‘But they want Jackson?’ Mariel asked. ‘You and I–’
‘Collateral, but I think they’ll take you along with Jackson.’
‘Leverage.’
‘Exactly. I’m… fifty-fifty. They may think I’d be useful, but I’m also dangerous and I don’t think they’re interested in having someone like me, an infomorph, in their new world. Whatever they do, go with it. Don’t resist. Whatever they do, I think I’ve made arrangements to handle it and I’ll do my best to get to you and get you out. And they’ve also made a really big mistake.’
‘They have?’ Jackson asked.
‘Yes, and if you weren’t a bit sick and a bit scared, you’d have figured it out.’
He frowned, then his eyes widened. ‘We’re overdue. Teresa.’
Fox smiled. ‘I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but Terri and Kit will get an assault force out here. We know they’re around L-five. They may not know we know that. I think the UNTPP would already have a squadron out there if they hadn’t just lost…’ Her jaw tightened and her right hand clenched into a fist. ‘They’re shaken up at the moment, rushing to try to fix things. If Terri and Kit can put together the right briefing and yell loud enough, they can get my former colleagues to do something.’
‘Teresa will be working on it already. Kit has all the information she should need.’
‘Damn right. The biggest problem I’m going to have is leaving them anything to arrest. I really don’t like these people. Go put your suits on. We need to be ready.’
~~~
The sound of magnetic grapnels attaching to the outer hull echoed through the silent ship and Fox checked the time. Eleven minutes after the engines had cut out, leaving them hanging in microgravity. She figured the security locks on the airlocks had been disabled when the ship had been taken over, so there was no major surprise when four men in vacuum suits, each armed with an automatic shotgun designed for close combat, appeared in the lounge within minutes.
‘No one moves, no one gets hurt,’ one of the men said. It seemed a rather unnecessary statement since no one was moving or saying anything. Just waiting, which seemed to unnerve the man more than violence or shouting.
‘We will cooperate fully,’ Jackson stated, his voice firm though Fox knew his stomach had been turning upside down for almost fifteen minutes.
‘Yes, you will. We have the power here. God granted. You two’ – he twitched his weapon toward Mariel and Jackson – ‘will come with us.’ He still managed to seem a little surprised when they pushed away from their seats and began heading for the ladder. Two of the four went up first, the third following behind, and that left the leader.
‘And what do you have planned for me?’ Fox asked when it was just the two of them.
He lifted his shotgun, settling the stock against his shoulder. You could tell he had never been taught to use a gun in microgravity. ‘I ought to shoot you right here, right now. You’re–’
‘Let’s assume you actually have slugs in the magazine,’ Fox interrupted. ‘You should have baton rounds, but you seem stupid enough to risk decompression. On the other hand, you’re probably not stupid enough to have armour-piercing rounds loaded. You clearly know what you’re dealing with, so let’s make this simple. That weapon doesn’t have the punch to do any damage to this frame. If you fire, God or no God, I’m going to snap your neck like a twig, take your gun, then take your ship. So, just piss off before I get annoyed.’
He pushed back and Fox waited while he manoeuvred himself up to the hatch. As soon as it started to close, Fox pushed off for the other side of the room, grabbing her helmet on the way and pulling it on as she floated to another hatch, this one leading to the lower decks. It was basically just an emergency access to the aft airlocks: below the habitation and control section, the Thynnus was basically just fuel tanks and engines.
Checking the starboard side through the tiny porthole in the outer airlock door, she saw only space, but she grabbed the duffel she had left there before pushing off to the port airlock. Through the inner door, hit the emergency close button. She could see the bulk of a ship outside the porthole, a significantly larger bulk than the shape she had seen from the turret, and this one had no optical camouflage. A transport. They had to have stealthed transports to get people from Seattle, and maybe other locations, to whatever was waiting out here. She did a fast check on her suit, made sure the environmental and camouflage systems were working, and then she bypassed the automated depressurisation and forced the outer door to open. Air rushed out through the gap, a whistle at first, but that died away quickly, and Fox followed the gasses out as soon as the door was wide enough.
