Europa Deep, page 10
Javier regarded her for a long moment, his gaze unflinching. “I don’t consider myself the greatest judge of character,” he said, more quietly, “but I know when someone’s hiding something from me.”
“I want to find Chris,” said Cassie. She drew in an unsteady breath. “Or at least find out how he died. If you want a reason for me to be here, that’s it.”
Javier looked surprised, as if this hadn’t occurred to him. His expression softened. “Well, that I can understand. But let me be very clear: if I see any sign, or have any reason to think you might endanger yourself or anyone else on the crew, you’ll go back into cryo until we get home and fuck the consequences. Understood?”
With that, Javier pushed away from the console and launched himself out of the deck entrance. Makwetu, who had been hovering just outside, ducked out of his way. She turned to look at Cassie with a concerned expression, but Cassie just shook her head.
Idiot, Cassie chastised herself. She should have known something like this would happen.
“I wasn’t listening in, I swear,” said Makwetu as Cassie went to join her.
“You hear much?” Cassie asked tiredly.
“Some,” Makwetu admitted. “He…”
“Really hates me,” said Cassie, nodding. She sighed, working her head from side to side. Tension had built up in her muscles over the hours since being pulled out of cryo. “Perhaps he’s right,” she added despondently. “I’m starting to feel like it’d have been better if I’d just stayed at home.”
“Actually,” said Makwetu, “being out here might be about the best place you could be.”
Cassie peered at her and wondered what she was getting at. “Why?”
“First, go see Haunani,” said Makwetu, without further explanation. “Once you’re done, I could use your help in the Farm.”
“Ernest mentioned that. What is it?”
Makwetu’s mouth quirked slightly. “The hydroponics bay, of course. But as soon as you get the chance, you ought to catch up on what’s been going on back home during our outbound voyage. You’ve got about three years of news waiting for you.”
The skin on the back of Cassie’s neck prickled. “Good or bad?”
Makwetu’s expression was tinged with sadness. “Is it ever really good?”
Cassie supposed she had a point.
Haunani took blood and saliva samples and gave Cassie a second shot, explaining that she would need weekly boosters from this point on. That done, Cassie made her way to the hydroponics bay, where vegetables and other fresh produce grew beneath UV arrays.
For the next few hours, she and Makwetu tended to the soil-free crops. She thought of asking Makwetu what she had meant, about being better off where she was than back home, but something made her hold back. Makwetu herself offered no further elaboration, perhaps waiting for Cassie to ask.
She learned soon enough when she returned to her bunk some hours later. For the next several hours, she sat with her back pressed to the wall of her bunk, scrolling through years of backed-up media that had been transmitted to the Veles since leaving Earth orbit.
Things were indeed not looking good at all for Opts, judging by what she read. There were more Opt refugees fleeing oppressive regimes than ever before—people whose parents had hoped to give them an immense advantage in improved health, intelligence and lifespan, and who instead wound up hunted and, sometimes, killed. Even in those countries where Opts weren’t actively repressed, they still faced discrimination, precisely because of what was considered to be their unfair advantage.
In one case that caught Cassie’s eye, three Opts had been murdered by a gunman in a hotel lobby. The gunman, like the deckhand on the Deep Range, had been convinced Opts were responsible for his daughter’s death from neo-atonic syndrome—or the Whispers, as it was better known.
To her surprise—and deep concern—the news from the New Chinese Republic was just as bad. They’d reversed earlier pro-Opt legislation—legislation that had persuaded Tingshao to move there—in favour of actively discriminating against them.
Was Tingshao still in the NCR’s space industry, she wondered? Or had he, as many apparently had, been forced out by political pressure?
Yet despite widespread oppression and even internment, it seemed the NCR was still employing Opt astronauts in space and in their lunar colonies.
It didn’t make sense. But maybe they needed them badly enough off-world they were willing to turn a blind eye.
Tingshao had spent a lot of time up on the Moon. Maybe he’d found himself a permanent rotation up there, knowing that there, at least, he might be safe.
