by Jason LaPier
They also tracked fluctuations in the geomagnetic field.
“It’s got to be a localized disturbance of some kind,” Lealina said, shaking her head. She looked up at the map, the blips refusing to congeal into a pattern. “But they’re not localized.”
“They’re not even all in the same city,” Riky said, tapping sharply and then pointing at the center screen. The circles on the map grew larger as he zoomed in and panned around it. “Three in Stockton. Two over here in Nuzwick. One all the way up at the d-mail station. One here in the Low Desert.”
“That’s seven.”
They looked at the counter. It was already at seven, and they hadn’t noticed. It changed to eight before Lealina’s eyes. Riky silently tapped at the keyboard, and the map expanded to reveal the newest pulsing red dot, far to the east.
“They’re all over the place.” The operator pushed his chair away from the console and stood, still staring at the screens. “What does that mean, Lealina? We never get magnetics.”
“It means we need data. We need to know how strong the flux is.”
The comm rang again but she ignored it. “I’ll get it,” Riky said after it went unanswered for several tense seconds. He got up and went to the wall while she stared at the map. Three more red circles appeared. She felt transfixed, hypnotized by the patternless events, surprised at herself for not being able to panic. All of the events were magnetics. There was only one explanation.
Riky came back. “That was the research outpost in Low Desert. I told them we’re looking into it.” He paused, then added, “What are we looking into here?”
“Shit, Riky,” she said. “I think this is bad.”
“What could it be?”
The comm rang again and this time they both ignored it.
She swallowed, tried to make sense of the numbers. They were bottoming out. “It looks like we’re losing it.”
“Losing it? What’s it?”
“The magnetic field.”
“What?” Riky took her arm to pull her eyes away from the screens. “What does that mean, Lea?”
She stared at him for a moment before registering his face. “One of the things that makes Terroneous such a perfect moon to live on: the magnetic field. It protects us from solar radiation. Makes it so we don’t have to live in domes.”
“How could we be losing it?”
She shook her head. “Back on Earth, they knew that throughout the planet’s history the magnetic field had flipped. North became south. It was extremely rare, but … devastating. We’ve always known that the magnetic field here on Terroneous was a little on the unstable side; one of the reasons we monitor it so closely.”
Riky’s voice squeaked. “Are we going to die?”
She closed her eyes and tried to breathe slowly. The comm continued to ring. “No. We don’t know anything yet. We need more data.”
“How much time do we have?”
“We have time. These systems are designed for early warning. We just have to be sure. Worst case, we’ll have to evacuate the planet.”
“God damn,” Riky breathed.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she said. “It probably won’t. Just keep watching the monitors. I’m going to set an auto-reply on that comm. Everyone on the moon is going to be calling.”
* * *
“Greetings. You have reached the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau. We are aware that many people are reporting alarms on some of their local sensors. We are very sorry for the inconvenience. We are investigating the root cause of the problem and we will be dispatching technicians as soon as we are able … You don’t need to contact us, we will contact you. Thank you.”
The screen on the comm phone was only a few inches in size, but the picture was clear. The woman’s skin was a reddish pink, her hair was light brown and cropped short, and her eyes were a bright blue, with a warmth that he’d never seen before, though they shined with wetness. Her smile was nice, but it wavered. Even through a recording playback on a tiny screen, he could sense her unease.
“She’s very pretty,” Librarian Kay said. “Don’t you think, Mr. Fugere?”
Jax felt his face warm and he pulled away from the image, which had frozen at the end of the message.
“Oh, don’t tease him,” Librarian Elle said. “The Bureau is practically on the other side of the moon.”
“Hush, Elle. Love can find its way around a tiny moon.”
“Love? It’s a bloody recording!” Elle shook her head, then added, “In any case, you heard the girl. Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Kay muttered. “What about the blasted noise the thing is making? This is a library!”
The sensor located behind the counter continued the relentless series of beeps that had started up twenty minutes ago and refused to quit. Jax didn’t recognize the model and the librarians didn’t seem to know anything about what it was there for, only that the TEOB had installed it about a year ago and told them it was important.
“Librarians,” Jax interrupted. “Do you mind if I have a look?”
They looked at each other. “Oh, I don’t know,” Kay said. “We’re not supposed to let anyone back here. And the Bureau put that thing in and said not to touch it.”
“Kay – Mr. Fugere has been coming here almost every day for weeks now. He’s our best patron and probably the smartest person in Stockton.”
“Thank you.” Jax would have blushed at her flattery, but there was already plenty of heat in his cheeks from their comments about the girl in the recording. “But I’m not really – look, how about I just take a quick look. I won’t touch anything.”
They looked at each other again, Elle nodding. Kay sighed. “Okay, Mr. Fugere,” she said, then smiled mischievously. “Maybe you’ll find an excuse to talk to that lovely girl at the Bureau.”
“Oh, Kay,” Elle said, shaking her head and opening the gate to let Jax behind the counter.
