by Ralph Kern
“Thanks for that, Lana,” I smiled encouragingly. “I need you to walk me through the events leading up to the evacuation—your thoughts, what you felt, anything suspicious you might have seen, things like that.”
Lana pursed her lips. Perhaps I’d presented myself as little too friendly for she evidently felt she could challenge me. “Mr. Trent, can you tell me why I’m being asked these questions by a police officer? Am I under arrest? Do I need a lawyer?”
“Not at all. If anything, you’re a witness. We want to understand what happened down there. Why it happened. That’s why we’re speaking to all the survivors.”
“Okay…” She still wore a suspicious look on her face. “The Danube research station was quite small. There are…were only twenty of us researchers there, but we had a couple of engineers and a pilot to hop us around.”
I nodded at her, inviting her to continue. All this I knew already.
“I was just working in the lab, looking at some data from a recent eruption, when Pete, my line manager, linked me and told me that we were going to evac stations. We normally have an evac drill once a week since Io is so active that we have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. Anyway, I saved my work and walked over to the shuttle.”
“You walked over?” I asked. “You didn’t run?”
“Yes, I just thought it was a practice drill,” Lana replied, “nothing special. You know, like when you’re back on Earth, and you have to do fire drills every few weeks.”
“Okay, go on.”
“We got into the shuttle and waited. I was a bit annoyed because those drills always seemed to interrupt me at important times. Anyway, I was just sitting in my prescribed seat waiting to be released from the drill when, next thing I know, the shuttle takes off. I was completely surprised. We all were.”
“I can appreciate that.” I nodded encouragingly at her to keep her speech flowing. “What next?”
“As we were climbing away from the surface, I could see a bright flash of light through the window. I wondered what it was; I even wondered if one of the antimatter bottles had popped over at one of the power station prototypes. Then I saw the massive plume of debris spraying out of a huge hole in the side of the moon. I didn’t know what to make of it. None of us had ever seen anything like it. I thought maybe an asteroid or comet had struck Io, but we didn’t understand why we hadn’t had much warning. They would have seen something that could do that much damage months beforehand. Only later were we told about the Magellan.”
I knew this, too. A common theme we were finding was that a lot of people were surprised when they had found themselves actually being blasted up into space. I hadn’t wanted to start with the reasons why Lana here was on our red list, but now she was relaxing; it was time dig into her past.
“So, Lana,” I got up off the chair, making like the interview was over, and pushed myself off toward the watercooler in the corner. I got us both a drinking bulb before returning to my seat. I was definitely getting better at this zero-g maneuvering. “You went to MIT, I understand?”
“Yes, I’ve been there since my undergrad days, other than field work, of course.”
“It’s nice in Boston. I went there on a conference once. Years ago, mind, but I thought it was a lovely city.”
“Yes, it is,” she said agreeably.
“Lots to do, and I thought New York was the city that never sleeps. It’s got nothing on you guys up in Boston.”
Lana gave a snort. “I wish I’d had time to enjoy it.”
I took a drink from my bulb and then said in a calm, carefully measured voice. “So are you going to tell me about the Unlinked?”
“What?” she said, dropping the bulb. It just hung in the air, spinning gently. Beads of water trickled out of the straw like a watery Catherine wheel.
“In your second year at MIT, you signed up with a proscribed organization, the Unlinked. Why?”
Lana gave a sharp intake of breath and her eyes widened. “How did you know about that?”
“We’re the police; of course we know about that,” I said, putting on a blasé manner. I wanted to give her the impression we knew more than we were letting on. I leaned in a little closer and let my tone become firmer. “Tell me about them.”
“What’s there to tell?” She glanced nervously about the room. “Are you sure I don’t need a lawyer?”
“One of the biggest acts of terrorism in history has just occurred, and you are a significant witness. The destruction of an entire moon! You want a lawyer?” I shrugged and took another sip. “Fine, we’ll get you one as soon as is practicable. Of course, you’ll be in isolation until then. Might be a while as it will likely mean bringing in one of the few in the Jupiter Alliance or lifting one up from the inner system. Meanwhile, I will simply apply for an ERP and get the information I want, anyway. It’s your call.”
