The Homestead

by G R Higginbotham

  “So you’re responsible for getting everyone in Homestead IV sick through the ventilation ducts as well?”

  She started to shift on the examination table.

  “How was I supposed to predict that the spores would adapt so quickly to living outside of a controlled aquatic environment? That’s not my fault.” She brought her eyebrows together out of frustration, then wincing at the pain of moving the skin around the injured area.

  “Actually,” Moses replied, “it is sort of your job to predict those things.” He stood. “In fact, you supervise an entire department of people whose job is to predict and control that exact scenario. It seems like it could have only happened with either intent or neglect. Which one do you think Jacobs will guess?”

  She grunted.

  “What did Adrie discover that you’re trying to get rid of?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?” She was getting more defensive. He couldn’t let her shut down and stop talking. He had to handle this well. He walked across the room and considered how to proceed, allowing her to squirm for a little while before going on.

  “I know you’re the one who trashed your lab.” He turned to look at her again, to see if her reaction would give anything away. It didn’t. She was ready for it this time.

  “That’s ridiculous,” her voice was getting louder. “I have no reason to destroy my entire department’s work.”

  “But that’s just it. You didn’t damage any working equipment except for one workstation. The one Adrie was using while she was doing research in your lab. I checked the ID number of the broken unit against the registration log of Adrie’s research before I woke you up. You see, I have all of Adrie’s files.”

  “Jacobs would never have given you access to that! You’re just trying to get to me. Have you lost your mind?” Her face was turning red, fury building up in her. This is exactly what he needed: get her riled up enough that she would get careless and admit to something. “I’m your patient in here, injured from some madman out there, and you’re tormenting me with crazy talk.”

  “But that’s just it.”

  “What’s it? What are you talking about?”

  “You weren’t attacked. You couldn’t have received an injury to the front of your head without seeing your attacker at all. You did that to yourself after you turned the lab over and destroyed the one object you really wanted to damage. But you pulled over one wall too many, and it collapsed on top of you. That’s how you broke your wrist and knocked your head.”

  Before she could answer, the room began to fill with a buzzing sound. They both looked to the door. The sound was coming from nearby. “Stay here, you could pass out again if you stand up,” he told Idleman.

  Chapter 15

  Moses left the exam room and followed the noise. It led him to the door into his personal quarters. When he opened the door, he discovered that it was filled with cleaning bots. These things were programmed to spread out throughout the facility to maximize efficiency. They were pushing against one another because there were so many that they had nowhere to go. The buzzing noise was coming from their servo motors beginning to overload from the stress of pushing against one another.

  As he started looking closer, he noticed that several of the machines had writing on them. Some of the writing was red. Some of them had writing scratched onto the surface of the unit. They all had the same message:

  COME GET ME

  -R

  Rebecca was alive and had somehow managed to communicate to him. He had to find out where these robots came from. He knew she had reviewed that on one of his tours, but so much had happened since then that he could not remember where that was.

  Moses pulled up the facility schematics that were loaded onto every resident’s personal tablet and searched for the waste disposal system. He followed the sloping return system down to the bottom of the pyramid where the refuse and waste were burned and sorted into either mycobacterial fuel or atmospheric accelerant. But the control room wasn’t down there. He then began to study the cleaning robot repair system. Just like every machine, the cleaners wore down over time. Everything had to be repaired eventually. If capable, they would report to the upper levels for repair on their own. If they were incapable of self-transport, another drone would be sent out by the system to recover its damaged counterpart.

  That had to be where Rebecca was being held. There were no other places in the drone schematic that allowed enough room for a full-grown human being. Still alive. But she had been gone for days. He didn’t know what shape she would be in when he found her, so he assembled a small collection of various pharmaceutical and physical first aid to assist her, throwing them into his messenger bag. How long had it taken her to access and write on these robots? Was that blood she was writing with? He had to find her quickly. If they discovered her play for help, they may kill her.

  He went to make sure Idleman wasn’t going anywhere before leaving. She hadn’t listened to him. She tried to leave while he was in the other room and passed out while walking to the door, hitting her head again. This time on the hard floor of his exam room. She was unconscious on the floor with another small bleeding wound on her forehead. He checked her over as best he could in his present injured state and she seemed to be fine. He would have to recheck her for a concussion when she woke up, but there was nothing he could do now. He couldn’t even lift her from the floor because of his own injuries he was dealing with. He rolled her onto her side, put pillows under her head and between her knees, and shut the door. Hopefully, she would heed his advice and stay there when she woke up.

  Hopefully, he would be able to make the trip to the top of Homestead IV without passing out himself.

