Red Zone - 11
A Novel
8
The colonist's town at the other end of the transport tube opened up to a half dome that faced out over a long black sheet of ice, its spiraling supports seeming like flattened trees made of some black wood and trimmed with a low but persistent glow. Globes of light were strung in long strands, hanging pearls in the bitter night. The very polarized light gave everything a pallor cast. This was quite unusual, most lights for a long time had been delicate mixtures of light-emitting ceramics, whose lattice had small glowing diodes cut out of atoms, which combined to produce the desired hues and created a softness. These lights were a brute force, of one kind, and one kind only. There was a slight variation in their emission. He was not sure why they varied, but it seemed to be in time.
He looked out over the dark sheet of ice and saw that it was speckled with lights and movement. Some were moving slowly, in that progress that is telltale of people on foot. Others zipped along, at the speed of vehicles. It was too dark to tell what kind. Some marked places, because they did not move. He didn't understand what the activities were. Farther across the ice, there was the vague sense of a mountain, which he may have been remembering more than seeing since he had often patrolled here. This sheet was the center of southern colonist activity. In its warmed depths grew the krill they ate, and along its polished surface traveled the turbine-powered sleds they drove. Its kemosynthetic pools, deep near vents lasered into the warmer folds of Mars, supplied the basic living energy. It was their field, farm, road, and roof. Under it lived more than two hundred thousand people. Many of them were migrants from the equatorial range. He'd broken up more than a few fights between the under-ice dwellers and the miners. The icers you see made most of the food and charged well for it. The miners resented that prices were higher now than they had been long ago.
And off, very very very far, very far in the very distance, was a huge whirling spinning array of glowing chopping blades. These were the windmills, which caught the breath of Mars: every year when the freeze comes, much of the still thin atmosphere of the planet would freeze at one pole and erupt by sublimation from the other. The old vast sandstorms, were from this process, now far more subdued in the warmer planet. But it was still an enormous power source. Right now, the wind blew towards the ice, and when Antarctic spring came, it would spin, and then establish a pressure north. Those windmills slashed even now, their light smearing across the back of his eye.
He turned to look back at the activity of the dome itself. This terminal was not very important: it connected to the SouthSec command, and from there to the monorail network that was slowly girdling the planet. The more important half or quarter domes were closer to vents and deep mine shafts. He knew across the ice on the other side, at the peak of the mountain, was the magnetic gun that fired cargo and capsules into space. They would then be deflected once far enough up and sent on their long serpentine orbital journeys into Terra or outwards to Jove.
This pleasant sense of the lifeblood of commerce, of a small whirling engine of trade and activity, was rudely broken by shouting.
He turned and looked there was a Martian venting something at the Jovians marine. Tony stood there impassively listening to some harangue about prices and “gas giant gouging.” He saw that Kiesha waved her hand, and two blue-uniformed men pushed the shouting colonists away. Not roughly, but a kind of constant pressure.
She said something to Tony, and then walked towards him, her step light and easy in the very low gravity, he wasn't sure if there was some kind of floating assist on the large platform. The platform itself was a semi-circle of vaguely gray material, with a large semicircle opening into the transit area. This part was the waiting room, assembly point, staging area, observation deck, and resting place. He saw clusters of people engaged in virtually every public activity, talking, arguing, sleeping on bags, pushing loaders, and haggling. He saw two people wandering around selling some kind of shrimp sausage or vegetable pita. It was odd, the amount of focus on money there was here, back on Terra, people seldom spoke of it. You went into the shop you wanted, you asked for what you wanted, and you left. He knew that there were, in fact, all kinds of controls. Most people didn't even know how conditioned they were, or even how much their lives were pushed and adjusted.
It was just that things worked out in certain ways. Most people didn't want what they were not supposed to buy, because they would not fit in with their friends and co-workers. Since all advertising was extremely personal, people simply did not find out about apartments they could not rent, or vehicles for sale they could not buy. And of course, it was extremely rude to reveal your adverts to others. Only a great act of intimacy allowed telling people what you saw that they did not see.
But here, there was the bustle of exchange, notes, coins. It was almost an archaic fetish. They argued, haggled, lusted, dreamed. He could see all of those expressions reflected here. One person over and over again counted out small shiny counters, another feeling slips of polymer that oiled between his fingers, a third constantly checking who had money and going over to strike up a conversation.
They don't use electronic means to transmit credit even. He had the startling realization that they did not want their transactions to be tracked.
Kiesha had reached him, with each step growing to be the center of the focus of his field of view. It was an illusion that gradually the bustle lost focus, color, and became quieter as she came closer, her soft deliberate steps gradually making it seem as if all else was merely a tapestry draped behind her.
