Things that go bang in the night: Part 2 (A novelette)

 (Part 1 of this story can be found here).

My office is cooler than station-normal; I keep a vortex chiller in here to soothe my Martian skin. Callie’s already there when I arrive, sitting straight up in my Mars-wood chair, her exuberant dandelion-fluff of silver hair adding another head’s worth of weight to her frame.

Callie Durrant. No-one could’ve been kinder, to the resentful, wounded person I was, when I left Mars on her mining boat to come here. That her particular form of kindness involved keeping her crew off my back, providing me with ample stimulants, and feeding me at regular intervals did not make it less potent, or real.

I’ve never resiled from owning the debt I owe her; not then, and not now.

I sit down behind my desk and say, “Are you going to tell me straight away, or shall we dance around for a while?”

She flares her nostrils slightly and focuses her sighted eye – the lavender one – on me.

“Hmmmmm.”

I shrug. My thoughts are already racing ahead to the investigation; as StationMaster, I have the authority to conduct it as I see fit but I am starting to get an uneasy feeling that I might not have the ability. Not fully. Not if multi-layered human shenanigans are involved.

I tap my finger idly on the desk. “So it looks like something blew up. In your third hold. Do you have any thoughts about that?”

She rubs at her eyebrow ridge. “Like, a bomb?”

“Maybe a bomb. Maybe just cargo that wasn’t supposed to sit together, or be in a station atmo. I don’t know, I’m not a tech. I’m sure my guys will have some thoughts, once they’re done.”

She looks notably uncomfortable at the reminder that forensics will be involved, but it can’t come as a surprise. Not really. Something in her ship almost defanged 203-Beta’s most important drydock gate and could’ve taken a double fistful of ships with it. If the Bowery had blown completely, we might’ve even lost station atmo and that’s goodnight June, for all of us.

Callie leans forward. “Rik. How’re you going to handle this?”  There’s an urgency in her voice that surprises me, because it’s more fearful than enraged. I was expecting the fury of Hades, not the terror of Phobos. (The mythic one, I mean. The people of the moon-world named for him rarely display fear, or any of the softer emotions).

I say, “There’ll have to be an investigation, of course. I’ll have Gemina help me put together a crew. Chem analysis first, I suppose. Then …” I fix her with a level stare.

“I’ll have to talk to your crew, of course.”

She’s shaking her head, no, no, and that spidey sense that started jumping in my neck is at full screech now.

“Callie,” I say. “What’s going on? For real.”

She sighs, a long, drawn-out ooooooh-ach sound that makes my skin prick. “It’s complicated. My crew doesn’t know anything about it, though, so –“

“You can hardly expect me to take your word for that, though. Especially if you won’t tell me what’s behind it.”

She makes an impatient gesture. “I don’t know what’s behind it! Obviously I wouldn’t have been carrying anything that I knew was going to do that!”

Huh.

“But you were carrying … something, then. Other than iron ore.”

She sighs again. Uh-oh.

“It was a package. Didn’t need any special conditions, the shipper said. About …”

She gestures a bit with her hands, then drops into the ping.

-          [pictogram squat square box] –

-          you see? –

-          isee isee –

Now it’s my turn to say it. “Hmmmmmm.”

“Look, I know,” she says. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s just.”

I drop back to ping. I need to push away the obfuscation of words, now; get at the heart of this.

-          money tight less ore more ships lesslessless every year less –

She scratches at the place where her ping connector is implanted, and nods slowly.

I say, quietly now, “They offered you a lot, then. To carry it.”

“Yeah.” She’s dejected. “More than we’ve made in the last year, picking ore.”

My eyes must have widened at that, and she reacts with a deprecating grimace.

“OK, it’s a red flag. I can see that now. But – Oh hell. That money would’ve kept us for another six months, no matter now slim the Belt work.”

I say, “Well, what was in the package then? Let’s start with that, and move on to who shipped it from there.”

Another sigh. Oh hell.

“You don’t know what was in the box?”

She runs a hand through her frizz of hair.

“They paid extra. To keep it confidential.”

I say, “Callie –“

She cuts me off. “I know I shouldn’t have taken anything without a clear manifest. I knew it at the time, but I just … Oh, they did the usual attestation about dangerous goods -”

“Might’ve been a bit disingenuous there.”

