Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  Next to the manual, he placed his notebook. The information was all right there in the manual, but ever since his days with Officer Stanford Runstom, he found himself with an uncontrollable desire to write everything down with pen and paper. More than once, his notes had been handy enough to save him time, but never useful to the extent they were when he and Runstom were trying to solve the murder that Jax had been accused of. The flipside of using a paper notebook was that every time he opened it, he thought of his friend, whom he hadn’t seen since fleeing Sirius-5. Was the officer his friend? Or just an ally? He hated thoughts like that. It would be so much easier if he could just talk to Runstom.

  He also hated that he was still on the run. Despite all the work they’d done, all the evidence, everything.

  He shook the thoughts away. He had plenty of time to dwell on that situation, and there was no sense in wasting a good distraction. On his terminal, he flipped to the window with the connection display.

  MAINTENANCE MODE INITIATED.

  AUTHENTICATION ENABLED. ENTER PASSWORD TO CONTINUE.

  “Password,” he mumbled. What would they have made it? He tried TEOB.

  INCORRECT PASSWORD. 1 OF 3 TRIES BEFORE SYSTEM LOCKOUT.

  As much as it pained him to do it, he tried PASSWORD.

  INCORRECT PASSWORD. 2 OF 3 TRIES BEFORE SYSTEM LOCKOUT.

  He sighed. One more shot and then he’d have to give up. He had an epiphany and flipped through the manual’s early chapter on device initialization. “Default password,” he mumbled to himself after scanning the pages. “Well, here goes. Glad they didn’t use the company initials.”

  PULSON SYSTEMS

  PASSWORD ACCEPTED. MAINTENANCE MODE ACTIVE. ENTER COMMAND.

  “Yes!” Jax cried, then flinched, remembering he was in a library.

  Using the manual as a guide, he spent a good twenty minutes poking around configuration settings, looking at the system stats, and analyzing logs. As best he could tell, the thing was mostly using default settings, and by default, it never purged any data. It had been collecting data for almost a full year and had finally just run out of space and thrown up its hands in alarm. He thought about the software engineers who designed the system and probably never tested it for more than a week; to them, the device had infinite space on it, so of course they assumed it was safest to keep all data by default. If he had an Alley for every time he found a difference between the world of an engineer and the real world, well, he probably wouldn’t be in the library trying to fix an alarm and hoping for pity charity for his work.

  He was packing up his terminal when the librarians came over. “All set,” he said. “It was all full up with data, so I reconfigured it to do a nightly purge of any data that’s older than six months.” He paused as he saw their pale faces.

  “Mr. Fugere,” Kay said. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “It’s not for certain,” Elle said.

  “Certain or not, everyone has to get ready, Elle.”

  “Ready for what?” Jax asked.

  “Evacuation.”

  “What?” Jax blinked, the thrill of the fix draining away in an instant. “You mean, of the city?”

  “No, Mr. Fugere,” Kay said. “All of Terroneous.”

  He stood up. “What the hell for?”

  They looked at each other and Kay handed him a handypad. There was a kind of news story on it, part journalism and part Bureau emergency warning. It described in brief some of the early-warning systems that the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau employed: radiation levels, seismic activity, gravitational anomalies, and so forth. And magnetic field fluctuation. For this last one, there were sensors installed at various townships and outposts that took magnetic readings and transmitted them via satellite to the TEOB station in Fort Krylon.

  A statement was issued by Lealina Warpshire, bright-blue-eyed (there was a distracting photo) acting director of the Bureau, that sensors all over the moon were in an alarm state. She warned all residents of Terroneous to prepare for possible evacuation. Jax scanned past the details of where residents would be evacuated to: some townships had emergency domes, others had underground facilities, and some would have nowhere to go but up. At the bottom of the article, he found links to related information, and he followed the one to an older article that reported on the original installation of the new magnetic field sensors.

  Evidently, Pulson Integrated Sensor Systems had donated several dozen of the MFS-19 models, with comm dishes and wall consoles included. It was noted that the MFS-25 had recently been released and was being heralded as the galaxy’s foremost leader in magnetic field measurement technology. Whatever the case, the TEOB had been extremely grateful for the donation, as the moon had no other means of measuring field activity on a global scale. The article was a little over a year old.

  Jax looked up, the handypad going slack in his hands. The details of the data were left out of the article. Would it have meant anything to him if they included the data? Probably not, nor to anyone else who wasn’t a geophysicist. Still, it was a conspicuous omission. “I have to check something,” he said, handing off the pad and turning back to the wall console.

  He unpacked his terminal and repeated the steps to get connected to the console’s maintenance port. After a few minutes of digging, he turned to the librarians and announced, “I have to talk to the Bureau.”

  * * *

  The headquarters of the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau was a building much smaller than Jax had expected. It was a long, thin structure, with only one floor – at least, above ground – with a chest-high chainlink fence around the perimeter. As Jax and his companions approached, they could see that behind the building, the fenced-in yard extended a few dozen meters to accommodate an array of satellite dishes of all sizes.