  He left the clinic and limped toward the lift, pressing the button for the highest floor that he could access without special clearance. Nobody would be in the civilian leadership offices this early in the morning, but perhaps there was a way to reach the main ICE offices from below. He had to try.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  From the corridor outside of the Homestead IV Peer Government Offices, he could see in through the slotted windows of the doors leading to each executive office. Exiting the lift, the automatic lights flicked on in the hallway, triggered by his movement. This gave him an idea.

  Moses removed a packet of butterfly clips from his bag. He took the time to flatten out a handful of them as he headed toward the wall of doors. Stopping at the first door, the one that led into President Chen’s office, he knelt down with a groan. As his left knee bent and then contacted the floor, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to get back up again. He could feel his skin split back open painfully. Tiny lights began to flicker throughout his field of vision. He got dizzy, too. He forced his eyes to stay open and focus on a fixed point, then using a finger he flicked a flattened butterfly clip under the door through the five-centimeter clearance.

  He grabbed the doorknob to assist himself back to his feet, the world stopped spinning, and then he made himself look through the slotted window into Chen’s office. His plan worked. The butterfly clip caused enough noise and motion to trigger the room’s lights. He couldn’t see anything from his current vantage point that would help him get into the ICE floors above. Damn. He was sure that the president would have access to the upper levels. If the other offices didn’t pan out with a way upstairs, he would come back to this one and try to get in. There had to be something in there that would help that was not visible from the thin window.

  The next office was Administrator of Accountability. Prival Patel ruled her section with an iron fist, making sure every citizen of Homestead IV contributed significantly to the goals of the facility as well as to the terraforming project overall. Having learned from the last office, Moses adapted his technique to avoid having to kneel. This time he dropped the butterfly clip to the floor and kicked it under the door. It took him a few tries to get it to go through the opening because the spikes on the clip weren’t quite f
lat enough, but he got it through. The lights came on inside revealing a stark office with one chair behind a desk, the walls absent of any pictures or personalization, and nothing else. The top of the desk was bare other than a dim tablet that would no doubt reveal the productivity expectations for each civilian member of the facility and their most recent performance rating. If there had been issues of under-producing in the past, they would assuredly be detailed within as well. He was kind of glad nothing inside looked promising. He had never been in that office and never wanted to be. Even though his only expectation was to keep the general populace well and working, he had not heard nice things about the woman who had the power to force people off of the planet.

  Stumbling over to the next room, the office of the Administrator of Personnel, Moses began making sure that the next clips would be completely flattened out before dropping them. One of the spikes cut into the tip of his index finger, drawing a bead of blood. On top of all of his other pains and injuries, this one somehow annoyed him more than the others. He stopped in his plodding progress to the next door and closed his eyes, focusing on breathing. He sucked at the newest wound and tasted his salty blood. It would not do to lose his temper. He needed to get upstairs. Besides, a tantrum would be counter-productive at the moment. This was probably being recorded on CCTV. He had to maintain composure.

  The Administrator of Personnel was in charge of bringing in new staff once the Administrator of Accountability sent someone away. The rumors speculated that they coordinated on this so that the replacement would already be on the way as the original worker was going back to Earth. The two resupply shuttles often had some overlap so that neither party knew about the other. He couldn’t remember the man’s name who had this position, which was sad considering it was the first person from Mars he had a relationship with. The video chats he shared with the Egyptian man who had hired him were often confusing due to the delay in transmissions, sometimes a few minutes when signals lined up right, and sometimes nearly forty minutes when the signal had to be bounced off of satellites to reach around a planet or moon. He didn’t anticipate any help from this office, and was not surprised when his prediction turned out the be true.

  Only two chances left. The next room was that of the civilian-ICE liaison. A relatively powerless position that effectively just tattled on everything ICE was doing to the Peer Government Board and vice versa. At least, everything that ICE allowed the liaison to know about. In theory, the position was one of information exchange, freely flowing in both directions for the good of the project. It should help to improve coordination between the conglomerate of large businesses and countries that ran the overall terraforming project with the volunteer workforce that labored to meet their goals for a share of the eventual profit. Or in some cases a share in the adventure of making another habitable planet. But in the short time Moses was at Homestead IV, he had seen very little evidence of the streamlining of cooperation.

  As he kicked the clip under the door and the lights came on, he was struck by the status of the room inside. There was a chair on its side, and a man in a dark gray uniform laying on his stomach across the floor. There was a small pool of blood under his head. He was breathing.

  Moses had to get in to the room, and now he had a reasonable medical reason to force entry if he had to. He tried knocking and shouting first. The room remained quiet. He tried the handle, but it was predictably locked. It had been years since he had picked a lock, but it looked like now was the time to resume the practice.