There was, maybe, five metres between the two ships. They were linked by an extensible tube, locked in place by magnets and then sealed to the hull of the Thynnus. The tube disengaged and began to retract just as Fox made contact with the other vessel’s hull. She pulled a tether from her belt and locked it onto a fixing point on the hull, and waited.
~~~
A vast lump of rock loomed ahead of them, visible primarily because it obscured the stars. Quite a few asteroids were very dark objects and this one followed that pattern. The only relief came in the form of a belt of solar panels and the gaping maw of the hangar the ship was edging toward. It was a not a huge ship, but it was big enough. Fox estimated a thousand tons, the same size as a Thunnus-class, and it slid into the bay easily where it was dwarfed by the available space.
Robotic, crane-like arms reached out to guide the transport into position for the docking tube to be locked in place. Unlocking her tether, Fox pushed off from the side of the ship, relying on her camouflaged suit to keep her unnoticed as she flew across to the side of the cavernous bay.
‘I need a way in,’ Fox mused, peering around.
‘A way in which is likely to remain unnoticed,’ Kit said. ‘I’m detecting a wireless network. A weak signal, but it’s there. I’ve initiated a scan for authentication packets. If I can hook in, I may be able to find information on the station.’
‘Be careful. I’d prefer they didn’t know we were here.’
‘I shall refrain from commenting, but know that I am insulted.’
Fox smiled, despite the circumstances. ‘Isn’t that a comment?’
‘A statement of fact.’
‘Okay then. I wonder if that service hatch can be opened from inside the bay…’
Eden Station.
‘Good morning and welcome to Eden Station.’ The speaker was a man several inches shorter than Jackson’s six foot one and, in fact, a bit more than an inch shy of Mariel’s five-nine. He lacked stature, but seemed to make up for it with an obvious sense of presence, charisma, or possibly just arrogance. His hair was long, dark brown with a few strands of red, and neatly trimmed in the kind of cut you expected to see on a suave businessman, but he was dressed in simple clothes: a T-shirt under a light waistcoat, and denim jeans. He was handsome in the manner of someone who had had extensive work done to tidy everything up: sculpted features, sharp cheekbones, a carefully shaped nose. His eyes should have added to the handsomeness, but the blue was icy.
‘My name is Edwin Montcairn,’ the man went on, ‘and I am very happy to receive you into the numbers of the Chosen.’
‘I’m going to assume you know who we are, Mister Montcairn,’ Jackson said. His stomach was settling now that they had passed out of the microgravity regions of the station and into a section which had spin gravity. It was not quite full Earth gravity, but it was substantial and it was bringing the colour back to Jackson’s cheeks. Also the anger to his mind.
‘Edwin,’ Montcairn said. ‘We avoid formality here, Jackson.’
Jackson gave the man a stiff smile. ‘Edwin then. Frankly, we would much prefer to be un-chosen.’
‘I’m afraid that isn’t going to be possible.’ There was a hard hint of menace to Montcairn’s voice which belied his smile. ‘You’ll be escorted to your room now. Rest, gather your strength. You’ll find suit
able clothing in your rooms. Someone will be along to show you our blessed sanctuary in due time.’ Without another word, Montcairn turned and walked off down a corridor.
The four armed guards escorting Jackson and Mariel moved, pressing their prisoners forward. The corridors were lined with metal plate, but the construction was likely based around tunnels and caverns cut out of the rock of the asteroid. Even with the plating, the place still seemed bleak: pressed metal, unpainted, textured underfoot to improve traction, and with harsh white lighting mounted to the ceilings. Then they took a turn and found themselves in corridors with murals on the walls, religious and pastoral paintings, and here there were doors on the left, evenly and quite widely spaced. The guards stopped in front of one of these doors and a code was entered on a panel beside it.
