The Huralon Incident Read online

  Because of boredom, bridge watchstanders sometimes noticed small things that otherwise escaped notice.

  “Hmm,” said Warwick, working her sensor screens. Blue highlights lit across her dark skin. “That’s interesting.”

  “What is it?”

  “Huh?” She looked up, appearing surprised that anyone spoke. “Oh just…something.”

  “You’re killing me. What do you see?”

  “It’s probably nothing important. It’s just an old passenger liner. It’s surprising anyone still uses them.”

  “Some companies operate on a budget. Is that the only thing that’s interesting about it?”

  Warwick placed a closeup optical view of it in the tank. “Well, there’s a lot of activity around the ship. See? Shuttles have been coming and going for hours now. That’s not unusual. If it’s a tour boat for instance, people would head down to Huralon III to do some touristy stuff.”

  “Okay. Huralon has some interesting sights, I suppose.”

  “Right, if you think fields of crops are interesting. But look here. I’m highlighting the path of the last three flights down.”

  McCray whistled. “That’s fast, almost a combat re-entry. They’re really in a hurry for a bunch of tourists.”

  “I know. And then look, they’re heading for this little town named Braunfels. It’s a farming community. What would tourists do there?”

  “Beer and Sausage festival?” offered McCray.

  “Who knows?”

  McCray scratched at the beard growth on his cheek. “Now that I think about it, I don’t like it. Keep a close watch on that, Eyes. Let me know if anything else interesting happens with that ship.”

  ***

  Aja found herself becoming convinced that something strange must have gripped the Admiral. She knew him as a good and honest man. She felt certain of it, and reading people was part of her specialty. Perhaps Gaatz’s rather public position may have forced him to make statements he disagreed with. If so, he’d make certain McCray knew his true feelings. She had expected a private communication from him within hours after Springbok arrived, but still no courier came calling.

  Add to that, IS-3 hadn’t communicated with Springbok yet either, and that worried her. The need to maintain their true nature as a Q-ship secret meant mission orders weren’t radioed through Fleet channels, even the encrypted ones. Thus, couriers delivered them instead. She wondered what delayed the arrival and the lack of communications from Gaatz or IS-3 struck her as ominous. Unable to use simple comms to get an answer, she planned a trip down to Huralon.

  Though usually a lone-wolf operator, physically, she never went anywhere without remote comms support. Until she contacted IS-3, she wouldn’t have it. Ando was the logical person to be her ‘control’ while on the ground, but the comms specialist seemed dubious about the listing of IS-3 communications protocols she sent to him, and even claimed he didn’t have the security clearance for it. Aja soothed his concerns saying it was an abbreviated version he was cleared for and, honestly, it was unlikely they would need it. That done, she hitched a ride on a shuttle to the planet to connect with her assigned IS-3 contacts on the ground.

  An hour later, Aja walked down the pale sidewalks of Callas on Huralon III. The city was big for one on the frontiers of Elysium. Like many such cities, struggling to grow, it drew people in with unusual cuisine and many parks. As in most Elysian-founded cities, every building sported broad terraces with large trees growing at each level, even the tall ones. Climbing vines crawled across the pastel stonework, obscuring much of the structures with large flowers and hanging fruit. A well-populated city like this seemed quiet to her. Only the notes of a distant busker playing a hammered dulcimer drifted on a breeze, scented with honeysuckle. It probably explained why so many people wandered around outside. Callas felt like an older town, despite its true age. It looked matured and comfortable in its own skin.

  It still surprised her a little to see so many people. The oxygen content was nineteen point five percent, just at the minimum concentration needed for human respiration and hardly enough for physical activity. The terraforming effort was ongoing and would likely continue for several more decades to increase the oxygen level. Elysians had adapted to the inconvenience in characteristic high fashion by donning colorful and clever carrying cases for the supplemental oxygen tanks while outside.

  Naturally, oxygen bars proved popular in Callas. Aja purchased a tank with a stylized, pink kitty breathing mask clipped to her shirt, allowing her to take a breath of pure oxygen. She found the childish styling repellent, in complete opposition to her own, but apparently cute animal masks matched the current style, and this one was the least offensive. To make things even more annoying, she didn’t really need it. Her incredibly efficient respiratory system meant she could breathe normally in oxygen levels as low as sixteen percent. Still, it wouldn’t do to be outside without a tank when everyone considered them a crucial safety measure. People might ask uncomfortable questions.

  She wore it over her slightly unfashionable jogging suit. In Elysium, where most people were obsessed with current styles, looking too unfashionable drew as much attention as being too forward-thinking.

  She jogged into the city’s ever popular Mirava Park, careful not to jog too expertly. She let her elbows flop to the sides like someone who ran because popular people ran, not like someone committed to it. As she ran down the tree-lined paths, she directed the nanites in her body to secrete a clear gel from her left index finger. At a particular trash can, she casually allowed that finger to brush it as she passed it. Anyone else walking by the can wouldn’t see anything. Only someone with highly classified nanotech mods like Aja’s could see well into the ultraviolet and detect the clear gel. For them, such simple marks stood out like a neon sign.

