Extermination, page 2
“Yes.”
Seriously, was that all he could say?
He continued, “Very well, then, I will need a list of all the trials you’re doing here and any results you have. I will evaluate this for usefulness compared with the cost. I will start tomorrow. I will want to use the office over there.” He glanced at the mess that was Ken’s office.
“Sure,” Tara said. “I’ll prepare a list. I would hope that we can continue our current trials. We’ve put a lot of effort into them.”
“For the time being, yes.” But his tone sounded like he didn’t expect that to continue.
“How will you decide which projects can continue?”
“I’ll base it on relevance. I’m not the sole person to make decisions. I’ll be liaising with Colonel Patel of Sector Command. She has a view of the overall situation. She gives the ultimate orders based on her knowledge and her orders.” Military knowledge and military orders. Great.
“By the way, what do you want me to call you?”
He replied without hesitation, “We are now a military installation, so you can call me by my rank.”
“And how does that work?”
“Lt Wilkins.”
And he turned on his heel and left the room again.
Seriously, what a jerk. Call me by my rank. No, privately, she was going to call him Freddie the Frog.
Chapter Three
JONATHAN WALKED WITH GABY down the hallway in the direction of an open door through which he could already hear the sound of many people talking.
He looked over his shoulder to see the strange man walking off around the corner.
“Who was that?” Gaby asked.
“Good question. An odd character. His name is Mark Stevens. Have you ever heard of him?”
Being a doctor, Gaby was far better at remembering names than he was.
She shook her head. “It’s a pretty nondescript name. It doesn’t ring any bells.”
“He wanted to speak to me in complete confidence.”
“Don’t they all?” She laughed. “Everyone is full of secrets.” One of her fields of study was human behaviour in close quarters of a ship or station. She claimed that everyone went a little nuts in space.
But Jonathan didn’t laugh.
“I don’t know about this. Either he’s completely crazy, or he’s got something serious to say.”
“Well, we’ll be in this hole for a few days. I’m sure you’ll hear about it if it’s really that important.”
Jonathan wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to hear about it. Jobs to solve problems came to him via the usual channels: his supervisors at headquarters on Earth.
They reached the common room, full of talking and laughing people, and were greeted with cheers. A whole bunch of people sat on couches around a low table. There was a kitchenette in the corner, where various containers with beverages stood, all of them open.
A good number of the faces in the room were familiar and the various military off-duty outfits even more so.
“Jonathan!”
That was Ben from the Orbital Launch Station. He clapped Jonathan on the shoulder.
“Man, how are you?”
Jonathan shook his old colleague’s hand. Ben had grown a little fuller in the face. “Look at you! An exercise regime is hard to stick to in space, right?”
Ben laughed. “Watch out what you say. I’m a married man now.”
“You’re kidding. Cindy?”
“The very one.”
“Is she here?”
“I wish. They wouldn’t pay for both of us to come.”
“Are you still with the Launch Station?”
“Yup. Boring, compared to you, I know. I’ve heard a lot of things about you.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“You’ve made a bit of a reputation for yourself, man. Defying a superior and all that.” That was about his last job on the Moon.
“It was all within the guidelines.” Barely so, but that aside.
Gaby was talking to someone else. Jonathan spotted a few more people he recognised from the Launch Station, and even a few from university on Earth.
“What are you all doing here?” Jonathan asked. “I thought you were in agriculture.”
“You know how important recycling is,” Ben said. He winked. “The whole research division at the Orbital Launch Station has been diverted into it.”
That was a surprise development.
Not only that, but quarantine and recycling were considered the poor cousins of space biology research, especially at the Orbital Launch Station. Because protecting Earth from alien microorganisms was very unsexy work.
When he worked there, Jonathan had kept a dangerous bacteria from reaching Earth. It was something with truly terrifying potential. Maybe the authorities finally understood how important quarantine was. “Was there a problem?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?” Jonathan’s heart jumped. He did make an effort to keep up with the news, but he’d been busy preparing for the new project at Ceres.
“Opis Station,” Ben said, his voice dark.
“What about it?” Opis was a small commercial research station in the asteroid belt. It had belonged to the same mining company as Olympus and its catastrophic habitat failure had been the cause of the company’s withdrawal from the area.
“People are being mobilised.”
“What? Why?”
“They found the station completely dead with all the air locks blown out and wide open.”
“And? What does that mean?”
“No matter how catastrophic the failure, no human would leave it like that.” Ben’s eyes were penetrating.
“Wait—are you saying that command has finally found the aliens they’ve always claimed were present in the outer system?”
“Not claimed. They are present. The Force are sending a fleet of ships to comb the area. At the Launch Station, it means a lot of sanitation work for us. When the stations and ships are filled to capacity, it’s amazing how much recycling stuff can go wrong and how quickly.”
