Buried Deep

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  If she wanted to keep those Disty vessels out of Moon space, she would need the cooperation of every Domed city with a port. Their own space traffic control teams would have to take on the Disty vessels.

  The Domes had agreements about which port controlled what section of Moon space—and even had agreements for sharing burdens, should something go out of control. But no one had set up a fleet of ships that belonged entirely to the United Domes of the Moon.

  So when the governor-general swept in without even an announcement of her presence, she found DeRicci staring at the wall screen, praying that none of the Disty ships would test the restrictions placed on Moon space. Usually, DeRicci didn’t believe in prayer.

  At the moment, she thought it the only hope left.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the governor-general snapped. Her delicate frame always surprised DeRicci—not because the governor-general was so tiny, but because she carried so much force. She wore dark pants and a black shirt, casual clothing by the governor-general’s standards

  She put her hands on her hips and looked up at DeRicci. “You have no authority to do anything. You should have cleared this with us—”

  “I tried.” DeRicci said.

  “Tried isn’t good enough. You weren’t given this position so that you could take over the Moon.”

  DeRicci made herself take a deep breath. If she lost her temper, she would never get the opportunity to make her case.

  “You appointed me to keep the Moon safe,” DeRicci said. “This Disty crisis is worse than you think: it’s going to spread like a disease, and if it gets on the Moon, we’re going to have the same kind of problems that Mars has.”

  The governor-general took a step toward DeRicci. She tried not to sneeze at the sudden overwhelming scent of the governor-general’s vanilla perfume.

  “I’ve been following the news on my links. I’m as informed as you are. Maybe more informed.” The governor-general nodded toward the wall screens. “I’ve heard nothing about anything except some kind of refugee crisis. My aides have heard nothing except the refugee crisis, and the other officials in the United Domes have heard nothing except the refugee crisis.”

  “Have you spoken to the Disty?” DeRicci asked. “Or Sahara Dome? Or anyone connected with either? Because I have been gathering information and—”

  “Save it,” the governor general snapped. “All I’ve been hearing is your hatred for the Disty, and how you’ll do anything to keep them off the Moon. And that’s becoming quite apparent.”

  DeRicci felt like she’d been slugged. “My what?”

  “Your hatred of the Disty,” the governor-general said. “Don’t deny it. I’ve seen the interviews and actually went through the details of the case.”

  DeRicci felt like she had stepped into another world. “Case? Interviews? What are you talking about?”

  “What everyone on the Moon is talking about, Noelle. You tried to prevent the Disty from disciplining some poor boy, and when that failed, your hatred of the Disty was cemented, proven, perhaps, by the way you handle other cases. Certainly proven by the way you’ve handled this crisis.”

  DeRicci had no idea where any of this was coming from. She wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

  “I honestly don’t know where you’re getting your information,” DeRicci said. “I’ve been talking to Disty experts here and in the Alliance. What I’m understanding is that the crisis in Sahara Dome started with something the Disty call ‘contamination,’ and it’s not an easy concept to grasp. What happens is—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the governor-general said. “What matters is that you’ve created an out-of-control mess. I’m going to reopen the ports and—”

  “No!” DeRicci grabbed the governor-general’s arm, her fingers slipping on the silk sleeve. “You can’t.”

  The governor-general looked at DeRicci’s hand, then looked up at DeRicci’s face. “You want to rethink this moment, Noelle?”

  DeRicci didn’t move. “You’re going to have to listen to me. I don’t know what kind of garbage you’ve heard about me. What I’m doing is protecting the Moon, which is what you’ve asked me to do. Yes, I know I’ve acted without authority, but someone had to. I told you this was an emergency three hours ago. The other members of the council have been standing by for the last two hours and forty-five minutes. If you’d had the courtesy to contact us, maybe all of this could have been avoided, or maybe you could have acted on this as a unit. But I had to do something before Disty ships got into Moon space. There is a chance if they even enter Moon space, we could be in trouble, and—”

  “Let me go, Noelle.” The governor-general’s cheeks were flushed.

  “No,” DeRicci said. “You can call for help on your links all you want, but I’m not letting go until you give me an audience. We have to protect these Domes, and we’re going to do it. You hired me because you believed in me, because you thought I would do the right thing. I am doing the right thing, even if I had to use unorthodox methods. Just give me the chance to explain before you jump to conclusions.”

  “The evidence they have against you on InterDome Media is pretty damning,” the governor-general said.

  Ki Bowles. Dammit, she found something and she was twisting it.

  “No one ever contacted me,” DeRicci said. “So right there, you can assume the reporting is biased, if I haven’t had a chance to respond to the charges. Besides, hasn’t anyone ever accused you of something you didn’t do?”

  The governor-general’s head moved ever so slightly. DeRicci had scored a point with that comment.

  “All right,” the governor-general said. “You will tell me and the council why you have pitted us against the Disty, and you will do so succinctly. We have to have time to rectify this situation.”

  “By the time, I’m through,” DeRicci said, “I’m pretty sure the only changes you’ll need to make are ones that give us some firepower at our spatial boundaries.”