“So it seems. Yes.” She’s looking so cast down that, in spite of myself, I feel the urge to cheer her.

“Well then.” I kin-lift a couple of bottles of water out of the chiller and manoeuvre one into Callie’s hand, one into my own.

“Let’s look at it from the other angle. Who was the shipper? How did they get in touch with you?”

Callie takes a deep swallow of her water, and says, “I. Well.”

The disbelief in my face must be evident, as she says, “I mean, they gave me a name, but –“

“It’s a fake.” I’m shaking my head at this point. What an epic omnishambles.

“I checked up on them. Yeah, nothing there. It was well done, though – we had to reverse hack the Guild listings to find it for sure.”

Needless to say, doing any such thing is illegal, but I’m ignoring that; Belter perorations with Guild pingdata are not the main, or even a secondary, game at this point.

I take a deep breath. Two. Three. Open my mouth and I do not speak.

-          tala drydock crewtolook crewtoanalyse releaselock yesyes –

-          yes gemina releaselock crewin youwatch yousee –

-          isee iwatch itell-

Callie’s looking at me with worried eyes. If I report this to the consortium that owns 203-Beta, as I should, in fact, do, she will not only lose docking privileges, she’ll be on the hook for station repairs. It will break her, and her crew; her crew, who have sailed with her these fifteen space-long yearslong, long nights adrift in the black Belt, short days in the cool sun on Mars’s plains and scrublands. always chasing something they haven’t quite caught yet; but then, we never do, any of us.

Worse than losing a livelihood, for Callie, will be the idea of losing theirs. There is nothing for Belters, outside of the Belt and Mars; nowhere they can go, nothing they can do but pick the ore and sell it to the Guild and take what delight that can be found in a sky backlit by distant stars, an open velvet runway in the black, and the comfort of others: the self-loss of love, the nightwatch philosophy, the roar of good sex and the warmth of children born and reared.

And still, something is slippery here. I don’t think Callie’s blowing spacedust at me, but at the same time, I know there’s something we’re both missing.

“What was the name?” I say suddenly. She looks at me quizzically.

“The name…?”

“The fake name. The one the shipper gave you. What was it?”

“Oh. Huh.” She concentrates briefly, then says,

“It was Ezrit. Ezrit Bolton. He said he was a researcher, on 389-Omega. I spoke with him – well, with a person who said he was him – via stationlink, when we were passing SciBloc.”

“So no ping, then.”

She shakes her head, no. “We voice-spoke. He said he had a package to ship back to Mars. Seemed to know we were due an unloading trip soon, and offered me ..”

“Yeah, a lot of money to take it. That part I got.”

I sighed.

“The assumption you were supposed to make is that it was a sample of some kind.”

She raises her hand palm upwards. “I’m not sure what assumption he expected me to make. It’s the assumption I did make, though.”

A sudden little flash of comet-bright righteous rage:

“I ran it through the assay, you know. I’m not a complete moron. It should NOT have blown.”

Well now. That’s interesting.

“It assayed as inert?”

“Inert and inorganic. Yeah. My scanner’s only set to identify routine Belt saleables –“

That’s situation normal. More complex assay scanners can set captains back more months’ pay than they can ever afford.

“- and it wasn’t any of them. I thought it was some clever new alloy, that he wanted verified back on Prima. 389-Omega’s a metallurgic research outfit, you know.”

I did know. Gemina makes sure I am kept fully apprised of the composition and activities of the thin sliver of the Belt designated for research; the SciBloc, theoeretically apolitical, purist, seekers-of-truth-in-the-asteroid-wilderness; in reality, as venal as everywhere else. Most of the research is bought and paid for by the Guild; largely, it is about new value tech, tightening their grip on the system’s purse strings every year.

There are a couple of gene research outfits out there, too, but interest is waning in that. All the useful tweaking of our own, and Earth life, genomes has been done already; and, for now, other than finding new ways to coax extra production out of grain plantations, it’s not where the smart money goes. No, most of SciBloc is working on the big grunty projects and the micro money shots: new ships, new bots, better AI, new tools, new ways to twist space to suit us.

