by Devin Hanson
From the hallway, Jackson heard a hissing clap and one of the men outside staggered and spun around. Jackson caught a glimpse of shredded flesh and misting blood. A shotgun boomed and the man in the room with Jackson spun about and raised his gun toward the doorway.
Without thinking, Jackson threw himself at the back of the man’s knees and tripped him up. They crashed to the ground together. There was a staccato rattle of muted gunfire from down the hallway, then an elbow struck Jackson in the side of the head. Sparks flew through Jackson’s vision and he clung desperately to the man.
Repeated blows against Jackson’s head and arms loosened his grip and the man kicked himself free. Groggily, Jackson pushed himself to his hands and knees. He looked up as the man scrambled to his fallen shotgun and snatched it up. Jackson flinched as the man spun, the shotgun coming up toward Jackson, then the man’s face disappeared in a bloom of bloody gore.
Jackson sagged to the side and threw up. His head throbbed and he struggled after breath. Every gasp seemed laden with the rich iron scent of blood.
Strong fingers closed around Jackson’s arm and rolled him onto his back. Evan leaned over him, his face hard. “You hit, kid?”
A choked sob was all the noise Jackson was able to make. Evan stood up and dashed out into the hallway again. Jackson pushed himself to his knees and threw up again, his stomach cramping. The sour reek of bile mixing with the smell of blood filled his nose.
“Jackson!” Millicent exclaimed.
He felt her warm arms wrap around his shoulders and pull him into her embrace. Distant shouting came through the buzzing in his ears. He realized he was splattered with blood all across his front.
“Are you okay?” Millicent was asked.
Jackson nodded. “I’m okay. The ainlif, are they…?”
“One of them, Edison, I think, caught part of a shotgun blast, but he’ll live.”
“I’m sorry,” Jackson sighed. “I tried to warn them.” He twisted around to look at the dead man and Millicent caught his arm.
“You don’t need to look at that, Jackson.”
He looked anyway and swallowed against the surge of bile in his throat. The man’s head was a soggy mess with no recognizable features and shards of bone sticking out haphazardly. “Holy shit,” he muttered.
“I warned you. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Jackson let Millicent help him to his feet and he stood a little unsteadily. The floor in the hallway was slick with blood pooling from the other three dead men. He averted his eyes from the monomol wounds and let Millicent steer him up the hallway back to the room where the ainlif had been.
One of the ainlif was lying on his back, his shirt torn open. He was bloody from the shoulder down to the waist. Chase was leaning over him with a knife, picking shotgun pellets from flesh and gluing the holes together afterward.
“Your warning was timely,” Chase said without looking up from his patient. “If Edison had been thinking more with his head than the gun in his hand, we would have come out of that cleanly.”
“Your bedside manner is shit, Chase,” Edison grunted. He had his teeth gritted together, but other than the tensing of the muscles in his jaw, he was letting Chase dig around in his flesh without flinching.
“You’re not in a bed, so you’ll have to forgive me.” He teased out another pellet and squeezed a drop of glue into the hole before pinching it shut and holding it for a few seconds. “Either of you two know who our uninvited guests were?”
“Wharton’s men,” Millicent supplied.
“I’ve played back the footage outside the hotel,” a female voice said, “and Chief Nicks is correct. Facial recognition matches them with extras who frequently worked under Chief Wharton.”
“Thanks, Tabitha.” Chase released the hole, verified that it had stopped bleeding, then went to work on another pellet. Edison gritted his teeth and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.
“Dennison wishes me to inform you that the hotel is secure. Serina is missing from her desk.”
Chase nodded absently.
“Who… what?” Jackson asked Millicent.
“An AI,” Millicent replied quietly and gestured for him to be quiet.
“Well, secure or not, we can’t stay here any longer.” Chase paused, his tongue between his teeth as he dug the point of his knife deeper into Chase’s shoulder. “The jig’s up. It won’t take Wharton long to send more men.”