Or so she hoped, anyway. Not that she should really have been so surprised—she herself, after all, had very nearly been murdered by an Opt-hating maniac when she’d still only been a child.
And if not for Chris, he might have succeeded.
Fatigue washed over her. Yawning, Cassie moved to turn off the flimsy, then saw the message icon still blinking.
She’d forgotten all about it. Opening it, she read—
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: CASSIE. YOU’RE IN DANGER.
SOMEONE TRIED TO KILL YOU BY SABOTAGING YOUR CRYO POD.
REPLY IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE. BUT PLEASE DON’T SHARE THIS MESSAGE WITH ANYONE.
For a long, long moment, Cassie stared, mute, at the message.
Was this somebody’s idea of a joke? Who the hell would send a message like this?
She stared at the words as if they might spontaneously reorganise themselves into something less threatening or bizarre. Yet no matter how many times she re-read them, they spelled out the same message.
A few taps on the screen revealed there was no way to identify whomever had sent the message, although a date stamp showed it had been sent midway through the second-last maintenance shift of the outbound journey.
A moment’s searching brought up the original crew schedules. Each member of the crew was required to work two four-and-a-half month long shifts on the outbound journey, and the same again on the return journey.
Javier and Doctor Haunani had shared the first shift, followed by Agents Braemar and Holland. Then came Evan Harrow and Anton Lebed.
After that, it should have been her and Daphne Makwetu, but Javier had left her on ice and worked the shift with Makwetu instead.
Similarly, Cassie should have worked the second-last shift with Harrow. Instead, Javier left them both on ice, working that shift entirely on his own—the same period of time during which someone had sent her this message.
For a moment, she thought of going to find Javier to ask him if he’d sent the message. But if he’d wanted to warn her of something, why not bring it up earlier, when they’d been alone together on the command deck?
No, she thought: Javier hadn’t exactly made a secret of his dislike of her. If anyone had a motive to kill her, he surely did.
The back of Cassie’s neck prickled at a memory: Ketteridge had warned someone else on the mission might be after the same information she’d been sent to find.
Was it possible, she wondered, that someone on the crew knew why she was on the Veles—and wanted to get rid of her?
Christ, she thought: could the message be from Ketteridge?
For long seconds, she regarded the message with indecision. Then she typed:
CASSIE: WHO ARE YOU?
The reply came within seconds. It couldn’t possibly be Ketteridge: he was over thirty light-minutes away.
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: A FRIEND.
Cassie typed again.
CASSIE: I SWEAR TO GOD, IF THIS IS SOMEONE’S IDEA OF A JOKE AND I FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE, YOU’D BETTER WATCH YOUR BACK. THE SHIP ISN’T THAT BIG.
Several moments passed, long enough for other possibilities to occur to Cassie. Could this be someone on board one of the Chinese ships? Was that possible, despite the signals jamming?
A reply flashed up on the screen.
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: NO JOKE.
Suddenly, Cassie’s mouth felt very, very dry.
CASSIE: WHY SHOULDN’T I TELL COMMANDER JAVIER ABOUT THIS?
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: BECAUSE HE’S THE ONLY ONE WHO WAS AWAKE WHEN IT HAPPENED.
Well, fuck, thought Cassie. She typed again.
CASSIE: CAN YOU PROVE ANY OF THIS?
A second passed, then another, then more text appeared:
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: I CAN. BUT ONLY TO YOU.
Cassie typed again.
CASSIE: WHY WOULD ERNEST OR ANYONE ELSE WANT TO HURT ME? WHY WON’T YOU TELL ME WHO YOU ARE?
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: THE SABOTAGE DIDN’T JUST AFFECT YOU, CASSIE. WHETHER IT WAS JAVIER OR SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE INFECTED FIVE OUT OF EIGHT CRYOGENIC PODS ON BOARD WITH MILITARY-GRADE MALWARE.
