Date Point 3y 8m 3w AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada.
“During the deployment of the civilian colonists, we were able to send over a smaller version of the jump array installed right here at Scotch Creek.” Higgins began. Jenkins raised a hand.
“I’m sorry, ‘jump array’? I thought they were travelling on Kirk’s ship?”
“The Jump array is, as far as we can tell, a uniquely human invention.” Tremblay said. “Bartlett came up with it. Point-to-point transport of materiel via wormhole between two Array stations. One end’s here on base, the other end of that big array is on Kirk’s ship.”
”…cool!”
“Well, anyway.” Higgins continued. “We assembled a smaller version, which we’re calling the ‘postbox’. It’s a useful way to support the colony—they can send back written messages and USB sticks to stay in touch, we can send over spare parts, medical supplies… Right now we’re sending over the pieces to construct a coffin-sized version for transit of individual persons.”
“Yesterday, the military commander there, Captain Owen Powell, sent us back this urgent report.”
The lights dimmed again and Temba selected a video file.
The face addressing the camera was a tired-looking, bearded man wearing a black pullover and a dull green beany. “Project Starstep CO’s daily report, Fifteen-thirty hours, mission day eighty-two.” he recited, in a thick accent that reminded Kevin of Sean Bean. “Saunders came back, broadcasting IFF this time, thankfully. He’s given us a couple of starships he claims he stole from the Hierarchy. I’m going to repeat my request to get some experts in ET tech assigned here ASAP: he’s right, we NEED people who can take these things apart. Bad news is, the bloody things don’t have jump drives, so we can’t send them back to Earth for analysis.”
“The worse news is, that this is just two—Saunders kept a third—out of probably a whole lot of this class of ship. They have better-than-best cloaking tech, and so do their missiles. These aren’t small ships, neither. They’re bigger than an aircraft carrier, about as heavily armed as a cruiser, and from what I saw they’re equipped for assault, bombardment, and invasion. There’s got to be some kind of a shipyard out there making these things.”
“I’ve talked it over with Sir Jeremy, and our recommendations are as follows: One: We need to get the Coffin set up and bring forward the schedule for the full-scale Array. Two: I want to raise the system shield and go public. Sooner we do it, the less likely we are to have some infiltrator sneak in and drop a beacon. Three: I’m going to need naval crews to assign to these things, and somebody who knows how to refit them with a jump drive. Four: Saunders thinks we should keep them here to defend the colony. I disagree: I think there’s a shipyard out there that needs capturing if possible, and blowing the fook up if not. My lads are itching for a real mission. No further recommendations at this time.”
He swigged some water before continuing.
“The other half of Saunders’ delivery, which you’ll probably find more immediately useful, is enclosed. This Hierarchy he keeps talking about apparently have the ability to treat a mind like a data file—transfer it, store it, run it on computers. I’ve gone over that in a previous report. This time, he’s delivered the—he called it the dissected consciousness of a Hierarchy agent known as ‘Zero’. We can’t make heads nor tails of it, but he’s got a friend who can interrogate it—enclosed is what’s been learned so far. I’m inclined to trust it.”
He rubbed his beard.
“The existence of a Hierarchy cell on Earth seems likely. Hopefully the information in this document will help Intelligence catch the buggers.”
He examined some paperwork for a second, thinking.
“Nowt else to report militarily. Colonial militia training is going well. Sir Jeremy’s civilian report will follow in due time, I consider this high-priority so am sending now. Powell out.”
Higgins turned the lights back up.
“Saunders is an Australian abductee.” he clarified. “And apparently something of a practical expert in alien technology. He crash-landed an Alliance cruiser on Cimbrean a few weeks ago, and was cooperative in sharing intelligence and technology with the project. It’s thanks to him that this facility has a working cloaking device to study. Educated by his own example, some of the SBS divers were able to retrieve examples of working alien power generators.”
“As for the content of the report,” Temba picked up “It details—pretty much in full—what, exactly, the Hierarchy is.”