And, of course, the Big Hard Thing – how to finally work out the key to travelling outside this solar system. Once so vast to us, now, as the moon cities and planetismal bases and stations fill, as Mars begins to creak under the human load, as Earth, able to support so many fewer now, circles the drain a little more tightly every year, feeling so unchancily, crampingly, small. We can’t go faster than light; we’ve gone as close to that line as seems possible to get (which is why I can get back home to Mars in just five sailing weeks now, a pipe dream of a commute even twenty years ago), but it’s my view that that line will hold, despite what the Guild strives towards.

Oh, the Guild.

Ask them, and they will say: we will build ourselves anew in machine parts and energy surges, write across the expanse of the dark with lasers made of suns. I think the Guild looks to a future where bodies are redundancies; where the flesh is a memory of weakness, a mythos of birth that we tell each other in the eternal now we inhabit.

I open my channel to Gemina.

-          checkcomplement check389-Omega checkscistaff checkactivities –

-          icheck ilook –

-          389-Omega scibloc 5yeargrown 5yearflown 300units Hygieabase –

-          complement115 80sci 35support stationmasterisAI selfdesigBran –

That was a small surprise; StationMinds are rarely doubled as StationMasters even though, in reality, they are better at running a station than any Mind-Not. There are nowhere close to enough Minder-Kinetics with adequate stability to run all the stations; the Golden Hundred takes the cream of the Earth-born crop, Earth herself takes most of the rest and the moon sisters, Luna, Phobos and Demos, for all their power and silver-handed beauty have yet to birth a functional Minder of any kind. Genetic manips have been disastrously unsuccessful; it seems the mutation needs soil and sand, air and sky, to survive.

Mars produces more Healers than Kinetics, but still, Minder-births occur on my homeworld at roughly the rate that they do on poor wounded Earth. Most of them get sucked up by the Guild. Almost all, in fact. But it’s still nowhere near, nowhere close, to enough; nowhere near the power and reach that we need, to push out, to go further.

The grandiose dreams of reaching Callisto and Ganymede with ships and supplies, of building bases and domes and eventually, worlds, are just that. Fever dreams in the swallowing expanse of space.

The Mars-side Belt is the furthest we’ve managed to go, and even here, even here, we push constantly at the edge of what we can sustain. There are not enough Minders, and the tech is too raw. 203-Beta has me because it is the biggest Belt-hospital station out there; and for other reasons, of course. I’m not surprised that a small shop like 389-Omega doesn’t rate a Kinetic StationMaster.

I am surprised, though, that they had the common sense to realise that the AI is the next best option, by orders of magnitude, to any Mind-Not alternative.

Gemina’s back with more. I can see Callie’s frown gathering, but this will take as long as it takes and I know it’s going to matter.

-          income complementnames allnames all desigs usee –

-          isee isee –

I flick quickly over the list. A bunch of metallurgists, a few chemists, some techs; maintenance, food, med, comfort. All as you’d expect; but, wait. Wait.

-          gemina usure desigcorrect allcomplement –

-          yes tala isee isee strange –

I turn to Callie.

“Have you ever had dealings with 389-Omega before?”

Her lips twitch a bit, as they often do when she’s losing patience.

“No, why would we have? I hail them for courtesy, of course, as I do all the SciBloc outfits. As we pass.”

Yes. Belters are notorious for being sticklers for the accepted genuflects.

“ Usually the StationMind just responds with a generic on the open ping. Says they have no business to transact, wishes us safe sailing, that sort of thing.”

“Yes,” I say, thoughtful now. “But this time, it wasn’t Bran who responded to your hail?”

“No.” She worries at her left earlobe. “No, it wasn’t ping, it was voice. This fellow, as I said, who told me he was this Ezrit Bolton. He asked if we would take a package to Mars.”

“Have you taken packages before? For SciBloc stations?”

She nods. “Oh, sure. If we’re Mars-bound, and it’s not too bulky. It’s usually samples, you know. Alloys, recombinants, that sort of thing. I don’t carry biologicals, but there’s not much of that out here anyway.”

She huffs a breath between her teeth.

