The Twelve Stones

by RJ Johnson

  The two men on the other side of the bulkhead turned to restrain Sinjakama when the bulkhead slammed down on their bodies cutting them both neatly in half. The last security guard standing looked down in horror at his friend's blood that splashed all over his uniform and Sinjakama wasted no time zapping him with 75,000 volts from the shock baton. The man went down hard, smelling faintly of urine.

  A klaxon alarm began to ring loudly as a result of the emergency bulkhead being engaged. Sinjakama held his hands over his ears cursing the damn thing for being so bloody deafening. Turning, he sprinted down the corridor until he reached the entrance to a Tun. The tunway were what the moles in downtown called the vast network of tunnels that had been carved throughout the asteroid to make travel easier for the population of Rosetta. Most traveled from one end to the other using Rampets - tiny pod-like cars large enough to seat two people comfortably. Rosetta wasn't a large asteroid by many standards (only around one hundred and eighty-eight miles in diameter), but it was certainly ample enough to make movement from one end to other a hassle without the tunway and Rampets.

  Opening the Rampet's cover, he got in quickly and set his destination. Two more security guards, alerted by the klaxon, rounded the corner and saw Sinjakama getting into his Pod.

  “Stop!” One of the guards cried out. Sinjakama ignored their shouts and slammed the canopy shut, accelerating out of the station, through the tunway and towards The Pit and engineering a few kilometers away.

  Behind him the two security guards jumped into a pod that had popped out behind Sinjakama's and they accelerated after him, hoping to catch up to the rogue scientist.

  Sinjakama looked at the heads up display and directed the camera in the back at the two security guards giving chase. The computer informed him that the Rampet behind him was gaining on him rapidly. He was only minutes away from The Pit, but he would need to shake the guards off his tail before they could catch him. Security would soon recapture him unless he could lose them within the extensive tunnel system of Rosetta.

  His Rampet rocked violently, sparks flying from the rails as the wheels came up and off before settling back on their tracks. The two security guards giving chase had rammed his pod with their own. They were moving at incredible speeds up and through Rosetta's tunnels flipping one way to the other navigating the twisting tunnels that snaked through the vast asteroid. Sinjakama knew the Rampets weren't designed to take much damage and he feared that his pod would come loose from the rails and crash in a spectacular explosion against the burned out walls of Rosetta's tunnels. Sinjakama had helped bury many men who had succumbed to the same fate, and those Rampets had been operating at peak efficiency. The panel behind him overloaded and exploded as his pod was rocked violently once again. The damage being inflicted by the security guards on his Rampet was beginning to take its toll. He needed to do something fast, before he ended up as a red smear on the walls.

  His heads up display was flashing red warning lights and the computer's voice began to urgently warn of total systems failure. Sinjakama tapped quickly on the computer's panel as he disabled the Rampet's safety protocols. He knew this was going to be a high risk, high reward sort of move. Sinjakama grabbed a Rebreather suit out of the emergency kit that was stored in all Rampets and quickly put it on. If Rincon's security was bent on killing him, they'd have to try a lot harder than this.

  Sinjakama snapped the Rebreather suit closed and pulled the emergency release cord on the hatch.

  The canopy blew off his Rampet as it screamed down the tunnel. The cover from Sinjakama's pod crashed on the rails behind him and caught the Rampet's front right wheel giving chase in a perfect million-to-one shot. The security guard's Rampet flipped up and over, crashing spectacularly as bright red and yellow flames filled the tunnel behind him.

  Sinjakama's pod slowed, as the damage inflicted by Rincon's security finally proved to be too much for the delicate craft. The fusion generator on his Rampet failed and the power output quickly diminished to nothing. Fortunately, he was only a few thousand feet away from the Pit and the momentum was enough to carry him to the mass driver that would take him home.

