Juno Rising (ISF-Allion) Page 5

  Just as there wasn’t another place like Io in the solar system, there wasn’t another place where you could generate electricity off the magnetic field of a planet.

  The source of the radiation, Jupiter, hung above, a huge red and cream striped disk, about half lit and waxing visibly.

  This then was the Stick Farm. The sight of it brought a memory, but it could have been from pictures. A diagram with lines of magnetic flux. School. He remembered that. Had they spoken about the Stick Farm?

  Then another thought: what was the point of trying to do astronomy at this base? Any observations would be severely limited by the radiation generated by Jupiter. Simple communication was hard enough. He glanced at Major Doric. The comment about being free to speak now began to make more sense. Research was a euphemism for intelligence. And in this case, the intelligence appeared to be directed at another branch of the force—Banparra, suspected of acting outside his authority, and making agreements with the Council Of Four outside the approval of ISF headquarters. So. ISF Sarajevo plonks a research base next to Banparra’s patch to keep an eye on him.

  The concrete bunker had two flexible access tubes for vehicles at the back, which made it look like some sort of beached sea creature.

  Major Doric drove the truck up one of these tubes and stopped. “Here we are. Welcome to the ISF Research Base at Calico.”

  “Here?” He frowned at the concrete shelter on the screen. It was barely big enough to house a truck.

  “This is the access. The base is underground.”

  She manoeuvred the tube into position with a remote-controlled gadget from inside the cabin. Something hummed and clanged on the outside of the truck.

  “What exactly do you research here?”

  “Mostly geology, geothermal research, biochemistry, astrogeology—”

  “Biochemistry?”

  “We have a team analysing the samples taken from Jupiter’s cloud tops.”

  Something stirred in his memory. “Samples from Jupiter’s cloud tops? Did you take them? How?”

  “No. Neither Calico nor ISF, for that matter. The samples came off the Allion wellship Morgana when we captured her. They’re the only samples from Jupiter we’ve ever been able to lay our hands on.”

  Fabio glanced at the huge half-orb in the sky, the gravity well that no one had possessed the technology to approach, except the commercial company Allion Aerospace. He remembered seeing that historic footage where the now-defunct communications company Fenosa had paid Allion to paint its logo on the cloud tops of Jupiter. That was something like twenty, thirty standard Earth years ago? Back then, Allion was a strong force to be reckoned with, under the guidance of CEO Eilin Gunnarson. They were unbelievably far ahead of any of the Earth-based militaries, companies or governments. They had been the first to put humans on Mars. Until recently, they had maintained a strong presence there even though most of their population lived on ships and stations—

  The Morgana had been one of their research ships—

  There had been another ship, a huge behemoth called the Forthright—

  Which had quite suddenly vanished and had never been found.

  Yes, that was how events had gone.

  He wondered where Allion was now, and if Eilin Gunnarson was still alive.

  There had been a war, he seemed to remember.

  This place was full of triggers that made him remember stuff. It was good. The interplanetary transport had been boring because there were no triggers and no one had encouraged him to remember. Right now, bits of his life were coming back, even if they were like a bunch of puzzle pieces thrown randomly in a box. Eventually, he’d be able to put it all together in a way that it made sense.

  Mars. Sanchez. Allion. Those things were important. Allion and Morgana he remembered. Samples from Jupiter’s cloud tops.

  Meanwhile, the mechanism in the tube communicated with the truck’s door. The tube moved over and suckered on. There was a hiss and after a while the airlock opened.

  Major Doric got up from her seat.

  “Do we suit up?” Fabio asked.

  “Not necessary. Just put on a jacket and gloves.” The outer door hissed open and let a blast of cold air into the cabin. It smelled of stone with a hint of farts. Sulphur, one of the main components of Io, in all its forms and colours.

  Major Doric went down the ladder into the tube, which wobbled with her footsteps. Fabio also climbed down the ladder, still feeling a bit queasy. His feet were unsteady and hands sweaty. It was cold and dark in this damn tube.

  He had just remembered that back in the days of first settlement, the Stick Farm used to be a prison camp, a place where people worked on the stick frame, cleaning and restringing the wires. It was in the time before reliable radiation suits, so they often died from radiation exposure, and sometimes fell off the frame, which was about a kilometre high. Others were electrocuted in the many accidents that happened when the wires arced. He shivered and wondered what the human rights people were going to investigate.

  Why did he remember all this stuff and not the important things, such as how to do his job, and what he had done to justify being sent here?

  The ground under the tube’s flexible material felt hard. Fabio took a step, and the crust cracked under his weight, plunging him half his shoe’s height into the ground. He retreated, shocked.

  Major Doric laughed. “That’s Io. Any volcanic ejecta that are still hot form a crust over the surface. Usually there is soft material underneath. It’s the thin ice effect. That’s why we have to keep resurfacing the road. Come on, let’s get out of this cold thing.” Her breath steamed in the glow of the single feeble light that hung from the tube’s ceiling. But the steam evaporated quickly in the dry air.

