Contamination

by Patty Jansen

  Kerry said, “Well, I wouldn’t put it that wa—”

  “I do. I made the unfortunate mistake of taking my job seriously. I somehow managed to miss that the Everbright had a standing arrangement with the Quarantine Authority to let it pass unquestioned. The Captain was even unaware of the necessity of completing it.”

  “You spoke to Captain Farrell?” Manuela’s eyes were wide.

  “I didn’t know that was a special thing, but I did.” He was starting to get irritated.

  “Man,” David said. “She’s a hero. Saving us from an alien invasion. She wouldn’t do anything illegal.”

  Manuela shook her head. “No, never.”

  “Maybe not her directly, but her crew might. They might even do it without her knowledge.” The latter sarcastic.

  David turned around, his face flustered. “Man, what are you actually on about? I want to keep my job. Just do the fucking job and leave the questions. Who cares anyway?”

  “As I see it, it is our task to make a choice: is this job of ours about protecting Earth from harmful diseases, or is it about politics between the Quarantine Authority and the Space Force? Or ultimately between civilian governments and the force? That is really what I’m about. Civilian institutes seem to think that there is a risk. The Mars case shows that there may well be.”

  David snorted. “So, a handful of colonists on Mars got the shits. Wow. Seriously, man, they didn’t need to go that far away. I can get the shits right here from the crappy food.”

  “On Mars, it’s an illness caused by exobacteria. We need to do research to check the bacteria’s effects. We don’t know if giving people ‘the shits’ is all it does. If we can stop it spreading, scientists will have longer to work on it before it eventually does spread to Earth. We’re playing with valuable time here. The force wants to continue business as usual. It’s afraid that too many ships will be pulled up for carrying illegal material and that practices will come to light that they would prefer to keep hidden. So they’ve got White here, who is so tied down that she can do nothing except agree to their demands. They’re laughing about the Mars bacteria. Nothing serious. It’s all a big to-do that will blow over.”

  David said, “It will. We get these scandals every couple of months. Last time it was about misappropriation of the station’s general account.”

  “This is nothing like that. This is about stopping harmful organisms reaching Earth. This is not a bureaucratic issue.”

  “Man, don’t take it so seriously.”

  “How else am I supposed to take it?”

  Kerry shrugged, looking uneasy. “Whatever, man.”

  God, now Jonathan was angry. If the Quarantine Authority wanted people to rubberstamp bogus forms, they shouldn’t have appointed an exobiologist to the job. You’ll get to use your knowledge—what a load of rubbish. They didn’t want anyone with useful knowledge, they wanted minions who didn’t bother anyone.

  Chapter Eight

  JONATHAN PLAYED Space Invaders with Manuela, and then watched half of a movie on one of the smaller screens towards the back of the room. The screen was so small that it was difficult to see the movie properly, and the sound was being drowned out by the large screen at the front, where that guy Cresswell and his mates were laughing.

  Eventually, he’d had enough and went to his room. It was still too early to go to bed, so he dressed in his sports gear and went to the gym. There were a few people on the treadmills and bikes.

  One woman in the corner was going flat out. She was whip-thin, her breasts mere mounds on a taut chest and stomach. She wore tight-fitting leggings of a shimmering material that rippled with her muscles. Her short hair was dripping with sweat.

  Gaby.

  Jonathan climbed on a bike in the row in front of her, distinctly aware how pale and hairy his legs were, and how lacking in impressive muscles. He fiddled with the music, but he could still hear the pounding of the machine behind him.

  Eventually it whined to a stop. Gaby walked past, wiping her face with a towel.

  “Gaby!”

  She stopped and looked at him with a distant expression. Her face was red and shining with sweat. Her chest heaved with breaths.

  “Oh, hi.” She wiped her face again.

  “Nice run?”

  “Bit short. Only twenty k.” She glanced at a man running on another treadmill at the back of the room. “Well, um, I stink, I’ll go in the shower.”

  “Yeah.” That sounded all kinds of wrong. “No, I mean, you don’t stink. Um . . .”

  What did Kerry say was wrong with Gaby? Right now, nothing seemed wrong with her at all.

  An awkward silence. Jonathan wanted to keep talking to her, even if only to prove that he wasn’t as stupid as he sounded. He grasped onto the first subject he could remember.

  “How is the man with the broken leg?”

  “He went back to the ship.”

  “Could you do anything for him?”

  Kerry stuck his head into the gym. “Hey, Jonathan, you want to come for a drink?”

  Gaby gave him an uneasy smile.

  Manuela and David looked into the room over Kerry’s shoulder.

  “Maybe later,” Jonathan said to them.

  Gaby gave him a half-smile. “Look, I won’t keep you from your friends.”

  “They’re not my friends. They’re just colleagues. Is there a problem with this injured man or anything?” Or is there a problem with my friends?

  She glanced sideways. “Do you want to see it?”

  “His leg?”

  “The X-ray.”

  “Um. Yes, sure.”

  It was kind of strange, and he had no idea why she thought he could make any comment about X-rays, but what the heck.