“Call Habitat Security, they could—” Millicent began.
“Negative, Chief,” Edison shook his head. “At this point there isn’t anyone on this habitat we can trust.”
“Stop moving,” Chase said irritably. “Don’t make me sedate you. What Edison is trying to say, is Habitat Security might be compromised. I think you’ve proven your trustworthiness.”
“We don’t know that—ow!”
“Sorry.” Chase flicked the pellet away and glued the hole. “Almost done. If young Harding hadn’t warned us, some of us could be dead, not just winged and cranky.”
Edison muttered something under his breath.
“You owe Jackson your life,” Chase said calmly. “He’s proven his sincerity.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Edison said sourly. “All right. Fine. Thanks, kid. You did good out there.”
Jackson nodded mutely. He still felt shocked from the suddenness of the violence. He had acted on instinct, the same way he had out on the surface when Tristan had been struck by lightning and he had to act swiftly to save Polder. There wasn’t any heroism there, whatever Chase and Edison seemed to think.
He felt exhausted. It was getting late and all he wanted to do was go to bed. He didn’t want to have anything to do with Wharton and the war he was picking with the matriarchs. He just wanted to do his daily work and do what he could to make a better life for himself. He had his own room, or at least he was sharing it with only one other person. He was making credits, and work was challenging and interesting.
The upheaval Wharton was striving for threatened all of that. That didn’t make the looming threat of overpopulation any less real, but Jackson’s overwhelming instinct was to ignore the problem and hope it would go away.
Chase finished pulling pellets from Edison’s side and smeared disinfectant from a packet onto the wounds. Stiffly, Edison got to his feet and helped Chase wind a bandage around his chest and shoulder.
Dennison returned and he slumped into a chair. “How are you doing, Edison?”
“Chase patched me up. I’ll live, but I’ve lost a lot of mobility in my right side.”
“Shit.” Dennison scratched at a dry smear of blood across the back of one hand. “I suppose we should be grateful these homemade shotguns don’t have a tighter grouping. I just don’t understand how they could get away with making them in the first place. Maybe one of you natives could help fill me in?”
Millicent shook her head. “Extras have access to more than enough fabrication tools to make weapons.”
“So, these extras are armed, now?” Edison asked, frustrated. “We’ve lost the initiative.”
“How many guns could they have?” Chase asked.
“I’ve never tried to make one myself, but if they’ve a simple enough fabrication line, they could have dozens by now.”
“They’ve the motivation to produce them quickly.” Dennison brooded for a moment then wearily pushed himself to his feet. “Okay. Millicent, Jackson, thank you for your assistance. There’s no point in keeping you here any longer. You can’t go running to Wharton with what you know since we’re leaving.” He sighed and held up his hands. “That wasn’t fair. You’ve proven yourselves to be reliable.”
Chase got his tablet out and sent Jackson and Millicent his contact information. “If you learn anything that could be of use to us, I hope you will keep being as helpful as you have been so far.”
“If I learn anything, and it is safe to send it to you, I will do so,” Millicent promised.
Jackson nodded his agreement. He coul
dn’t believe the ainlif were just letting them leave.
“We’d appreciate it,” Dennison said seriously. “Tabitha, let the others know I’m sending our conscripts home.”
“It’s been done, Dennison,” Tabitha said smoothly.
“Well, that’s it.” Dennison shook Millicent’s hand and clapped Jackson on the shoulder. “Take care of yourselves. Stay away from the Basement, if you know what’s good for you.”
Jackson followed Millicent out of the room. The hallway had been cleared of bodies, but the smears of blood were still in evidence. Millicent took his hand and hurried out of the hotel, nodding at Evan as they passed him in the lobby. She didn’t slow her rapid pace until they had reached the lifts and they were alone inside.
“I’m going to take a vacation,” Millicent said once they doors had slid shut. “I’m taking Sari, and I’m getting off this habitat immediately. I strongly suggest you do the same.”