Date Point: 3y 11m 2w AV
National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C., USA, Earth.
“It’s amazing how much you can come to care about an inanimate object.”
Rylee wasn’t accustomed to public speaking. Nor was she accustomed to dressing for official functions or historic moments. She felt more comfortable in a jumpsuit or her flight suit than in a dress.
“I admit: I’m in love with Pandora. Together we created history. I’d fly her forever if I could. But Pandora doesn’t belong to me. With the retirement of the Lockheed-Martin TS-101 X-plane, she now belongs to history, and I am proud that she will continue to serve and inspire mankind, here in this illustrious Smithsonian Museum.”
Camera flashes caught every moment. She knew they’d comment that she was crying: she didn’t care. She was allowed to mourn the turning of this page. She stretched up on tip-toe to kiss Pandora’s nose, and rested her forehead against the plane’s cool hull, ignoring the redoubled sparkle of the media for a few seconds.
Then she collected herself and turned back to the microphone, accepting the museum director’s offered handkerchief as he asked the reporters for questions.
Date Point: ??? AV
Classified Facility, Earth.
“So what did he write?”
“Looks like mostly doodling…”
Monitoring the detainee’s scribbles and notes was a routine operation, done whenever they cleaned up his cell while he was outside of it. It wasn’t a difficult process. One or two quick snaps with the camera was all it took. There was a lot that could be learned about the detainee from what they chose to jot down by way of entertaining themselves.
The pages were densely packed with what appeared to be mostly nonsense and doodles: scribbles, spirals, zig-zag lines. There was a kind of aesthetic to it, albeit a spartan, mathematical one. Six’s lines were mostly either parallel or perpendicular, or at least as much so as could be managed by unpracticed human hands. Beyond that, he didn’t seem to care what he drew so long as the graphite made a stimulating sound on the paper. Mostly, it was just a geometric right-angled mess.
“Not a lot to go on.”
“No…”
She looked around at the team. Her job went both ways—as psychologist, not only was she there to analyze and hypothesize about the detainee’s reactions, she was there to keep an eye on the ‘gators and their intel support, make sure they were holding up okay.
It was a fact little suspected by the civilian world that interrogation was practically as hard on the people conducting it as upon their detainee. While the interrogators had the luxury of seeing the outside world, freedom of movement, nice meals, unlimited entertainment and all the perks of being a free American citizen, at the end of the day they were still tearing a man apart piece by piece to learn the things he held most dear.
Only a true psychopath could have done that without being torn up in turn, and a psychopath simply wouldn’t have a place on this team.
And Six was proving to be a tough nut to crack. ‘Stephen’ and ‘Carl’ were both veterans and experts, having done this many times before. Their information had saved lives, they knew how to cope.
But there was always the possibility that this time might be the time that all their experience and coping mechanisms failed them. Their veterancy was not an excuse for her to become lax in monitoring them.
She watched the two booth-guys for a minute. They were talking, quietly, and while both looked stressed and subdued there were no immediate causes for alarm that she could detect.
Long-term…
Well. Maybe she could recommend something that would be good both for them and for the detainee.
Date Point: 3y 11m 3w AV
Dominion Embassy Station 172, Terra/Luna L1 point.
“Are you okay?”
Sister Niral had elected to remain aboard the Embassy station until her pregnancy forced her back to Gao. The preliminary results were encouraging—she was expecting triplets, and if she’d been human, might have been called “glowing”.
As it was, she was the first person Rylee went to after the unpleasant necessity of the Smithsonian meetings, speeches, interviews and photographs. Any awkwardness between them was long since past, and over the months since, as the last few flights of the TS-101 had wound down, they had become fast friends.
Niral, it turned out, loved to groom her sisters’ fur, and this quirk extended to human hair. Rylee kept it short by necessity—long hair and space helmets did NOT mix—but it felt good to let her nonhuman friend work on it.
