Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Given the labels,’ Fox said, ‘I’m going to say that it’s a high-end air-filtration system. I’m not exactly good with biotechnology, but the fine filters suggest it’s designed to handle viruses. They use the same filters in high-end NBC systems in the Army.’

  ‘So, they are working on some form of bioweapon.’

  ‘That would be my guess. Air through the room is filtered and cleaned before it goes back into general recycling, just in case there’s an accident.’

  ‘These people are monsters,’ Kit said, sounding more resigned than horrified.

  Fox walked on, stopping halfway between the two machines where a ladder ran up the wall into a hole in the ceiling. ‘I’m not going to argue. Think this goes up to the core?’

  ‘I would imagine there’s only one way to find out.’

  Fox climbed. Well, she climbed until the effect of the rotational gravity was so slight that she was pulling herself up the pipe by the ladder rungs. Then she popped out into a cylindrical room containing multiple banks of electronics. Circuit boards were stacked on top of each other with large fans forcing air over them. Other racks contained hard drives, complete with lights flashing in and out of sync. Yet more racks seemed to be network hubs with thousands of fibre-optic cables piped into them, spreading from bundles which vanished off down conduits in the walls.

  ‘Central computer system,’ Kit said. ‘If we could get Jackson in here–’

  ‘He could throw up all over the circuit boards and bring the entire system down!’

  ‘Oh, well, there is that. I’m sure he could overcome nausea long enough to do some fairly unpleasant things to their system.’

  ‘Yeah, but unless they’re entirely incompetent, they’ll be able to take local control away from the hub system in reasonably short order. I need some time to think and, I guess, here is as good a place as any.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kit said, ‘plug into a spare network port and I’ll see what I can dig up while you think.’

  Fox pushed off toward one of the switch cabinets. ‘Fair enough. Maybe I can get a charge at the same time. See if you can find out exactly where Jackson and Mariel are. Then we’ll see about getting together and making this bunch of morons pay.’

  UNTPP Cruiser Philip Sheridan.

  ‘ETA is zero one forty tomorrow,’ Captain Arnold stated. He did not seem especially pleased to have his two guests aboard, but neither Terri nor Kit really cared. ‘Until then, there’s really nothing much to do or see.’

  ‘We’re aware, Captain,’ Terri replied. ‘We’ll keep ourselves to ourselves as much as possible.’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure why you’re here, Miss Martins.’

  He was honest and open at least. ‘Because my father and two of my closest friends are out there, and because you wouldn’t be on your way if we hadn’t presented clear evidence that the people responsible for Prokhorov Station were holding them.’

  ‘And,’ Kit said, ‘because the evidence we have suggests that many of the people you’re going to find out there are psychologically disturbed dupes. Miss Martins’ background in psychology may be of as much help as the combat frames you have in your hangar.’

  Arnold did not look impressed. ‘I’ll take that under advisement, Miss–’

  ‘Kit. Just Kit. I’m Tara Meridian’s personal assistant and data analyst, and while she’s indisposed, I’m the acting Chief Investigative Officer of Palladium Security Solutions. Please don’t underestimate me, or the contribution I can make, simply because I’m an AI, Captain.’

  While Terri tried to keep a smirk off her face, Arnold, a career spacer with a thick black moustache set under a large nose which dominated his face, raised a somewhat bushy eyebrow. But now he did look at least mildly impressed. ‘I’ll keep that in mind too, Kit,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Captain. I believe I’ll try to remember how to move in barely any gravity and return to our cabin. I’m sure we can rely on you to let us know if anything comes up.’

  ‘You can count on it.’

  Eden Station.

  ‘Why does it have eight limbs?’ Jackson’s question came with a distinct hint of irritation. He was frowning at the schematic diagrams of the Seraphim on a screen which was, to his mind, too small; they would not allow him wireless access so that he could create a virtual image.

