Expendable Heroes, page 2
The room next door turned out to be a generic meeting room of the type one would find everywhere on these types of ships.
It contained four tables set in a square, with several chairs around them. In one of those chairs sat a man with a short pepper-and-salt beard. He wasn’t wearing a uniform.
In Steven’s experience, most of the exploration ships were run by commercial contractors, but some still had military crews because they had received the best training.
“Oh, there you are.”
His face split into a smile that looked awfully forced. Steven looked for any weapon on him in case Rollo got aggressive, but saw none.
“Sit down and take a tray.” He gestured to the corner of the table, where there were four trays containing two covered bowls each. Jack grabbed a tray off the corner of the table and pulled off the cover of one of the bowls.
It contained a kind of thick soup. A bread roll lay on the tray, as well as a packet of sandwiches. The other bowl contained yoghurt.
Steven also grabbed his and found a spot at the table opposite the man.
“My name is Jeremy Calvert,” he said. “I will be your superior and the person you will go through when performing the task that I will tell you about shortly.”
“We are on a ship, right?” Steven asked.
“You’re quite perceptive.”
“Well, I have travelled on these before.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” Rollo said. “I was about at the end of my sentence, why this? I never did anything wrong.”
“Quiet, Rollo,” Luciane said.
Rollo sat back, a scowl on his face.
Jack had gotten stuck into the soup and had almost finished it.
Steven took a spoon and started eating as well, but he didn’t feel terribly hungry. The soup was not bad, though. Better than on the military ships. That, and the fact that Jeremy didn’t wear a uniform, probably made this a commercial vessel.
Jeremy started.
“Yes, as your mate here has already figured out, you’re on a ship. The exploration vessel Marmoset, and we are in the Sedaris system.”
“You’re fucking kidding,” Rollo burst out.
Steven felt like a hole opened in his chest. “But that is years away, even through the jump points.”
“That’s correct.”
A feeling of horror crept up on him. “How long have we been out?”
“You have been travelling for close to four years.”
He burst out, “Four years?”
Sophia would have started school. Heaven knew, Lette might have been told he was dead and might have taken up with someone else.
“I was about to be released. What happened to the trial?”
“The judge decreed that you would be released after performing community service.”
“Fuck your community service. Where are my wife and my daughter? I have a right to see them.”
“Yeah, we were just about finished with our ridiculous sentence,” Rollo said. “I never signed a contract for this.”
“Guys,” Luciane said, her voice soft. “I warned you.”
Rollo whirled at her. “What do you know? Have they sent you along to keep us under control? Is that why you’re playing miss tough guy?”
“I’ve been through this kind of shit before. If you make a fuss, they’ll just keep punishing you. They’ll call it community service but they’ll send you to the most remote locations they can find.”
Jeremy looked at his hands, pretending he wasn’t there.
Jack’s face showed an expression of distaste.
Steven remembered Luciane’s fingers up Rollo’s nose, and didn’t want to suffer a similar humiliating fate, so he shut up, but the rage inside him only grew.
Meanwhile, Jeremy got up and pulled up a protective cover on the wall in the room, revealing a screen, as if nothing had happened.
“Let me explain your job. You only need to complete it, and then you’ll be free.”
Luciane snorted. “Let’s just say I’ll believe that when I see it.”
CHAPTER 3
Jeremy turned on the screen on the back wall of the room.
When the screen came to life, a logo flashed over it for a split second: a blue letter M with a sharp and pointy outline. Steven had seen this before. It was the logo of Merlin, a company he knew as a provider of highly specialised equipment and chemical compounds for space exploration teams and colonisation bases. They were suppliers to governments, the military, and large companies. They also took on projects that were remote and risky, and didn’t always end well.
“Welcome to the exploration vessel Marmoset, which belongs to the Space Settlement Authority and is run for the authority by Lifeboat Engineering.”
Steven knew both of those entities. “Just to be clear, you work for… which organisation?”
“I have a contract with the Space Settlement Authority.”
Which wasn’t the same as working for them. Why the evasiveness? What did Merlin have to do with this project, or wasn’t he meant to have seen the logo? Or was—and a feeling of horror crept over him—this location so remote or risky that it necessitated a bunch of competitors to work together?
Jeremy turned to the screen, which now displayed a solar system. “There are three stars in this system, Sedaris A, B and C. Sedaris A and B are hot stars incompatible with life, but Sedaris C houses a solar system that was of interest because it contained a number of potentially viable planets. The team discovered a beautiful green planet orbiting the star.”
He zoomed in on the image, and a planet filled the screen. It was a pristine world, with blue oceans and green continents, many different islands, and thin ice caps at the poles.