  He got off the bike and followed her out the room, breathing a waft of wet and sweaty clothes in her wake. They were well into the corridor when she said, in a low voice, “You know, there’s no such thing as just colleagues up here. After you’ve been here for a while, people become either friends or enemies. There is no in between. Trust me.”

  The look in her eyes chilled him.

  He followed her through the corridors to the hospital. She didn’t speak and he didn’t ask any further questions. In fact, the whole thing was decidedly awkward and he had no idea where to look.

  Jonathan had been to the hospital briefly for a medical check-up when coming off the shuttle and when helping Gaby with the man with the broken leg, but had not seen more than a simple waiting room and a nurse’s station.

  The small emergency room was behind the waiting room. It held six beds, four of which were occupied. He remembered his briefing by the Quarantine Authority before leaving Earth. A cheerful woman in a business suit had assured him that they had a fully equipped hospital that could deal with most emergencies. But although the room seemed well equipped, he had the feeling that if he were to get sick, he’d rather not do it while working at the Launch Station. He suspected that the hospital’s main task was to bundle the patient off to a flight down to Earth as quickly as they could.

  A number of doors opened into the emergency room, and one of them bore a tag that said Dr G. Larsen. Light flickered on automatically when Gaby opened the door.

  The room looked like a field version of a typical doctor’s practice, with a small desk, a chair for the patient and an examination bed.

  The wall shelves sported clear plastic boxes containing a variety of bandages, rolls of sticking plaster and balls of cotton wool, tubes, needles, scalpels, tweezers and other more sinister implements.

  Gaby shut the door and went to the desk. Jonathan sat in the patient chair.

  “I’m going to show you this, because there is something you need to be aware of, before you really put your foot in it. You’re young and new and have the best intentions to do the best job possible, but up here, it’s very easy to do too good a job.”

  She activated her pad and set it up on a stand. The entire back wall of the room lit up with an X-ray i
mage, showing a bone, or rather, lots of fragments of bone.

  “Is that the leg? Looks pretty bad.”

  Gaby snorted. “Pretty bad? A strong man with a hammer couldn’t do this much damage, let alone a fall, no matter how severe. And he didn’t fall that badly.”

  Jonathan frowned and studied the photo. “Then what? I’m sorry, I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what a normal break looks like.”

  “Nothing like this.”

  “Then what do you think happened? What did he say about it?”

  “He kept telling me that he fell. But it’s pretty clear that something else happened aboard that ship. Didn’t you notice how nervous they all were?”

  “Um.” He hadn’t noticed that much, except that the patient had looked too sick to just have a broken leg. And that nurse who had asked about his father. Maybe he’d been too annoyed about that to notice anything else. “So. What do you think?”

  She hesitated and licked her lips. “OK, I’m going to tell you something now that I don’t want you to repeat elsewhere, to anyone, all right?”

  He frowned.

  “You need to know this, before you put your foot in anything else.”

  “I didn’t put my foot—”

  “You didn’t cause some trouble with that ship?”

  That had all been dealt with, hadn’t it? Why the hell did people keep talking about it?

  Gaby took another deep breath. “Have you ever heard about shame parties?”

  The term sounded familiar. “I have, vaguely. Wait, wasn’t that why those officers were arrested a few months back?” He remembered something about it on the news.

  “I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have heard. Our news is very limited up here.”

  He had noticed. “You really only get Earth news, don’t you?”

  “The Space Corps news is mostly filtered. They give us approved news, which is mostly general Earth news about things that the Corps has no involvement with. When it comes to news about the Corps, they don’t give us the same story they tell the public either. The philosophy goes that we’re supposed to get this news from our supervisors in more complete form.”

  “And I’m guessing that the operative word in that sentence is supposed?”

  She nodded and sighed. “In any case, shame parties are the awful abominations that happen amongst isolated crew, commonly on deep space flights. A group decides that certain crewmembers have acted against the group and need to be ‘shamed’. This usually happens in a rec room or some such, and can involve anything from the victim having to wear silly clothing or go naked for a day to cases of horrific abuse.”

  Jonathan felt cold. “You mean they’re bullied?”

  “That and worse. It’s a black mark on the reputation of the Space Corps and they won’t discuss it. I see a fair number of cases. None of the victims will talk about it or make a statement.”

  “Hang on, if this was going on within her crew, then why would Captain Farrell let us on board and let you take these pictures?”

  “Because she doesn’t know. That is also why the rest of the crew were not happy to have us there.”

  Damn. “What have you done about it?”

  She looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  “Have you reported it or anything?”

  “Where should I report it?”

  “To . . . I don’t know. Authorities? Police?”

  “Do you see any police?”

  “Space Force militia then.”

  She laughed, not in a happy way. “Like they’d act against their own people, especially the ship crew. Haven’t you noticed how much everyone here adores ship crew?”

  Strangely enough, his colleagues had told him the same thing today.

  “But you could report it to the Captain.”

  “Like she would believe my word over that of her crew.”

  “But, then, is anyone doing anything about this?”

  She went on, her voice low, “We—you and I in our capacities as Quarantine Officer and Doctor—may be the only people who have access to those ships and their crews.”

  “But then if there are problems aboard those ships, we may be the only outsiders to notice.”