“This … It was a standard-sized package. Nothing special. He said the contents were confidential, but was happy to aver that they were not dangerous.”

“And you assayed it,” I say.

“Yes. I did. It was not – well, not obviously – any kind of risk.”

“Where were you taking it to? On Mars? Prima, or …”

She nods. “Yes, we had a warehouse address in the industrial district. Very typical, very normal. Nothing about rang any bells, for me.”

“I can see why not,” I agree. I’m still mulling over the data from Gemina, but I’m reluctant to speak too soon, or too openly. Even to Callie. Even to her. But it is passingly strange, and it’s itching at my cortex now, a grain of sand in the works that is more likely to produce a sore than an oyster.

“So naturally you recorded the destination. The addressee? They had a name?”

“Yes, of course.” She takes on that odd unfocused patina that Mind-Nots do when accessing the ping; toddlers have to concentrate to walk, and Mind-Nots are, always will be, mental toddlers. I assume she’s contacting her data store in the mainline database, and I’m right; a minute later she’s back with me, and says “Yes, it was a personal name. Not just a corp.”

That’s interesting, although, of course, it could be a fake too, but hard to know until we ask.

“The name?” I say, poised to record.

Callie says, “It’s an unusual one. Quite pretty in a way, if you like the throwback trend.”

Suddenly my palms start pricking. Surely, surely, this can’t be –

“The package,” says Callie, “was addressed to someone called Arabella Yellowlees. Care of the receiving warehouse, in Prima downtown.”

And with that, I know, and my stomach turns over sickeningly.

“Yellowlees”. My voice is flat, even as my mind keens a high threading song of alarm. I force myself to speak calmly, but Callie’s no fool; her eyes narrow instantly, the good one and the plesglass.

“You know her?”

I ping Gemina.

-          plssearch bdm attina yellowlees whowed whosib –

-          isearchisee –

-          yellowleesnaomi nowed sibstwo simonmale arabellafemale –

I meet Callie’s eye.

“Arabella Yellowlees is the sister of the LEO that broadcast Nadine Gynt’s manifesto a couple of years back. You know, the woman who killed Rosinta Swann, and blamed it on what she said was the Guild’s Ceres clearance plan. The LEO that went rogue after … for a certain value of rogue. When the Troubles kicked off, in the Guild cities.”

There was a beat, where we both took it in.

“The Resistance,” growled Callie, deep in her chest.

“It looks that way, yeah.”

“Presumably they didn’t aim to blow my ship to fucking kingdom come, though. Or this station. What would be the use of that? I’m independent and so are you. Hurting us wouldn’t hurt the Guild.”

I nodded. “No, quite the opposite. The Belt trends supportive of the Resistance, although no-one’s really managed to galvanise a consistent base here yet –“

Callie grinned. “We go our own way, here.” Her face darkened. “So it was a weapon, then, that was shipped in my girl’s guts. That went off when it wasn’t supposed to.”

“Looks that way.” I sighed. “It’s going to be a trick to work what it was, though.“

“Or what set it off”.

“Or why now”.

We contemplated each other gloomily across the desk.

And that is the moment that all hell breaks, once again, loose.

 

-          gemina whatthefck wherebang whererift airairair –

-          bowerygone hurtlespace flyvoid breachbreachbreach itmovesitmoves –

-          whatmove wheremove canuseal canusave–

-          isealisave centreholdsrimbreaks rimbreaches voidfingerscomeinwards –

We were running; Callie, so much shorter than I, keeping pace with me by dint of furious terror.

“What the FUCK, Erika –“

“PING!” I roar, using breath I didn’t have to overwhelm her with sound. Absolutely no time for niceties, as we round the corner towards the dock and see the teeming swarm of panicked people clustering back from the barrier that Gemina, bless it, has thrown up to hold the atmo against the gaping house-sized tear that’s just blossomed where the Bowery used to be.

-          what everlovinfuck rik rik rik myship –

-          idont know callie ilookisee –

-          what is goingon –

I careen through the dock door, eyeing the big black hole in my station’s skin with horror. The gap is ragged, like a wound from a serrated knife. Gemina is holding the line, but I can already see this is a temporary measure, and that it won’t hold. If that gap widens … well.