  She ran on until she found a food cart, one of the many within the park. The smells of roasting, spiced meats drew a rumble from her stomach. Best of all, she could tell it was the real deal—hand-made food. Answering the call, she bought a shawarma roll with tahini sauce and a pickle and sat at the carved wooden benches nearby. The Mediterranean sandwich was popular with the crew and practically a staple aboard Springbok. Enjoying the rich flavors beneath a massive live oak, with the smell of jasmine drifting through, made it taste even better.

  Not long after she finished, the timer in the lower right hand corner of her sight, a feature of her Zephyr communications system, completed a thirty minute countdown. She threw her trash into the perpetually empty bin, pausing briefly to check that the remains of her meal dissolved in the disassembling nanites within, and started on her jog again.

  As she passed the rubbish bin she’d marked before, she spared it only the briefest glance. It had been crossed with a similar ultraviolet gel. She continued her run without the slightest pause, knowing her contact waited to see her.

  Structures in her brain, formed by her Zephyr nanotech suite, led her to the meet location in the park. She didn’t have a picture in her mind or even geographic coordinates. Someone interrogating her could have pulled that info out of her conscious memories. Instead, she knew where to go in the same way a migrating bird knew where to go. It functioned like an instinct, a feeling to turn here or there. Eventually, she arrived at a park bench.

  A businessman dressed in gray with a long coat sat reading his datapad. At the marble mosaic platform before the man, three teenaged girls practiced dance moves and giggled loudly. A gardener trimmed the flowering hedges nearby. Young boys inexpertly tossed a frisbee in the neatly mowed grass behind the bench.

  Aja had no idea what her contact looked like. It didn’t matter. Her Zephyr system broadcast a simple ping in a very specific bandwidth, one only other IS-3 agents knew to look for. Aja began a stretching routine at the bench, waiting for a reply.

  Chapter 11

  McCray finished his watch and dawdled in his stateroom. Reports piled up in his queue, but they hardly seemed important any more. The ship would soon be ano
ther captain’s concern. His eyes wandered around the space; it seemed so empty without Aja’s things scattered around. She had removed the plants, except for one; the forget-me-nots still rested in their little vase near the head. He shook his head. She still kept insisting the head was a bathroom, no matter how often McCray corrected her on naval terminology.

  He smiled sadly at the vase with rainbow-colored hearts she’d painted by hand. He wanted her back, and he was willing to do anything to repair their relationship. Trouble was, he wasn’t sure what that anything could be.

  McCray considered himself a man of few talents. Truth be told, his only real talent was commanding a warship and all the skills he possessed were focused around the demands of that job. Most everything else, including romance, made as much sense to him as Greek written by a dyslexic chimp.

  Seeking something to quell the boredom, he called up his holospace and began digging into the files in the cube-like, 3D presentation. Eventually he found a folder marked “Earth History Reclamation Project” (EHRP). He tapped it and waited for an index with hundreds of thousands of files to open.

  Most of Earth’s history disappeared when the asteroid struck centuries before. Astronomers saw it and issued a warning only weeks before the event. Officials gathered up all the servers they could find containing humanity’s knowledge. With little time to organize the effort, they placed all the hard drives they could collect in one half-built orbiting habitat named Alexandria. Murphy’s Law never loomed so large than on that day. When the world killer arrived, it smashed through Alexandria on its way to the planet.

  Eight million survived on the remaining nine habitats. On Earth, billions died. Billions more perished slowly in the years that followed as the planet’s climate fell into chaos. The dead left behind billions of cell phones, tablets, and personal computers. Unknown to most, scientists returned to Earth and gathered up many of these devices in the hope that data in the cache files might one day be recovered.

  They did find data, but scattered through trillions of Tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media to pour through. Recovering history became a job too big for one organization to piece together. Many groups formed and put out a call for volunteers to help dig through the files; for that reason, he Citizen Historians were born. It proved an excellent solution, with the unfortunate side effect of many competing versions of history.

  McCray had joined the ranks of Citizen Historians years before. Now, he sifted through files, scrolling with his chin in his hand. He remarked on each as he tapped. “Selfie, selfie, selfie...selfie, yet again. Hmm, cats again. What’s the deal with cats?”

  After several hours, he tired of sifting and dictating notes. He found a communication from the Bradley & Dunleavy Group, who McCray worked with on the EHRP. Apparently, his latest report with his summations received a reply. It read as follows:

  Dear Mr. McCray,

  We at BDG do appreciate your efforts at becoming a fully vetted historian. However, we feel that there is still much work for you to do before claiming such an esteemed title. As we have warned you, Old Earth information sources are notoriously unreliable. They commonly over exaggerate claims, deceive through carefully worded rhetoric, and are not averse to outright falsehoods. In your latest summations, it seems you’ve fallen prey to one or more of these common pitfalls.

  For instance, your assertion that vehicles on American roads were controlled by individual people, untrained by any formal organization and not robotically guided as late as the 1990s are, frankly, preposterous.

