by C. Gockel
Normally she’d expect such a task to take days—but Ghost had accessed the scanner so quickly. She glanced over at James, just by habit. He was staring at Adam’s group, face expressionless, and then his head jerked back as though he’d been stung by a xin-bee.
“I’m already on it, Commander,” Ghost said.
Beside her, James whispered, “They’ve —”
Ghost cut him off, the ciphered words coming in rapid fire succession. “They’ve decided not to send a team aboard. It’s too risky … for now.”
Manuel’s chest rose and fell and Gunny whispered a prayer to Allah. There was a pause from Ghost’s mind, and it felt like a little light going out. And then Ghost’s thoughts came back like a flickering spark. “But Adam is still keeping the option open.”
“Well, we’ll need to get our supplies and get out,” Noa said, tapping the smooth surface of her interface.
There were murmurs of assent across the ether, and the electrical impulses of those thoughts charged Noa’s resolve.
Beside her, Gunny said to James, “That was some fast actin’ with that story you came up with back there.”
Noa couldn’t tell if he sounded suspicious of James’s glibness, or if her own disquiet just colored her interpretation of his tone.
James shifted on his feet. “In my former life I sometimes … bluffed … authoritatively about things I knew nothing about.” His head ticked to the side, and he stared at a point on the floor. “I think sometimes I was a bit of an ass.”
It was so … candid. Noa felt her apprehension burst like a soap bubble. She grinned.
Gunny snorted.
Manuel shook his head. “Professors.”
Meeting Noa’s gaze, James shrugged. Noa winked at James, and simultaneously reached out across the ether to her computing officer, not wanting any of her team to be forgotten. “Well done, Ghost. That was some fast access.”
She swore she could hear his flush even across the ether. “It was … well, it was unusually easy to crack. System security not updated since the time gate was sabotaged ... that's all.”
Noa blinked at more of the uncharacteristic modesty.
“That has to explain it,” said James, shaking his head.
The buzzing of wings made her raise her head. Clara was approaching with several of Adam's guards. “Commander Sato,” the woman said with a shark-like smile. “I will be guiding you to the appropriate districts and giving you a tour along the way.”
Noa felt herself prickle. Across the ether, Ghost said, “Her orders are to delay you while they get a scanner out here ... not to abduct you outright.”
“Wonderful,” Noa said, managing a smile. Over the ether, she railed to James, “Mud from a sick horse!” It was the closest she could get to “lizzar excrement” in Heian Japanese.
In real life his face stayed as flat as stone, but his avatar appeared and gave her a smile ... which was the correct response. Her ventings weren't to be taken seriously, and nebulas, it felt good to vent to someone again.
She wanted to smile back, but across the ether, Ghost said, “Be careful, Commander. We really don’t want to be stuck here.”
“I’m always careful,” she replied.
The electrodes firing in her neural interface between her, Gunny, Manuel, Ghost, and James halted all at once. Noa huffed. It was the ethernet equivalent of a snort.
* * *
The gravity on Adam's Station was less than Luddeccea's, Earth's, or standard starship grav. Despite the thinner oxygen, Noa had no trouble without her CO2 mask, as her team was guided by Clara away from the dock through a narrow, canyon-like space that cut through the ore stained rock of Adam's Station's asteroid.
A few paces in front of Noa, Clara swayed close to James. “So as you can see, we may look like just another bumble-rock asteroid, but we have—” The buzzing of her wings interrupted the rest.
An avatar of James appeared in the ether ... and then winked out. Noa's connection to the ether was dying, out of range. Noa's eyes swept to Clara's guards, a few paces ahead of Clara. Why were they walking ahead, and not behind?
Discreetly slipping out an ethernet extender from his pocket, Gunny flipped it on, and Noa felt the warmth of access seep into her mind. Gunny called across the general channel. “James, you could try and be a little more friendly while we find a place to hide our ether-rocks!”
Clara briefly looked back at Noa and her two team members, as though she'd heard something, and Gunny hastily hid the extender.