  He followed her through the tube, shivering in his inadequate jacket. At the end they came to a concrete door with a pockmarked surface. Major Doric turned the handle and heaved it open. Fabio stepped inside the concrete bunker that was empty, except for a bench in the corner and a line of hooks on the wall next to it, where several environment suits hung. A neat line of boots stood underneath the bench. There was a rust-stained washbasin in the corner. A rectangular opening provided access to a lift foyer. Major Doric preceded Fabio in that direction. She wore hard-soled boots and her footsteps echoed in the emptiness.

  Fabio shivered with the feel of dust and grit under his feet. Millions and millions of particles of dust rained from the sky every minute, every hour and every day. It buried any structure that was not regularly cleaned by people.

  Dust, tonnes and tonnes of it. Spewed from the volcanoes and slowly raining down on the surface, turning the moon inside out.

  The thought of it constricted Fabio’s chest. He knew he was being stupid and that people had lived here for many years, perfecting their dance with some of the most hostile conditions in the solar system, but no one ever said that panic attacks had to be rational. He couldn’t breathe.

  The lift pinged, jolting him from his panic. They went in, and the doors closed in the bare, grey-painted capsule. It was a thing of comfort, this small cubicle that protected him from the outside world, that kept him from being buried under a drift of volcanic crap. And that was a stupid thought, too. He must stop allowing his mind these kinds of thoughts.

  He stared at the cubicle’s ceiling.

  The only indication of movement was a soft rumble in the floor. It was fast, dizzying, and Fabio steadied himself on the smooth metal wall behind him. It reminded him of his cabin in the interplanetary. Cosy, if cramped.

  The magic of the moment broke when the lift doors opened and beyond loomed more large open spaces to become lost in.

  They came out into a large room where people were working on screens. Some looked up when Major Doric and Fabio came in but continued their work without speaking.

  Fabio glanced at the screens, but couldn’t see anything that triggered a memory. Couldn’t see anything that said these people were prisoners. They wore Space Corps un
iforms with the small planet insignia that indicated that they worked for Special Ops. They held ranks. That labour camp was some time ago, wasn’t it?

  People glanced up at him and nodded polite greetings. One or two spoke to each other in a who’s-that-guy kind of way.

  “What sort of work are you doing here?” he asked of Major Doric’s bobbing uniformed back.

  She didn’t answer the question but led him across the room into the back where there were some smaller rooms, each with a door.

  Inside, there was a table, chairs and two wall screens. Major Doric gestured for Fabio to sit down.

  Fabio sat, clamping his hands between his knees. His leg was shivering again.

  She closed the door and turned on the screen.

  This was it. Now she was going to find out that he was a fraud, that he knew nothing and was useless. She’d send him away and he would go into prison or be shipped to another place. Possibly the Saturn system, where he’d had to work in the wet and cold domes of Titan for their terraforming efforts. That would keep him out of circulation for a while.

  Major Doric tapped on the screen. Long fingers with short nails, broken or bitten.

  Silence hung in the room while she typed. Tap, tap, tap. The people outside in the large room didn’t speak, or if they did, he couldn’t hear them. Were they ISF recruits or volunteers? Were they recruits from Council Of Four local communities or from Earth or Mars? Were they free to leave if they wanted?

  Questions, questions.

  Tap, tap, tap. A concentrated look and small frown at the screen. Fabio’s heart jumped at that.

  His hands felt restless. He wanted to put them in his pockets—but he had no pockets. Then held his hands behind his back, but that felt exposed. He tried crossing his arms so that he could hold his shoulders.

  He was too scared to ask her about what he was meant to be doing, but the sooner he came out about his problem, the better. He cleared his throat.

  Major Doric looked up.

  “Look, I think there has been a misunderstanding about me.” His face felt like it was on fire.

  She raised a platinum eyebrow.

  Another deep breath. Sanchez had said keep your head down? The hell! “It may be that you asked for an astronomer, but I don’t actually remember anything about my job.”

  She nodded. “Many people from the rehabilitation program are like that. It will come back soon enough. You’ll be fine.”

  And still they called this research?

  “But then . . .” Another thought, and one that worried him much more. “Is this an institute? A jail?”

  She laughed. “A Research institute, yes. But I guess that’s not the type of institute you’re talking about?”

  He said nothing. She was playing with him; she was a therapist or some such, wanting him to talk about his life or whatever. Therapists asked all these stupid questions: what do you feel about this. What do you feel about that, Blah, blah, blah, nonsense. He didn’t feel anything. He didn’t want to feel anything. Any time he felt something, someone abused it. He’d read all the psychology manuals. He knew what they were doing. Winning his trust by getting him to talk. Pretending to feel for him. Making him understand that he was not alone.

  Of course he was alone. He’d been alone since they did the thing to his head, or maybe even before that.

  “You don’t need to be soft with me. I know I’m fucked up. Tell it to me straight. I’m no good for any kind of job, except to be a kitchen hand, as long as you keep me away from the knives.”