I SAID I CAN PROVE IT. GIVE ME A CHANCE TO. BUT YOU MUST TELL NO ONE OF THIS.
The message scrolled up, and an icon for a video file appeared on the flimsy’s screen.
Cassie hesitated, suddenly nervous, then tapped the icon. She listened to the thudding of her heart as video from inside the cryonics bay played on her flimsy.
It was immediately evident what she was seeing had been recorded through the lens of a flying monkey’s camera. The video had a date stamp in one corner, and an alphanumeric sequence identifying which flying monkey had been used to make the recording.
The video showed the curved lids of the cryo pods arranged around the tight inner circumference of the cryogenics bay. The viewpoint moved towards a console screen.
Cassie momentarily glimpsed the monkey’s reflection in the screen, which was otherwise dominated by a flashing red symbol. Text beneath the symbol warned of imminent catastrophic failure in five out of eight pods.
Ice-water flooded Cassie’s veins. If Javier was the only one awake at the time, then had he lost his mind and set out to kill his crew?
Cassie typed another reply. It took longer this time, because by now her hands were shaking.
CASSIE: YOU NEED TO TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW, INCLUDING WHO YOU ARE. WHY ARE YOU HIDING? WHY ARE WE STILL HERE, IF SOMEONE SABOTAGED FIVE OF THE PODS?
No answer.
CASSIE: ARE YOU STILL THERE?
She waited for most of a minute. Still nothing.
“Fuck,” Cassie muttered under her breath. She slammed one fist into the roof of her bunk, then started typing again.
CASSIE: I’ll MAKE YOUR LIFE MISERABLE AS HELL IF YOU DON’T GIVE ME AN ANSWER.
At last, a reply came.
UNKNOWN MESSAGE SOURCE: FIRST, TELL ME WHY YOU’RE ON THE VELES, CASSIE.
For a moment, she heard nothing but the sound of her own breathing, and the ever-present hum of the ship’s active systems.
When she tapped at the video icon again, an error message flashed up: the video had been deleted from its source. She no longer had proof. Assuming, of course, the video wasn’t some kind of AI-generated fake.
But if so, why go to such lengths? Was this some fucked-up scheme Javier had come up with to trick her into telling him why she’d been put on the Veles?
And then, another, even more terrifying realisation struck her.
Who had been controlling the flying monkey? Javier?
Or had someone else been awake at the time?
Then something occurred to her: if only five out of eight cryogenic pods had been affected, which three had been spared—and why?
There was no point in sabotaging Javier’s pod, obviously, since he’d been awake. But who were the remaining two?
Perhaps, she speculated, the remaining pods had been empty. Perhaps Javier hadn’t been the only one awake.
She stared uncertainly at the question on the screen of her flimsy, then rolled it up and climbed back out of her bunk.
Five minutes later, Cassie found herself alone in the cryogenics bay. She worked quickly, working her way through the information stored in the bay’s operational databases, but found no trace of sabotage at any point during the outbound journey.
Of course, she realized, if any such evidence existed to be found, the rest of them would already have known about it.
By now, the adrenaline had worn off, and Cassie made her way back to her bunk, feeling sluggish and tired and more paranoid than she remembered feeling in a long time.
Pulling her flimsy out, she stuck it back onto the wall of her bunk by its velcro patch, then stared up at the ceiling of her bunk in the certain knowledge that sleep would not come.
CHAPTER 8
THE MESSAGE
In the end, sleep did come: and with it, dreams of standing alone and shivering on a vast and frozen plain beneath stars that were sharp and unmoving.
She wore only her lunar pilot’s uniform. Far off in the distance, a metal-sheathed figure came lumbering towards her across an expanse of dirty and streaked ice.
All around her, vertiginous ice cliffs cast deep and impenetrable shadows, while the great, banded curve of Jupiter filled the sky.
Europa.
Then Europa was gone, and Cassie stood behind a window made of armoured glass, looking out across a grey and mottled expanse with Sergio by her side.