  “Firepower,” the governor-general repeated. “You actually think we’ll shoot defenseless Disty ships?”

  “This is life and death, Celia,” DeRicci said, using the governor-general’s first name as a weapon, just like the governor-general had used DeRicci’s. “We’re going to do what it takes to protect every single life—human, Disty, Peyti, Rev, it doesn’t matter. Every single life on the Moon is our responsibility, and we have to take that responsibility very seriously.”

  The governor-general shook her arm slightly. DeRicci let it go. The governor-general ostentatiously rubbed the skin with her other hand.

  “Call your meeting,” the governor-general said. “You have exactly fifteen minutes to convince us you’re right.”

  Forty-seven

  Sometime during her examination of the work in front of her, Sharyn Scott-Olson shut the door to her office. As she went through Allard da Ponte’s memoir, she almost felt like she was examining a forbidden document.

  She kept her wall screens and news links off. But she had her personal communication links open. She expected to be summoned into the lab at any moment.

  The deeper she got into da Ponte’s work, the more she wished someone would summon her. She was beginning to understand why this incident had been left out of the history of Mars.

  Da Ponte’s memoir was a work of art. He compiled still photographs, drawings, composite vids, and other information throughout the document. He linked to various blogs and partial histories, and even made several vids of himself recollecting events—once under some kind of regression.

  And he researched everything he had lived through, citing other sources, news reports, historians, and once-live feeds to document his claims.

  After two hours of watching, reading, and following links, she was able to piece together something of a story:

  A hundred years before, Sahara Dome was a closed society. Founded by humans who mined the polar ice caps and shipped the water to new developments on Mars, Sahara Dome had become a thriving
community of the miners’ families and descendents, one that was surprising uniform in its looks, religion, and beliefs.

  But the Dome’s leaders believed that the Dome had to expand, and expansion required new capital. The only way to bring in new capital was to bring in new industry, which it did. Suddenly Sahara Dome had money, and actually started expanding the Dome itself. Before the residents completed that job, however, they opened their port to off-world traffic.

  That had been their first mistake.

  Their second was failing to establish some kind of customs system.

  A group, recently expelled from Europa for attempting to “grow” democracy in alien societies that couldn’t understand the concept, needed a new home. Their leader, one Jorge Bouyzon, somehow located Sahara Dome, targeting its export business and its new industries, believing that his group could take over the growing government there.

  Bouyzon’s big mistake was announcing his intention the moment he and his band of two hundred settlers arrived in Sahara Dome. The settlers took over an abandoned church at the far end of the Dome, and began buying property in the as-yet-unexpanded section of the Dome.

  Scott-Olson skipped through the year of back-and-forths. What became clear, as she looked, was that Bouyzon refused to negotiate. When he needed something, he cajoled, threatened, or outright stole it.

  The citizens of Sahara Dome hated this new group, and soon worried that the group would overtake the Dome. Bouyzon’s people called that democracy—asking for free and fair elections, knowing that their large numbers would at least gain them a few seats on the growing council.

  But as the elections were being held, a number of citizens were attacked. Others “lost” their children for a few days, only to have the children returned with a message. Still others were directly told not to register to vote.

  It became clear that the “free and fair” elections would go to Bouyzon and his cronies in a landslide.

  Allard, in his memoir, tried to dispute this. He claimed this part of the record was a distortion—that his family and his people were good people with only the best intentions for Sahara Dome, that Sahara Dome’s government was corrupt, and that the beatings came not from Bouyzon and his friends but from the Dome’s own government.

  The truth was lost somewhere in the middle. Scott-Olson didn’t have time to ferret it out.

  But what she did discover was that Sahara Dome’s original population decided to take matters into their own hands.

  In a secret meeting held late one night, Sahara Dome’s council approved a vigilante committee to “take care of” Bouyzon and his group. Some on the council objected strenuously to the use of violence, and the fact that children were involved. So the new committee and its leaders brokered a truce within the council: Children four and under would not be harmed. Instead, they would go to a foster home and then be farmed out to relatives off-world. The leftover children—those without family elsewhere—would go to a mission off-world and be raised with the stipulation that they could never return to Mars.

  Somehow this satisfied the council, many of whom did not want to know what exactly the vigilante committee was going to do.

  Da Ponte claimed that the vigilante committee lied to the council, knowing that no one would approve the real plan. The real plan was simple: they took families from the Bouyzon group one at a time, under guard, to a pre-dug hole at the edge of the Dome. The hole was deep, da Ponte said, because that way the good citizens of Sahara Dome wouldn’t smell what hid beneath the sand.

  The vigilante committee made entire families stand inside that hole, then shot the family members one at a time, from oldest to youngest. Sometimes parents would crumble, clutching a still-breathing baby in their arms.

  The vigilante committee would then go into that hole and remove the living children, not bothering to wipe the blood from them as they took the children to the so-called foster home.

  My older brother—he was six—stood next to me, Allard said in one of his vid interviews, his lower lip shaking. He took my hand.