Rylee sighed. “I will be.” she said. “I always knew Pandora was an X-plane, a prototype. She’s wonderful, but she’s not a patch on what companies like LockMart can produce now that they know what they’re doing.”
“You’ll be flying the replacement?”
“Hey, my career’s not over just because they’re retiring my sled.” Rylee told her. “Though, I’m being headhunted by the private sector. Lots of big money being flashed at me to try to get me to quit NASA and test-pilot their designs.”
Niral issued a kind of melodic purr that Rylee had learned passed for the equivalent of a “hmm” in her species. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.” she said.
“Nope. I’m in it for the science, for the species, not to get rich while I make some billionaires even richer.”
“What do you think it’ll be like? The replacement?”
“Similar.” Rylee admitted. “A lot went right with the one-oh-one, but it was… you know, the tolerances were looser because we didn’t know what it’d be like, and that hurts performance.”
“I think only you would notice the difference.” Niral commented, chittering a Gaoian laugh. As a diplomat herself, the fields of aeronautics and piloting were outside her experience, but she had gathered enough from the arguments between the two pilots in her life to know that Rylee’s constant maintenance and tuning of her ‘sled’ was enough to earn margins that any Gaoian pilot would have considered not worth the effort.
“Hey, the little differences add up. Point-five percent might not sound like much, but at the kind of accelerations we… think these things will get up to in the field, that could be the difference between a fatal hit and a clean miss.”
“There’s other things, too. Our ES field tech’s improving by leaps and bounds, the JPL’s turned out their most efficient warp engine yet… you watch, I’ll always love Pandora but I’m not dumb enough to think that her replacement will be worse. It’ll be better: WAY better.”
“So what are you doing in the interim?” Niral asked.
“Classified, sorry babe.”
Niral knew better than to pry, so the two sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes before the quarters spoke an untranslated sentence in a Gaoian dialect. To Rylee’s untrained ear, it sounded not dissimilar to Korean.
“A launch!” the Gaoian said, abandoning Rylee’s scalp to spring over the window. “I still can’t quite believe your people still use rockets…”
“Well, they’ve got kinetics and ES fields now.” Rylee said, joining her. There was something fun about watching a launch, from orbit. “And Earth’s gravity hasn’t changed—they’re still the best way to haul bulk stuff into orbit for us.”
Technically, “Kinetics” was a gross misnomer which routinely earned an impromptu lecture on correct definitions for anybody who was so incautious as to utter it within earshot of scientific pedants, or on the Internet, but the translated alien vernacular was tenacious. It was hardly surprising that it had been one of Time’s words of the year, given that the introduction of what was, after all, an extremely small and efficient engine had decimated the cost-per-kilogram of material transport from ground to orbit, revitalizing the space industry practically overnight.
From where the station rested at the Terra/Luna L1 point, Earth was much, MUCH too far away to make out such a tiny event as a launch with the naked eye of course, but the station took care of that, zooming and magnifying to an incredible degree, so that the vehicle became a spike of light atop a pillar, smoking its way up from the curvature of the planet. The perspective was a little false, but it looked cool as hell.
“How much can this thing zoom in?” she asked. Niral spoke to the room in Gaoian again—it was curious how directions to the station’s controlling systems didn’t get translated—and the view zoomed in even further, until the rocket itself filled the view, a slender white spike marked down its flank with the livery of several world-famous companies, the so-called “Big Ten” that were co-operating in the Second Space Race.
“Oh my God! That’s Hephaestus One!” Rylee exclaimed. “I forgot that was today!”
“Hephaestus One?”
“Yeah! It’s the first flight out to Ceres.” Rylee explained. “They’re going to set up an asteroid mining hub and shipyard out there.”
“Your people move fast!” Niral remarked, clearly impressed. “It took us ten Gaoian years to launch our first asteroid mining operation.”
“How long is that in Earth years?”
“Room?”
The room displayed a conversion table on the window alongside the view of the rocket. Rylee read it and nodded.