“There’s a maintenance run to Clavius at eleven hundred,” he said, handing her a coffee. “I saw your name on the flight schedule. Could be a good chance to hang out, if you like.”
Before she could reply, Cassie looked down to see that her left hand was trembling. It took a conscious effort to make it stop.
Sergio appeared not to have noticed.
Then she saw that someone was outside on the lunar surface, their face and body concealed within the massive bulk of a behemoth suit. Except there were no behemoth suits on the Moon.
She saw a faint puff of gas along the seam of the behemoth’s helmet, and it lifted to show Chris, seemingly unaffected by the vacuum. He looked straight at her, his mouth moving like he was trying to tell her something important.
Use your radio, she thought, with no small amount of irritation.
Then the Moon was gone, and Sergio and her brother with it.
Cassie tumbled into a void of air between the vertiginous cliffs of a great chasm. A profusion of strange and alien vegetation grew up and down the cliffs, the air thick and soupy in her lungs and carrying a thousand unfamiliar scents.
Spreading leathery wings wide and banking hard, she broke her descent. Others flew alongside her, huge and lumbering creatures, gill-like slashes on their long necks pulsing rhythmically.
Dipping lower, she passed over lush and steaming jungle that spread beneath a red sun filling half the sky. Smaller winged beasts circled just above the treetops, and she dived low, sighting her prey…
Cassie lurched upright in her bunk, the sweat cool against her skin. Her shoulders ached as if her dream had been somehow real.
Then she looked down and saw that her left hand was trembling, just slightly.
Oh, no.
Pushing her privacy curtain aside, Cassie swung both feet out of the bunk and onto the floor of the hab-ring corridor. It took a few minutes for her heart to slow down from a rapid thud.
At last, she drew a breath and dared to look at her left hand. It still trembled, but not as much as a moment before. After another minute, it subsided altogether.
Breathe, she told herself, gripping the edge of her bunk with both hands. There’s nothing to worry about. The treatments are working just fine.
For a moment she listened to the creak of the ship around her, then checked the time. She was due to start her next shift any minute now.
Making her way to the hab-ring canteen, Cassie almost stumbled over a flying monkey. Although the ring was permanently under spin, the little machines could still get around in low-gee environments by standing on their wiry-looking manipulators. This particular AREM, she noticed, had a bundle of data port connectors gripped in its plastic pincers. Something about it niggled at her, but whatever it was, she couldn’t figure it out.
When she stepped inside the canteen, she found a tired-looking Harrow sitting at a communal table, scraping up the last of a bowl of porridge while paging through a battered paperback biography of Roald Amundsen.
They made small talk while Cassie first drank some water, then scooped some porridge from out of a pot and into her own bowl. As soon as Harrow got up to leave, she collapsed back in her seat, anxiety chewing at her nerves.
She knew she should tell someone about her shakes. It might be that her treatments weren’t working, just as Javier had said they wouldn’t.
But if she told the doctor, she knew, he’d be obligated to tell Javier. She’d be giving the Commander the perfect excuse to make sure she never set foot on Europa. He might even follow through on his threat to force her back into cryo and keep her there until the Veles returned home.
Leaning forward again and placing both hands on the table, Cassie spread out her fingers and slowly breathed out as she watched them.
Not so much as a twitch this time.
For the next several hours, Cassie was back in the Farm with Daphne Makwetu, then underwent another check-up with Haunani that was unrelated to her low-g treatments: instead, he made her run on a treadmill in the Veles’ gym with a dozen monitors stuck to her.
She waited for him to tell her he’d picked up something unusual that warranted further tests. As she ran, she kept glancing at her left hand, waiting for it to twitch. As hard as she tried to appear calm, she couldn’t keep her mouth from setting into a thin, worried line.
Instead, Haunani gave her the okay and sent her on her way.
The rest of that day’s shift was spent on general maintenance: checking electronic systems, dealing with component fatigue and, finally, helping Lebed track down possible bugs in the life support systems.
