CHAPTER FOUR
Get to Ganymede . . .
Jupiter filled a quarter of the sky and San scrutinized the swirling gas. It shifted, the colors mixing in a hypnotic motion that she swore hissed and moaned, punctuated with sparks of bright light. War was coming. Across the jagged landscape of Ganymede’s ice, a line of figures wandered, their armor-suited shapes obscured by phase shifters—cloaks that bent light to render wearers invisible. The figures hadn’t secured them so the cloaks moved as if in a gentle breeze, swaying from side to side in Ganymede’s low gravity, exposing parts of the soldiers to make them an army of dismembered legs and arms.
San was about to turn away when a bright glow erupted above Ganymede’s surface and grew in less than a second into a massive fireball, a sphere of plasma that blinded her as it blossomed larger, the radiative heat so intense it vaporized the warriors and melted a wide swath of ice in an instant. Before the plasma reached her, its spherical shape broke into pieces and tendrils. Then the fireball disappeared to leave behind a shallow crater. Clouds of ice mist hovered, creeping back toward the surface. War was coming, San thought again. Soon.
Get to Ganymede . . .
She woke from the dream to find her arms and legs strapped to a table in sick bay, with thick straps across her waist and chest. How? San thought. What happened and who put me here?
Get to Ganymede . . . This time the voice wasn’t in her dreams; it was an old woman, real, and inside her head.
“Shut up! Stop talking to me!”
The medbot spurted a jet of vapor and glided toward her, its mechanical-sounding voice making San’s skin tingle with fear.
“Rest, Ms. Kyarr. You need to rest.”
San couldn’t tell if the bot was thinking. It had no idea: war. She imagined that the thing had sympathy, that if she told the bot to set her free, it would. San could make her way into deep space, well beyond the Neptune elliptical into everything cold and dead, where Fleet would burn past her without noticing the tiny hole she’d dug in one of the ice balls of the Kuiper belt—just her, alone. Without energy signatures nobody would notice; the sense of failure would form a coating, a blanket of shame to keep San warm from the absolute zero of space, and a bubble to maintain atmosphere under a dome of disappointment. It would be better than facing her friends as a washout. San dreaded the thought of explaining it over and over, followed by the expressions of sympathy and the—
A pair of arms unfolded from the bot’s spherical core and one of them reached toward her as a needle snapped out. It plunged the needle into her arm. San struggled, trying to remember her train of thought and keep her focus on expressions of sympathy, but instead descended into darkness.
Get to Ganymede Orbital Station . . .
Voices mumbled nearby, but not the one telling her to run to Ganymede and San gritted her teeth at the thought of disembodied words returning with no warning. For now, it was silent. The ones she heard were soft, real, and San rolled in zero g, the weightlessness a welcome relief after having been in Earth’s gravity for so long, her muscles able to stretch enough that she imagined she could gain a full inch of height if she stayed weightless long enough. Then the straps bit into her wrists. Without looking San knew she was still secured to the table, trapped in a loss of time-sense that made everything surreal, fuzzy when she risked peeking from one eye.
The ship’s medical officer floated next to her, grasping the table’s side and flanked by bots. He spoke with two men. Both visitors wore black pressure suits with thin armor plating covered by Fleet markings that San couldn’t recognize, even after scouring her mind, sifting through all the data stuffed into it; if these were Fleet markings, she should have recognized them. The men’s faceplates were down, tinted gold to hide their features, and it sounded as if electronic masking altered their voices.
“Dump the girl.”
“Until she is transferred to family,” the doctor said, “I can do nothing. The regulations are clear: Medical issues must be resolved prior to release, so that injuries sustained during Fleet duty can be documented. She was in a Fleet transport when San fell ill.”
“You have orders,” one of the men said.
“Which conflict with regulations! I’m not endangering my career just for you people.”
“Release her, Doc, or we tell your wife everything.”
“Everything what?”
The other man, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, pulled his colleague to the side and gestured for him to head to the hatch. He turned prior to leaving.
“About the brothels. The drugs. The girlfriends. Then we cancel university allowances for your children. They’ll never find a job other than dock maintenance in occupied Singapore. San Kyarr isn’t Fleet responsibility anymore, and she sure as hell isn’t worth the risk you’re thinking of taking.”
Once they’d gone, the doctor let go of San’s table and curled into a ball, drifting toward the middle of the room where he cried. The sight unnerved San. The man was much older than her, well into his forties, and for some reason it felt as though he was too old to be afraid. Her father had never cried, not even at his end. She remembered only laughter and the occasional outburst of anger when his frustrations with Fleet regulations boiled over, but these were rare and her father was there—always—when she finished a tank session. San recalled how he’d help her dry off just before playfully snapping the towel and then scooping her into both arms.