  Studies made with the finest simulations available show that human beings are incapable of safely operating the vehicles of the time at speeds above fifteen miles per hour. People experiencing the oft-reported road rage would be constant threats. And how could anyone safely send texts and receive phone calls while driving? The chaotic nature of intersections controlled by lighted signals (suitable only for robots) would be far too confusing for human drivers. Deaths due to accidents would run into the hundreds of thousands every year. No sane government would tolerate such carnage. A more logical, rational conclusion is that robotic vehicle guidance began in the 1960s.

  Mr. McCray, this is the sort of clear logic one must apply when analyzing history. We thank you for your work in sifting through the files we sent to you. For the time being, please continue with that and leave the analysis of history to the experts.

  Regards,

  P.W. Grossman RHS, DNC, POL

  Bradley & Dunleavy Group Senior Historian

  McCray sagged in his seat. The scathing communication couldn’t have arrived at a worse time. He poured himself a whiskey, having avoided it until then. Drinking wasn’t an answer to problems, but it sure felt good while figuring out what to do. He wandered around the small confines of his stateroom. It was spacious for a warship, which meant it occupied an area the size of a small sitting room. Now, it seemed entirely too big without Aja.

  A tone sounded in his Iris, an alert he’d programmed for when the boat carrying Castellano and his men would leave Springbok. It would also carry former captain Stephen Mallouk. McCray hadn’t wanted to leave the ship for anything except to see Castellano down to Huralon III. The former enemy marines had become friends during their time aboard and McCray. Although he had every reason to believe Castellano's request for asylum would be granted, he intended to travel with the marines—presenting himself as a civilian captain. It was important to him that the administrators of Arcoplex Detention Facility didn’t treat them like prisoners, and made them as comfortable as possible.

  ***

  Stewart Tzeng slowed the slider as he approached the little town of Braunfels. Airbrakes flipped out from the hovering car’s flanks and swiftly dropped his airspeed to the in-town speed of 50kph. The countryside, blurred by his fast highway velocity, now became easily visible as he entered the rustic town with its grain silos and its elderly, no longer really necessary, airtight habitat buildings.

  He loved his job as a traveling salesman. It took him to many places around Huralon III, to Hikonojo Port, and to ships in orbit. The best thing about it was the job provided a chance to strike back at Madkhal’s MLF.

  Having grown up on the mean streets of Madkhal’s A’Dib, fighting other children for the scraps of food in the rubbish bins of the Elites, he knew what true hardship looked like.

  It made him furious that the MLF arrived here, in this near-utopia, to tell emigre Madkhalis their life in Elysium was hard. Hard? This was easy! He couldn’t believe his luck when the Elites granted his request to migrate to Huralon. And when the company that recruited him realized he wasn’t actually an EVA suit technician, did they shove him out an airlock the way the Elites would have? Did they imprison him? No. They just offered him a different job.

  Who does that?

  His quick mind and a penchant for humor cemented his position as a holodeck support contract salesman, and it offered him a comfortable life he’d never imagined possible.

  Some of his peers brought with them the ‘you pretend to pay me, I’ll pretend to work’ mentality of Madkhali life. A major reason why the DPM remained impoverished. These same people failed to excel in Elysium, and this is what the MLF used to prove their point. Many others, like Stewart, seized their opportunity with both hands and flourished. They proved Madkhalis who failed in the ESE hadn’t been failed by Elysium. Instead, they had failed themselves.

  His gratitude to the ESE could not be measured, so when the shadowy Elysian men asked him for simple favors, he recognized an opportunity to repay the debt at once. He expected they worked for the legendary IS-3, but they refused to confirm or deny. They only acknowledged they fought against the propaganda campaign of the MLF. A chance to work against the terrorist devils murdering innocents was all he needed to know. That brought him back to the best part of his job, acting as a courier for the Elysian intelligence services.

  His trip to Braunfels marked a mere waypoint in a standard evasion pattern before arriving at h
is destination in orbit. Typically, he stopped at several businesses here to maintain their support contracts. But unlike previous visits to the quiet town, today he could see burning buildings in the distance and people in the street running towards him.

  Concerned, he landed the slider and stepped out. He tried to hail several people running past, but no one stopped.

  He headed towards a nearby hardware store. Before he could cross the street, a pair of men in uniform threw open the airtight front door. Stewart recognized the Elysium Marine uniforms, but the men who wore them seemed small and slender, moving in that economy of motion born from inadequate diet like native-born Madkhalis. They appeared too unkempt to be Elysian military men as well, but he had little time for such details, for between them, they held a screaming Madkhali girl. The wisp of a child couldn’t have been more than fourteen, but she fought like a demon.

  The two dragged her to the sidewalk and pinned her down, one holding her hands, the other fighting off her frantic kicks.

  “You!” shouted Stewart, appalled by the sight. “Have you lost your minds?”

  Back in A’Dib, such scenes were common. Police rarely left a pretty girl unmolested. Madkalis simply walked around such scenes, doing nothing for fear of attracting the same kind of attention on themselves. But after decades of living in Elysium, he’d developed the Elysian direct hostility to such outrages.

  The pseudo-soldiers paid him no mind. The man at her legs produced a knife and expertly slashed open her dress, as if he’d done it hundreds of times before. Two more men dragged out an older fellow, perhaps the girl’s father, and forced him to watch the horrific proceedings.