The door opened. ‘In here,’ one of the guards said.
‘If we’re going to be prisoners,’ Mariel commented as the door closed and locked behind her, ‘at least the accommodation is presentable.’
They had, it seemed, a suite of rooms. The lounge was nothing compared to Jackson’s solarium, or Mariel’s apartment for that matter, but it shared a characteristic: one wall of the room was glass and it looked out onto a large, open space, a park or garden, filled with trees, grassy lawns, and flowerbeds. The flowers had been chosen for primary colours which the artificial light picked up on and brightened, making the whole thing seem somewhat garish, overdone.
The room itself was comfortably if sparsely furnished. A pair of sofas formed a V in front of the window. Off to the right of the door was a table with four chairs: plastic coated to appear wooden and simple. There were a few unprogrammed v-tags around the room to allow for further decoration, but no immediately obvious way of setting them. A small kitchen was set off on the left-hand side, and a door on the right led into a bedroom with an attached bathroom. The bed was large and firm, and the bedding was cream with a high thread count: simplicity and luxury in the same package.
‘Only one bed,’ Jackson commented. ‘I’ll sleep on one of the–’
‘Don’t be foolish,’ Mariel said, cutting him off. ‘We’re adults.’ She opened a wardrobe built into the wall and examined the clothes hung up there. Simple stuff, similar to the outfit Montcairn had been wearing. Skirts, she noticed, for her: ankle-length and wrap-around. She pulled open a drawer and found panties and briefs. ‘No bras,’ she muttered. ‘Well, I suppose the gravity’s lower.’ She turned back to Jackson. ‘I’m going to change into something more comfortable.’
‘I suppose we both should. I’ll… change after you.’
Mariel nodded, then her expression flattened. ‘What are we going to do, Jackson?’
He took a half step toward her and then seemed to think better of it. ‘We’re going to wait. I’m quite sure someone will be along to get us in due time.’
‘You really think so?’
Jackson kept his smile inward. He had noticed the cameras and figured the rooms were wired for sound, but he was not sure Mariel had figured it out until then. He should, he thought, have had more faith: Mariel was an intelligent woman. But perhaps she needed a little reassurance. ‘I have every confidence,’ he said, and realised that hearing himself say that was reassuring to him as well.
~~~
‘Fucking abysmal security,’ Fox commented as she hauled herself out of one of the service tubes and into some sort of engineering access room.
‘The arrogance of isolation,’ Kit replied. ‘No one who would wish to compromise their security could possibly get here to do so.’
‘I think it’s idiocy rather than arrogance, but I take your point. What about the network?’
‘A basic, password-based, challenge-response protocol, but it is encrypted and I don’t have a spare quantum processor to work with. We’ll need to do things the old-fashioned way if we want to access their network.’
‘Okay.’ There was a console unit attached to the wall near the room’s door and Fox checked it quickly, finding the fibre port on the side of it. ‘We’ll get plugged in and you can go looking. Want to bet their fixed network isn’t secured?’
‘I believe you’d win that bet without trouble. I think that the wireless network is configured with default settings.’ As Fox plugged in a fibre cable from the console to the back of her neck, Kit set to work. ‘Unsecured… Searching.’
‘I need at least a basic floorplan. I need to know where the control room is, security offices, uh, and where they could be holding Jackson and Mariel.’
‘It would appear, then, that we’re in luck,’ Kit said as she began to pop web pages into Fox’s sensorium. ‘There’s a public web server with floorplans, contact data for various administrative functions, and, oh my, the wireless network identifier and password. How welcoming.’
Fox let herself smirk. ‘It’s almost as if they want us to walk in and say hello. Let’s see what we’ve got…’
~~~
The door of the suite opened and a man entered, smiling. ‘I am Shepherd Ezekiel Branch,’ he said. ‘Please call me Ezekiel. I’m here to show you our home. Your new home.’ He was an average sort of man, pale-skinned, neither handsome nor ugly, probably into his fifties, and bald. A blonde goatee was shading into grey in places. His eyes were grey too, and they were filled with the smile in a manner suggestive of genuine pleasure. ‘I’m always happy to meet those new to the fold.’