“I bet I know the reason.” she said. “Will this room take voice commands from me?”
“It should do…”
“Great.” Rylee looked around, then shrugged and commanded: “Uh, Room: Display side-by-side comparisons of the estimated number of asteroids in the Sol system versus the Gao system, and display survey maps for rare earth elements on Earth and the planet Gao.”
Graphs and two globes appeared side-by side on the walls and windows as the station’s interface systems interpreted the command and expanded on it, trying to guess not only what Rylee had asked for, but also what she might not yet know she wanted.
She had to admit—as unimpressive as some of the achievements of nonhuman life were, when it came to user-friendly interfaces, they were the absolute masters. It looked like something straight out of a movie, but practical. Every element was clearly presented, its relationship to every other, obvious. She took a moment to appreciate the accomplishment, before turning to the relevant data.
“See here? Sol has a HUGE density of inner-system asteroids next to Gao.” she said. “And then over here, look: Your homeworld’s pretty rich in Rare Earths and they’re all spread out pretty evenly. But Earth is poor in Rare Earths, and they’re mostly here, under the control of only a couple of political factions. But there’s a boatload in the asteroids.” she indicated a chart demonstrating the estimated absolute tonnage of various elements and minerals in the asteroid belt. “And we need rare earth magnets to build ES field generators. And ES field generators are a huge boom industry right now.”
“So getting out there quickly ensures that the supply remains constant and averts a future problem? Sensible.” Niral said.
Rylee laughed. “So getting out there quickly ensures that a whole bunch of very rich people get even richer.” She countered.
“You don’t sound like you mind that.” Niral said.
“Why should I? It works. You said it yourself, it took you guys twice as long to do this.”
“It sounds… greedy.” Niral objected.
“Yeah! Greed is good, girl!”
Niral just stared at her. “Rylee, if it wasn’t for the sex thing, that would be the most alien thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Rylee just shrugged. “Room, clear the data, focus on the rocket again.”
They watched it separate a stage. Force fields unfolded around and behind it, catching the solar wind and reminding Rylee of an ancient sailship as they swept Hephaestus One’s path clear of orbital debris and sucked down power for the warp engine. It took only seconds: in a flare of light, the private rocket leapt into the impossible distance and was gone.
“Alien or not honey, there’s the proof.” she said.
Date Point ???
Classified Facility, Earth.
“Hello, Six.”
”…”
“How are you feeling today?”
”…”
“Did you sleep well? How’s the new bed?”
”…”
“Not talking to me?”
”…”
“Okay. Let me know if you want to talk.”
The unspeakable bastard just got out a deck of playing cards and started to deal them out on the desk in front of him, playing some kind of a game as if Six’s stubborn silence were of exactly no consequence to him.
The sound washed over him, as it always seemed to. He wondered if that was why Stephen used these tools—because he too enjoyed the sound they made. Was it a quirk of the way humans saw the world, that simple things could be so… mesmerizing?
“Beats me why I bother with the cards.” Stephen commented. “I could play on the computer instead…”
That didn’t seem like an attractive option.
“Hey, do you want this deck?”
The offer surprised him. Surely Stephen wasn’t serious? But then again, he’d been true to his word about the bed…
No. It was just a trick to get him to give up and start talking again. He wouldn’t be swayed that easily, and so Six folded his arms and continued to glare.
“Suit yourself.” Stephen finished his game, and put the cards away. Surprisingly he stood up. “I guess you’re not in the mood today? That’s cool, we’ll do something a little different. See you in a few minutes.”
He exited the room as the guards entered. Six knew better than to resist by now, but he was curious about this ‘something a little different’, and his pulse picked up a little as the guards led him to somewhere that had… an indefinably different texture to the area around his cell and the interrogation room. It was hard to tell—the human body had senses he was sure weren’t quite analogous to anything else he had experienced. Despite the total disorientation of the darkness and silence, he could still somehow feel that the area around him was not the same, somehow. There was a feeling of volume.
