Permutation, page 8
Ron rose, too. “All right, that just leaves me to say that your access to any electronic system will no longer work. You’ve also downloaded material from the station that you will need to hand back to us. We’ll send someone to look after this issue later today.”
“You can’t do that,” Gaby said.
“We can. It’s in the contract. But rest assured, we will follow up on your findings.”
“And I’m meant to believe that?” she said.
For a moment, it looked like he would bar her from reaching the door, but Jonathan got up as well.
He followed Gaby into the hallway, his heart hammering like crazy.
They walked through the passages back to their cabins without speaking.
Jonathan was seething with anger.
They went into Gaby’s room.
Once the door had shut, he broke into a rage. “I can’t believe that anyone would cover up a deed like this, and allow the perpetrator to get away with it—worse, give him free passage on this ship. They know Shelton is alive. They know where the shuttle is. They let him escape before we came to look for him. ‘His reputation is beyond reproach’, what utter rot! And then they deny us access to the data, because it’s company property.”
“I know. You don’t have to tell me anything. But the data from Astoria is company property, and it’s the company’s right to keep it.”
“But I can’t believe it!”
And he couldn’t even take any data he had collected. His login had already stopped working.
He breathed out heavily in the angry silence.
“There is something else I’ve found while looking through the less well-known news channels,” Gaby said after a while. “Apparently after his fall from grace at the moon, Shelton offered Prosperity Mining money if he could work for them. Apparently, he said he’d develop highly specialised advanced drone technology, and only later did they find out that his knowledge didn’t really amount to much. His students and staff used to do most of the work.”
“Then why not sack him?”
“You don’t really understand the corporate world, do you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t think you do, and believe me, that’s a good thing.”
“You never worked for a corporate employer either.” If there was one thing that annoyed him about Gaby, it was that she was very good at playing goody-two-shoes and telling other people off. Taking the moral high ground. Doctors were so good at that. “If you’re suggesting that they would wilfully give refuge to someone who has murdered over three hundred people, then I really don’t believe that.”
“No, no, not in that way. Or at least that’s not their intention, but once balance sheets and losing face come into play, intentions go out the window. They employed him. He promised them things he couldn’t deliver. They fell for it. They felt stupid. Believe me, no one likes to be made to feel stupid, especially not rich people on company boards, whose position will be on the line if this comes out. So, they will say this: A tragic accident happened at Astoria Station. We feel for the families of the victims and will offer them a handsome payment that may hopefully compensate them somewhat for their loss. And the people will be placated and everyone will stop asking questions.”
Jonathan met Gaby’s eyes.
Yes. She was right. That sounded terrifyingly plausible.
“Gaby, you’re so much smarter than I am. I feel naive. I couldn’t even begin to think that people might do something like that.”
“We’re just different. I would never have picked up that one person might still be alive on the station.”
“You wouldn’t? Not at all?” It seemed so glaringly obvious to him.
She shrugged. “Maybe later, we would have noticed the discrepancy in resident identification because we’d have been stuck with one too many women and one missing man, but not until it was far too late to check it.”
He stared at her, wordlessly.
“We both have different strengths, and that’s very useful. I wouldn’t be so happy to work with someone who was good a the exact same things I’m good at.”
“You’re just saying that to flatter me.”
“No. I mean it. I’m good at people things. You’re good at technical things. I like it like that.”
“Yeah.” Yeah, he liked it, too. And now that they were pariahs in the eyes of the company, they might as well ignore their silly unspoken rules about relationships. He was going to move his things into this cabin today.
But he couldn’t just let this happen unchallenged. “So who are we going to confront about this?”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Afraid? Oh. You mean you don’t want me to speak up? Because we need to be afraid? I’m not afraid of company people.”
“Not in that way. I think we need to be quiet now, because if we speak up now and say that it was not a terrible accident, they will try to discredit us, and they will find something to make sure they succeed. The word of a company with lots of money is worth more than that of an honest employee.”