  ‘Montcairn wanted an extended field of fire.’ The speaker was Bartholomew Partridge, Montcairn’s lead robotics engineer. He looked like a man who had, at one time, been a lifeguard on some sun-drenched beach. The result had been prematurely aged skin hung on a body which still had some muscle tone, but not a lot. He had a fairly thick Australian accent and, now that Jackson had heard it, he realised that Montcairn’s voice carried a hint of the same origin.

  Jackson flicked to a second screen which was showing modular design imagery for software. ‘But your servo-control systems aren’t adequate for eight limbs with the processing power you have available. And’ – he switched back to the first screen, tapping the ‘head’ on the design – ‘you’ve got simple binocular vision combined with a sixty-degree scan, tracking ladar unit.’

  ‘It can turn its head,’ Partridge said defensively. ‘It started out with two arms and a more humanoid design. Montcairn kept changing the spec. He wanted it better armed, scarier, bigger.’

  Jackson sighed. ‘It’s the job of an engineer to understand the requirements of the customer and to make the customer understand what they actually want. I’ll have to talk to him, and he’s going to have to understand that this is going to take some reengineering. Either the software is going to need reworking or the hardware needs to change.’

  ‘He won’t like that.’

  ‘No, probably not. What’s your background, Partridge? You don’t seem the kind of man to fall in with religious zealots. You certainly aren’t a man who’s ever designed a combat cyberframe before.’

  Partridge frowned, looking away, then back. ‘Montcairn had a bunch of companies in Australia. I worked for one of them. We built service frames. Mostly androids, with a few other forms thrown in. Montcairn’s wife and daughter died in a UA bombing in Melbourne. Next thing we knew he was liquidating all his holdings. He offered a few of us jobs and the market was pretty tight then… Why did you agree to work on this?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t kidnapped alone. Now, I suggest you go about your business and allow me to work through these designs. I need to know what I’m working with before I can turn this around.’

  ~~~

  ‘Jackson and Mariel have been assigned a small suite beside the park,’ Kit said. Cracking the security on the servers and control systems had taken time, and they had worked carefully to keep themselves unobserved, but it was paying dividends.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Indeed. I’ve accessed the cameras–’

  Fox frowned. ‘So, they’re being watched.’

  ‘They are hardly the only ones. Almost all the rooms have surveillance. Only Mariel is currently in residence. She looks bored. I checked the security on the room and the door is locked. I assume that they are, effectively, being held prisoner.’

  ‘Okay…’ Fox pursed her lips and considered for a few seconds. ‘Could you loop the cameras?’

  ‘I’ll check, but I believe so. You want to visit them?’

  ‘This evening. Hopefully, and considering the locked door I think this should hold, their door isn’t guarded. They’re two of the most intelligent, observant people I know.’

  ‘Unless we’re talking about Jackson noticing Mariel’s feelings.’

  Fox shrugged. ‘Men are weird. Besides, what I want to know is what they’ve seen and learned about this place. Let me know when Jackson returns to the room and we’ll get started.’

  ‘If they keep office hours around here, that shouldn’t be too much longer.’

  ~~~

  ‘I remember Montcairn CyberTech,’ Mariel said. She forked rocket and tomato into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. ‘I hadn’t
connected it to this Montcairn.’

  ‘I don’t remember the company,’ Jackson replied.

  ‘You wouldn’t. Let’s say that innovation was not one of their best attributes. They produced robots for the Australian domestic market and they had contracts to supply parts for other manufacturers. They were small-time, but the man himself was rich. Not Jackson Martins-rich, but rich enough.’

  ‘Partridge said he liquidated all his assets after his wife and daughter died.’

  Mariel gave a shrug. ‘I recall the company vanishing off the map. I believe we picked up some of their manufacturing facilities. Retooled. Hmm, yes. There was a bit of an issue with parts for Gorton-May robots in the region for a couple of years after. We retooled specifically for our own.’

  ‘We would, I–’ He broke off as the door from the corridor outside opened, and was speaking again before he turned to look. ‘Really? Would it be so difficult to knock or– Fox!’