  Sinjakama's pod limped into the Tunway station for The Pit and Sinjakama exited quickly making his way over to the Mass Driver's main control panel on the opposite side of the room. The Pit was what the miners had nicknamed the enormous hole in Rosetta where the largest vein of ORI had been discovered. ORI was the reason they were all there on Rosetta. Valuable, expensive, and rare, ORI was a mineral that combined three rare earth elements; Osmium, Rhenium and Iridium. For the modern economy, there was nothing more valuable than ORI, used as it was in nearly every electronic system, ship hull and rebreather suit in the system.

  The Pit was usually quiet this time of night. None of the maintenance workers were up and moving as they usually did during the rush hour in the mornings. Daysol wasn't for another half-hour at least. It was only four in the morning on Rosetta, and all the workers were still fast asleep in bed, save for the skeleton crew required to keep Rosetta running through the night and a few enterprising souls who might be just now waking up and getting ready for their shift.

  Each morning just before Daysol, the station's clocks and computers were resynchronized to UDT (Coordinated Universal Time), and it was during this daily maintenance that Sinjakama hoped to launch his life-pod while the computers reset and updated themselves with all available data transmitted by the Consortium back on the Homeworld. With the vagaries in special relativity, it was sometimes difficult to keep a synchronized day with Earth and Mars, and a daily time check kept their systems in synch. It kept the trains running on time as his father used to say.

  He hoped that the re-synch would last long enough to give him sufficient time to get away from Rosetta so that Rincon would be unable, or unwilling to pursue him. If he was lucky, they might not even notice him missing for a day or two, though after his confrontations with Rincon's security guards and his big mouth around Vicktoria, this was unlikely.

  Sinjakama worked quickly lowering a nearby life-pod deep into the Pit and loaded it into the Mass Driver a few thousand feet below the control console. The life-pod wasn't large by Consortium spacecraft standards, but it would be enough for the six weeks it would take for him to travel back to Earth. The tiny ion engines weren't as powerful as the ones he had worked on while on Rosetta, but they didn't need to be to get him up to a cruising speed fast enough to make the journey between Rosetta and the Homeworld in a few weeks as opposed to a few years as it once had taken his grandfather.

  The ion drives were marvels of modern engineering. They were simple machines really when it came down to it. It worked by accelerating tiny ions to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light within its engines and used that momentum to propel the craft to fantastic speeds, nowhere near the speed of light of course, but it was the constant acceleration that was its true value - the longer he kept the engines on, the faster the craft would travel. It was this technology that had made space travel feasible for human beings to expand within the solar system. By the time he got close to the Homeworld, his craft would likely be traveling at a top speed of 1,000 meters per second. Not bad for an engine that only needed a few BB sized pellets of ORI.

  The mass driver he would use to launch the life-pod was mostly used to propel unprocessed ORI back to the Homeworld in enormous twenty ton containers measuring fifteen by forty meters long. Once a large container was filled, the mass driver would fire them towards Earth's Lagrange point where a large processing plant ran continuously, processing the ORI into usable material. The refined ORI was then used for building all sorts of things, including the sizable orbital cities where the rich and powerful lived far above the scorched ruins of Earth.

  It was hard work, millions of kilometers away from home. But for these workers living, breathing and working in the hollowed out Asteroid known to them as Rosetta, it was their only shot for a prosperous life.

  Rosetta was unlike any asteroid humani
ty had surveyed before. Sitting in a comfortable orbit within the Asteroid belt situated between Mars and Jupiter, it had begun its four and a half billion year old journey full of the elements Humanity used to build the ion drives and spacecraft that took them between the planets.

  Measuring one hundred and eighty nine kilometers at its diameter and one hundred and nine kilometers at its height, it was one of the largest asteroids in the 'belt. Steven Breynard, a Consortium scientist, was the first to survey Rosetta. After a few samples were analyzed, he was certain the readings he was getting from his instruments had made some sort of mistake. According to his survey, the asteroid contained the single largest strike of verified and minable ORI in the entire solar system. It dwarfed anything found thus far by the Coalition on Mars.