Jackson swallowed. If he stopped working, then when rent was due on his room, he wouldn’t have the credits to pay for it. That meant he’d be back in the community bunks until he saved up some credits again. Still, as much as it hurt to abandon his recently acquired stuff, it was better to repurchase it than get caught up in the madness Wharton was bringing to the habitat.
“Yeah. I might just do that.”
Millicent got off the lift on her level and waved. “Once this blows over, I’ll be back at work. Look me up and I’ll put you on my crew.”
“Thanks, Chief. I… thanks.”
Millicent waved once more and the doors slid shut again. Jackson leaned back against the wall of the lift and started thinking about where he would go. He had never even considered leaving Nueva Angela. Maybe he could take a trip to Horizon. He had always wanted to see the spaceport there.
He had some credits, enough to buy passage on a dirigible and live for a week or two if he was frugal. The lift doors pinged open on his level and he hurried toward his rooms. Every step he took, the thought of leaving this madness behind grew on him until he was all but running. Whatever the price he had to pay, it would be worth it.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
The habitats on Venus are not perfectly sealed ecosystems. Part of the problem in creating a true sealed environment is the amount of space required per person. The nitrogen cycle is the limiting factor, which can only be brute-forced through engineering and technology to a certain extent. On the mega-habs, with their crushing burden of population, this factor is the bottleneck that eventually will lead to the deaths of a sizeable percentage of the population.
Food is produced, through yeast crops, vegetative growth, and animal protein in the form of fish. That food is eaten by the human population. The waste material—plant stems and roots, fish offal, human waste, et cetera—is ground to a homogenous paste and sterilized, then fed to vast cultures of black soldier fly larvae. BSF larvae convert nearly eighty percent of the waste to usable protein, with the remaining twenty percent left over as compost. The larvae are harvested, processed into pellets, and fed back to the fish. The frass compost left over from the larvae is used to grow rooted crops, and thus the cycle continues.
The only inputs to the system are water, electrolyzed from sulfuric acid rain, and sunlight. Necessarily, then, growth at the top of the food chain is limited by the photosynthesis of the plants. Because there is an enormous number of habitats, the burden of the mega-habs is spread out among those habitats that export food and import compost, such as New Galway. Truly self-contained habitats are spacious and apparently underpopulated out of necessity.
Leila signed out of her workstation and wearily rubbed at her eyes. She had only been on the job one day, and the amount of work she had to do was staggering. The issue with the tilapia being reared in the grow beds was only a microcosm of what was wrong with the Health and Habitat Sector.
At every turn, shortcuts had been implemented and systems had been allowed to fall out of use. It was a miracle that H&H was able to feed the habitat at all, and there was a white-knuckled desperation about the place. In truth, the whole habitat was one disaster away from mass starvation.
She wasn’t the only person to see it, of course. Her new crew chief, Olan, was aware of the looming catastrophe, he just didn’t have the knowledge or experience to implement a fix to the system. Every problem hinged on the disrupted systems adjacent.
For example, taking the grow bed offline so the tilapia could be removed from it would interrupt the precarious balance of the farm outputs. Not to mention that the aquaculture tanks were in disrepair and there was no place to put the tilapia.
Already Leila was beginning to feel the anger of the section managers. They had become so entrenched in the need to produce the next day’s food that they viewed any interruption to the current state of affairs as nearly treasonous. And all the while, the food output went downward and the demands of the population grew.
It had taken Leila the entirety of the first shift to begin to understand the state of affairs. With Chief Olan at her side, browbeating people into cooperation, she had made a tour of the whole H&H sector and walked the lines from waste processing all the way to harvest and preparation.
There were manuals to be read and courses that could be taken to understand the nuances of every system, but Leila wasn’t a specialist. Her primary qualification was extensive experience in a system that functioned correctly. Her mother, and a few other matriarchs, might have the breadth of knowledge to understand every facet of H&H, but Leila couldn’t go to them for help.