But he never cried. He’d even grinned while whispering his last words: “Never a reason to fear if you’re on the right path.”
“I hear things,” San said. They’d strapped her to a guidance gurney, which used tiny jets and magnetic-field generators to make sure she couldn’t bump into walls or hatches while the doctor pushed her through narrow ship’s corridors. Crew members watched as the two passed.
The doctor nodded. “I know.”
“What’s wrong with me? What happened? I don’t remember anything after the space elevator in Charleston.”
“We’re at Phobos Station. Your mother is waiting to take you home.”
“But what happened?”
The doctor grabbed a handle on the gurney and stopped their forward motion by using his other hand to press against the wall; the corridor was empty. He glanced around to make sure nobody listened and leaned close to San, whispering.
“You lost your mind and tried to steal an escape pod, almost killing two crewmen in the process. The whole time you were screaming about having to get to Ganymede Orbital Station. There is no orbital station on Ganymede. So I ran some tests and found something with your brain. It’s . . . changing.”
Get to Ganymede . . .
“There’s a voice in my head, even right now. It’s an old woman telling me I have to get to Ganymede. Why is my brain changing and what do you mean?”
The doctor started pushing her again, floating behind the gurney. “It’s a kind of tumor, but one which is snaking itself throughout your neurons and tissue. Inoperable. We haven’t had time to do a biopsy but the remote reading indicates it’s a novel type, causing auditory hallucinations. The voice isn’t real, San; try to remind yourself every time you hear it. New synapses are growing at a rate that’s impossible and if we didn’t have you dosed on pain killers, your head would feel as though it’s splitting in two.”
“Who were those men?” she asked. “The two men in black pressure suits who came to speak with you.”
“The less you know, the better. I don’t know who you are or why you’re so interesting to them, and I don’t want to know. I just want you off this ship.”
At the airlock, two crewmen punched in a key code so the inner door cycled with a hiss and one of them pulled the circular hatch toward them. The doctor nudged her into the tiny room. Both San and he waited for the door to seal behind them, which triggered the outer door to hiss open, after which he glided through, yanking San’s gurney. He didn’t get far before a woman’s voice cried out.
Her mother looked worse than when San had left. Even weightless, the woman’s spine twisted so badly from infection that she stooped into a near C shape, her bone disintegrating and muscles tightening. San’s father had looked the same before he died. She fought back tears at the sight before noticing something else had changed: Her mother, Nang, wore a black robe over her pressure suit and long hair had now been cropped close, almost bald. Nobody told me, San thought, she had joined an order. The robe was so dark that its shadows gave birth to shadows, drawing her focus so that the vision, combined with the drugs administered earlier, pulled her into a darkness which encased San’s thoughts. The Church, she thought. It had risen from the death of obscurity and emerged from the catacombs of time, reasserting itself with at least enough vigor to have captured her mother in its grasp.
San began sobbing in the microgravity of Phobos Station; tears welled and detached, drifting toward air recirculation intakes along the corridor floor, one droplet larger than the others. Maybe if I can concentrate hard enough, it will block the voice. At first it worked; the water undulated in gentle air currents, back and forth, then settled into a perfect sphere that reflected the ambient lighting in a display of sparkling flashes.
Get to Ganymede Orbital Station . . .
San started screaming. She stopped when her mother grabbed her hand. “I’m here, San. You must be strong. This is not the end.”
“I’m going insane.”
“No. You are not. This is only part of your journey. Your father and I decided to take this course long ago, when you were still inside me and I do not regret a thing.”
“You made me a short, fat creature. And now I’ve failed at what I’ve been designed to do. Where do I go now, especially now that I have a brain tumor?”
Her mother smiled again and used the sleeve of her habit to wipe the tears off San’s cheek, then turned to the ship’s doctor. Her voice became stern. The commanding tone made San feel safe—a child again—and she was almost certain her mother would fix this.
“I work in one of the research institutes planet-side. Why is my daughter strapped down like an animal?”
“Ms. Vongchanh, this is Fleet’s decision. I don’t have the authority—”
“Fleet,” her mother said, “has abandoned my child. They have no say here. What happened? She was fine when she left.”
Their voices disappeared. San saw the doctor’s lips move but it was as if a throbbing hum swallowed all sound and before she knew it he had grabbed the gurney handle again and San flew through Phobos Station’s tunnels. The voice again materialized in her head, intruding into her thoughts: watch and remember.