He was happy to meet newcomers, but apparently not happy to do so without a pair of security guards armed with shotguns. Jackson smiled back. ‘It appears to be quite beautiful. This park is quite something.’ He turned to look out the window. There were a few people walking over the lawn now, all of them naked.
‘The Garden,’ Branch said. ‘The purest are allowed the privilege of time in its glory. Joshua spends much of his time there, in communion.’
‘Communion?’ Mariel asked.
‘He communes with his father.’
‘Of course.’ Mariel glanced at Jackson and received little more than a twitch of an eyebrow in response, but she knew him very well after so long working together. They would continue to play along until their very own Angel of Vengeance made her move. ‘Shall we proceed? I’d like to see more of the station.’
‘We don’t think of it as a station,’ Branch said. ‘Eden is the prototype for the new Earth the Lord will create over the ashes of the old one. It is our world, and the Garden is the centre of it.’
Jackson decided to ignore the fact that the centre of the world was nowhere near the garden and would have no gravity. ‘Please, lead on. Clearly we have much to learn.’
There was more habitation. The prime locations bordered the garden area and had windows to look out on its splendour, Branch’s words. There was a ring of the larger apartments, like the one Jackson and Mariel had been put in, and further sections on both sides of the gardens which were more numerous, but not so well appointed. Jackson had to wonder why he and Mariel rated the luxury facilities, but some fast estimation brought another question up.
‘Ezekiel, there doesn’t seem to be an especially large number of… abodes here,’ Jackson said. ‘I’d say you’ve space for two to two-and-a-half thousand people here. Surely there are more of you than that?’
‘Many more. Promised Land has brought some twenty-five thousand chosen to Eden in the past months. Many are housed in the habitation areas toward the middle of our world. You will have passed through them on the way to this section.’
‘I see.’
‘Our primary fabrication systems are there and there is a central radiation refuge. Accommodation is… more spartan than in this section, but the chosen ones understand that they must purify themselves to assure their place on the remade Earth.’
‘Purification. Of course. I’m sure they do.’
~~~
The place was built like one of those capsule hotels still popular in certain parts of Japan. There, they made a good place to crash after a night on the town when you were too drunk to
crawl back to your apartment. Here in paradise, this was how thousands of people were expecting to have to live through the end of the world. Individual bunks were set into the walls with virtually no privacy; a plastic screen sat between the bed and the corridor outside. Each cubicle had a few built-in conveniences: a small washbasin, a couple of drawers for clothes, and an entertainment screen about the size of an old paperback. Everything else, bathing, cooking, and toilets, was communal and scattered through the zone.
Stealing some clothes had not been exactly difficult. The cream-coloured T-shirt was a little small, but the skirt was wrap-around, so that was not an issue, and footwear seemed to be, at best, an optional extra. No one seemed particularly bothered by a tall, strong-looking woman lugging a bag through the corridors. Fox just smiled warmly at anyone who looked her way, and generally got a smile back. Even the odd security guard she spotted ignored her.
‘What’s with all the screens?’ Fox asked inside her mind as she continued to prowl. ‘I’m not really paying attention to them.’
‘I believe it’s best that you don’t, though you show a high resistance to memetic programmes,’ Kit replied. ‘I think the best way to describe it would be religious propaganda.’
‘Stuff like the web pages?’
‘Yes, but more active. What we found on the website were tenets of faith, information on the leaders of this “Promised Land” sect, information for those who already believe and believe quite fully. The screens are vectors for active memetic messages designed to ensure that the population here does believe exactly what the leaders are pushing.’
‘I figured they’d only bring true believers up here.’
‘Agreed, but I’d imagine that the conditions here might begin to wear down that belief.’
Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7) Page 22