Lana had gone back to looking completely scared. Her face was drawn and pale, and her bottom lip tremored every so often. “They weren’t anything. They were just a silly group protesting against the growing Linked movement. I was with them for all of a few weeks. They were just technophobic racists, and the whole concept of being Linked didn’t seem that bad to me.”
“So why did you join them?” I pressed.
“For personal reasons,” she said firmly, looking into my eyes. She managed to hold my gaze for a couple of seconds, and then dropped her eyes.
“Come on, Lana. I need more than that.”
“Okay, fine. I’d met a guy. He took me to a few meetings with him, and then we split up. That was it. I was never really in the Unlinked. I just liked a guy in them.”
“Right, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me about who was in those meetings…”
***
“Ten down and jack shit so far.” I was trying to stretch out, but it just wasn’t as easy or satisfying when floating around. The cramps were even worse. You used a lot of muscles moving around in zero-g that you didn’t under gravity, and when those cramps came on, you had to find something to brace against to stretch them out. I’d had to float over to the wall—bulkheads, or whatever they were damn well called—and stretch myself out an ignoble number of times. Cheng, of course, was fine and casually playing catch with himself with ball all he’d found somewhere. I suspect he had spent some substantial time in zero-g. That or his implants that Giselle had alluded to were a lot of help.
“My group have pretty much been nonstarters,” he replied, catching his bouncing ball again. He was ambidextrous, favoring neither right nor left hand, using whichever happened to be closer to the ball.
I looked back at the wall screen containing the list of twelve other reds we wanted to question, trying to divine some meaning from the litany of names. Giving up, I rubbed my eyes, dry from the recycled air in the dehumidified compartment.
“I reckon Vance and Frampton are the ones who are going to hit pay dirt with the Magellan passengers and crew,” Cheng said, the ball still ricocheting disconcertingly around the room.
“Maybe,” I said. I gave a sigh and crawled into the chair. I set my HUD to desktop mode and let it unfold virtually in front of me. “Next up for me is…Phillip Prince, technical support at a station at the base of some mountain, Gish Bar Mons, which is situated to the south of a collection of craters called the Gish Bar Patera. Why can’t they make these place names out here straightforward to remember?”
Cheng gave a shrug between bounces of his ball. “Why make life easy? So tell me about Phillip.”
I scanned over the information. “Mechanical engineering degree from Olympus, Mars. He’s a spacer through and through. A few brushes with the law, all relatively minor. Low-level assaults, yadda, yadda, yadda. Here we go. He’s red-flagged; he was part of the service team for the QAR just before she went pirate.”
The QAR, or Queen Anne’s Revenge, was not her original name. In fact, the crew never even called her that. That was just what she was known as in the media circles, nicknamed after Black
Beard’s ship. She was actually a light freighter named, rather inauspiciously, the Hare. The crew had rigged her out with some primitive weapons, and she spent a very short career preying on the asteroid cities. Unfortunately for the crew, the perceived glamour of the pirate life was far outstripped by the practicalities. They discovered that the small amount of cargo they had managed to steal simply didn’t have a market anywhere. I suspect they spent far too much time playing VR games and not enough time thinking about the law of supply and demand. Their short-lived buccaneering days came to an abrupt end when a corporate ship hunted them down. The crew were now all serving very long sentences in a prison somewhere.
“Prince have any links to the crew?” Cheng asked.
“Nah, it was just a standard service contract, nothing more nefarious than he happened to be one of the last people to do some maintenance on the QAR.”
“Bah,” Cheng said. “Not our man.”
“I doubt it, but on the red list he is, so questioned he will be.”
CHAPTER 19
HIBERNIA
“I still don’t see what the Hare has to do with Io,” Prince moaned. “I was just the spanner who serviced the engine on the damn ship.”