  A man sat on a wicker chair (a kind of fibrous, thin wood that wound around upon itself, something Jax had not encountered until he came to Terroneous) in front of the building. He was positioned in a spot that suggested he was a guard, but was not armed and certainly not alarmed at the arrival of newcomers to the remote facility. He barely looked up from his paperback.

  “Personnel only, fellas,” he said as they approached.

  “I was hoping to talk to—” Jax started, and stopped when the door opened.

  Lealina Warpshire, acting director of the Bureau, came halfway through the doorway in mid-conversation with another woman – older, with long black hair fraying its way out of a ponytail – who was fussing with a handypad.

  “Make sure that—” she started, then stopped and looked at the new arrivals. “Charlie, who the hell are these guys?”

  Charlie the guard looked up from his book, glared at Jax, rolled his eyes up to the director, then rolled them back down to his book. He seemed to be the sort that didn’t bother answering a question he didn’t know the answer to.

  “Uh, hi,” Jax said, lifting his hand to wave sheepishly.

  “David Granderson,” one of his companions said, thrusting out a hand for someone to shake. “Creator of holofilms The Real Streets of Stockton and A Tune for Terroneous, just to name a few.”

  Jax cringed. Granderson was an entertainment mogul; well, a mogul in the small township of Stockton anyway, which meant he’d done a bunch of semi-documentary, semi-reality holovid films and broadcasts. He was used to being well known around town, so he fancied himself a celebrity.

  After Jax had looked through the logs in the magnetic sensor console at the library one more time, he verified what he hoped was true. He couldn’t make any sense of the data, but based on the size of the data and the timestamps, it was as steady as clockwork. This was good news, as it meant there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary: the disk hadn’t filled up suddenly from an onslaught of data, it had filled up one drop at a time until there was nowhere to put the next drop. As he originally suspected, the problem was nothing more than a misconfiguration.

  When he got the librari
ans to try calling TEOB again, they got another recording, this one different than the first. It wasn’t the acting director, but another employee who emphasized the need for everyone to prepare for evacuation and gave very little information other than that. Jax had left a message, but had little hope of getting a reply.

  With no way to contact anyone at the Bureau to warn them their alarms might be false positives, Jax started looking for ways to get out to the TEOB headquarters. No mag-trains were running as a precautionary measure, and all sub-orbital flights were suspended as the flight centers prepped for full orbital launches on a mass scale. His only option was to find a self-powered land vehicle; fortunately, he knew someone who’d given him a ride once before.

  When Granderson heard Jax’s story, he was immensely interested in helping. It wasn’t only that he didn’t want to evacuate, which he really didn’t (he’d have to leave all his possessions, and he was really attached to his possessions), but he also decided that the whole situation would make for great reality HV.

  Jax hadn’t given Granderson much in the way of his background, but since the day they first met, the man had clearly known Jax was hiding something. Granderson seemed to respect Jax’s need for privacy; nonetheless, the presence of cameras made him nervous. But he felt in debt to the documentarian, and realized he was digging that debt deeper. If Granderson got something out of it, then it felt less like begging a favor. So they came to an agreement: Granderson’s cameras could roll, but they’d use the facial detection software to blur any images of Jax and hide his identity.

  It had taken two days of solid driving for them to get to the headquarters.

  “Hey,” Charlie said, suddenly losing interest in his paperback. “Do you do that one show, Over the Moon? Where all the people can’t handle living on Terroneous and just wish they could go back to the domes?”

  Jax frowned. He didn’t own a holovid, so he didn’t know, but he really wished that wasn’t a real show.

  “That’s right,” Granderson said with a smile. “That’s me.”

  “Oh, man, I love that show!”

  “Look, I don’t know what you two want here,” Lealina broke in, “but you need to leave. This facility is personnel-only. No public access allowed.”

  “Well, except for tours,” Charlie said. The look she gave him indicated his comment had not helped the point she was driving for.

  “Ms. Warpshire,” Jax said, putting out his hands. “Please, I need to talk to you. It’s about the MFS units.”

  She stiffened at the last sentence. “What do you know about them? Who are you?”

  “My name is Fugere. I used to live on B-4.” This caused all four of them to glance at each other. Jax knew his pale, white skin and tall, gaunt build pegged him as an obvious B-fourean, but sometimes it felt necessary to say it out loud. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I used to be a life-support operator. I’ve had a lot of experience with Pulson sensor equipment.”

  The last part wasn’t really true, since Pulson mainly manufactured geological and geophysical sensors, but he figured he knew as much as anyone, given the state of the configuration he found in the console at the Stockton library.

  “Mr. Fugere, we don’t really have time for this.” She turned and tilted her head to look at something on her companion’s handypad.

  “It’s a false positive,” Jax blurted.

  “What?” Now she gave him full attention again.

  “The alarm on the MFS-19. It’s not really an alarm, it’s a device fault.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The disk drives that the data is stored on – the internal memory banks – in the consoles. They’re filling up.”

  She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. The remote units send the data back to us via satellite.”

  “Right,” Jax said. “But first it collects locally. I looked at the configuration of the sensor console at the Stockton library and it had the default settings. It never purged any data.”