True, but Jonathan was still puzzled. “Did anyone actually see enemy vessels?” Surely the news would have been stiff with that information if that was the case.
“I don’t know about that. They’re keeping it very close to their chest, because they don’t want people to panic. But they released this to a friend of mine who was called up for duty.”
He fiddled with his pad and showed Jonathan a picture of a space station side-lit by pale sunlight.
From a distance, it looked normal—except there were no lights anywhere on the outside of the station—but when Ben zoomed in, you could see that the air locks were open and that debris floated around the station. A closer view still showed that not only were the air locks open, but some had been damaged.
“That’s pretty depressing, isn’t it?” Ben said. “Over two hundred people dead, just like that.”
Many other people in the room fell silent, listening in on the conversation.
“We need to go out there and get the bastards who did that,” a man whom Jonathan didn’t know said.
He was from the Security Division, stood next to Gaby, and appeared to have been talking to her.
“Yeah,” another said. “We’re doing our bit here. Keeping the ships and the troops healthy.”
There were several solemn nods around the room—military people with a strong sense of duty.
Jonathan had completed his mandatory military training, but had never felt at ease with that aspect of it: that the answer to any threat is a gun. Internal conflict and the dangers of space formed a much greater threat than anything else he had seen so far.
And still, even with the image shown by Ben, there was no evidence of the existence of an alien enemy. The airlock might have blown out, but there was no evidence of a violent cause.
He wanted to say, “I’m not seeing bullet holes,” but he figured that wouldn’t go down well. These people utterly believed it. They might have information he didn’t. It wasn’t his place to question the leadership.
Jonathan was tired from travelling and the long day, so he beckoned Gaby.
“What is it?”
“I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”
“Yes, sure. I’ll come, too. Let me just tell Rick.”
“Rick?”
“You don’t remember him? Come, let me introduce you.”
She took him to the Security Division officer she had been speaking to. His badge said Lieutenant First Class Arbib. He was a strapping man with dark hair, olive skin, an athletic physique and the biceps to match, and was at least a head taller than Jonathan.
“Rick, this is Jonathan. Jonathan, this is Rick.”
They shook hands.
Jonathan did see something familiar about his face. “Did you work in the Orbital Launch Station?”
“I did. I was working in the security and processing division. I remember you very well. You kicked up quite a stink.”
Jonathan honestly did not remember him. He wasn’t very good at remembering faces, and someone like this proud military officer was not really his type. To be honest, men like that usually made fun of him so he avoided them.
“Are you still at the station?” he asked, because that was the only question he could think of asking.
“Heavens, no. That was one shithole of a job for losers, wasn’t it?”
Yes, Jonathan agreed it was, but probably not for the same reason as Rick. For Jonathan, it had been a bad job, because people thought that his work was inferior and not very important. It was also before he had officially joined the Force and had been working for the much-maligned Quarantine Authority. “No,” Rick went on, “I work in this region now, providing surveillance and security for the settlements and the asteroid belt. We look after natural and unnatural threats to our settlements.”
He was one of those aliens are going to destroy us types.
Someone Jonathan was not going to engage with. What was the man even doing at this conference? He should be off fighting aliens.
He nodded at Rick. “Nice to have met you. I was about to go to bed. We’ve travelled quite a way, and the daylight sequence on the ship and the station aren’t the same. So if you’ll excuse me.”
“Yes of course. I’ll see you over the next few days, anyway.”
Jonathan left the room. Gaby came after him.
“Do you honestly not remember him?” she asked.
“I was quite busy when I worked at the Orbital Launch Station,” Jonathan said. “Busy trying to stop people bullying me off the station, sabotaging my work and making me look ridiculous.”
“He used to provide security for incoming ships. Whenever they had a patient who needed to come to the hospital, he would come with them, and sometimes, if the patient was there because of some violent incident, he would have to sit at the bedside until the patient was well enough to go back to the ship. He was often bored out of his mind, so we would talk and chat. He was so funny.”
“Did he tell you what he’s doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to be the scientific type.”
“Opis Station is not so far from here. I suspect he’s here to provide a level of security between us and military action if there is any.”
“Do you really believe there are aliens?”
Gaby shrugged. “They seem convinced. They probably have more information than we do.”
“What about you, personally? I mean—you saw the picture that he showed.”
“Yeah, and?”
“Did you see any damage to that station that could only be done through a military attack from outside the station?”
“What are you on about?”
“Did you see any impact holes?”
“I have no idea what form an alien attack would take. If they say it’s an alien attack, I have no reason to disbelieve it, if that’s what you mean.” She frowned at him, her expression disturbed.