“So,” James said, lifting his head. “The walls of this walkway look very organic, not like they were carved out.”
Across the ether, Gunny said, “You're supposed to show interest in her, not the rocks!”
“The rocks are interesting,” James quipped back. “I have a buggy eidetic memory app and I will have to remember everything she says. Forever.”
Noa felt the spark of Gunny about to reply, but his thoughts were cut off by Clara saying, “The unusual formation of the promenade is what was left over when Adam the First melted away the natural ice of this planetoid nearly two centuries ago.” Raising one hand to the walls, she put another on James's arm. Thankfully, his sleeves were rolled down and her green-tipped nails didn't get near his skin. Noa's stomach roiled, but she used the woman's distraction to hide an ether extender in a crack in the floor.
“Done,” she said across the ether.
“Hmmm …” said James, pulling away from Clara, seemingly inspecting the walls in professorial interest. Aloud he said, “I've never been to an asteroid before … this is … new … to me, at least. What sort of economy do you have?”
“Professors,” muttered Gunny.
Fluttering her wings to regain her balance, Clara said, “We have few of the minerals needed for cyber-manufacturing or time band production.” She shrugged. “But some people get rich by striking gold, others get rich by selling gold to prospectors.”
On either side of them, doors began to appear in the channel’s walls. Two especially large ones swung open and Clara guided them through. Noa found herself on a landing above a stairway in a large cavern with a high dome of poured concrete. The lighting, the layout, and the size of the space were reminiscent of a large warehouse, but packed with people, small ground cars, bicycles, and so much noise of humanity, it hit Noa like a physical force. The traffic passed between buildings carved out of rock or made of poured cement, set in a neat grid pattern. Most of the structures had solid walls without windows. All were typical of places like this. It wasn't typical how Clara's guards ran down the steps, rifles raised. She felt Gunny and Manuel tense beside her, and James stopped so fast Noa nearly ran into him. He looked back at her. She expected him to say, This looks dangerous, or I'm not sure we should follow them. The sort of reasonable, cautious, unhappy things he would say when Noa was about to lead them into “the belly of the beast.” Instead he said, aloud, “I've never seen anything like it.” There was a touch of awe in his voice.
“Professors,” Gunny muttered.
From a few steps down, Clara said, “Come,” gesturing James to take her arm. Pretending not to see, or maybe not seeing, James passed by her on the steps. One of her guards hastily came back up the staircase, and held out an arm for her to lean on. It might have been funny, but a crowd was gathering at the bottom of the staircase. They were skinny, dirty, and wore threadbare clothes. Someone shouted, “Food! I’ll work for food!”
“Please, I have children!” There were too many voices, and Noa couldn’t put the faces to all of them. She looked over to James. His eyes were on the dome above their heads. Noa's eyes darted toward the edge of the dome; at the periphery there were cavernous openings with immense iron doors that looked like medieval battlements ready to drop from the ceiling at any moment. Airlocks. She looked at the doors to all the dwellings; they too were metal and rugged—smaller airlocks.
She felt James reach to her across the ether. “Maybe it is the newness … but this place feels
real.”
“It will feel even more real when the phasers start going off,” Noa snipped across the ether before she could stop herself. “This place is a powder keg.”
“Please, food, I have children.”
Noa heard a stunner, and spun in direction of the sound just in time to see a beggar collapse to the ground. A guard stood above her, weapons upraised. A toddler, not much older than Oliver, started to cry next to her body. Noa gasped. She heard Gunny swear. Manuel jumped and James rolled back on his feet.
Lips contorting into a snarl, Clara roared at the crowd, “These are our guests! You will stand back!” Noa expected to see spittle fly from her lips.
The crowd edged away and Clara turned to James, all evidence of her anger gone. Tracing her collarbone with a finger, she said, “This is the shopping district, our downtown, if you will.”
Noa managed to stay silent, but her thoughts whipped over the ether. “Listen to her … As though stunning a beggar is normal!”