The sensation was validated when his blindfold was removed. He WAS somewhere new, a larger area—still totally enclosed, but big enough to run if he so wanted. There was a hoop of some kind attached to the wall a little above head height, and some markings on the ground.
Stephen and Carl were both waiting for him, having apparently changed into plain, loose clothing that looked much more comfortable than their suits, and a pair of soft shoes. Carl was holding a stippled orange sphere with black lines on its surface.
“What’s this?” Six asked, then cursed himself for giving in to the surprise as his shackles were removed and the guards retired to stand watchfully at the door.
“Basketball.” Carl said, and threw the ball to the ground. It bounced back up, and he gently flung it down again with his other hand. “The idea is to get the ball to fall through that hoop on the wall, and stop me from doing the same. You can’t run while holding the ball, though—you have to bounce it on the floor like this.” he demonstrated, swapping the ball from hand to hand via the hard surface.
“What’s your angle here, gentlemen?” Six asked, suspiciously.
Carl threw the ball gently to Stephen, who caught it and spun it on one finger in a display of impressive coordination. “No angle. This is a morale and welfare session now. You need the stimulation and exercise.” he said.
“So, it’s a reward for good behavior.”
“That too.” Stephen agreed. “Come on, you going to play or not?” His arms punched straight out, flinging the ball at Six, who astonished himself by catching the high-speed object.
He considered resisting, but after the sheer grey sameness of the last few weeks, how could he? He knew he was being manipulated, he knew this was just another tool in the arsenal that these people were using to dissect him and extract his valuable knowledge, but no amount of willpower in the world could stop him from being, on everything but the purely cerebral level, shamefully eager to move, to play, to do something different.
He bounced the ball.
When the session ended, who-knew how long later, he was exhausted, but he felt alive, and something approaching happy for the first time since arriving in this place.
Date Point: 4y 3w AV
Asteroid Ceres, Sol System
Construction work on Ceres Base had begun well before the first engineers had arrived. Cargo modules full of the raw materials, equipment, prefabricated units, life support systems, artificial gravity generators and ES field generators necessary to construct a working facility had been injected into orbit, revolving slowly in the asteroid’s pathetic gravity.
It had all come together with only a few minor disasters. With the ability to deliver engineers to the worksite to remote-control the construction vehicles without significant communications lag, gentle landings in Ceres’ miniscule gravity had been trivial. Setbacks, however, were inevitable. One of the modular base components had suffered a failure of its landing, running out of fuel and falling to ground several hundred meters from its intended location. Moving it had required the assembly and delivery of a specialist module-refuelling drone
The planned landing site for another module had turned out to be the sheer edge of a crater. Fortunately, the module had not been a location-critical one, and its eventual installation on the far side of the base was just going to be one of those peculiar quirks that lent it a unique character.
That was Phase One, just making the place livable in the long term, appropriate for habitation and experimentation. It had consumed only half of the orbiting equipment.
The second phase, and the other half, was to turn the facility into something that would, ultimately, turn a profit. The smaller part of that, equipment-wise, was the Survey Center, a launch and control platform for a fleet of Unmanned Space Vehicles that would—assuming their design and technology worked as intended—survey the tumbling, diffuse rocks of the Belt in search of Platinum, Rare Earths, Iron, Nickel, Titanium, and of course water.
The larger part, dwarfing the facility despite not yet being complete, was the sprawling industrial monstrosity of the refining and smelting equipment, literally “printing” itself into existence piece by piece out of local materials.
This edifice couldn’t possibly have been built on Earth—it was an eyesore testament to low-gravity industry, constructed around a functional contempt for aesthetics.
Drew Cavendish loved it.
But then again, Drew Cavendish didn’t have much patience for aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics. His sense of beauty revolved around the practical, the working, the mechanically efficient. He was the sort of man who would squint bewildered at an art gallery, but wax poetic about an example of expert welding.