The odor of humans trapped inside a rock hit San, making her wince with the smell of recycled sweat and disinfectant, just enough chlorine spray to prevent mold from growing within pools of condensation. Phobos reminded her of a prison. Narrow cylinders had been carved into the moon’s rock, with silver handrails that its occupants used to pull themselves along in microgravity. San tried to grab one, forgetting that she couldn’t move, but her arm came free of the straps and both hands moved through the rail, which gave no resistance at all. You’re hallucinating again, she thought. As if to confirm, San now floated off the gurney at the same moment a man emerged from another corridor and passed through her body, so that she began to wonder if she had died. How else could this be possible? I am a thing made of air and consciousness, nothing else—a phantom soul. The humming volume increased to a roar, drowning her thoughts, and the voice reminded her to watch so that San concentrated, following her mother’s flowing black robe while they moved past another docking airlock. This one had been emblazoned with the warning symbols of a ship preparing for imminent departure. San stopped; she pressed her face closer to the screen, which danced in a series of red and green data markers, the shorthand of Fleet and indecipherable to anyone but those practiced in the vagaries of logistics and space port regulations.
She absorbed every detail, taking in every system status no matter how inconsequential: a scout ship, military—fueled and waiting for its pilot who was returning from Mars’ surface in just a few hours.
Get to Ganymede Orbital Station . . .
A memory flooded her thoughts: Fleet had needed something. Her father had been the key to one of their research programs but even now San sensed secrets behind secrets in her mother’s face, tensed muscles causing her jaw to quiver with the stress of knowing a thing that nobody would want to know, and San had once asked why her father had been so important. She’d asked it on the day of the accident, via vid-coms; both her parents had been quarantined. The one thing her mother had admitted was that a bacterial vector had been used for something. For what? Genetic alterations? What could have been so new and important that such an ancient and unreliable vector would have been risked? Whatever the reason, her mother had mumbled that either the vector had mutated or that it hadn’t been understood in the first place and she and three other scientists had exposed themselves before anyone knew there was a problem. Then, just as suddenly as they’d been quarantined, the infection vanished.
Within a week her mother and father had been released from medical lockdown and for a few weeks the fear vanished. The tests had been successful and her father had called, grinning from ear to ear to let her know that the experiments had been completed and Fleet no longer needed him—or the cybernetic portion of his brain—for poking and prodding. That’s when San had first heard the name Zhelnikov. She’d never met the man. But the tone of her father’s voice said everything she needed to know: Zhelnikov was evil. San’s father never spoke with that quiet and even tone unless it was in reference to something despicable.
A few days later, her father started coughing. It soon grew into a hacking so bad that he’d gone to medical and one day they’d pulled San from the tanks, calling her to the Fleet training administrator who gave her the news. Both her mother and father were dying. Whatever had infected them had altered her parents’ DNA and touched off a human self-destruct sequence that was working its way through their brain cells and spine, shutting everything down; the best doctors could do was slow the wasting. But with her father’s brain makeup, where so much of his gray matter had been replaced, he had only lasted a few months.
Soon, I will also lose my mother—because of Fleet.
San yanked herself from thought and glanced around. The pair waited in a tiny sleeping cubicle where Mars’ orbital station surrounded them with its hum and made it hard to talk, Phobos so small that the noise of supporting machinery echoed through the rock. The walls rang with metallic sounds and clanking.
“It’s good to see you again, Daughter.”
“I washed out.”
The woman kissed San’s forehead. “You don’t see the future. There is a plan and you’re part of it; don’t give up even if you can’t see the point.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Well . . .” Nang’s voice cracked; her face looked worn with thin wrinkles that hadn’t been there when San left, lines that made her ancient instead of middle-aged. “They say you may have an aggressive brain tumor. But I have never trusted in the wisdom of physicians; they rely on diagnostic equipment, algorithms, and bots that, if they can’t identify an illness, conclude it must be deadly. You don’t have a tumor; you have something similar to a tumor. The two are not the same.”
San looked away. “You are a Proelian now. A nun? Why? There is no faith anymore; you raised me in the Church, and I don’t feel any closer to it.”
“I think I’ve always been a Proelian at heart. I just hid it from your father. He was very Buddhist and I didn’t want to cause any arguments between us. The universe is changing, San; it’s smaller than we thought. I have learned much about the Sommen during my time on Mars and you will too. They gave something to the Proelians: hope, and a way to grow. Now the Church rebounds. It has finally come out of hiding and in just a pair of decades our order has found its home throughout Fleet-occupied territories. You are on the side of good. But you have to have faith.”
