Extermination, page 3
His hopes rose. “And when that is completed, can I be posted to Ceres?”
“After that, we will definitely look into that.”
And that was as close to a yes as he was ever going to get from her.
He had also found that asking to be rejoined with his family was counterproductive with her. She would remind all her people that their first duty was to the military, and that begging for favours would not make anyone look good. He pushed away his anger over being given this position, while in a comfortable research station on Ceres his wife was living by herself and his daughter had started school and he was missing all of the important parts of her life.
So here he was.
Opis Station.
Either he hadn’t quite appreciated the meaning of the word “dump” or wildly overestimated the conditions that came with the term.
Fred’s specialty was research management.
Everything about the station was old. It functioned—barely—but there was no reserve capacity in case of failure, and station management didn’t appear to have planned for any.
Sections of the small station were empty and deemed unsafe for use because air quality was not maintained.
He was to share command of the takeover with an Operations Officer who would look after the station’s vitals and the residential sectors and all staff associated with them, and he would look after the research and development facilities.
Commander Mariani was a very talkative man, as Fred found out when he first met him.
Fred didn’t mind him. He didn’t like talking so much, but the other guy wouldn’t shut up and didn’t even notice that he was the only one doing the talking. He was quite entertaining.
Like when they sat having dinner at a lonely table in the room designated Officers’ Mess.
“You see, the Force never asked for this station. It fell into their hands when Lemura went broke. The Space Force wanted Lemura’s Ceres operations, but they had no interest in the smaller stations. That’s what we are: collateral damage.”
He laughed.
“Mind you, this place is such a mess that I’m surprised it maintains even two hundred people.”
“Is that all?”
“Unless some of them are hiding somewhere. I wouldn’t put hiding beyond some of the characters I met today, but let’s be realistic and assume it’s pretty hard to hide in a station this size. The roll of station workers is fully two hundred and one people strong. I think at one time, the station must have housed as least twice as many. It’s never been very big, of course, but at one point there must have been some point to the existence of this place.”
That was what Fred was wondering about. Why had he been sent to this backwater? Why didn’t the Force just tow the whole lot to another settlement, and attach it? Of course, that would still require the station to be made safe and sanitised.
A three-month period—he could survive that, even in the company of this talkative guy.
He asked, “Have you found out how many of these people are actually working in research?”
“There are fifty, but that includes the guy who died last week.”
Yes, Fred had run into that story. “Does the record say what he died of?”
“Heart failure, being morbidly obese, kidney failure, diabetes, stuff like that. Of course, in a place like this, the medical facilities leave something to be desired, and in order to provide proper care, people have to actually agree to receive that care.”
“Meaning?”
“He was a stubborn guy. He knew he had health issues, but refused to leave the station for treatment. I heard all kinds of stories about the reason. Man, that guy’s a rich source of gossip, if that’s your thing.”
Gossip wasn’t Fred’s thing at all. Most gossip was just that: cheap rubbish, untrue, innuendo spread by people who didn’t like someone. “He seems to have been very popular with the staff, though.”
“Yes, he was.”
But the more popular someone was, the more vicious enemies they had.
Chapter Five
THE CONFERENCE STARTED the next day.
When filing into the low-ceilinged mess hall for breakfast, Jonathan looked for Gaby in the surprisingly busy space, but she was sitting with the people they had met last night, including the straight-faced Rick Arbib.
He didn’t feel comfortable discussing Opis Station when those people were listening, so he just ate quickly, and made some small talk.
He looked around for the strange man who had spoken to him yesterday, but it was too busy. He went to his room, collected his pad for making notes for the program, and took the sideways elevator through the centre of the space station to the conference centre.
The big hall was filling up quickly.
After his talk with Ben the previous night, Jonathan did a quick head count of the lecture theatre, and guessed that about six hundred people were in the room.
Come to think of it, that did seem to be a lot of people for an unsexy subject such as recycling.
Most of them seemed to be quite young, which was also unusual. Somebody must have finally understood that these were important research areas.
He found a spot about halfway up the sloping audience seating.
As they filed into the hall, conference delegates came past a table where an assistant handed them their name badges.
The table became increasingly empty the more people arrived until, when the doors were closed and the first speech started, only one tag was left.
Jonathan didn’t think of it until Gaby said next to him, “What’s the bet I get called in for help?” And she nodded at the tag. “If that person isn’t in the hall, they’re probably sick.”
True. And she had registered for the conference as a medical officer with experience in emergency situations, because that was what the Force required: if you’re in a civilian situation where your skills may be of use, always list them so that authorities know about them.
But the proceedings started without Gaby being called out.
