by Patty Jansen
The other person in the picture she knew was also related to that group of friends. While she and Thalia had muddled through lists of boyfriends, Paul Armitage had always been with Kat.
When they had all recovered from that terrible accident and were slowly leaving the permanent care of the hospital to the less-permanent situation of many recurring hospital visits, he had asked her to marry him.
Jaykadia had attended the wedding in a wheelchair.
But the accident had changed all of them and as far as she knew Kat had become quite closed. She didn’t think she had divorced her husband, but her job in the military had definitely taken her away from him.
So now Paul was part of this delegation that was going to investigate the military record of its treatment of lower-ranked officers. He was an interesting addition to that group. What if he had to investigate his wife—or perhaps ex-wife? Although she had lost contact with Kat, she assumed she was still in the military.
Jaykadia had always thought Paul was strange. He was moody and prone to outbursts of anger. But he also cared deeply for people around him. She remembered joking about how he followed Kat like a doggy. After the accident, though, he had spent as much his time as he could in the hospital sitting next to her bed and later helping her in the gym regain her strength and she had felt stupid for making that comment.
Her own family only visited sporadically and much of her recovery from having the bones in both her legs shattered came through her own efforts.
Being an executive officer of a commercial company was lonely, and she missed her friends.
Chapter 2
* * *
MAJOR DORIC CHARGED out the door.
Fabio heaved his duffel onto his shoulder and scurried out after her, drawing curious glances from the troops still waiting outside.
The major set off through the warren of corridors at a pace Fabio had trouble keeping up with. He felt sick and dizzy. His head hurt. The air was so sharp and dry that it stung the inside of his nose. He was on the verge of asking her to slow down, but another memory flashed through his mind.
He was in a classroom with wooden chairs and tables. Children were standing around him. One in particular was a big boy with a round head atop a thick and short neck. He who shouted, Boys don’t do that. You’re such a girl.
Fabio, in the body of his ten-year-old self, got up and punched the boy in the face. There was a moment in which the bully stiffened, looking shocked. Glistening red blood welled in his left nostril and ran down his upper lip. The boy wiped it with the back of his hand, looked at it, and started crying. The teacher ran into the room, because she had been called away. She dragged Fabio into the corridor and yelled at him. He had to stay there, and couldn’t come back into the classroom and she kept yelling about how bad he was that it got kind of boring—he remembered the sun coming in through the windows. After the teacher had left him alone in the corridor, he sat down, leaning with his back against the wall and stared at a bird wheeling in the blue sky outside.
A bird, in blue sky.
He remembered thinking that he wished he were a bird and would fly away as soon as he could, and none of these dreadful people would be able to stop him.
And somehow that memory gave him the strength to quicken his pace, to look at the sterile linoleum floor moving under his feet, to follow the shadow of Katarina Doric.
Doubt still niggled. Where was the school and what was he doing that attracted the ire of the bully? A worrying thought: were the memories even his?
Major Doric led him into the same huge hall where he had arrived off the troop transport bus from the landing pad. The tube where he had first entered the base still showed the in use lights, and he presumed the caterpillar bus in which he’d come from the shuttle still sat on the other end. The hall was full of activity from unloading the freight that had come on the same shuttle. A conveyor belt disgorged blue plastic-wrapped parcels out of an access tube. A couple of troops were stacking these onto a trolley. The air was cold here, and being moved around by huge dust-caked fans.
Above him rose the inner ceiling of the dome, with metal struts dripping rusty condensed water from rust-tinged icicles. The concrete below was stained with orange patches.
Two things he knew about Io, from half-remembered pages in a guide. The bases there had never boasted much of a civilian population, because radiation restricted life to the inside of depressing domes, even more than in other places: Ganymede, Europa, Mars. That last name kept popping up in his memory.
Secondly, apart from radiation, machines suffered a lot of wear and tear from volcanic dust and the abundance of salt that formed droplets as soon as a vehicle came in contact with air containing traces of water. All this was made worse by sulphur dioxide snow that vehicles and troops carried into the airlock and that sublimated as soon as the temperature rose, and formed sulphuric acid with the humidity in the air and compounded problems with rust. There, he remembered that. Maybe he had been here before.
When traversing the hall, he became aware of raised voices. A group of Space Corps troops surrounded a couple of people who had, by the looks of the open access tube behind them, just come in from a transport that was not the ISF shuttle that had brought Fabio here. They were not ISF military either. The three men and one woman wore civilian clothes, quite garishly colourful ones, too, especially the tallest of them, a broad-shouldered man dressed in a bright-blue trench coat and yellow trousers. His head was shaven and his skin possibly the blackest Fabio remembered seeing. Another was a blond-haired man, dressed in reds and whites with a fringed shawl, a vest over a wide-sleeved shirt and patterned trousers.
One of the Space Corps troops had opened a travel bag, spilling clothes and personal items over a table. The dark-haired young man, who Fabio presumed was the bag’s owner, was speaking to a Corporal, a defensive expression on his face.