It was true, he had been coming to the library every day since he discovered it. David Granderson had brought him into town, and Jax had helped him calibrate a pair of new camera-hoverbots that “fell off the back of a truck” somewhere and he needed to “put to good use”, or so the story went. The hoverbots were slightly used, but with a trip to the library for some old manuals and a couple of resets, Jax was able to get them to sync up with the source camera system. He had to admit, the resulting film was much better at capturing all three dimensions as the bots rotated around objects in response to the source system’s tracking. It felt good to fix something, and he felt an immediate attachment to the library.
After he’d gotten Granderson’s camera-bots working, the documentarian had paid him just enough to cover a month’s rent in the cheapest building in town: something between a short-term apartment and a long-term hotel. It was a roof and four walls and nothing more. Jax had no idea he could be so content with so little. But it was shelter. It wasn’t what he wanted to call home, but it was the closest he’d had in – how long had it been? He’d lost track. Stopped counting the months. Stopped counting the days between meals. Knowing where he was going to sleep at night did something to him, something inside that he had a hard time understanding. It gave him a piece of his humanity back, something he hadn’t known he’d lost all that time on the move.
Obviously he had no extra money for enjoying himself around town in any true sense of the word entertainment; no holofilms, no pubs, no game halls, not even any art galleries or museums. The library, however, was open to the public and didn’t charge unless he checked something out and took it home. To save money, he usually did his reading on the premises.
More than the free entertainment (such as it was), Jax liked coming to the library for a sense of order. He didn’t allow himself to regret coming to Terroneous, but the moon’s townships were, well, settled, as opposed to engineered. Growing up in the domes, everything made so much sense to him; everything was somewhere it was supposed to be, bec
ause someone deliberately put it there. In a town like Stockton, the buildings and streets grew like plants; they wound around themselves, going where they needed to go, when they needed to go there. The library was the one place Jax could go and unwind whenever the chaos got to be too much. It was a grid, it was organized, hell it was even catalogued. It was worth putting up with the paper books to enjoy the architecture and the systematic filing.
The librarians stood behind him – looking over their own shoulders more than his – as he took a closer look at the device mounted on the wall. It was a console of some kind, not much larger than the comm unit. It was flat and white, and there were a handful of lights along the top, one a steady green and one blinking red. Below them there was a panel that his fingers itched to pry open, but he kept himself in check. He promised the librarians he’d only look, not touch, and he really didn’t want to get on their bad side.
There were two cables coming out of the top of the device. One, black and thin, ran off to the side and he suspected it was for power. The other, blue and thicker, ran up and disappeared into the ceiling.
“Any idea where that goes?” he asked.
“Oh, right,” Elle said. “There’s a bit that went up on the roof. Like an antenna or something.”
“And a dish,” Kay added. “An antenna and a little satellite dish.”
“I see,” Jax said. At the top of the device’s front panel was the logo for Pulson Integrated Sensor Systems, Inc., and there was an alphanumeric code running along the bottom. He pulled out his notepad and jotted it down. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
He left them and found a nearby terminal to look up manuals for Pulson Integrated Sensor Systems equipment, realizing with sudden dismay the manufacturer’s unfortunate acronym. He shook his head and pawed through search results until he found a section that looked useful. The manuals all started with three letters, and the model number he’d written started with MFS. He made a note of which section he wanted and got up.
“Mr. Fugere, Mr. Fixer!”
He flinched and saw Lonny Chen, one of the local livestock raisers. “Hey, Lonny.”
“Man, I was hoping to find you here,” Chen said. “You know that stat-monitor you helped me get set up a few weeks ago?”
“Yeah, of course.” It was a LyfStat brand monitor, originally designed for short-term (nursery) or long-term (elderly) care; at least, that’s what it would have been used for on Barnard-3 or Barnard-4. Somehow Chen had gotten a hold of one and was told it would be good for monitoring his livestock, which were some kind of small herd animal that produced edible eggs as well as milk. Jax couldn’t remember what they were called.
“It was working great for a while. It even helped me spot a sick kibu before she infected the others.”
“Kibu,” Jax said, mostly to himself so that he would remember the name of the animal. “Glad to hear it.”
“Yeah, so, uh, anyway,” Chen said, bowing his head sheepishly. “I was showing off the monitor to my buddy Gary, and I guess I got too excited and hit the wrong button. Now it doesn’t work. It’s all locked up or something.”
Jax frowned. “Probably just needs a reset.” He looked around briefly. “Did you really come here to find me?”
Chen looked up hopefully. “Of course. You’re always here, and if you’re not, the librarians usually know where you went off to. So you can take a look at it?”
Jax allowed himself to turn his mouth back up into a grin: he was officially a regular. “Yeah, I can look at it. Do you still have the manual we checked out?”
He shook his head. “No, I brought it back here after you set everything up.”
“Okay.” All kinds of equipment like Chen’s LyfStat monitor showed up on Terroneous. No one questioned where it came from, and it was usually last-gen, but it was obvious that none of the locals really knew how to use the stuff. It was as strange to them as the kibu were to Jax. The upside was that it gave him some value around this place. He was pretty useless when it came to laboring of any kind – gardening, building, even cleaning – but he could figure out just about any piece of equipment originally meant for B-3 or B-4, especially with access to a well-stocked library. He waved his notebook. “I still have the info written down, I can grab the manual and bring it by a little later.”