  The news spread quickly, and the Consortium, never one to waste an opportunity, recruited the CEO of Nebula Mining, Dimitri Koschei, to immediately set up shop. Huge self-sufficient drillers with crews of one hundred began to land on the harsh asteroid rock like dozens of tiny mosquitoes searching for blood. A mere six months later, the first permanent settlement was established within the rocky walls of Rosetta. Koschei moved to Rosetta and touted the safety and luxury of his colony to encourage immigration, Rosetta needed workers, and lots of them.

  Fortunately for Koschei, the depressed Homeworld economy made millions desperate for any job, even the ones you might never come home from. In fact, the more superstitious considered it bad luck to call Earth anything other than Homeworld outside the Van Allen Belts. Most of the miners who immigrated to Rosetta never returned to Earth.

  At its core, Rosetta was a PR stunt, designed to give those without hope living within Consortium borders on Earth something to shoot for. Advertisements depicting the exciting life and unlimited possibilities awaiting settlers in deep space were often misleading and rarely depicted the terrible conditions workers found themselves in once they had immigrated. The slogan was repeated ad nauseum across all the poorest of countries: “Better Living through Space.” The campaign was designed to collect the cheapest labor available, and it worked. Oh, how it had worked.

  The shattered economy on Earth ensured that millions signed up for even the chance to stand in line for the program. Riot police had to be stationed outside enormous “Job Fairs" which promised real opportunity and a chance to escape the hellhole their countries had become as a result of the Consortium's ironfisted rule. As a result, workers signed draconian contracts, heavily indebting themselves to Koschei and the Consortium. Even despite the whispers that conditions aboard Rosetta were barely above slave labor standards, that rarely discouraged anyone who hadn’t had a meal in a week, which happened all too often across the Homeworld.

  The first few years of mining Rosetta were disastrous. Workers were routinely killed by micrometeorite storms which punctured the rebreather suits they wore mining the surface of the small protoplanetary world. If you were fortunate enough to survive the micrometeorites, you still had to deal with what the miners called “Heavy Rain," the tiny invisible cosmic rays which constantly struck the miner's bodies, mutating their cells and creating the worst kinds of cancer rotting the insides of anyone unfortunate enough to mine Rosetta's surface.

  They had treatments for the cancers of course, but those were expensive, and many of the workers died before being able to save enough credits for their own care. Those who were able to scratch out a small profit immediately spent it on his medical care so that he might be able to get up and spend another day mining ORI, again exposing himself to the horrid conditions that led to the cancer in the first place. It was a vicious cycle, a matter that Consortium leaders routinely ignored. ORI was the only thing they cared about. So long as it was cheaper and in greater quantities than what the Coalition could offer, the Consortium allowed the CEO of Nebula Mining Dimitri Koschei to run things as he saw fit.

  Things got marginally better for the miners once they dug the Pit deep enough to protect them from the cosmic radiation. Underneath a kilometer of solid rock, the miners built what would later be known as Downtown. There, a community complete with living quarters, a place for shopping, drinking and socializing, they spent whatever limited free time they had when they weren't mining for ORI deep within the Pit.

  Bit by bit, life improved aboard the station, but luxuries like clean water and food beyond Sump (a synthetically grown meat product grown using recycled organic waste) were rare. Despite assurances that their food and water were perfectly safe and tested for quality, the meat routinely came to the workers rotten and their drinking water stank of sewage.

  Sinjakama was sweating hard and he wiped his forehead as he checked the ArmBar attached to his forearm. During the night cycle, the dehumidifiers were taken offline to conserve power, and the air in the Pit became thick in his throat. Residual heat from the mining equipment used below combined with the water imprisoned within Rosetta's walls. During the night, the water would trickle out of the icy rock surrounding them and without the dehumidifiers constantly running, the air quickly became saturated.

  Tonight, the heat felt especially oppressive to Sinjakama and he worked quickly to get the life-pod online and position the Mass Driver's trajectory. He triple checked his math - even the slightest miscalculation could send him millions of kilometers off course from Earth.