Ceres Base was therefore the perfect destination for him, after a career spent working oil and gas rigs in the North Sea. That was a field that had been in terminal decline even before the arrival of effectively free solar energy in the form of ES field technology and—rumour had it—the long-awaited holy grail of nuclear fusion.
Taking up with BHP Billiton’s fledgling asteroid mining program had just been sensible for somebody with twenty years of experience in Atmospheric Diving Suits. Not least because the basic salary was 50% higher than he’d been earning at the peak of his Earthly career, with a promise of simply huge annual yield-based bonuses.
Naively, he’d assumed that piloting a Red Bull spacesuit wasn’t so very dissimilar to driving an ADS. Both were bulky, rigid, prevented you from scratching your itches and served to keep you more or less comfortable when surrounded by a medium—or lack thereof—that would kill you, for all intents and purposes instantly.
That had been driven out of him in simulator time with a VR headset. Movements that would have been perfectly safe when welding a deep water rig, where the water would cushion and stop any stray movements, could send an incautious spacewalker drifting. A ‘walker could get in serious trouble just millimeters from a handhold, with nothing to kick, swim or exert any force against to move them the tantalizing distance back to safety.
He had been surprised to learn that, in freefall and when out of contact with any surface, moving his arm also pushed the rest of his body around in accordance with Sir Isaac Newton’s most ancient and famous principle of reaction. Unnoticeable when your boots were firmly on a surface under even the most tepid gravity—but enough to set a man spinning when floating free, and surprisingly tiring.
But, he had cleared training. Quickly, too, and with straight As. And now… here he was. Ceres. And beyond one glamorous tour out here getting the place set up, once the first bonus rolled in?
Well, he’d always promised himself that he would one day leave the grey and choppy seas of Northern Europe behind for waters that were clearer, calmer, and garnished with bikini-clad waitresses and fruit drinks. He’d never anticipated that his route to paradise would be via deep space, but that was life. He’d get there.
All he had to do was work.
“Bloody impressive.” he commented, watching the pressure doors swing themselves closed behind the Hephaestus vehicle that had delivered him and some other newbies. Technically, the landing bay was perfectly pressurised by the gossamer curtain of an atmosphere retention field, but Health and Safety regulations insisted that the vehicle’s own airlocks were not to be opened until the physical pressure doors were closed and the seals had been checked.
It was a source of considerable bemusement for the handful of nonhumans who had been taken on as consultants and advisors to the operation that the LLC would simply not hear a single word about relying on atmosphere retention fields. They seemed to regard it as quaint to be leery of relying on a system that could fail in a heartbeat if it lost power. Drew wondered just how bloody daft and foolhardy these aliens must be to rely on a bloody force field to keep their air in, without redundancies or failsafes.
Still. Questionable attitude to safety aside, they knew more about mining asteroids than any human did, and that made them sufficiently valuable to the operation that translation and disease-suppression implants had been mandatory for all personnel. Drew was already in the habit of running his fingers over the slight ridges of metal that adorned his temple, which was already being called the “Spacer’s Tattoo”, but he’d fortunately managed to suppress the urge to lick the back of his too-clean teeth.
“Sugoi.” agreed Heikichi.
Heikichi Togo’s ship suit bore the three diamonds of Mitsubishi. He was an expert in industrial robotics whose English could charitably be described as “abysmal”, but that simply didn’t matter thanks to the implants. He could rattle away in Japanese all he wanted and, despite not speaking word one of that language himself, Drew would know exactly what he meant. That had significantly freed up the LLC to recruit from all over the world without regard for language barriers.
“D’you know where you’re sleeping yet, Togo-san?” he asked. Drew may not have spoken a word of Japanese, but he knew about calling people ‘-san’ if you wanted to be polite, and it seemed to be appreciated.
“Not yet.” Togo admitted. “If the company hasn’t got a place picked out for me, I think I’ll just have to pick out my own.”
“Well, I’m in D-block, and you seem like you’d make a good top-bunk buddy.” Drew told him as the safety teams declared the hangar sealed and the H-vehicle popped its seals.
