone to spy on. Then it becomes a question of whose military and whose intelligence service. The Jupiter Alliance has, at best, the equivalent of small-town sheriffs who are used to dealing with minor white-collar crime. They simply don’t have the skill to take on this size of job.”

  I didn’t want to point out that no one has the skill to take on something like this; it had never happened before.

  “The conclusion, as of me walking out of the conference link,” Giselle continued, “is that they want us onboard. We have no known terrorist organizations that would have the capability or particular will to do something like this, and no one is claiming responsibility.”

  “I thought the Linked were targets of some minor acts of terrorism and demonstrations,” I cut in, thinking of the controversial hive-mind culture that dwelt in Jupiter Space.

  “Yes, but the anti-Linked bloc have a capability gap. Those organizations with the will to do something like this simply don’t have the ability or resources. Besides, if that were the case, why didn’t they take out Concorde, Europa, Callisto, or any of their other major settlements?” Giselle asked.

  Fair point. Anyone who wanted to damage the Linked had far better targets to go for than Io.

  “That being said, we are not writing off that possibility. Bottom lin
e: War Crimes has the skill if it’s an act of war, a terrorist act, or a criminal act. You are going to be our on-scene representative on the international and intersystem task force that’s being put together.”

  I leaned back in my chair, lightly drumming my fingers on the tabletop. A thought occurred to me. “How many casualties are we looking at? The media has kept it pretty vague.”

  “Eighty-seven on the moon itself. Forty-two unrecoverable deaths on Earth between two skyliners that crashed as they came in to land and hospital system shutdowns due to the EM pulse. Maybe a few more through the system, but nothing confirmed yet.”

  “And Dev,” I said.

  “And Dev,” she agreed.

  With all my effort, I bottled down my feelings on Dev. I had to admit, as high and as horrific a number as 130 people was, it still seemed pretty low for the destruction of an entire world, and I said as much.

  “Fewer than a thousand people were on the surface of Io. From what I’m told, it was a hellhole: random volcano eruptions, earthquakes, and generally what can best be described as a pretty shitty environment. It is…it was an awful place, and the only people on the surface were engineers, scientists, and technicians to service the mostly automated power-generation systems. That was Io’s main export, apparently something to do with the way it interacts with Jupiter’s magnetosphere.” I got the impression Giselle was simply reeling off something she had been told. “Means that the moon can, or at least could, be used as a major source of power generation in the Jupiter system. Anyway, part of the operating protocol was that the crews had to be near evacuation shuttles at all times. The ones that died, well, looks like they breached protocol.”

  “So this could be a strike against the Jupiter system’s power infrastructure rather than the goal of mass casualties?”

  Giselle shrugged. “At the moment, we only know how whoever’s done it has done it; we don’t know why or who. That’s what we have to find out.”