“Hello, how are you?” The rolls and lilts of her voice were still a mystery to her, the women he knew from Earth all had a particularly high and scoop tone – very high voice, that dropped down in dips, like a bird skimming for fish over a pond. Hers rested in a secure low spot, and leaped upwards, soaring for a moment and then scooping downward. Her eyes held his.
“As well as can be expected after having passed out on the journey.” He was ashamed but realized that it had been expected. He was not a creature of low air pressure.
“Don't worry about it dear, it wasn't meant for people.”
He took a deep breath in and looked around again.
“It looks like your people are abandoning this place.”
“We don't have long before the infantry comes. They've been around for a while.”
“Another thing they did not bother to tell us.”
“You wouldn't have expected them to tell you.”
“If I were the man, they would have. They would have told me, in case I needed to follow up.”
“By follow-up, you mean to kill.”
“Yes, I suppose I do.”
“Well then, it is better than they didn't.”
“You will have to tell me what they were doing, it wasn't a military mission.”
“Accelerated settlement, and expedited asset recovery.”
He looked out over the sheet of ice, his knees weak his eyes dry, and his tongue warm. There was an uncomfortable bloating in his belly. He realized that the last of the adjusting drugs were ebbing out of his system, and this was going to be normal for some time.
“What do those mean?”
“Accelerated settlement means taking people's homes before they've missed a loan payment. Expedited asset recovery means killing people who are contesting.”
“How can that be legal?”
“It's all got important announcements and seals. It is probably illegal, but that's not important.”
“I still don't understand this obsession with money. At the base, half of the XO's time was spent trying to figure out how to match the Sol, called money we collected with actual needs. We ended up buying things we did not need and bartering them for materials that made program goals. You wanted to pay in money, and they would not take it for anything that mattered.”
“You worry about Liberties all the time. I can't tell you how many times we've had that conversation.”
“That's for my child. It is because my wife and I wanted something exceptional.”
“And being able to retire, that's exceptional?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Dominion has been making it harder and harder to emigrate back home. They won't take requests, people have to stay here.”
“I will tell you truthfully, the econology of this place barely makes any sense. The only reason that people are here at all is that when Mars was settled, mining here got around environmental restrictions, particularly thorium radiation on rare earth. They are on earth, but the cost to deal with the radioactivity was prohibitive.”
“So, what, we are slaves here? Or fools for taking their promises?”
“We need to stop the mining because when Mars is all one hydrosphere, the leakage will be dangerous. Water is more valuable than any rock, once the ecology ignites.”
“That's the other reason for the revolt. Every year the ocean gets closer, and our places to mine get smaller.”
“We have offered jobs running farming.”
“Our ancestors didn't come here to be farmers. It's a poor hard life, and all you do is die.”
“I'm sorry.”
She turned his back on him for a moment. It was meant to convey, he supposed, anger or frustration. All it did was remind him of how much like a flower vase her figure was, round below, tapered in the middle, and then opening like a “V” at the top.
He reached his arms around her. She settled into them.
“That's very brave. What about your wife?”
“I'm an outlaw. I may not have a life, let alone a wife when all of this is over.”
“You can always come here and be with me.”
“I do not know if that is possible.”
“What do you think they will do.”
There was a figure moving through the people who caught Venky's attention, he was in something like a space suit or environmental suit, but it was larger than that.
Keisha stood up straighter.
“I have a message: I've got to go.”
She turned and walked away but was listening to something coming in through an ear plant. It was strange to see that here, among her people, she was a nexus of activity and power. That was not how she was viewed at the base. In his mind, he had understood that she used sex as currency, and the coterie of men and boys that had had her had longed for her or orbited her, was what she bargained her charms for.
It is hard to believe she chose me. I still want to believe it was for convenience, but then, she could have had Sunhil or Maje Kohli.
He again watched her walk away.
Venky nodded and set himself to sorting through what he had managed to hide from the rather poorly done and hasty search, it wasn't substantial, but it included a small hand weapon, a com square, which would fold out to a pyramid for holoprojection, a small toolset, and some rations. No bio-regulation, a prospect which did not enamor the next two days to his imagination.
Organized movement immediately drew his attention.
He could see, about 20m away, that Keisha was clearing people into a circle, and placed a larger projector down. It folded out to a pyramid, sides just visible. The people, men, and women, even children, formed in a circle at the proper distance. Keisha moved around the circle holding her arms out, bent at the elbows, making a pushing movement with her palms up.
An enhanced version of her voice was easily audible.
“This is what happened to the last two people we left behind. It is very bad, but I think everyone should see it.”
With that, she stepped back and out of the projection range. The orderly circle of people paid rapt attention as a white area appeared, it then filled with a scene, visible from all angles. People did not shuffle or try and move into a better place, but he saw slaps of people buying and trading for better places and neat rotations.