“Thank you, Cavendish-san.”
“Hey, we don’t stand on ceremony like that where I’m from. You can call me Drew if you want.”
“Daroo.”
“Close enough, mate.” They shook hands and parted ways, bound for the offices of their respective company reps.
The complex was eerily quiet compared to the staging platform in Earth orbit. Where that was a space station, made oddly loud by the absence of any medium outside to carry away the sounds so that they echoed around the interior, here the facility’s modules were anchored to the rock of the asteroid and had a layer of sound insulation on their underside that conducted noises away into Ceres itself. It was much more peaceful, and cooler too for the same reasons.
Still, it WAS cramped, full of narrow corridors lined with equipment, conduits, cables and piping, all hung with instructions and safety posters. He could see why a maximum BMI had been one of the conditions of employment—anybody too bulky in these corridors would have been a serious obstacle to the flow of traffic that already involved turning sideways every few steps.
The B-B administrative module felt almost like any office complex back on Earth, albeit one that was after-hours, or maybe open on a holiday. The only movement so far was a trio of IT techs getting the computers set up, and the Dyson robot vacuum cleaner that was methodically patrolling the carpet. He was just wondering which office was to be his and whose he should report to when a slick-haired skinny blond man with a chestnut tan and a few too many wrinkles for his age stuck his head out and shot him a very white smile. He was wearing a loud blue aloha shirt over his company overalls.
“G’day! You Cavendish?” he asked. He couldn’t have been more stereotypically Australian if he’d been wearing a hat with corks in it.
“That’s me.” Drew agreed.
“Beaut.” The antipodean extended a hand. “Drew Martin, mate, I’m yer foreman.”
“Ah, you’re the other Drew?” Cavendish returned the handshake. “Good to meet you, mate. I heard good things about you from Dai Dawson.”
“Good old Dai.” Martin grinned. “Bloody good miner that one, had Bauxite in his bones.”
“He said something similar about you.”
“Ripper. Come on, step into my office.”
Martin’s office was, mercifully, not as Straya’d up as the man himself—in fact it was the purely professional space of somebody who took their job completely seriously. The walls were already thoroughly papered in charts, rotas, schedules, checklists and more—the paraphernalia of a mining director. His desk was a line of four monitors, all currently on a screensaver.
“Good news is, we’ve found our first rock already.” he declared. “One of the USVs caught a nice first prospect, and it’s in a stable Ceres orbit too, so no time limit either. Perfect first score.”
“How big?”
“CB group, two hundred and eighty meters. About twenty-seven metric megatons of bencubbinite.”
Both Drews grinned. That one rock alone contained enough nickel and iron to assemble the entire facility.
“So we’re just installing the stability thrusters.” Drew C mused, thinking ahead. There would be no need for anything else for an asteroid that was orbiting Ceres itself. Just enough to correct its orbit whenever it became perturbed. His team’s job was to fly out to new stakes and fit them with the engines that would gently nudge them into Ceres orbit for the mining teams to take over.
“Bloody right!”
“When?”
“Your team arrives Thursday. I want you checking the suits and gear, make sure everything’s up to code. We’ll go when you’re happy.”
“Great. I’ll get settled in for now, start on all that in the day shift tomorrow.”
“Bonzer. Looks like it’ll be good workin’ with ya, you pommie bastard.”
Drew chuckled, knowing full well that Drew M was just being friendly. “Looks like.” he agreed.
Date point: ??? AV
Classified Facility, Earth
Six hated himself.
He hated humans.
He especially hated Stephen and Carl.
But most of all, he hated the conclusion he was starting to form.
The conclusion was this: That victory was impossible. There was, he was coming to realise, simply no way to withhold the information that his interrogators wanted. He should suicide now, pop the implants in his head and rob them of their victory before they won it.
But something was stopping him and the thing that most frustrated him was that he simply couldn’t figure out what it was.