“Then what? You honestly can’t suggest we do nothing?” He couldn’t believe she wanted that.
“I don’t know yet. We have to work out how to hurt them as much as possible.”
Chapter Sixteen
So they said nothing and remained quiet for the time being.
They watched the news come out about the “terrible accident” while still on board the Renae Stellaris.
They watched the list of victims and their wonderful achievements, and messages from the company’s board and offers of compensation.
As Gaby had predicted, none of them got angry at the company.
But not a word was said about Shelton. It was as if his life had been wiped from the history books.
After the news went public, Helen contacted Jonathan. She wanted to know if she’d heard him correctly that Shelton was working at the station, because no one in the news seemed to be talking about him.
She said, “I know it’s not customary for the news bulletins to name names, except when the person is dead and well-known.”
But Richard Shelton was well-known.
Gaby seemed to have been right about the company wanting to protect their name.
Meanwhile, Shelton was on board the Renae Stellaris.
Jonathan had been making efforts to try to find him, but the ship was big and had many corners that were only accessible to staff. He no longer had access to any logs—this was also normal for passengers—they hadn’t had this since the start of the journey. But as a result, he couldn’t even check if Astoria Station’s shuttle was indeed in the dock.
Likewise, he had no idea what cabin Richard Shelton could be hiding in.
But he and Gaby made a plan.
They kept quiet.
Five days later, the ship arrived at Ceres Station.
Jonathan and Gaby met with their contacts. The work they were meant to do was wonderfully uneventful. The station had opened a new section and had a problem with their recycling.
Because the lab was new, they were still in the process of hiring staff. Jonathan asked if he could propose people they should consider employing.
A number of weeks later, a personal package arrived for him at the apartment he and Gaby shared while they were here.
Inside was a pack of old-fashioned printed sheets, although they were not made of paper but recyclable plastic. The stack smelled of the bleach that the manufacturing process used to make this type of material as light-coloured as possible.
A little note sat on top of the stack. On it was scrawled in messy handwriting, Thank you. My brother loves his first real job. He’s a different man. L
L, of course, stood for Lance.
The stack consisted of sheet after sheet of evidence. Logs, images, messages, all the material that Jonathan had collected earlier, but had lost access to.
The idea of sending printed copies was that they had no electronic signature, and their printing record—using the 3D printers—could easily be erased.
Jonathan went to a self-serve printing lab to add his own information, such as the letter from Helen. He then used the public freight office to send two copies of the lot to both the Asteroid Belt Mining Collective office and the Outer Space Civil Administration which was located in Main Base on the Moon.
Then it was a matter of waiting.
Delivery times dictated that the mining collective got theirs first, but they elected not to go public with it.
The administration on Main Base, though, did.
But it was to announce that the civil police had apprehended Richard Shelton the previous day. They had been following him because his reappearance on the radar at Ceres Station had already set off an alarm. He had been reported as having died at Astoria Station and was still wanted for fraud.
A big scandal blew up over the whole thing. The entire board of Prosperity Mining had to resign. Everyone was talking about the anonymous tip-off that the administration had received, even in the lab where Jonathan and Gaby worked with a young wheelchair-bound worker who went above and beyond his job description to do his part. Lance had been right about his brother. He was very capable and keen to work.
A week and a half later, Jonathan and Gaby took part in a scheduled briefing with their supervisor on Earth, Major Sara Edmundsen. They spoke about progress made on their task, which was going well.
Then she asked, “I hear that you two were on the transport ship Renae Stellaris when Astoria Station went silent. This whole affair has a bit of a Bartell & Larsen stamp all over it. The ruthless revelation of shocking facts in a methodical, indisputable, scientific way, delivered through a method that’s both effective and procedurally acceptable. I’m guessing that had something to do with you two?”
Jonathan said, “It could, but I think we may just leave it at that.”
“That might be a good idea. Now let’s talk about your next project.”
Thank you for reading Permutation. For other books in this series, or other science fiction titles, visit my website at pattyjansen.com.
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Patty Jansen, Permutation