  With a soft—annoyed?—sniff, she turned on one of the wallscreens and navigated through menus until the screen displayed a series of pretty images of objects in space, which she flicked through one after the other. There were about twenty pictures that seemed randomly thrown together—moons, pitted surfaces, sharp-edged segments of a planet with rings: Saturn, he remembered; cryovolcanoes spewing ice dust into space: on Enceladus—he remembered that, too. There were nebulae, multiple-star systems, grainy images of extrasolar planetary systems, suns with huge planets circling in tight orbits. Images in different colours. Blurry scans of spacecraft. She paused a while at these and he felt tempted to ask her if they didn’t have any better images of those craft, but somehow the craft seemed important, crap quality as the images were.

  She said nothing, but kept flicking the images over the screen, one after the other. Click, click, click.

  She said nothing.

  He stared at the screen.

  Saturn, Enceladus, spaceship, nebula, Hellas Planitia on Mars, another blurry space ship. Click, click, click.

  So what? He recognised these places. Did that make him an astronomer? The blackness inside him grew.

  Fabio started jiggling his leg again. Sweat trickled down his back. What was she hoping to achieve?

  She abandoned the screen and sat on the table. The pants of her military fatigues stretched across broad thighs. She was a large woman, not just tall but with broad shoulders and large hands in the correct proportion to her height. Tall without being gangly. She folded those large hands on her knees. Her fingers were long, her forearms corded with muscle.

  “The Research Base on Calico is only four years standard old. Headquarters decided to use the facilities at the Stick Farm that had lain more or less abandoned for fifteen years. Io is too unique an environment not to keep conducting research. In the past few years, we’ve worked on magnetic fields and radiation. We’ve worked on predictability of earthquakes, which has had some very useful applications on Earth. I’m both the head of the Research Base and the leader of the very small astronomy division we have here.”

  “This is no place to do astronomy. Too close to Jupiter.”

  Something glinted in her eyes. Her mouth twitched. Was that a smile? “That’s why the division is small. It’s also the most perfect place to study Jupiter.” Again that smile.

  His heart was thudding hard against his ribs. She wanted something. Research was a euphemism for Intelligence. She’d squirrelled him away in this secretive part of the base in order to get whatever she could get out of him.

  He was half-scared and half wished to flip her the bird and tell her good luck.

  She asked, “What did you make out of the pictures?”

  “They have no relationship with each other. You’re showing me random things.” He pointed at the image that was frozen there. “Look here, this says it’s from Satscope. You didn’t even take it here. And this is an image from a completely different system. You’re testing me. You’re trying to annoy me into sharing things I don’t want to share. I tell you now: there is nothing to share because whoever wiped my memories after whatever I’m supposed to have done or found out did a fucking good job. I barely remember who I am.”

  She looked at him and smiled and that only enraged him more. “We are a genuine research division. Astronomers are hard enough to find, and there is a shortage of skilled ones. We also do rehabilitation. Your name came up. The spec said you were damaged and I said I’d take you on. I’m testing if you can do this job. I think you can. We didn’t ask for someone who had political opinions, or someone who wins scientific prizes. We don’t want anyone who has opinions on what we were doing here and why. We want someone for the job, and I think you can do it.”

  “OK then. What is the job?”

  “I’ll tell you in detail tomorrow, but in short, we need someone who can analyse a wide set of scope data so we can locate some asteroids or cometoids for us to harvest our own water.”

  “Water?” There was none on Io. It had a dire absence of hydrogen and not much oxygen either. Didn’t they. . . ? More memories came rushing back. . . .

  “I thought you imported water from Europa?” That made the most sense. The closest settlement, full of ice. There was an automated barge system that made regular trips to all the moons and space-bases using the Galilean sling. Had been for many years.

  Major Doric’s face showed no emotion. “We can’t use the ba
rges at the moment, I’m afraid. I want you to find an independent source.” She flicked through more images. “We need to find asteroids we could divert.”

  “But that could take quite a while.”

  “As I said, we can last for about six solars.”

  Within six solars? One hundred and fifty days? That would mean locating something either in the system or in the asteroid belt. There were millions of smaller ice-covered bodies out there. Yes, he could do that. A memory niggled in the back of his mind that he had done something like this before, but . . . “It will be much more expensive than getting it from Europa.”

  “I am aware of that.” Yes, that angry look. Something was very much out of order here. “I want the work done, and done quickly. I do not want any more dependency on the Council Of Four. We have equipment. We could even shoot a nano-bomb to produce course diversion rockets in situ. We just need someone to calculate the course and amount of thrust needed and the time of arrival.”

  “I presume you want the ice chunk put into orbit.”

  “Crashing it on the surface would be unhelpful, not to mention dangerous for us down here.”

  Another shard of memory: People are running through a corridor into a shelter. Sirens are going off, and lights are flashing.

  He jammed the palms of his hands into his eyes. If only those flashbacks would stop.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Think so. Just tired.”

  “I’m almost done.”

  She showed him all the available scans the base had purchased from Satscope—so that was how they got the information. That took care of the “astronomy” department. There must be a small fortune in data here. Someone had been through and flagged all the possible comets of interest.

  “You’ve already done a lot of the work.”

  “Not me, the previous astronomer. Unfortunately, he left suddenly without having completed the work. We need to go through composition scans and overlay sets of results to make composite and false colour images. It’s routine work. I’m sure you can do it.”