  Fox smirked as she tripped across the room as though she had no care in the world. ‘Jackson, Mariel. They don’t seem to be treating you too badly.’

  ‘You can’t be in here, they– You’ve looped the cameras.’

  ‘And the sound is off,’ Kit said, appearing beside Fox. ‘I am very pleased to find you both unharmed.’

  ‘Montcairn wants me alive to fix his cybertank,’ Jackson said, ‘and Mariel is his leverage.’

  ‘He won’t hurt me,’ Mariel agreed, ‘but he’s dropped a hint or two about putting me in one of their brainwashing tanks if Jackson doesn’t do as he says.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fox said. ‘Sit down. Finish your meal. Cybertank?’

  ‘There are a couple of laboratories I’m concerned about,’ Jackson replied.

  ‘I know they have a biotech lab.’

  ‘That’s one of them. That would need to be destroyed, I think, and the robotics lab too. From what I’ve seen of their design – they’re calling it a Seraphim – if they’ve even managed to build a prototype, it’s incapable of using its weaponry effectively and it’s effectively blind to you if it isn’t looking right at you, but it’s heavily armoured and could mount some heavy weapons.’

  ‘I have a few of those too.’

  ‘Try to get behind it, if you ever need to. The rear armour is weaker, and it won’t be able to see you coming. There’s also the memetics suite.’

  ‘We could do with getting their campaign data from that,’ Mariel said. ‘It would make producing countermemes far easier.’

  ‘I can handle that,’ Kit said. ‘Their security is pitiful.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fox said. ‘Montcairn. He’s barely listed on this information site they’ve got set up, but you’ve mentioned him, but not Joshua.’

  ‘We haven’t even met this Joshua,’ Mariel said. ‘From my perspective, Joshua appears to be a figurehead. Montcairn is running things.’

  ‘I’d have to agree,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Thinking on it,’ Mariel went on, ‘there was also a Montcairn Agricultural. They produced GM crops. Drought tolerance. He’d have access to some genetic engineers just as he has robotics engineers.’

  ‘Montcairn…’ Fox tapped at her pursed lips for a second. ‘Okay, so we need to take out their offensive capabilities, get you two somewhere safe, and get a message out to whoever’s coming to rescue us. The ships outside the station are probably going to have to be someone else’s problem, but I might be able to do something about the ones in the hangar… Going to need a distraction…’ She grinned. ‘I think we can manage this. I’ll see if I can scare up some nausea meds.’

  ‘Why?’ Jackson asked warily.

  ‘Sorry, their main computer core is in microgravity.’

  Jackson sighed. ‘Just kill me now.’

  ~~~

  It started at a few seconds after twenty-two fifteen, station time, which seemed to be in rough sync with UTC. One of the docking cranes malfunctioned and pushed a thousand-ton transport off its moorings and across the hangar bay. There was not really a vast amount of speed involved, but there was significant momentum and the mess was spectacular.

  Some seventy technicians, flight crew, and security people rushed through to ensure that the malfunction was, in fact, a malfunction and that it was dealt with. Compared to the number of people on the station, that was a relatively small number, but it did represent a significant proportion of the station’s security contingent.

  Twenty minutes later, an atmospheric containment failure alert sounded in the capsule habitat, scaring the shit out of a huge number of people. Before any of them had a chance to do anything much about it, the station’s automated response was to close all the bulkhead doors around the affected area. Eden Station was, effectively, cut into three isolated parts.

  In the main control room, the staff were looking forward to the end of their shift at midnight. They had become used to an easy life and most of them sat at ease at their consoles, strapped into seat-like structures which, primarily, held them in place rather than having them float absently around the room. The computers did most of the work, and nothing had happened to bother them for over three months; generally, it was the day shift that actually had to keep an eye on things. Suddenly, the men and women of the evening shift were having to deal with alarms going off left, right, and centre.

  There had been no indication of an impact, but they were suffering atmosphere loss. Communications were down with the hangar bay and failing in other areas. All the security cameras were down. They were reading power fluctuations in a number of circuits which had been stable since the station had been commissioned. The only explanation was some sort of large impact: an asteroid or maybe some large piece of space junk.

  When a dull thump reverberated through the station’s structure and more alarms burst to life to inform them of a fire in the robotics lab, the operations head on duty decided that it might be best if someone called Edwin Montcairn. As he pressed the intercom button, he prayed to Joshua himself that the circuit was down.