“I’m sure that you can appreciate that we are obligated to ask these questions, Phillip. We would be remiss if we didn’t,” I said.
“It’s just I’ve been asked over and over again, and the investigators were happy I wasn’t involved,” Prince responded. The man was a product of the low gravity environment of Mars: pale and lanky. His face was glistening with perspiration, and he had the slightest of trembles to him. He didn’t look happy to be here at all, which was understandable, but not to the extent he was showing.
“Okay, Phillip. Did any of the others at Gish Bar station know about your involvement with the Hare?”
“No. Well, maybe a couple of them, but they just assumed it was what it was: me giving the engine on the ship a once-over as part of her standard servicing schedule.”
“Were you close to your colleagues at the station? I mean, the others were mostly academics, weren’t they?” I asked. “You were the only tech and pilot.”
“Well, I wasn’t a pilot as such. I was just checked out to fly the EV, the escape vehicle, if we were called to evacuate. I knew enough to get us up if that’s what you mean. I couldn’t exactly fly the shuttle much beyond that. But yeah, it was a bit lonely sometimes, I guess.”
I leaned back in my chair. I didn’t really know where to take the questioning of Prince further. I didn’t get the impression he was involved with anything too bad, but something was niggling me about how uncomfortable he looked. “So who were you friends with?”
“No one at the station. Sometimes we did a little trading with another station. I was friends with one of them.” Prince was doing his hardest to avoid eye contact, looking at everything but me.
I casually manipulated my HUD as I asked, “So what did you use to trade, Phillip?”
“Nothing much.” He was really squirming now. “You know—parts, consumables, stuff like that.”
Bollocks. He wouldn’t be looking nearly so awkward if it were just spare parts. “Phillip. I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth here.”
“No, I am!” he exclaimed.
“What were you trading?” I pressed, making my voice firmer and authoritative.
“Just stuff,” he said. I swear he was about to cry.
“Tell me what,” I said as I leaned forward and said more gently, “and I’ll do what I can for you, Phillip.”
“Moonshine, alright? Fucking moonshine. Booze is banned on Io. There are too many opportunities for something to go wrong,” he said miserably.
I pursed my lips. Booze. He probably had a still and was the local fence—not exactly the crime of the century. Suddenly, I wasn’t quite so interested, but still, I needed to bring this to a wrap rather than just boot him out. “Who did you fence to, Phillip?”
“His name was Josh. I just knew him as that.” His eyes were darting around the low-lit room like he was looking for an escape. I’d let him sweat for a while then cut him loose and send the interview over to the JAS. They could do what they wanted with him, which would probably be a slap on the wrist and a firm telling off.
“What station was he from?”
“He never said. Told me he couldn’t.”
No worries on that front. I typed Josh and Joshua into my HUD virtual desktop. That was interesting. Nothing came up on any station’s manifest. “Josh, you say?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever go to his station?” I asked.
“No, he always came to ours. Look, why don’t you ask him these things?”
I looked through the data on my HUD at him, a little surprised. The data in my field of automatically whisked off to the side to get out of my line of sight as I focused on Prince. “Do you know where he is now?”
“Yes, of course. He’s down in the billets. He was at our station when it…it happened. We had the spare room, and he couldn’t get home in time, so he came with us.”
Now that was interesting. We had a man who was not listed on any of the manifests, a man who was apparently downstairs. I quickly scanned through the list of people on Prince’s shuttle. Sure enough, onboard was an eleventh man, Joshua Smith.
“You’re right, I think we do need to talk to him, Phillip,” I said as I leaned forward. “But first, you’ll tell me everything you know about this Joshua.”
If this Joshua had to invent a name, it could have been more original than Smith.
CHAPTER 20
HIBERNIA
Cheng and I decided to double-team our mysterious Mr. Smith. We had led him up from the cramped billets to our interview room. He was a forty-something balding guy, and he knew he’d been made.