Chen smiled widely. “Thank you so much, Fugere-the-Fixer! Hey, I’ll get you some credit at Bonnie’s store. She just got in a batch of that dark ale. I know you love that stuff.”
Bonnie was Chen’s second cousin and she owned a very non-specialized store that carried everything from food to tools to clothes. “That sounds great, Lonny,” Jax said. His background as an operator was more than just useful; it was a way to make a living. He didn’t know how much he should be charging people, but they were always grateful and he often got cash or trade that was enough to keep him going from day to day. There were a few things he needed from Bonnie’s store, and he almost thought he should go with Chen right then and earn his credit. But something about the oddity of this sensor alarm tugged at him. That and a vision of the brightest blue—
“Great, great. So when do you think you’ll come by?”
Jax blinked and looked at him. The faint beeping of the sensor alarm was beginning to blend in with the atmosphere. It was probably no big deal, and the woman in the message had said they would send someone out. He thought it might be better to take the paying job and leave the interesting job alone. “You know what? I was just about to pick up another manual, so let’s grab that and the one for your LyfStat and then we’ll head over to your place and get that monitor reset.”
CHAPTER 11
Runstom followed Troyo down a series of greenish-blue hallways until they arrived at a conference room, where they stopped just outside the door.
“Hold on,” Troyo said in a low voice, putting a hand on Runstom’s chest. “This is almost there. We just need to give it a nudge to nail this deal.”
“Seems pretty straightforward to me,” Runstom said. “They came under attack. They have no defense.”
The events of the previous day flooded into his mind. He’d been so spiked on adrenaline, unable to process them fully, even later in the evening when he calmed down with a few celebratory drinks. In the cold gray of morning, he couldn’t believe it had even worked. They’d only gathered a handful of vehicles, and their arsenal was sparse. But somehow they’d managed to kick up enough dust and noise and flash to send Space Waste running for their dropship. Runstom had driven the lead rover, and somehow found a balance – they’d gone fast enough to appear as a threat, but not so fast as to actually engage the gangbangers. If his enemy had gotten a good look at the hodgepodge force, they would have hunkered down in the observatory and turned it into a real, bloody fight. But his gambit paid off. They ran.
“Yeah, it does seem that way,” Troyo said. “But we still need a little finesse here. Not everyone is sold.”
“No? Like who?”
Troyo leaned in. “Willy, for one. His security team looks like the failure here. He’s going to look for ways to redirect the blame. Rhonda, I’m not so sure about. She’s always distrusted ModPol. And Dr. Leesen – well, she’s always been skeptical.”
“You don’t think an attack on her research team will change her mind?”
Troyo nodded. “If it did, that helps our case big time. We need her on our side.”
Runstom looked at the door and caught himself adjusting his jacket. Troyo had insisted on treating him to a shopping trip that morning, and he was wearing what the account rep would consider classy clothing, but to Runstom it was uncomfortable and too bright. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.
“One more thing,” Troyo said. “I know you have this bad habit of telling the truth. I need you to follow my lead, and anytime something needs uh – a little spin – you leave it to me.”
“What, why? What part of what happened needs a spin?”
Troyo gave him a stern look. “Stanford, you ar
med a bunch of civilians. And it worked. I mean, thankfully none of them got shot, but it’s not great for us.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t felt good at all about the danger he’d put the civilians in. But he wondered if that was what Troyo was getting at. “Why not?”
“Stan,” Troyo said, again leaning close. “We don’t want them to get any ideas about defending themselves.” He paused, and as Runstom’s own mind birthed the question that maybe they should defend themselves, Troyo seemed to read it on his face and answered. “They’d end up getting killed. We’re the specialists. We handle this shit. That’s what we’re selling.”
Runstom sighed and nodded. It was the ModPol mission: protect people so that those people could live their lives without violence and warfare. “Okay,” he said.
Troyo’s trademark smile sprang to life. “Let’s close this baby.”
The conference room was another one of those completely circular spaces, with walls so white and no place for shadows to lurk. It was like standing in empty space, and it made Runstom’s stomach lurch. The drinking he’d engaged in the previous night along with half the city of Vulca didn’t help his state. He was determined not punish himself over it; it’d been a long time since he had a reason to celebrate.
Already present were Willis Polinsky and Rhonda Harrison, sitting next to each other at the large round table in the middle. Troyo pulled a chair opposite them and gestured for Runstom to sit, then sat next to him.
“Good afternoon, Willy, Rhonda,” he said. “How are we all doing?”
“Okay, Pete,” Polinsky said.
“Fine,” Harrison said. They both wore wary expressions. “Dr. Leesen will be here any minute.”
“Great,” Troyo said with a smile. “I believe Captain LJ will be joining us as well.”
Fortunately, they didn’t have to sit in the uncomfortable silence for long. Leesen came in with a stocky Sirius-fiver man with black-specked white hair and a large bandage under one eye. They were both wearing white lab coats, as if the debriefing of the attack on their research station was just another meeting interrupting their otherwise normal workday.