  The large claw machine he used to insert the life-pod into the Mass Driver completed its task. He glanced at the readings, adjusting them one last time. If all went to plan, this would be the last time he'd be on Rosetta. He looked down into the pit where the Mass Driver was located, a bout of vertigo assaulting him. He stared over the edge of the pit, clinging to the railing next to an impossible flight of stairs. He swallowed. He hated heights, especially ones that looked into bottomless pits of despair.

  Thousands of feet down in the pit, he could see the Mass Driver's bright white lights flashing towards the exit leading to deep space and five hundred million kilometers away from Rosetta, Earth. Suddenly overcome with dizziness at the sheer height below him, Sinjakama moved away from the railing. He leaned back against the safety of the wall behind him and sunk down, sitting as he tried to catch his breath. He pawed at the glowing PDA situated on his left arm. A glowing screen leaped out in front of him as Sinjakama clicked through various station interfaces. As a senior engineer, Sinjakama had access to nearly every system on Rosetta and he hoped to use those administrative rights to slow down Rincon's goons.

  Calling up a live security feed, he watched as two of Rincon's security bypassed the bulkheads he had locked down and headed towards him in the Pit. Sinjakama had hoped it would take Rincon's team longer to break through the bulkheads, but, they had proved more resourceful than he expected. For now, he was stuck at the top of the ridge, looking down at a thousand feet of empty space between him and his deliverance. He needed to move, damn his fear of heights.

  “There he is!” The shout came from behind him, and it kicked Sinjakama’s mind back into high gear.

  The two security guards ran down the hallway towards the pit, the uneven gravity well making their clomping boots sound all the more ominous. Walking on Rosetta wasn’t a simple task like it was back on Earth or even Mars. Huge gravity well plates (or GWPs as they were known) installed through the station, allowed for near Earth norm gravity anywhere on the station. An unwelcome side effect with the uneven placement of the tiles, it could make you feel as if you were drunk or falling in a hole every other step. It was not dissimilar to what sailors went through when they crossed the mighty oceans in their tiny boats hundreds of years ago. Instead of sea legs, a man had to earn his ‘droid legs in order to move comfortably about the hollowed out asteroid without vomiting in his sick bag.

  Sinjakama looked down into the pit, and typed a few commands onto his ArmBar. Holding tight to a stabilizing bar anchored into the rock, he watched the security men behind him and typed one final command onto his PDA. Suddenly, the gravity plate for the Pit released, and the two security officers c
hasing him found themselves suddenly floating in midair, screaming and cursing at Sinjakama.

  Taking a deep breath, he looked deep down into the Pit. His ticket off Rosetta was down there, waiting to take him back to Earth. Swallowing his fear, he pushed himself off the side of the ridge and began to slowly float his way down into the deep chasm.

  Lights began to turn on as his body floated past the sensors, activating them. He waved his arm, using conservation of momentum to turn his body slightly and look up at the ridge behind him, to see if Rincon's goons were still chasing after him. The two security guards had regained their footing, and pushed themselves down into the pit, falling after Sinjakama at an impressive rate of speed. The bottom of the chasm yawned beneath him, Sinjakama knew at their pace, they would catch him before he could make it to the enormous Mass Driver on the ground below.

  Judging the distance below, he flattened his body, and began typing on the PDA on his arm once more. Sinjakama began waving his arms in a swimming motion as he slowly began to move towards the tiny buckets lining the side of the Pit finally reaching one as he grasped it tight. Watching the security men float down towards him, Sinjakama pushed enter on his PDA.

  Gravity reestablished itself within the Pit, and the two security guards screamed as they plummeted all the way to the ground below. Sinjakama closed his eyes tightly and ignored the sickening crunch of their bodies as they splattered on the equipment below.

  Above him came another shout, and Sinjakama looked up. It was Omar Rodriguez, Koschei’s right hand man. There were rumors that Omar had killed a man on every settlement in the system and one look at the man convinced you that the scuttlebutt surrounding the six foot nine musclebound terror was likely based on fact. Why he was chasing after Sinjakama now, he had no idea. He decided it was best to stick with the plan. Men like Omar were known to sell their services to the highest bidder.