The Ashling Gray is barely hanging on. I can see two of her crew, wide-eyed, hanging on for grim death to her port bow, shipmasks hastily crammed over their nose and mouths, their skin blistering already from the voided atmo. First things first; I pick them up and port them to the safe side of Gemina’s barrier, and half-note Callie running towards them, her cries rising like gull at the water’s edge.

But, wait. Wait.

What’s that thing crawling along the Bowery wall?

I reached out my mind, shoring up Gemina’s seal and probing towards the moving object. That it was a object, something mechanical rather than biological, was an immediate certainty; for one thing, it moved like a bot, but rather more importantly, it was fairly apparently not very dead, despite being exposed to a vacuum. This wasn’t especially reassuring, though. Biologicals (well, other than phages) were a lot less dangerous than the fantastical and potentially deadly machines that scientists loved to tinkered with, out here in the Belt labs.

I pushed a ping towards it, cautiously.

-          dou read do u hear –

Silence. Then, tinny, calm:

-          iread ihear –

Well then. An AI in there, no matter how basic.

-          what urpurpose why uharm  –

-          willu stop standdown –

The robot, which I can now see resembles nothing so much as a piece of hand luggage on a local hop flight, freezes in place. It’s a foolish idea, because the bot certainly doesn’t have eyes, but I feel like it is staring towards me, contemplating, very possibly judging, my capacity to spike its guns, whatever they might be.

I roll my shoulders. Fuck this.

-          respond altis destroy  –

-          i willdestroy –

The robot, clearly confused:

-          whereis placethis  –

Huh. Suuuuurely this is not a Little Bot Lost scenario?

-          resupply station 203–

-          [insert starref coord]

-          notarrive marsprima notarrive yellowlees toosoontoosoon –

The bot crawled a few more metres, uncertainly.

-          notprima {queryemoji]  –

-          whynot  –

I sighed. If all this turned out to be a fucking programming error, heads were going to roll from a very great height, if I had to roll them myself.

-          shipstop repairrepair –

-          umake explode –

The bot managed to look offended, which was quite a feat in a smallish lump of titanium and parts.

-          notinoti  –

-          firestickin box istopistop –

-          istopnotall ustop firestickfind –

Cursing, I immediately throw out a wide sniffer net and stick a mental thumb on the bot to hold it in place. I’m about 73% sure that the bot isn’t the culprit now, but it never hurts to be sceptical about these things.

I reach, and, wait –

Yes. There it is.

The explosive is a clever little fucker, powderised so finely that I missed it altogether the first time (damn it, Erika, you lost the Bowery Gate by being so fucking sloppy – but no time to dwell on it now). I can feel it, now, doing its programmed diffusion across the wide wounded mouth in the side of my station. Getting every grain of it is going to be exhausting and painstaking, but absolutely necessary. I wonder if –

-          ihelp isniff ineutralise  –

I’m really warming up to this little guy.

-          uhelp umakesafe onmymark –

I lift my thumb and the bot scurries towards the hole, reaching out its minor sensors like amber filigree threads.

-          ifix  –

I half-smile at its firm, almost prim, mental voice.

-          wework wework we save –

And we do, although it takes hours.

Later, they’ll discover that the explosive powder was formulated for the Resistance by a Belt-born sympathiser, a person called Ferris Sailor, who’d used the lab at 389-Omega as a remote-enough outpost to do their weaponry work in obscurity. The powder, experimental, had been coded to blow once it was immobile and in atmo for 48 hours, which Sailor, not knowing the Ashling Gray would make  a long stop with us, had surmised would happen once Yellowlees had collected it from Prima and deployed it to its target on Phobos. They were going for one of the largest industrial arrays, no small-target strategy – things that go bang in the night are always more fearful, and more effective, when they rip holes in the beating heart rather than just taking off a finger or two.

Later, they’ll discover all that, but by then, no-one will actually care, because.

-          allsafe allsecure  –

-          [insert gratitudethanksappreciate] –

-          whomade samesamefirestick whywhy –

The bot, trundling slowly towards me, pauses.

-          notsame notsame –

-          imakeforstars –

You make for what now, little guy?