After the tour, she had sat down at the terminal and proceeded to work up a step-by-step plan on how to go about restoring the sector to it’s proper functioning. If every system was working as intended, the amount of food the sector could produce would practically double.
Now, at the end of her second shift in a row, she had the beginnings of a plan. Tomorrow, she could pitch it to the section managers and begin requisitioning the manpower and materials to begin repairs. She had to start at the beginning of the cycle. Without the aquaculture tanks in full working order, nothing else could be fixed.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten in nearly eight hours. Even the prospect of finding nothing but yeast and vegetables didn’t turn her stomach. She knew how little fish were being harvested daily. It was a minor miracle that the textured yeast “fish” even smelled like fish at all.
She left the cubicle Olan had left her in and wandered out into the managerial offices. It was the end of the third shift, nearing midnight, and the office space was all but abandoned. The first shift was a period of darkness to allow the plants time to respire, and only a skeleton crew kept watch.
Leila made her way out of H&H, walking between rows of plants rustling in the ventilation drafts, using her tablet light to guide her. It was peaceful. It was, she realized, the first time she had been completely alone since arriving on Nueva Angela.
A sudden sob jerked from her throat and her steps dragged to a halt. The whole day, concentration on her work had driven thoughts of New Galway from her head. But now, among the grow beds, listening to the soft susurrus of flowing water and the whisper of leaves rubbing against each other, her loss came crashing back.
Tears tracked down her cheeks leaving cold patches and she stared about at the gently waving plants suddenly unable to recognize her surroundings. Was this her future? Was she going to spend the rest of her life working here?
It was a big responsibility, and the work was fulfilling… but compared to the eternity that she had lost, it didn’t seem worth the effort of trying. What would her life mean? Sixty years of unremarked labor, then ground up and fed to the maggots so the precious nutrients locked up in her body wouldn’t go to waste.
Bobbing lights and approaching voices dragged her thoughts back to the present and she scrubbed her hands across her cheeks. She pressed against the side of the grow bed and made way for the workers as they passed. They looked at her curi
ously but without comment, and she ducked her head, ashamed of the tears still pooling in her eyes.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her how hungry she was, and she reluctantly followed the workers at a distance. Though she couldn’t follow the conversation of the two workers, she could hear the laughter and light-heartedness of the banter between the two.
When was the last time she had laughed? Probably only a few days ago, but she couldn’t bring a specific instance to mind. Turning her thoughts back to her life before the Challenge was agonizing and her mind reflexively blanked out the memories.
She stumbled through the humidity lock and winced in the sudden bright light of the hallway. She felt disoriented, lost in how massive Nueva Angela was. New Galway had a displacement mass nearly fifteen times smaller than her new home, but that was a deceptive figure. Stack A in Nueva Angela was almost two kilometers tall, and even the ring stacks, while smaller than the central column, were still double the size of New Galway.
That was the displacement mass. New Galway had a preponderance of heavy water tanks that took up most of its mass, while the vast majority of Nueva Angela’s mass was devoted to living space. Nearly thirty percent of Nueva Angela’s mass was dedicated to H&H, but the remaining seventy percent was a vast and confusing maze of hallways and rooms.
She fumbled out her tablet and found the path back to her new quarters. She felt a brief flash of guilt that she hadn’t tried to contact her new roommate since turning down his offer of lunch. Jackson was the only person who had made any attempt to be friendly with her since the Challenge.
Maybe Jackson was still awake and would be interested in getting food. If she had to live with a roommate, she’d prefer to be on good terms with him. Ignoring for now the ache of her stomach, she set out for her room.
When she finally walked into her room, it didn’t feel like coming home. It was the right room, but the space had no emotional attachment for her. The room was dark when she entered and she waved her tablet light around, wary of waking Jackson. She needn’t have bothered. Jackson’s bed was still folded up, the room as empty as her future.