  Already they had killed more than a dozen families—people we all knew. They were lying in the orange dirt, most of their middles gone. The committee’s weapons were designed for maximum hurt. The wounds weren’t small like those made from most laser weapons. They blasted holes in the center of people, covering everyone around them in warm, sticky goo

  My sister—she was ten—she screamed at them to stop, stop! as first my father, then my mother fell to the ground, covered in their own blood.

  Da Ponte had paused then, put a hand to his mouth, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked down, unwilling to stare at the camera any longer.

  It was that motion, more than any other, that convinced Scott-Olson this elderly man was telling the truth.

  They shot and shot and shot—my sister went down screaming at them—and then they turned the gun on my brother. He wet himself—I could smell it—but said nothing. His fingers dug into mine. They shot and—

  Da Ponte’s voice broke. He shook his head, and the vid cut off there. Later, all he added was:

  For the longest time, they thought I was dead, too.

  A little boy, less than four years old, his family dead around him, surrounded by maybe fifty other bodies of friends and adults he had known all his life, lying in the sand, clutching his dead brother’s hand.

  Scott-Olson stopped there. She couldn’t take any more.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there before Nigel opened her door.

  “They’re starting,” he said.

  It took her a moment to understand him. She was thinking of a vigilante committee and humans so intent on protecting their little piece of ground that they had murdered children.

  “Doc?” Nigel said. “Did you hear me?”

  She nodded, then realized what he was talking about. The bodies were coming in. From the latest disaster.

  There’d be dead children here, too.

  She stood up. She was shaking as badly as da Ponte had been when he recorded that remembrance. How did anyone clean the stain of that from his soul?

  Maybe the Disty were onto something. Maybe some events did contaminate a place forever.

  She stepped out of her office. A dozen techs carried bodies inside. Male, female, human, Disty, adult, child.

  Her work had finally begun.

  Forty-eight

  The hour had come and gone, and they had no solution. Jefferson sat on the tabletop in the session room, surrounded by Disty and humans, and a handful of other top officials in the Alliance—Peyti, Nyyzen, Ebe—none of whom seemed to follow the Disty protocol, with bare feet and table sitting.

  He felt like a fool. He had felt like one ever since Number Fifty-six had had his apparent change of heart—supporting the Moon boycott, a boycott that had spread to Earth (not that that was any surprise—no one expected Earth to welcome Disty refugees).

  Number Fifty-six sat across from him, looking less perturbed than he had when Jefferson first arrived—if, of course, Jefferson was reading Fifty-six correctly. The Disty were being as mysterious as ever, but it felt like they were working together.

  The temperature in the room had risen, and Jefferson’s feet weren’t as cold as they had been. His stomach had started growling an hour before and he longed for food, but knew better than to eat in front of a Disty.

  The negotiation looked like it would never end.

  Jefferson set an information pad in the middle of the table. Then he took his hand off the pad, so that he wasn’t touching it or the screen when Number Fifty-six picked it up. That would offend the Disty outrageously.

  Jefferson nodded at the information he called up. He said in English, “We can’t find any available land anywhere in this solar system. Not that’s big enough or free enough of Disty to take on this refugee crisis.”

  “Our information is the same,” Number Fifty-six replied in the same language.

  “Then we started looking for empty
space stations,” Jefferson said, “even some old, still-working generation ships that we could supply with food and other needs for your people. We have found no one thing big enough, but there are a few combined—”

  “How would you propose that we transfer our people there without contaminating anyone else?” Fifty-six asked.

  “It would have to be an in-space transfer. The generation ship, for example, would be towed to your people’s location, then left there. They’d have to transfer on their own.”

  “Most of these Disty have no space experience,” Fifty-six said. “This is a tricky maneuver.”

  “I know.” Jefferson nodded to the pad again, trying not to point. Pointing was also considered rude. “We could just fill some ships with supplies, and transfer them over until this crisis ends.”

  “Thereby contaminating those ship’s crews,” Fifty-six said.

  “We could use some automation,” Jefferson said. “It might work. We have—”

  “As I said.” Fifty-six spoke curtly. “Most of these Disty have no space experience. They won’t know how to get the supplies out of the airlock without risking their own lives. We prefer a single transfer to a safe place, which would then allow us the leisure to settle our differences with you, and solve the problems on Mars itself.”

  Jefferson didn’t like the phrase solve our differences with you. He kept hoping that those differences were small enough that Fifty-six wouldn’t focus on them, but as this meeting progressed, Jefferson realized that the differences weren’t small. He might have temporarily avoided any kind of violent conflict, but there was no guarantee this so-called spirit of cooperation would continue.

  “I have only one other suggestion,” Jefferson said. And it really wasn’t his. It had come from the Peyti, who were good at brokering arrangements. But the Peyti representative, who had approached him during that hour-long break, warned him to make sure each idea sounded like it came from a human source.

  Right now, the Peyti said, its voice distorted through its breathing mask, the Disty are looking for all ways to blame humans. The Disty will condemn you all if you do not find the solution yourselves. Even then it is a risk. We have seen this in the past. The Disty are not forgiving.