“What’s going on there?” Fabio asked the major. “Do you have civilians on this base?”
“Council Of Four representatives,” she said, and a tone of distaste coloured her voice.
Council of Four, he remembered, were the civilian populations of the four Jovian moons and their mining operations, commercial concerns owned by a couple of powerful civilian families, the Hasegawas and the Laws and the Mesouaras. Io was a nominal member, lacking a civilian population.
“Why the fracas?”
“The Council Of Four has pushed through regulations that allow delegations to visit any settlement in any of the signatory members’ territories. They made it a condition for use of the Galilean sling. Banparra signed it.”
That would be Commander Banparra of Calico Base. He remembered that, too.
He said, “I’m guessing you don’t agree?”
She gave him such a vicious look that he quickly added, “Ma’am.”
“Calico and Prometheus are both military bases and no one has any say on who comes or goes here except Sarajevo.” Headquarters, again. He understood the nervous looks at the Sarajevo tag on his shirt. “So, no, I don’t agree. Banparra acted outside his authority when he signed. A lot of people are angry about that.”
The young man was still arguing with the soldiers. They had found a small bag in his luggage, and whatever was inside was cause for argument.
Major Doric strode towards another airlock tube and thumbed the panel on the wall. It flashed small yellow lights and a thick metal plate hissed open. When the gap had grown wide enough, Fabio could see into the interior of what looked like another caterpillar truck.
“Where are we going?”
“The Research base is at the Stick Farm.”
Whatever that was. He followed her into the tube, a rigid but flexible accessway about ten metres long. Most of it was unlit, save for a single light on the ceiling at the point where it met the open door of the vehicle.
“Across the surface is the easiest access to the base. There’s an underground train, but the air quality in the tunnel isn’t maintained to sta
ndard and is used only for goods.” Her voice sounded oddly muffled in the tube.
The truck’s cabin had room for a driver and six passengers. The front and surrounding viewscreens were still black and empty, but when Major Doric turned on the power on the door panel, the front viewscreen came alive, showing the outer wall of the dome and a section of the yellow, dusty plain dotted with blinking lights, which Fabio assumed were for landing shuttles. The truck stood in the ink-black shadow of the dome, but the sun was about to come around, and lit a section of the dome, showing its copper-coloured hue.
Major Doric shut both outer and inner doors and waved Fabio into the front passenger seat. Then she slid behind the controls and put on a pair of headphones. While she spoke to the base traffic control, she started the engine.
Fabio looked around. It looked like she had come here just to pick him up. According to his experience, everyone in the settlements was always trying to save resources. She wouldn’t have come here just for him if it wasn’t important. He must be important. He had no idea why. Really, what was he to her, for her to come barging into a medical examination, to put up special instructions about his treatment and come and rescue him when they got it wrong? She was angry about it, too.
Panic closed on him again. Since introducing herself, she hadn’t said a single word about who she was and why he was here.
He eyed her while she went through the motions of starting up the truck. There was something familiar about her actions. Check fuel, check air pressure in the tanks, check power, check batteries. He must have done this before, and he tried to think where that would have been. The air tube disconnected with a hiss.
The truck inched forwards, ploughing through yellow dust. She turned the wheel to bring it around. The yellow landscape scrolled sideways over the viewscreen. There was the caterpillar bus that had brought Fabio and the other passengers from the shuttle. A truck waited to be assigned to an airlock, its headlights a brief flash over the screen.
A path made of latticed rubbery-looking mats led away from the dome. Once the wheels of the truck had hit the hard surface, it picked up speed. For a while, the truck rumbled along the path. The latticed surface made the truck vibrate, which produced a resonating hum that made Fabio’s teeth ache. The dome of the base receded behind them and, occasionally, when they crested a ridge, disappeared from view.
“I want you to understand one thing, and one thing only,” Major Doric said.
“Ma’am. . . ?”
“As long as you’re on this base, I am your commanding officer. You will take your orders from me. Not from Banparra or anyone else on this base. Especially not from those clowns in the med unit, or quarantine officers. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Also, understand that it’s highly likely that those people I just mentioned don’t like you being here. They are likely to force you to submit to useless bureaucratic procedures if they get half the chance. They will try to find a way to get you off the base. I’m sure you can imagine many ways in which they could do that.”
“I think so, ma’am.” Anyone only needed to test his blood for nanometrics and his position would be history.
“Good. Therefore, you will not leave the research base without my express permission. You will not speak to anyone off-base by any means.”
“What about within the base?”
“Within the base, they’re all research branch. Our people. However. Your project is on a need-to-know basis only and you are not free to discuss the details with anyone else. I guess that concept isn’t strange to you either.”
“I think you’re right, ma’am.”
“Now, you’re free to speak. Am I right in guessing that you have brought instructions for me?”
“Instructions?”
She frowned at him. “A message?”
“Who from?”
Then her expression became guarded. “Sanchez sent you, right?”
“He did.” He thought so, anyway.