James met her gaze, a look of concern on his brow, but he said nothing, and thought nothing.
Waving a hand, Clara resumed walking. “The manufacturing zone is this way ...”
Noa hung back, and James hung back until she was beside him.
“I’m alright, Tim,” she said, too late to catch her mistake.
James stood stock still. The ether between them was uncomfortably quiet.
In front of them, Clara stopped and said, “To get there we'll take a detour through the tourist district; you really must see it.”
“Tourist district?” Manuel said, the surprise Noa felt loud and clear in his voice. Places like this didn't have tourists.
“We have a lovely orchard and a rose garden,” Clara responded, putting her hands together in front of her chest and fluttering her fairy wings.
Gunny, Manuel, and Noa looked to each other and shifted on their feet.
“An orchard … and a rose garden …?” Gunny stammered.
“I'm not very knowledgeable about these things,” James said slowly. “But the amount of water and space such a garden would need—”
“Normally it would be a huge waste!” Clara said. Her wings fluttered, and she gave what Noa thought must be her first genuine smile since they'd arrived. “But C Corp executives don't want to look at vertical beanstalks and protein-taters. They want gardens that are beautiful to look at and smell.”
“C Corp?” said Noa. “Here?” C Corp was the leading manufacturer of cybernetics. They produced useful augments like Oliver's or James's, but they made more money on discretionary augmentation … like Clara's ridiculous wings.
Smiling, Clara tilted her head. “You hadn’t heard? They were planning on expanding in this system. Mining here in the belt, manufacturing on Luddeccea … so much safer than Six with all the unrest there.”
“I’d heard C Corp had their eyes on Luddeccea,” said Manuel. “I’d hoped …”
“Not rumors,” Clara insisted. “We’ve had executives from C Corp staying here for months.” She fluttered her wings. “They gave me such a great deal on these. Aren't they beautiful?”
Noa felt her mouth go dry. She wasn’t shocked that she hadn’t heard about C Corp’s plan on her home world. Luddeccean news agencies would have been encouraged to keep it hush-hush. Her thumb went to twirl the rings on her left hand … and for the millionth time discovered her rings weren’t there.
A dark picture began to form in her mind. C Corp using Luddeccea as the primary location for their manufacturing would have felt like an invasion to the hardliners on her home world. C Corp's plans alone would have caused violence and unrest as soon as they became widely known. A lot of Luddecceans would have welcomed C Corp's arrival—Manuel and Hisha, for instance. A lot of people would have been terrified. They would have seen it as an attack on their philosophy, and on their very way of life. To them, C Corp's arrival would herald a society of … of … Claras.
C Corp's plans, and the takeover of Time Gate 8 by … Noa shivered. She didn't know who or what controlled Time Gate 8. She suspected Luddeccea's government didn't know either, but as far as the Luddeccean hardliners would be concerned, they were being threatened from every direction and had reacted by splitting from the time gate's ethernet, with the pretense of “thought control.” Too many Luddecceans were ether-science illiterate to catch the lie.
She felt her heart beat faster, and a cold weight settle in her chest as the picture became clearer. The authorities had rounded up augments because being augmented meant a person embraced technology—and in many cases, would have gone off-world to get it. Even augments that were necessary meant their adopters had been exposed to “dangerous ideas.” Her cousin John had artificial kidneys. As he'd grown, he'd had to have them replaced several times with larger models, and had to go to Sol System for all the operations. There he'd learned that the disease that had destroyed his kidneys could easily have been wiped out with nanotech banned on Luddeccea. He'd become embittered by Luddeccea's refusal to “evolve.” In the eyes of Noa's more religious neighbors, he'd been “led astray” and had become a “bad influence.”
… And the Luddeccean authorities had to go after someone to do the work that ethernet-based machines had done before they'd closed off the ether. James had told her that part of the Nazis’ Final Solution was to work the Jews to death. Her home world's leaders, so proud of the religious tolerance of The Three Books, had done the same to a different population, under the same pretenses of protecting the general populace.