The globe filled, and he saw about half again as large life Col, Alpha, but not in formal military, instead, he was wearing basic beiges, a loose-fitting uniform stripped to essentials with a black swoosh down the center trimmed with some kind of nano-strand. Behind him was his XO, and then he could vaguely see the partial features of a third person, who was mainly human in shape, though with impossibly large hands and exaggeratedly large features. His eye picked up the insignia on a flat triangular front of his tunic for a modified hum. A “mod.”
The sound was still off but was rising rapidly.
The voice was instantly recognizable, that of the Black Elephant Colonel.
“Listen sandscum, if you don't start making more sense, I won't just put you in the airlock and play with the pressure. Well drop you in a simulation, and then Obriji here will find pillage.”
There was a slurping noise and a shuddering sob. The words were forced out clearly through lips that were swollen from having been cycled between high and low pressure repeatedly.
“I'm telling you I don't know anything.”
The Colonel glared down.
“Load up the simulation from Kinshasa.”
The XO, with a kind of glee.
“That's the one where we popped the eyes out...”
The Colonel dropped his arm with the palm parallel to the floor, which was for silence.
“Listen sandscum, perhaps you believe you don't know anything, that means I'm just going to have to drain you down so we can sort through it.”
“I'm Terran Norm, thatsss illegal.”
“Don't worry, we'll slosh enough of you back so that it will be alright. But we will need a reference point. A nice sharp traumatic memory to use to anchor it.”
“Thatsss illegal too.” The XO moved behind and out of view, clearly, the holo recorder was on the person they were interrogating.
“It's just calibration. The doctor here will testify that you were in danger of a full meltdown. It will all be legal. So, which is it, you use your own unlock code so we can read some useful memories, or do you want to experience getting skull fucked by a squad of heavies. It is, of course, totally your decision.”
There was a slurping noise, and two hands became visible left, one much larger, and cradling the smaller one. The larger hand rotated, its index finger rotating backward to a prehensile position with the massive thumb. It clamped down on the thumbnail of the smaller hand. And jerked.
There was a distinct movement of the smaller thumbnail. In slow agonizing millimeters, the smaller thumb stretched tight, and then the smaller thumbnail seemed to be growing. A line of blood appeared and slowly filled to a rivulet of red.
The nail pulled free.
A voice off of view asked a mock question.
“Doctor, does this look fungus-infected to you? We need to grow a new one.”
The Doctor came forward, filling the holo center. On his hand, he had a series of tubules and nano-wires, clearly a mini-medical kit of the kind that Venky had seen frequently in addressing the minor scrapes, bumps, and injuries after duty, or during a mission.
The was a very busy movement of the feathery tendrils, it had a sickening resemblance to the movement of a centipede or the feelers of some deep-water arthropod. When it was done, only a minute later, a white crescent was visible on the edge of the injured thumb.
The doctor, in a reedy but utterly unaccented Dominion Standard, cooed in a vaguely reassuring way.
“It will grow back in three or four days if you don't sustain other injuries.”
There was a white puff across the screen. The holo ended abruptly. Venky processed immediately that some kind of self-destruct had been pulled. Whose he did not know.
There was an itching at the back of his skull, and he knew that he should know what it was.
But before he could tell what, he felt a stiff ram shoot up his body, and he collapsed.
9
He opened his eyes, but it was a blink after time, and second, had collided together since last they felt the hard stabs of artificial light. On Terra, light is preternaturally real, piped, and adjusted. Artificial light is reserved for times and places where it is meant to underline it. Such as here, on the South Pole of the Moon, bathed in eternal darkness. Shackleton Crater, the stepping stone to space.
Missing. Missing. Missing. Signal from the base is missing. I wish they would turn the alert down.
He spun around and observed and realized that he was realizing that he had been in a spacesuit.
I am not in this memory properly; it must be a simulation. Or perhaps it is the real memory, as the canopies were. Authenticity seems more elusive with each frame.
He felt his eyes dragged along a survey of walls, spattered with blood, and gobs of flesh. Some of it was human, but the frozen pipes also dripped with cephs.1 He saw several cuts and one octo. They had been mashed by exdecom into the station room and flash frozen.
The temperature read 32 coldly Kelvin. The slush had to be water plus a great deal of some kinds of anti-freeze. Even methane was solid at this temperature.
“Captain, ping?”[1]
“Base, ack.”
“What are you seeing there, all of the other channels are cut off.”
“I am past the airlock, there has been activity in here, but everything is dead. The station is evacuated to less than one-tenth of one atmosphere, and it is,” checking the exact number, “32.12 Kelvin.”
“Roger Captain, that is colder than outside.”
[1] Ping, used to ask if the hearer is live. Ack, for acknowledged.