“He didn’t give you a personal message?”
“Um—no. Not that I know.”
“What about something you don’t know?”
“Well, in that case I don’t know . . . um . . . ma’am.”
She gave him an angry stare, and returned her attention to the road, muttering imbecile which seemed a word that she loved very much. She breathed out hard through flaring nostrils. A tense silence followed.
“All right, let’s try this again. My information says that you’re from the rehabilitation program. You were caught embedded in enemy forces when ISF overran the Mars Civilian Army and the freehold revolutionaries, who are known to be a front for Allion. It says no one was sure of your loyalty, so they removed your service implants and wiped you clean. But insiders know that you work for Sanchez directly. Now, where or how would Sanchez have given you a message for me?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. He didn’t say anything about it.”
“The fuck he wouldn’t have. In your current state, you’re about as trustworthy as a poodle for a watchdog. Someone feeds you and you follow.”
“Well, I don’t know about a message. I can’t make any messages appear where there aren’t any.”
She snorted. “We’ll see about that.” And a bit later, she added, “Are you always this coherent?”
“Er . . . tired, I guess.” He had learned on the interplanetary that tired was always a good excuse for anything. Most people on the ship were tired most of the time. Tired got you sent off to the gym, which was a place where people did things, rather than talked about things. Doing suited him fine. It was the talking that got under his skin.
An uneasy silence hung between them. He wanted to say, I’m unarmed and not dangerous but that was probably not a good idea. Maybe she had been desperate for news. Maybe this was someone’s way of giving her the finger. We’re sending you someone, but he’s not going to be able to tell you anything. Maybe the information she wanted was buried somewhere inside him in a secret implant that no one had been able to find.
The engine hummed and thumped. The surface was uneven and she drove at a speed that made him sway in his seat. Her hands held the wheel in a white-knuckled grip. The truck’s headlights spread their glow, lighting a section of road ahead.
They were plodding through a parched desert of yellows and greens, soft-looking dunes with the occasional rocky outcrop. The road had started climbing up a ridge a while ago. They had left the rubbery latticed surface behind and were now on a path that appeared to have been spray-painted black. Every now and then there was a post at the side of the road with an orange light on top. When the truck faced the right way, the front viewscreen showed this snaking path zigzagging up the side of a huge jagged mountain. As the truck climbed, the plain on the left gave way to a ravine with black rock at the bottom. If he squinted, he thought he could see the glow of orange.
“Is that lava?”
“Yup. We call it the pit of hell.”
“And where is the Research base?”
“At the very top. Don’t you see the sticks yet?”
Fabio squinted, but didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for. All that messing with his implants had affected his eyesight, but he’d been too afraid to say anything about it. Any undeserved special considerations got you last pick on the shit jobs.
Around a sharp hairpin bend, they came up behind a slow vehicle crawling uphill. It was a huge square thing, and a spray of dust came from underneath.
The truck dropped a few gears as she overtook it.
“What are they doing?”
“It. It’s a robot. It’s reapplying adhesive. Resurfacing. The surface sediment is mainly volcanic ejecta, a lot of sulphur. It’s loose as hell, unstable, bad for trucks and incredible fun to get bogged in, because it gets into everything and fucks up all equipment. So we spray a layer of foam to hold the surface together, to stop it subsiding in the case of earthquakes. You may have noticed the ridges back on the valley
floor. They were the earthquake shield rings. With all the volcanic activity, we have to keep cleaning and resurfacing every six months. This place is continuously being turned inside out.”
She paused while steering the truck around another sharp hairpin bend.
“Crap falls from the sky all the time. There are bots cleaning the dome all the time, but it still sinks at a rate of a centimetre a year, because the surrounding area is also being covered.”
“So, in this hideously, dangerously volcanic place, we’re going up the top of a very tall mountain.”
“That does sound stupid, but you’re going to have to readjust your understanding a bit. Io is ass-backwards. The mountains are uplifted parts of the crust. They’re always next to cracks. Lava pits are in the cracks.”
“Pele is not like that.” He was proud of having remembered the name of the largest active volcano in the solar system.
“No. Pele is a class all of its own.”
Whatever had happened to him, whatever they had done to him on the interplanetary ship and whatever rehabilitation program he had attended before that, it hadn’t affected his factual knowledge. It had just affected his recent memory. And that made him wonder what was on that implant that had been removed and why he had the nanometrics.
Rehabilitation. He hung onto that word. Picked up with the revolutionaries. Sanchez. Mars.
He remembered he’d gone into the hospital, but remembered nothing except vague flashes just before the operation, something in the back of his head. He’d woken up face down on the bed in a lot of pain, on the interplanetary ship. Everything before that was a blur. He didn’t have the scars of being involved in an accident. He didn’t know if he’d been sick—
The wheeling bird in the blue sky.
Brown fields of waving grass, soft undulating hills, like the hills of Io outside the truck. Probably less high, and less jagged at the edges. And the sky was blue, not dark grey. The grass was brown, not dirty yellow.