Noa felt like she might throw up. Her eyes shifted to James. His gaze was on a point in the distance, as though listening to a far-off sound. Back on Luddeccea he’d said that genocides were precipitated by pressures from within or from without. She felt bile rise in her throat. “You called it, Professor,” she whispered over the ether.
James turned to meet her gaze, but Clara stepped between them, breaking the eye contact. “We get all the potatoes, wheat, rice, soy, and peanuts we need from Luddeccea.” She frowned. “I’m sure trading will resume soon.”
Noa's team froze, all the way down to their thoughts, as though hit by a weak stun.
Clara stopped and turned to them, wings buzzing. “Is something wrong?”
Gunny shifted on his feet. Manuel looked down. James’s eyes darted quickly between Noa and Clara.
Noa found her voice at last. “Is Luddeccea communicating with you at all?”
Wings halting, Clara said, “They told us the time gate was offline, and some ridiculousness about it and the ether being used by aliens to control augments …” She huffed. “Well, some said, aliens, some said demons. Can you believe that nonsense? If that were true, half this station would be possessed. They’ll see sense … soon … they have to.” Her voice, for the first time, became unsure.
James’s voice flared across the general channel. “If they believe that trade will resume, they’re more likely to let us go without incident.”
“I agree with that,” Ghost said immediately.
“The sooner they start planting protein-tatos, the better,” Gunny said across the same channel. Noa’s jaw got tight. James was right … but Gunny was right, too—the people of Adam’s Station deserved the truth.
Clara was looking between them, a look almost like fear on her previously imperious plasti-features.
“Is she listening in?” Manuel asked across the ether. “If we can hear them—”
“No,” said Ghost, and James, at nearly the same time. And then James looked up sharply in the direction they'd just come. Noa spun to see the doors they'd stepped through swing open with an eardrum-bursting clang. Beyond her line of vision, she heard a storm of footsteps and the whine of antigrav. She reached for her stunner, and saw Manuel and Gunny do the same in the periphery of her vision, just as two dozen armed men bearing phaser rifles emerged at the top of the landing.
“Ghost! What's going on?” Noa shouted across the ether, raising her stunner, Manuel and Gunny following her le
ad. James stood strangely still, not even edging closer to her.
“Nothing?” said Ghost.
“There are armed men here,” Noa said. One guard's eyes fell on her, and he lifted the weapon to fire. James hissed, “Put your weapons down, Noa!”
“Hmmmm …” Ghost's thoughts paused, and then came back online. “The only thing of interest is that a group of rabble rousers have had the bright idea of eating the O2-producing algae near the grav core.”
As if in punctuation of that thought, Clara shrieked, “They’re eating the algae in the O2 pits? What’s wrong with them?” She swayed past Noa's team. An antigrav litter appeared on the landing, and then hovered to the bottom of the steps. One of the guards raced to assist Clara. Taking a proffered hand, she hopped onto the litter. As she sat down, her eyes met Noa’s. In an irritated-sounding voice she said, “You need to go to the East Cavern for the time band and charge dispersers. Ask for Richard Yee at The Yard. For the goop, go to the Heap. Just head to the North Pole.” Turning to the guards, she barked, “Let's go to the algae pits!”
Noa and her team stood slack-jawed, watching the antigrav chair depart. People were eating the O2 production algae …
“We're attracting attention,” James said over the general channel.
Noa looked to him sharply. His profile was silhouetted by a street lamp. His focus was on the crowd of people around them that was beginning to edge silently closer, although all around them the business of Adam's Station roared.
“What do you hear?” Noa asked, wondering if he'd caught something with his augmented hearing.
He turned to her sharply, in a way that reminded her of one of the ptery-hawk. Touching one of her ears, she whispered, “You hear something?”
She could see his shoulders unwind. “Nothing dangerous,” he said. “They're considering begging.”
Something about that reply struck a chord in Noa's mind, but she couldn't say what.