He said, “For years, the Force has spoken of these aliens. At every available opportunity, they’ve trotted out the aliens, mostly to justify to governments on Earth the insane level of funding they receive. Now would be the time to show clear proof of the existence of these aliens, wouldn’t you think so? I’m sure they have a lot more information recorded, probably including from the very moment the station lost pressure. Why aren’t they sharing that?”
“Strategic reasons?”
“Yeah, because the aliens can clearly decipher our language and have equipment to receive our transmissions, and they can listen and learn that hey, we’ve figured we’ve been attacked by aliens and we’re letting everyone know. I mean—what else would we talk about? And also—if they can understand our language and our transmissions, we’re pretty much fucked anyway, so why wouldn’t they send everyone in the system messages that say: ‘Help, we’re being attacked by aliens, come over here quick so we can shoot them to bits?’ Why not?”
“I really don’t understand why you get so worked up about it.”
“You don’t? Because there is a whole contingent of people here who are all we’re going to bust some alien butt and they’re being hoodwinked.”
“I can’t see where you get that impression.”
“Because. They are not. Showing. Any evidence. Of the aliens. And here we are, on the edge of what is potentially going to be a war zone, talking about recycling! What can be more absurd than that?”
They had arrived at Gaby’s room.
“Well,” she said, uneasily. “You certainly have a bee in your bonnet about this.”
“Don’t you agree? Would you think they’d allow us to have this conference here if this sector was really about to break out into a war? Did you see anything that suggested an alien attack in that picture?”
She said nothing. He knew she could not. Her cheeks were red from the wine or fatigue, or possibly both. And he realised that he had probably hammered a favourite subject a bit too hard.
He said, “Look, let’s just do what we’ve come for, right?”
Gaby yawned. “Yes. I’m tired.”
He bid her an awkward goodnight and then Jonathan walked back to his hole-in-the wall by himself, feeling miserable. He always thought that Gaby could see his side of the argument and was disturbed that she did not this time.
Based on what? The words from some commander that an enemy had destroyed the station?
What was so terrible about showing better evidence?
Panic?
What did they think would cause more panic? Constant rumour or the truth?
The light came on automatically when he entered his room, an unappealing cubicle with two bunk beds and one storage cabinet with four doors, although the inner partitions had been removed.
He removed his off-duty uniform and changed into his regulation pyjamas. All of the clothing was grey.
Then he lay back on the bottom bunk and checked the story on Opis Station.
It said the parent company that owned the station had decided it wanted to withdraw from keeping many small and expensive stations and base their operations in larger population centres. The Force had expressed interest in taking over their infrastructure.
People from the Force had arrived at Opis Station, but very little was known about what they found there. A number of days later, the station had been destroyed, killing all crew except one: a middle-aged man by the name of Fred Wilkins. The article did not state it explicitly, but this turned out to be one of the Force workers.
Out of interest, Jonathan looked for his profile in the Space Force database.
He worked for Auxiliary Services until recently when he had been honourably retired. That was strange, because if he was the Section Commander, Jonathan would be bugging the hell out of this person about what he had seen, what had happened and how it had, no matter how weird the replies were or how much the person was mentally unstable and unsuitable to continue working.
Chapter Four
WHEN FRED HAD BEEN TOLD about his posting to Opis Station, Colonel Patel had warned him that the place was a dump.
“The place has been run by Lemura, and when they got into financial difficulties, they cut back on a lot of maintenance, some of it essential. They also employed a lot of characters who, what shall I say, would not have found employment elsewhere, because they had very strange ideas. The Force has had some minor involvement with some of them, but none that are on the station currently.”
“Am I likely to face discipline issues?”
“I would guess so. This is part of the reason that we’ve appointed you.”
Great. That was just what he needed. To be appointed manager of a bunch of staff who didn’t want him there. Was he meant to survive this venture?
“What does the Force want with this little station?”
“At this point in time, we’re taking stock of what’s there. I want you to go in there and establish safe practices according to our standards. I want you to make sure that all the work falls within acceptable guidelines. I want you to stop work that is not within our guidelines, and make the staff who are working on these things understand what sort of guidelines they need to adhere to. And finally, if any people look like they don’t want to stick to our guidelines, I want you to make sure that these people are satisfactorily removed from the station.”
“Satisfactorily to us or to them?”
“Both, if possible. If not, at least to us. If they’re not pulling their weight or sticking to the rules, I want them gone.” She said this in a fairly unemotional way, folding her hands together on the desk.
Colonel Patel was not a small woman, and not one who took nonsense either.
“And I’m meant to be doing this for two years?”
“That is the standard employment period. However, I have the discretion to end it sooner than that. I fully expect this to be done within a few months.”