“Tell me now. What about the Sommen gave you faith?”
“It’s not time. You still have to be tested and you’re young. But when you learn, you will understand. There is evil within Fleet, and evil outside.”
Those words. The drugs had begun to wear off, but still San’s brain refused to function normally and she had to concentrate, finally recalling where she’d heard them before.
“Sister Mirriam-Ann said the same thing. When will I understand?” She looked down at the straps still binding her to the gurney and realized there was no way for her to break free; they were too secure, too tight.
“Soon. Someday. For now we return to Mars; the shuttle won’t be here for a few hours but when it arrives we can board.”
“No. I have to leave. I’m not losing it, Mom; I just need to find out what’s going on at Ganymede. You told me how Dad had to run to escape from investigators in Charleston, when you first met him. I have to do the same thing. Something is happening to me and I don’t get it.”
“San.” The woman wiped a tear from her cheek and shook her head. “Stop this.”
“I’m not crazy!” San told her about her vision of a scout ship preparing to leave Phobos, including the name of its pilot, its manifest number, and ship numerical identifier. The memory was fresh, a photographic image stored in her mind. “I don’t know why or how, but I know that I have to get on that ship and someone or something is guiding me.”
Her mother gaped in disbelief. The woman then pushed off from the wall and the door hissed open. Before pulling herself outside into the corridor, she turned and shook her head.
“San, if this turns out to be wrong and you only imagined all those details from the ship’s manifest, will you stop talking this way and agree you need help?”
“Okay.”
“I wish your father were here; we need his abilities.”
“For what?”
“Wait.” Her mother unsecured the gurney and pulled it toward the cubicle door, looking both ways in the corridor outside. “Because he would be able to access the station’s logic systems—to see if we’re being monitored and surveilled. And he would be able to find that ship without having to venture outside.”
“What difference would that make? I’m strapped in and can’t go anywhere.”
Her mother unsecured the straps, freeing both wrists and ankles. San stretched. Her muscles ached from being pinned to one position for so long and the webbing had chafed so that she had to rub them for a few moments, urging the pain to subside. She hugged her mother, who felt so frail that San imagined a strong embrace might crush her.
Eventually she pushed San away. “Go. Get to that shuttle. If it’s there and you got the details right, then take it. Head to Ganymede while station security is too confused to react. If your vision was wrong or it’s not there, come with me to Mars. Come home.”
“What? You’re not going to argue with me anymore and just let me go? What if Fleet finds out you’re responsible for my escape?”
Her mother smiled and then hugged her again. “You’re not a prisoner, San. And there’s much you need to learn, but I can’t tell you. If you feel so strongly about this that you’re willing to risk everything, then what you’re hearing . . . it might be real.” Her mother then shrugged. “Besides. I will tell them I was asleep and have no idea how you freed yourself. Don’t trust everyone in Fleet—only in God. He will watch over you. Whatever you do, do not trust Zhelnikov. He created something awful, which neither I nor your father wanted you to face.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“You don’t know yet what we’re up against, what your father and I were working on for all these years. There are competing weapons research programs, empires and fortunes of power. When you learn more about why we’re preparing for a war, one most don’t even know is coming, you’ll understand.” She kissed San on the cheek and then pushed her away. “Go. Find the path you must take. I will be gone the next time you reach Mars so know this: I love you. Soon, I and your father will be watching while you make us proud.”
San struggled to hold back tears and did her best to remember the smell and feel of her mother, not knowing what the future held. Tears blinded her. By the time she blinked them away, minutes had passed but the corridor ahead remained empty. She crept forward and gripped the guide rail to keep from spinning head over foot, stopping a few meters away at a computer terminal. After a few taps, a web of green lines and dots popped up. Her mind struggled to concentrate through the pain, and she dug into the data that Fleet had fed into her gray matter during all those years of instruction, cable connected into semi-awares and simulation tanks. Soon she’d accessed the scout ship’s logs: specifications, navigation data, and Phobos Station docking details; they all matched what she had seen earlier. San pieced together the start of a plan, and then traced the lines on the terminal’s map to the point where she found the maintenance shops. She headed deeper into the center of Mars’ moon, where the clanking sounds got even louder and a roar of air handling enveloped her.
A group of men laughed. The sound echoed through the narrow shaft and recycled air carried with it a tinge of ozone mixed with oil, almost making San cough. Ahead of her a thick pressure hatch rested in the open position and bright blue light spilled into an access shaft, which otherwise was lit by dim LEDs placed to show handholds carved into the rock. San took a deep breath. Her heart pounded and threatened to shake her chest into pieces but she ignored the sensation and pulled her way to the hatch, slipping into the small compartment beyond.