On entering the room, I gestured at him to take the seat and, with practiced ease, he kicked himself into it. Cheng took up position at the back of the room while I gripped onto a convenient handle and lowered myself into a seat in front of him.
Smith looked at me without blinking, only breaking eye contact to gaze coolly at Cheng before looking back at me, a stark contrast to the nervous Prince. “I can’t tell you what you want to know.”
“Fine.” I leaned back and regarded Smith. He was calm, composed, and I doubted power plays and nonverbal dominance techniques would rattle him. “So, what can you tell me? Let’s start with what you were doing on Io. After all, you weren’t supposed to be there.”
He just smiled back and said nothing.
“We have evidence of an unregistered base near Gish Bar Mons and that you were a member of the complement there. I would suggest whoever runs you is not going to be happy that you breached security to go get tanked at your neighbor’s place.”
“They would be even more unhappy if I started talking,” Smith said with a shrug. “And their unhappiness would be far more…unhappy than yours.”
What the hell? I thought to myself. This guy had clearly watched too many VRs. He was talking like something out of a movie. We had trawled every database we could think of and had not found a single thing about Smith. Whoever he was had been expunged everywhere. We couldn’t even find when he had come out here.
“Okay. Let’s cut the bullshit. How do we get you to tell us what we want to know, which is who you are and what you were doing on Io?”
“Get me back to Earth, and we’ll talk about it,” Smith said calmly. “Someone will be in touch on arrival.”
“No.” Cheng gripped the edge of the table and loomed over Smith, a slight smile on his face. “No. they won’t.”
Cheng and I glanced at each other. That was our cue. As we’d agreed, upon Smith making his first demand, we left the room without another word. Let him stew on that!
***
I was looking at the satellite images from Cerise that I had superimposed on the wall of our “office,” trying to divine some meaning from them. There wasn’t much to interp
ret. Io didn’t have the twenty-four/seven sat coverage that the more heavily populated worlds of the Sol system had. I watched again as the satellite-trawl clip showed the hopper mysteriously appearing in the middle of nowhere on a satellite pass, heading toward Gish Bar Station.
The boxy surface shuttle crept across the landscape toward the base as the clip’s focus point drifted across the screen. Eventually the hopper disappeared from view. What I was looking at was the sole mistake Smith appeared to have made in the last six months. He had mistimed his travel from wherever he had come from to go get his booze shipment and flown right under one of the satellites.
We had examined his vector with a fine-toothed comb. We could see nothing—no bases, no stations, no sign of any settlement. Wherever he had come from was hidden. I had the analysis software running a search down to the pixel for any possible origin points, but it came up empty.
“So who the hell would set up a secret base on that hellhole?” I asked rhetorically.
Cheng gave a shrug. “I’m sure there are assets all throughout Sol that governments and corporations don’t want anyone to know about.”
I gave him a pointed look before asking, “Any of—”
“No,” he said with finality.
Not that he would tell me. “We need something to go back in there with something solid to squeeze him with.”
“We know our friend here comes from the Gish Bar region,” Cheng said. I could practically hear the cogs whirring in his mind over the sound of the circulation fans. “But that’s too general. We need to nail it down.”
“We could take a punt,” I said. I examined the clip again. I overlaid it on a larger scale map and gestured with my finger along the line the hopper had taken. I could see a wealth of rather wordy Latin-sounding names but nothing that sprung out near the vector. Other than one thing—an inactive volcano called Eston Mons, which was right along the line. It was better than nothing.
***
“We’ve decided we will continue questioning you here,” I said. Cheng and I had resumed our places, him hanging onto the back wall, me on the seat. I took a deep breath. This was it—the gamble. Neither Cheng nor I had turned up any evidence of anything interesting at Eston Mons. But Smith didn’t know that. And I had that itch in corner of my mind again. I could be wrong…but something told me I wasn’t. I let out my pent-up breath slowly, then asked the question. “What was going on at the Eston Mons facility?”