“The official name of the planet is Sedaris C2, but people call this world Eden. Our history with this world goes back about twenty years. Exploration teams observed the planet from orbit for a while, first with drones and then with a manned station. Finally, last year, they decided to send humans to the surface and establish a base. They selected a team of twelve who were all highly experienced and accomplished scientists. They were to research the vegetation and potential creatures on the planet, and report back as to its suitability for a colony.”
“It looks pretty good,” Rollo said.
“It does, but you might also remember the Taurus disaster, so it is understandable that we exercise utmost caution.”
Yes, the Taurus disaster, where people went down to a very nice-looking planet, only to find that almost everything that grew on its surface was highly poisonous, eventually killing all the colonists, and even continued killing them long after they returned to safety.
Steven was starting to get a déjà vu feeling about this.
“So, we sent down a small team of twelve people, and we equipped them with a hermetically sealed base that could be winched off the surface if something went wrong. They were trained in levels of toxicology and disease detection.”
“But?”
Jeremy gave Steven a sharp look.
“There is a but here, somewhere, isn’t there?”
“I was coming to that. But I see that you are impatient. There is no point being impatient, because being impatient doesn’t make us arrive at our destination any faster. We still have a lot of preparation to do. But yes, there is a but.”
He made a show of dragging the last remaining food tray towards him and peeling the lid off the yoghurt before continuing.
“After a number of weeks in which the scientific team was sending back regular reports, the communication went silent. At first, we could see their movements outside the building. We attributed the lack of communication to the solar flares that are known to regularly plague the system. The planet’s surface is well protected against those, but they do mess with communication. When, after the flares subsided, communication with the base didn’t resume and we could no longer see activity on the ground, we sent in a reconnaissance drone. It discovered the base was still intact. They had a buggy, which the drone located in the forest, but we knew they’d been having issues with it. Everything else was still where it should be. The base’s systems were operational, and the drone could communicate with them. But it found no evidence of life.”
Steven said, “In other words, the people disappeared.”
“Well, that’s what we don’t know.”
“Could they be inside, but dead?”
“That is unlikely, because we have footage from most rooms inside the base, and we can’t see any activity. There are no bodies either. The beds are empty, and there is no movement. There is a small time window where the solar flare disrupted the communication and it looks like during that time, the scientists all left the base on foot and then disappeared.”
“Or something happened, and they went in search of a place where they had reception so they could make contact,” Steven said.
“That’s also a possibility. It sounds like you have read the colonisation handbook.”
“Several times. It’s boring on those long flights.”
Jeremy nodded.
“How about something came in and attacked the person who took the vehicle and the others went out to help, but it ate them, too,” Rollo said.
“We haven’t detected large life forms on the planet,” Jeremy said.
“Doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
Luciane said, “How about they all went mad and killed each other?”
“Unlikely, because it would have shown up in the footage from inside the base.”
Jack snorted. “And you were calling me a grumpy moron?”
Everyone looked at him. There was something intense about Jack that Steven couldn’t place. He did the grumpy act really well, but it seemed like a facade that made him get away with not revealing anything about himself.
Luciane was like an open book. Rollo was clear about his grievances, but Jack… Jack was not what he seemed to be.
Jeremy continued, “The bottom line is that we can speculate about what happened to them as much as we want, but we don’t know.”
“And I guess you want us to go and look for them?” Steven said.
“You might be right.”
“I don’t buy it that you don’t know anything. You have to know more than you’ve told us,” Luciane said. “These planetary bases are worth a lot of money, and these companies spend extraordinary amounts of money and effort on protecting their secrets and their staff. I’m sure you’ve sent in a team to get these people out to see whatever was the issue.”
“We did look for them,” Jeremy said.
He didn’t say whether that meant they’d sent people to the surface or not. Probably not, for whatever reason.
Steven met Luciane’s eyes across the table. He liked that she said these companies. Lifeboat Engineering, which Jeremy had mentioned, just looked after the mission logistics: the ships and the fuel and the food. By these companies she meant Merlin. She had also noticed the logo that appeared for a split-second on the screen, and she knew the company and possibly its ruthless reputation. Heaven knew she might even have worked for them at some point.
“What did you find?” Steven asked.
“In broad terms, nothing other than what I’ve told you, although we have a slew of less glamorous data. The colonists are gone. There are no bodies. And yes, you are right. We want to send you as a search team. You will be well equipped, and your only task will be to find them, and once you have done that, we will send in resources to do whatever is necessary.”
“All right, so how much are you paying?” Luciane said. “If this is supposed to be community service, we’re only meant to work for free if the job is non-commercial. You’re with a company and the people we’ll be looking for were working for a company. So how much are you paying?”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
“Before we do the job, I hope.”
Jeremy gave her a hard look.
Huh. Steven knew these large companies were corrupt and could buy authorities, but it still shocked him to be faced with it. They had no intention of paying, and judging by Jeremy’s attitude, they would have hoped that none of them knew about this rule. Well, they were out of luck.