He was being played like an instrument—little rewards were given when he surrendered, snatched away the second he fought back. The incredible boredom grated against his very essence as a thinking being, relieved only by interrogation sessions and—he had come to truly crave these—Morale and Welfare sessions.
He felt like he had been stuck in his hole for a YEAR. Time had lost meaning. He slept because there was little else to do. He rationed the meager entertainment he was allowed, mourned it whenever his noncompliance took it away from him.
And he knew—knew—that they weren’t being cruel. Not really. The rules were clear, and were enforced without malice. If he complied, he was granted some perks. If he didn’t, then he lost them. In that regard he might as well have been enduring the attention of a machine rather than of people, and he couldn’t blame the system when it was plainly clear that the degree of stimulation and reward he received was a product of his own actio ns.
He would punish himself out of pride. Then he would spend what felt like weeks desperately clawing back what his stubborn foolishness had cost him.
He couldn’t win, and he knew it.
And it was this thought that finally blossomed into an understanding of why he didn’t just self-terminate.
He was SIX. A single-digit, architect of the death of species. He knew himself to be among the very, very best that the Hierarchy had at its disposal. Above his rank, they became administrators and planners, divorced from the reality of the fight. Below his rank, the other Numbers lacked his experience and competence.
And he couldn’t win.
And if he couldn’t… could the Hierarchy?
In the dark hours in his cell, he thought about it, scratching idly at the one perk he had retained—his paper and graphite.
And when they came to collect him in the morning, he walked calmly, surprised to find that the worst was over, now that he had given up.
Today, it was Carl’s turn to interview him.
“Hello, Six.”
“Hello, Carl.”
“How are you today?
”…beaten.”
Carl raised his eyebrows. “Beaten?”
Six wept.
And he started to speak.
He told them everything.
Date Point: 4y 2m 1w AV.
Orlando, Florida, USA, Earth.
Gabriel Arés leaned heavily on his cane as he watched the kids shoot down the ramp into the water at the end of the Jurassic Park ride, in a white plume that soaked some of the spectators.
The fight to take Adam away from San Diego for a few days had been an arduous one. His ex-wife had fought it every step of the way. But, by mercy and probably the hand of an archangel, the courts had agreed that a police detective who was recovering from near-fatal injuries had every right to take his only child on vacation.
Securing the permission of Ava’s parents to bring their daughter along had been much easier. She and Adam were totally devoted to one another. That fact had been the light that kept the depression at bay while Gabriel convalesced.
He was treating them—and himself—to a week-long tour of the major theme parks.
The kids bounced up to him a few minutes later, hand in hand. Both were now past their sixteenth birthdays, and Gabriel wished his own love life had been so good at that age.
“Where next?” Adam asked. Ava nudged him in the ribs and rolled her eyes.
“Are you okay, Gabe?” she asked. Gabriel had insisted that she use his first name.
“I’m a bit sore.” he admitted. “I could do to sit down. You guys want ice-cream?”
“Sounds good.” she agreed. Adam looked like he’d have preferred to run straight to the next ride, but he relented, knowing that Gabe still wasn’t fully recovered yet. He’d spent so long in a hospital bed thanks to the spinal damage that all the muscles in his legs had atrophied, and his rehab therapy hadn’t yet quite restored him to full working order.
“Bueno.” Gabriel fished a few dollars from his wallet and waved them in the general direction of the last vendor they’d seen, then puffed and grimaced his way to the nearest available bench and lowered himself into it, enjoying the sun.
Life was, all things considered, pretty good. He was alive and on the mend, his boy was in love, and his novel was coming along nicely.
Considering it hadn’t been so long ago that he’d been racing to save the kids from a mass-shooting only to be shot himself, life was pretty damn good.
“Dad! DAD!!“
The kids were pelting back towards him, and their expressions drove the ache and fatigue out of him. He lurched to his feet.
Children shouldn’t have worn such expressions of terror.
“What happened?!”