Gemina, to me:

-          tala takecare takecare –

-          powermind strongmind itreachesitseeks –

Hmmmm.

-          whatpurposeu  whomade –

-          imakeforstars i show –

Gemina:

-          taladont –

Me: Oh what the hell, go on then.

-          iopen ushow –

And then, it did.

 

 

REPORT OF THE AI ACTING STATION-MASTER RESUPPLY203
GEMINA REPORTS

This is my report of the events that took place on solar date 2124-40-59, which resulted in the disappearance and  reappearance of the injured mining vessel, Ashling Gray, and the Station-Master of this station, Mr Erika Tala, Minder-Kinetic, and, in my estimation, first astrogater of this system.

The code transmitted by the intelligent small robot, which was discovered in the dock sector of this Resupply Station following the explosion close to the Gate 34-B, known as the Bowery Gate, caused immediate and extreme amendments in Mr Tala’s mental patterns. Mr Tala’s existing patterns were familiar to me, after several years’ close work, but I was – and am – unable to fully chart the subtleties of the changes that were rendered.

I observed Mr Tala respirate rapidly, and her eyes dilate as if in a darkened room. It is my surmise that she was no longer perceiving the space in front of her.

She turned her head towards Captain Durrant, with whom I have observed that she has a personal connection, and spoke aloud, saying, Sorry, Callie, but I have to go. I’ll try to bring her back in one piece.

At that time, Station-Master Tala seized a space rebreather kit from the wall unit close to her position, fitted it to her face, and teleported herself on board the vessel Ashling Gray, sealing herself in the largely undamaged forward compartment.

Propelled by Mr Tala’s kinetic touch, the vessel spiralled slowly away from the edge of the Station, then began to pulse, and then vanished.

Approximately 58 minutes elapsed, during which time I was able to work with the small robot to seal the breach in the station perimeter, but was not able to elicit any information from the robot regarding what had occurred, where Mr Tala might have taken the Ashling Gray, and how that had been accomplished.

The human residents and visitors of the Station became, and remained, somewhat alarmed by these events.

As the hour approached since its departure, the Ashling Gray suddenly reappeared off the Station’s lower deck. In appearance, the vessel looked no worse than when it had departed, but the large-sized injury in its aft compartment was still in place. I immediately initiated a scan for Mr Tala and found her seated in the copilot’s chair, unresponsive but alive. I requested service bots to tow the Ashling Gray inside the now-repaired drydock, and had Mr Tala extracted and brought to the med-unit for analysis.

I further interrogated the small robot at this time, which suggested that if I wanted to know where the Ashling Gray had been, I should ask it myself, rather than continuing to press the small robot. Setting aside the small robot’s impertinence for the time being, I did query the vessel as to its destination and method of travel, and received data indicating that the Ashling Gray did not know exactly where it had been or how it had got there, but had surmised from star maps to which it had access that its destination had been located somewhere in or close to the Barnard’s Star system, approximately 5.978 light years from our current location.

At this time, the small robot informed me that Mr Tala had effected what it referred to as a “chart”, using her Minder aptitude to trace a path through subspace to a location outside the solar system, which had obviated the need for the believed-impossible ftl travel to traverse great distances. The small robot suggested that Mr Tala  had acted, in effect, as an “astrogater”, finding safe passage through the void to other worlds, as navigators once did on the seas of Earth.

I asked the small robot if it had instructed Mr Tala on how this could be done, and it responded that it had, in a manner of speaking, done so. I further enquired as to whether Mr Tala will have experienced damage from the action, to which the robot replied that it was unsure, but it hoped not. Insofar as an artificial intelligence can appear chagrined, it is my judgement that the small report did so appear.

The small robot has, at the time of writing this report, not disclosed who made it, or why, or how it came to be aboard the Ashling Gray.

Mr Erika Tala has not, at the time of writing this report, regained consciousness.

I submit this report for the information of the government of Earth, the collective of Mars Prima, the councils of the Guild of Moons and the Golden Hundred, and the independent traders’ associations of the Belt.

I submit this report to the people of this system and to their heirs, embodied and otherwise.

We are now free of this cradle in which we have sheltered, and free to sail this void, in all its vastness, in all its beautiful terror.

We are: free.