A prominent scientist in the field of the health of closed-system bases gave the opening address. Her name was Cleo Barr. Jonathan knew her from research papers, but had never worked with her. She was a civilian, and as far as he knew, she did not do any work for the Space Force, either.
She spoke of how important their work was, and that the future of space exploration depended on them. “Keeping the environment healthy and clean in space is a constant struggle that is the foundation for everything we do out here. If we can’t breathe the air, and we have nothing to eat, there is no us.”
She was preaching to the converted, although there were some students at the very back of the room who might be inspired to choose a career in recycling and habitat science. She even appealed directly to them. “You will be needed. You will find demand for your skills. You will find it rewarding.”
It was all very strange.
In the past, those subject matters had often been easily dismissed as merely a problem of chemistry and biology, which were well understood sciences.
It was just that managing a whole system and keeping it healthy long-term was hard.
But it was indeed good to see so many new faces, and to know that people finally took the discipline seriously.
Maybe the whole situation with Johnson Base on the Moon had been one mishap too many.
When the organiser announced a short break after the opening address, Jonathan heard many optimistic voices. Mostly, these were young people, and even students, and he only wished that there had been the same emphasis on the discipline of space biology when he finished university. Then so many of his friends from university would not have needed to work jobs in retail and restaurants that had nothing to do with their training.
Walking out of the hall on the way to the refreshments being served in the foyer, he came past the registration table with the single nametag.
The tag said, Mark Stevens. The guy who had spoken to him last night.
Well, that was interesting.
“Does anyone know who this person is?” Jonathan asked some random people near him.
“Never heard of him,” an older man said. He was in an Auxiliary Division uniform.
“No,” a woman said. She was perhaps in her thirties, and not in the military.
He took a cup of tea and mingled casually with the conference attendees. While he walked from group to group, he asked a few people if they knew who Mark Stevens was.
No one did.
So he was curious.
Jonathan checked the program for the conference, but did not see Mark Stevens mentioned as a speaker. He was, however, on the attendance list. And he had been there yesterday.
The next talk was about the use of the Corrigan cycle in the recycling process and how plants with Corrigan cycles would be rolled out to many settlements. The speaker, someone from one of the Moon bases, went on to explain it in detail. Jonathan had worked extensively with the Corrigan recycling principle, and found himself bored.
He used the time to check on who Mark Stevens was, only to find out that there was no information about anyone by that name. Not in the conference summary, and not in the research field in general.
His name was on the attendance list. That was all.
Maybe he was from a government agency, and did not usually work in the field? But weren’t those people listed on employee databases that would have come up in his search? As if he could find out, from here, who still worked at the Quarantine Authority office at the Orbital Launch Station that sat in Earth orbit.
At lunchtime, he went past the conference administration desk.
“Excuse me, I had a message to see a person called Mark Stevens. It appears that he’s not here, or at least his tag hasn’t been collected. Do you know where he is or how I can contact him?”
The student who manned the desk looked through his files. “I don’t know who he is or what he looks like, but he definitely arrived here and collected his welcome pack.”
He gave Jonathan a room number.
He would have to check this out later, when the day’s proceedings finished and they came back to the residential sector.
The conference was set in a separate part of the dumbbell-shaped station, attached as counterweight to the other side by a thin tube. One needed to catch the sideways lift to get from one side to the other.
A number of the station’s walls were transparent, so that from the foyer of the conference hall, you could see down the tube to the other part of the station and space beyond. It was pretty.
“Doesn’t it surprise you that there’s so much focus on recycling at this event?” Jonathan asked Gaby when they both stood looking at the view.
“Somebody there must have made a decision that it’s really important,” Gaby said.
“I don’t quite understand why that happened, though,” Jonathan said. “Normally when the Force makes a change in direction, they put out lots of public notifications that they’re doing so, and the reasons.”
“Wouldn’t the reasons speak for themselves? We’ve now had a couple of scares where a closed environment was almost brought down by an infection taken in from outside. You would think they would want to try to avoid similar situations.”
“But I haven’t seen any change in policies,” Jonathan insisted. “It’s a political event. Normally there is lots of communication, and I’ve seen none.”
Gaby said nothing for a while. The frown came over her face as it did when she was thinking. Jonathan wondered if she knew how pretty she looked when she did that.
He also wondered how he could ever tell her this, because they had been working together for so long, it would be almost embarrassing to admit to feeling attracted to her for all this time and never having done anything about it. And he had a feeling that she was slipping away through his inaction. “I’m wondering if it has anything to do with the talk of setting up a barrier zone around the asteroid belt,” Gaby said.
“You’re talking about an attack barrier?” Jonathan said.