  She frowned at him, eyebrows pinching together. “That’s just one unit. We’re getting alarms from units all over Terroneous.”

  “All the sensors were installed at the same time.” Jax tried not to let himself smile as realization crossed her face. He continued with as little gloat as possible. “If they’re all collecting data at the same rate, and they all have the same size storage because they’re the same model, they’d all fill up at about the same time, give or take. At least within a few days of one another.”

  Her jaw slowly dropped and those bright-blue eyes lasered in on him. He swallowed and looked around. “Oh my god,” she whispered. “You better come inside.”

  “Ah, Director?” Granderson said, raising a finger.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you mind if I bring a camera in? For the sake of historical documentation, it would be useful to capture this crisis on film as it unfolds.”

  She looked at him warily. “Yeah, whatever. If you think it’s any more exciting inside than it is out in this wasteland, you’re in for disappointment.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “You mean we flew all the way out here and now I gotta sit around and babysit Lucky Jerk?” Thompson said. “While you two go off and have all the fun?”

  Out here was the edge of some desert on Terroneous, largest moon around Barnard-5. Dava was cranky enough from the Xarp travel back from Sirius, especially following the Xarp trip out there with little recovery time in between. Everyone had slapped each other on the backs about the score at Vulca, even though Johnny and Frank had been arrested and several others had been wounded. No one died and they got the equipment they’d gone after, so it was an apparent success. Rando Jansen, the so-called underboss, capitalized on the momentum by slinging Dava and a few others back into Barnard space to chase some new rival gang that might or might not have a presence on Terroneous. Dava woke up from the FTL nap realizing she might or might not give a shit either way.

  Thompson had also made the back-to-back trips and was possibly more cranky than Dava. “This is bullshit. I have to stay here but he gets to go? I’m the only one here who’s seen the Misters before!”

  She had a bad habit of pointing during conversation, with the barrel of her loaded submachinegun. She also lacked anything that resembled subtlety in the wardrobe department. There was no way Dava was taking her into town in a bright-red nylon jacket that was covered in Space Waste patches.

  “Please don’t point that at me,” Bashful Dan said, shrinking from her gun. The tracker was much more appropriately dressed, although he always preferred muted colors and avoided anything that might shine or flash in the lowest of light.

  The lanky Lucky Jerk struck a pose, flight helmet under one arm, twirling an invisible baton in the other hand. “Tommy, you know I used to run with the Misters. If anyone can spot them, it’s me.”

  “Shut up, all of you,” Dava said in a low voice. They were miles from anywhere so there was little need for restraint, but she wanted their full attention, so she spoke quietly but firmly. “What we need on this mission is discretion. What we don’t need is you and your goddamn Tommy-Gun shooting up the city. We need someone to guard the dropship.”

  Thompson lowered her gun and frowned. “You’re the capo, Dava. But if you kill any of them without me.” She seemed unable to finish her thought, shaking her head and looking away.

  Dava had just learned during the mission briefing that Thompson and Barndoor had a run-in with the Misters on Poligart a few months back. Lost a couple of mates in a shoot-out. “I’ll try my best to wait,” she said. “But we need to scout it out first. And that means discretion.”

  “I want a shot too,” Lucky chimed in. “Those bastards had me over a barrel.”

  Lucky Jerk was one of the few of the Misters to survive the shoot-out on Poligart. He’d surrendered, and Thompson had nearly killed him anyway. But he was a pilot and she’d been in need of one. And he was eager to betray the crew he’d been press
-ganged into to pay back some gambling debt. Space Waste never passed up a recruit with talent, and Lucky proved his value quickly. Even if he did have a bit of a mouth on him.

  “Not gonna happen,” Dava said. “You’d definitely get recognized.”

  She signaled to Dan to get the ATV out of the ship. She started to check her belt and the attachments affixed to it.

  “Hey Dava,” Thompson said. “Can I at least come to town to get laid?”

  “We can worry about that after the job is done,” Dava said. Satisfied with the belt’s occupants, she concealed it by wrapping her duster around her body. “Listen, Thompson. I brought you along because I don’t know what we’re up against. I might need backup. So no slacking off. Be alert. And you, Lucky,” she said, pointing at the dropship pilot, “stay close to the radio.”

  “Aye, Capo Dava,” he said with a sigh.

  Dava watched Dan roll the ATV down the ramp and start digging through a bag on the back of it. “You almost ready, Dan?”

  He paused, bag open, marking inventory in his head, then nodded. “Ready.”

  The four of them pushed the ATV through uneven sand for about a hundred meters, until they reached a trail where the ground was a little more packed. She flicked a hand at Thompson and Lucky, and they turned to head back to the ship. She could hear their conversation trailing off into the hot wind.

  “Hey, Tommy,” Lucky said, “if you want to get laid—”

  “Lucky, I will break your tiny little prick off and use it for target practice if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

  “Eh. I’ve had worse.”

  “I believe it.”

  Dava looked at Bashful Dan, who just shrugged and made for the back seat of the ATV. Then he stopped. She could see him chewing on a question.

  “What, Dan?”