  ~~~

  Around about the time the operations leader was discovering that God was not that kind, Fox was walking out of the bushes in the Garden. She was no longer interested in blending in, though the suit she wore had adaptive camouflage good enough to blend into most backgrounds, so she had an assault rifle balanced in the crook of her right arm and her pistol was in its holster in the small of her back. Magazines for both her rifle and her pistol decorated her suit, and would have made camouflage a little difficult. She had done most of what she needed to do and was not worried.

  ‘Sister, the pure walk unclad in the Garden, for they no longer feel the shame of the knowledge they once took from my father.’

  Fox paused and turned to look at the man walking toward her across the pristine lawn. He was not wearing gold robes, but the rest of the image was about right. He was, possibly, more handsome than his banner suggested. His features had the chiselled quality of exceptionally good bone structure: sharp cheekbones, a firm jawline, a Roman nose which managed to look regal without looking overly large. His hair was long and black, darker than the painting suggested, but they had his eyes right: he had deeply blue eyes, beautiful eyes. And he walked toward Fox with his arms lifted and slightly bent, his palms facing her. It was welcoming, all-encompassing.

  ‘So, why do you wear jeans and a T-shirt?’ Fox asked.

  He smiled. It was a genuine, heartfelt smile. ‘You are not one of my Chosen, but you are here, in my garden. My father must be happy for you to be here.’

  ‘I’m not really sure who your father is. If I find him, I’ll ask. Pretty sure he doesn’t care though.’

  ‘The Lord cares for all.’ He stopped a few feet from her, still smiling. You could just feel the sincerity. Fox had met good actors before, many of them trying their best to keep her from figuring out that they were lying scumbags, but she did not get that from Joshua.

  ‘You really believe the shit you’re peddling,’ Fox said. Before he could respond, she went on. ‘Here’s
what I don’t get about all you Second Coming, apocalyptic, Rapture-loving… snake-oil merchants. If there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth and he wandered around the Near East sometime two thousand years back, he taught lessons about compassion, tolerance, and forgiveness. And, to you, his return means the destruction of the world and the salvation of the few people who agree with your twisted version of a pretty damn good philosophy.’

  ‘We are all but instruments of God, my father,’ Joshua said, sounding a little puzzled. ‘We all do what we must. Sister, we must all give ourselves up to the destiny my father has placed before us. That is the only way to find true peace.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. Really. Maybe all the people you’ve slaughtered in the name of your father really will find peace. And maybe what I’m doing is really part of his plan. I don’t think you’re going to think so, however.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Fox smiled. ‘You’re not, but you will be. Kit, hit it.’

  In the stands of trees set around the park, thermobaric mines detonated, spewing their charge of liquid explosives into the air as a mist before a second charge caused ignition in the resulting mix. Trees were blasted into splinters or flattened. Waves of heat and pressure battered over the two people watching the destruction. Fox, in her heavy, armoured cyberframe, barely seemed to notice the buffeting she was taking, but Joshua staggered, his face showing pain and shock. When the explosions died away, there was still the fire: grass, bushes, vegetables, and fallen trees roared in flames.

  ‘Eden’s burning, motherfucker,’ Fox said before turning away from him and heading for the nearby habitation.

  ~~~

  ‘Fire!’ someone shrieked across the control room. ‘We’ve got a fire in the Garden!’

  ‘Locate Joshua,’ Montcairn snapped. He hated the control room, hated the men who ran it more. They were, in his view, incompetent, though that had not been his view until he had been summoned to the room from his bed.