“I heard a number of people talk about it last night.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
“They’re very insistent about the existence of an alien threat. And they want to stop it here, before it comes into the inner system.”
Was that Rick talking?
It annoyed him even that he thought this. He trusted Gaby to agree with him and see his point of view, not parrot some dressed-up monkey.
“Last night, I had a look into the information about Opis Station,” he said. “The official report just mentions ‘catastrophic loss of atmosphere’ as the reason for the demise of the station. Not a single word about aliens.”
“We have no idea what’s really going on in the upper command. They may well have information that we don’t.”
“I’m sure they do, but I am equally sure that if the information was important, we would all know about it, especially us, while we’re here, with the job we’re about to start. All these stations on this side of the belt belonged to Lemura, including the doomed Opis Station. Putting aside the mystery of what happened to that station, Sector Command has said nothing about what they intend to do with the stations or why they acquired them. They are so convinced that they need to protect us against aliens, but have been unable to provide any solid evidence that any alien ships or just remotely civilised aliens actually exist.”
This sort of stuff made Jonathan really angry. Maybe it was his father’s rebellious streak, but he didn’t believe half-arsed arguments and statements without proof. He had studied astrobiology, for crying out loud. Certainly, alien life forms fell squarely under that discipline. Vague images enlarged to the point of extreme blurriness did not. Pictures of dead space stations with no sign of battle damage did not.
If there were aliens, he, with his knowledge, would be one of the first to know.
Chapter Six
TARA SPENT THE REST of the day in Ken’s office, because there was no way she was going to let this jerk get his hands on all the work they had done in here.
It kind of felt like sacrilege going through all those familiar books and knickknacks. Personal items, too, although Ken had not exactly been a family man. After his sudden death, people at the station were unable to contact any of his relatives. He’d never spoken about them, and no one was sure if any of them were still alive.
It was so strange to be packing up this room, where just a few days ago Ken had still been sitting, laughing and telling jokes.
Tara stacked the books that she took off the shelves and filled two boxes with all the models and drawings. She was pretty sure that Freddie the Frog was not going to need them. Ken had done quite a bit of work that was non-standard. That was why he was so brilliant, because he thought of new ways of doing things.
She felt a bit less comfortable about all of his notes. A lot of those were electronic, and they were accessible only to lab staff. She had Ken’s password, because she knew where he kept the passwords.
Would Freddie ask to have it? She hoped not, because she would much rather give him only the information about the regular experiments—the breeding trials and the nutritional value measurements. If she showed him Ken’s other trials, he would think that Ken was crazy. Many of Ken’s off-station peers said that. Or he would take the material and present it as his own.
In the oldest depths of the data folders, Tara found reports on the strangest things, things she did not expect anyone like Ken to have.
What would he want with a report from the ice rings of Saturn, for example? Ken was a biologist.
But she stored everything that was not related to the official trials separately anyway—not in the main area where Frog Face was going to find it, but in her personal research files. If Ken thought that there was a point in having this material, she trusted that there probably was.
She didn’t notice that, as she was working, both Ashley and Dominique, the other girl who worked in the lab, had left. It was the change in shift, and they would be going to the cabins and to dinner.
But all of a sudden she turned around in the lab and found that she was alone and it was time to go to her room.
She had completely forgotten to look at the plants in the lab.
Before she left, she cast a look through the tiny window in the door to the experiment room.
The room on the other side was filled with metal racks that held trays with tubes containing plants.
Normally, the banks of lights above each tray would spread a warm glow through the room, but it was so late that the room had moved into its dusk cycle and was preparing for night.
But a blue-green glow spread through the room from the very end of one of the aisles. It appeared to come from one of the trays.
Tara checked the room’s map, but it confirmed what she already knew because of the position of the trays: these were mushrooms from Ken’s private trials.
And she had never seen them glow like this before. Why was that?
Tara went to the suiting room, and put on all the gear to go into the infection control room. First the overalls, then the hood, the shoes, the helmet and then the gloves.
She never liked working in the suit, because it was hot and smelled on the inside.
With that done, she went in through the hermetically sealed double doors. It was much cooler in the greenhouse, and the humidity made her visor fog up.
Another reminder why she didn’t like to work here.
Yes, these were definitely the mushrooms from Ken’s private trials.
The mushrooms in question were of a type that had been grown inside the Orbital Launch Station. Most of her samples came from there, and a long time before that, they were harvested from the forests of Russia and Norway. They were kept in the Orbital Launch Station for several generations before being passed onto other facilities to make sure that they carried no infections from Earth.
These particular ones were quite tall and had nice even caps. They had been part of her experiment for quite some time, but this was the first time that she had seen this phenomenon.