  He removed some tools from his bag as he assessed the lock. Kneeling down again, but careful not to incline his head and lose equilibrium this time, he examined the door. It wouldn’t be a simple hack, but he could get it with time. Time he didn’t have. He dropped the tools back inside and took out his stethoscope. Groaning as he stood back up, he placed the smaller of the two reversible listening discs of the stethoscope against the small window with his right hand. With his left, he reached back as far as he could without upsetting his delicate balance and then brought the palm of his hand rapidly against the stethoscope. The window cracked on the first blow. The stethoscope cracked on the second. With the third, Moses managed to break both the window and his hand. Damn. He wasn’t planning on taking up the guitar anytime soon anyway. He reached through and opened the door from the inside, adding some nice cuts to his right arm from glass shards to his growing collection of injuries.

  He rushed over to the unconscious man on the ground and rolled him over.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  The large muscular man turned out to be the ICE-Homestead liaison officer, an important distinction from the civilian-ICE liaison officer. He provided the same service as the former, but in the opposite direction. He tattled on the civilian government back to ICE administration. This was not his office. A large Hawaiian man named Kamehameha that everyone called Kam, he must be the one who had attacked Moses in the vat rooms. He could match up the marks on his face with the furniture he had thrown the man into. But Moses didn’t hurt him anywhere near enough to do the damage he saw now. How could he have? The clothes on the liaison officer were stretched tight across muscles that made Moses feel like a puny teenager. Who could have pulled off a beating like this on a man who could so easily defeat a few men? This would require stitches and a lengthy recovery time. Moses rubbed his knuckles across Kam’s chest to wake him up.

  With the lights on, he wasn’t quite as intimidating as before. As he opened his eyes, it was plain to see that he wouldn’t be fighting anyone for a while.

  “You’re OK,” said Moses, trying to help dispel the potentially violent disorientation that came with rousing someone who had been beaten unconscious. “I found you lying here and wanted to make sure you were not severely injured. You’re in the liaison office, but not your own. Do you know what happened to you?”

  Kam chuckled to himself after looking at Moses’ injuries. He had obviously just figured out who was down in the labs. “Do you mean what happened to me after you happened to me?” Moses gave a guilty smile in return. “I came back up to report that I took care of the saboteur in the algae labs. Then somebody tasered me from behind.”

  “Took care of me? You mean left me to die in the algae fields?” The other man shook his head gently, wincing with the movement.

  “I didn’t put you in there. I can’t even get in to those rooms. I left you there on the ground so security could come deal with you.”

  Moses sighed. “Interesting.” Of course, more questions and no answers. “Who told you someone was down there, and why were you sent to handle it instead of security?”

  “I volunteer for night duty sometimes because I don’t sleep well. I worked for ICE’s security department back on Earth and have the training, but I moved up in the company to . . .” he paused, finding the right words, “. . .to help monitor the civilian side of things and report back.” Now he was the one with the guilty smile. “I’m a friendly guy, people like to talk to me. But sometimes I just like to work a security shift every now and again. Night is the only shift I qualify for because of my age. But I can still handle myself.”

  “I can attest to that,” Moses said. “I wasn’t down there to sabotage anything. I was investigating a health situation and found the lab a mess.” The death of two personnel was certainly a serious health situation. “Why are you in this office instead of yours? And who sent you after me?”

  Kam shrugged, flinching as Moses cleaned the cuts on the sides and front of his head. Someone had done a number on this man’s head. “The reports come through the system. I don’t know who sends them. It could be that the automated surveillance program self-generates the reports to security. Those cameras know what to look for and when things are going on that would shock you. I’ve stumbled on to more than a few married people but who aren’t married to each other, if you know what I’m saying.” Kam couldn’t stop a self-conscious grin from spreading across his face. “That can be pretty embarrassing. An
d the ICE division is off-limits tonight. Orders from higher up than I am privy to. I just follow ‘em, so they based night-shift security out of this office.”

  “Hmph,” Moses said, already thinking about what the next steps would be. It would be advantageous to stop interrogating him before he figured out he was being interrogated. He wasn’t getting much useful information anyway. This man was obviously not a guilty party in all of this. He was just doing his job. And Moses believed him about not moving him to the deadly algae fields. But then who moved him? It was a letdown to discover his attacker and end up liking the guy. So much for finding the mastermind behind all of the trouble.

  “You rest here for a minute,” he told the injured man, more for reassurance than instruction: he couldn’t get up if he wanted to. The list of people down with head injuries for the night kept growing. As he rose, again grunting through the pain in his knees, hand, feet, and ribs, he heard the man apologize for the beating. He wasn’t ignoring it, but was so focused on getting upstairs that it didn’t register with him.

  As he approached the lift once more, he took out Kam’s ID badge from his pocket. He hadn’t gotten to practice his lock-picking skills, but picking pockets was another old skill that was hard to unlearn. Guess he still had some hidden talents. He hoped the friendly beast of a man would forgive him for taking it when this was all over.

  Chapter 16