  “Yup. Welcome to the Orbital Launch Station, where secrets come to die.”

  He stared at her. Was she really saying that everyone kept quiet about this? “But we have to do something.”

  “You don’t know the saying that the best way to avoid shame parties is to not get involved in them? Basically, we can shut up and keep our jobs. As for the victim, the Space Corps will pay for his medical expenses and accept him back. If he makes a fuss and asks for a court hearing, he’s as good as gone. He won’t get any medical expenses paid. That’s the way of the Space Corps.”

  He stared at her, a feeling of horror creeping over him.

  “But that’s . . . awful.”

  “I know. It’s the way it is.”

  Chapter Nine

  THAT NIGHT AND all through the next day, Jonathan thought of all the questions he should have asked her, but hadn’t.

  Could she let someone know about abuse amongst ship crew anonymously? How often did it happen? Did it happen at the Launch Station, too? All the next day, he eyed the various crews of the ships walking the passages of the station and wondered what they got up to in the times that the station’s public places went quiet. And he looked at people walking alone and tried to gauge whether they had ever been victims.

  In the rec room at night, he met up with Kerry and Manuela.

  David was there, too, but he sat at one of the wall screens racing a Space Corps guy in a game where the players had little space ships. A couple of the guy’s mates stood at his back. One was tall and muscular. His nametag said “Cooper”. The other had a shaven head with tattoos and his tag said “Horvacz”. Both stared intently at the screen over their colleague’s shoulder. Their faces were blue with the glow of the screen.

  “Get him,” Cooper yelled.

  “Yeah, get the fucker.”

  His face scrunched up in deep concentration, David managed to outmanoeuvre the other guy. He laughed. “Ha, I win. So much for active duty, huh?”

  Cooper turned to him. “What were you? Steadfast, right?”

  This was a large Space Corps supply ship.

  David straightened his back. His eyes were penetrating. “I served on Steadfast, Endurance and Resilience.” All three supply ships, although the latter was a long-distance ship.

  Horvacz snorted and clapped his mate on the back. “Come on, show the fucker what we think of the cowards in logistics.”

  Jonathan sat down on one of the couches against the back wall, feeling uneasy.

  Now that Gaby had brought the bullying to his attention, subtle and slightly less subtle hints of unpleasantness were everywhere. He noticed how the groups were divided along the lines of military and non-military. Or older military and new recruits. Or higher-ranked military and lower-ranked troops. Ship crew versus station crew.

  The ones who had the best positions in front of the big screen were veteran members of station military staff. The group included Cresswell, who had made fun of Jonathan on the flight.

  The movie was some sort of B-grade horror flick. A zombie shambled through a dark alley after a young woman to whom it had obviously not occurred to take off her high-heeled shoes and run.

  The crew, men all, cheered every time the zombie came closer.

  Manuela dropped into the spot next to him, rolling her eyes. “Pffft, stupid movies!”

  Jonathan nodded.

  Then she met his eyes. “I meant to ask you earlier, but are you at all related to Paul Bartell?”

  “Why is everyone asking? OK, he’s my father. What has that got to do with anything?”

  Jonathan had spoken much louder than he intended. A silence fell in the room as everyone looked at him with strange expressions.

  “Well . . .” She shrugged. Her cheeks had gone bright red. “Sorry. I sh
ouldn’t have mentioned it. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Manuela, I’m not upset. I don’t know what my father did. I am not my father. My parents divorced when I was young. Even before that, my father was never there. I suppose it was part of the reason why they got divorced. He was kind of a dick. Still is, sometimes. My mother kept me away from him, and never told me anything about his job and always discouraged me from going into space. The dismissal happened after he left us. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know what happened and why he left. I’ve only started talking to him again recently now that I don’t live with my mother anymore. And it’s not the sort of thing you’d talk about with a son you haven’t spoken to for twenty years, is it? ‘Hey, Dad, I heard you got dismissed from the Space Corps, could you tell me all about it?’ That would go down well.”

  “Oh.” She let her shoulders slump. “I feel such a goose now.”

  “No need. Yes, he’s my father. No, he’s never taught me anything other than: try not to be like him. But maybe you could tell me why everyone gets so hung up about it?”

  Colour had risen to her cheeks. “I’m not really sure. I mean—I don’t think I’m the right person to tell you. I only heard bits of it through gossip. I don’t even know which parts are true.”

  She would not tell him any more, and Jonathan went to his room with anger brewing inside him. He wanted to speak to his father, but he had a feeling that if his father had not told him anything about the circumstances relating to his dismissal by now, he never would. It was not as if Jonathan had never tried to talk about his father’s time in space either.

  In his cabin, he spent some time unpacking the remains of his bag. Up until now, he’d just dug out what he needed, but he put all his clothes away, dumped his personal things on the desk—his pad, his photo frames and mementos from home—and stashed his bag on the top shelf of the tiny cupboard. Then he dusted off the screen of his pad—seriously, why did those things always attract so much dust?—and hung the photo frame on the wall with the magnetic hanger. Just as he stepped back to look at the result, the frame cycled through a very old photo: his parents on their wedding day.