Rollo snorted. “Can we call bullshit on this issue? Be clear with us. We’re supposed to be paid. It’s dangerous down there.”
“Whatever I tell you will make no difference. You’re here. You were sentenced.”
“We were not,” Steven said. “We were taken away before we could be set free. I don’t know what sort of deal you made with the prison.”
“I don’t appreciate the suggestion we were dishonest.”
“Whatever. There was a deal, otherwise we would not be here.”
Steven’s words were followed by an intense silence. Luciane nodded. Rollo nodded, too.
After a tense moment, Jeremy repeated, “You’re here. You’ll do the job. Any alternatives will not be nice.”
“See? That’s what I told you,” Luciane said, looking at Jack.
“But why get a bunch of misfits like us to do what sounds like an important task? We’re just a random bunch of people. I’m a biologist, Rollo is a technician, and I don’t know what Luciane does, and Jack, I don’t know what he does, either, but we have not been trained to do this kind of work, and worse than that, we have not trained as a team.”
“Well, guess what you’ll be doing in the next few days?”
“Nah,” Luciane said. “It’s a smokescreen for something else. A test. An experiment. Whatever. They got us because we’re prisoners, and they don’t want to release us, because we might cause trouble.”
Jeremy spread his hands. “Feel free to believe whatever you see fit. It’s not my job to convince you of anything. It’s my job to train you, so you can actually complete the task.”
CHAPTER 4
Jeremy explained that the Exploration Vessel Marmoset was still travelling towards its destination, and it would be a few days before the ship was close enough to the planet to send out a descent vehicle, so the next few days would be spent in training. This would involve becoming familiar with the base’s resources on the surface and the operation of the base’s software.
Steven asked about having support from the space station in orbit, but Jeremy said it had been “repurposed” whatever that meant, and the Marmoset would be their base and would stay in orbit for as long as they were on the surface.
Nothing in space happened quickly, so if the corresponding space station had been moved away, he gathered the scientists had gone missing a while ago. Why nobody had done anything in that time, he wasn’t sure and was even less sure he was in a position he could ask.
A job was a job, right? If doing this meant he would have fulfilled his community service and would be free to go, he didn’t even care that much whether it was paid or not. He was also not even that fussed about whether the Space Exploration Authority would fulfil their duty and offer him transport back. He’d work on a ship—for free if necessary—to get back. As long as he could be in control of his own decisions.
But the others, especially Rollo, were not so accepting, and perhaps with reason. He demanded to see a contract for the job, and Jack agreed with this. They wanted to know how long the job would take and how much they would get if it took longer. Was there any danger loading?
All the while, Luciane was rolling her eyes. “We’re prisoners, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered to Steven when he met her eyes. “We have no rights. This kind of shit is only going to get their backs up and make things difficult for us.”
Yes, they should have a contract, but no, there was nothing gained with this discussion. For as long as they were on board this ship, none of them had any power. Eventually, Rollo had to accept this as well.
Jeremy allocated each of the team members a rather unusually spacious room. Steven’s didn’t even have a bunk bed, just a single bed for a single occupant, a desk, and a lazy chair facing the entertainment screen on the side wall. The back wall contained a round screen that resembled a porthole window and that displayed the outside view, or a version of it, even if the emergency evacuation schematic on the door showed that none of the cabin’s walls faced the exterior hull.
None of his meagre possessions had made it from the prison, which meant that a slew of assistants came to provide him with things he needed: bedding, toiletries, towels, a change of clothes, a set of overalls which he was told he’d need the next day, and he was also told that the entertainment unit contained an emergency manual—do be sure to read it—and a presentation of the ship’s mission statement.
At night, when the last of the assistants in grey jumpsuits had gone, the door had shut for the last time and Steven was alone, he investigated all nooks and crannies of the room.
He had a vague memory of the personal belongings he’d kept the cupboard in his cell. Above all—a couple of photos of Lette and Sophia and a storage device with many more, including video recordings which he played when he felt lonely.
It included a video of a one-year-old Sophia taking her first steps on the painfully green grass in a park close to where he used to live—when life was good and he thought he had a secure job and his only worry used to be being sent back to space to research and fix problems with an on-board farm, and the thought that he should really get another job played—too softly—in the back of his mind. That was before he found evidence that the same companies that sold—expensive—supplements to food production facilities also caused the problems they were sent to fix. Because these government agencies and large companies were such rubes that they would never notice, right? Because they had enough money, right?
Well, they did notice, but were too scared to do anything, because the pharmaceuticals had all the power.
Oh, you want to investigate this scandal? Why don’t we just triple the price of that vital component? And hey, look at that, you’re now no longer our priority and by the way, we own more than half the votes in whatever legislative body you can throw at us.