“I need help. Do any of you have a set of torx drivers and needle-nose pliers I can borrow? Or a spare fix-all?”
The men said nothing. Then one of them pulled on an e-cig and puffed a cloud of vapor into the air, which drifted across and between them, eventually sucked into an air intake. Three maintenance personnel sat strapped onto makeshift chairs around an empty cable spool bolted to the rock to form a table, upon which they had been playing cards. The cards were magnetized. One of the men slapped his hand to rest on the metal table and stood, placing his other hand against the low ceiling to keep from bouncing upward.
“What they do to you, tiny?” he asked. He and the others were long and thin, crammed into the space—native Martians, the opposite of San in appearance.
“You mean why am I so short?”
“You aren’t just short,” another one said. “You remind me of a cube of that old stuff people used to eat. Spam. They took meat and poured it into a block-mold.”
San’s face went hot with embarrassment. “Yeah, funny. Look, do you have tools I can borrow or not?”
The first one nodded and grabbed a belt from a wall locker. “What you need fixed? I’ll do it.”
“My mother and I are waiting for the next transport and her oxygen generator is acting up. I know how to use a fix-all.”
All three laughed, confusing San; she hadn’t made a joke. She’d been gone for a month but already Mars was a foreign land, the men’s accents out of place, and if this was no longer home where was it?
The man yanked a fix-all from his belt and pushed so the tool flew across to San.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It’s not right what they’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You. The others they engineered. It’s not natural and they’ve started re-assigning normal people—real humans—to crap jobs. We used to be flight officers. Navigators and weapons techs. Fleet has us fixing low grav toilets and soon you won’t be able to enlist with Fleet unless you turn yourself into an ugly little brick of Spam. Give me my tool back in ten minutes or I’ll come find you.”
San reversed out of the room. The three men glared and the hair on the back of her neck stood up so that she didn’t feel safe, even after she’d reached the access shaft outside.
The main panel indicator light blinked red, indicating that the airlock had been sealed and San entertained the idea of a software hack. The idea faded; it was always easier to hot wire security doors. But her hands shook as she brought the fix-all closer to the panel because as soon as she began unscrewing the main plate, an alarm would alert Phobos Station security of unauthorized access to station systems. At best she’d have five minutes—a few more if the guards weren’t paying attention to their status terminals. Even then bots would alert if the guards failed to respond, giving her ten minutes at the most.
San grabbed a nearby handhold and brought the fix-all close to the panel before activating it. It hummed to life. The square black chunk of metal dangled via a thick wire attached to a handheld terminal, and she began punching one finger on the pad, entering commands. Almost immediately, the black metal transformed. Microbots released from the chunk and swarmed over the screws, which spun then flew away, until finally the panel drifted from the wall at the end of a tangle of multicolored wires and fiber optic cables. When San heard shouting in the distance, her hands trembled again.
“Come on!”
She continued punching at the keyboard, ignoring the fact that she floated in the corridor, her head bumping against the ceiling. The microbots swarmed again. Now they climbed over the panel’s wires and began severing connections, then glowed as they fused new ones until the red panel light turned green. The airlock door clunked open. Its servos chugged as they swung the giant metal square away from San, who dove through the gap and into the airlock.
San hit the main panel on her side of the door and waited for it to inch closed. Someone shouted from outside. She urged the door to speed up and heard the scrape of boots and metal against rock as someone moved, headed straight for her. The airlock shut with a clang. San pounded on the locking button and then activated the fix-all again, keying in instructions for the microbots to seal the door permanently. She grinned and pushed off for the scout ship’s door.
Get to Ganymede . . .
“I am getting to Ganymede!” San yelled.
A voice crackled over a speaker inside the airlock. “San Kyarr, you’re under arrest; stop what you’re doing and open the inner airlock door.”
“I’m sorry. I’m normally not a thief. But you’ll get your ship back.”
The ship’s outer door had no security activated so all San had to do was palm the open button, allowing a slab to disengage and disappear into a wide slot. She pulled her way in. There, she snaked herself through narrow shafts that ran between engine and fuel compartments, barely hearing it when the ship’s airlock doors shut behind her and San focused on making her way to the pilot’s compartment—a cramped space near the triangular nose of the ship. She strapped into the command couch. Controls swung from the wall and encapsulated her in a confined pod so that instrument readouts and switches surrounded on all sides, the ship encircling her in a protective embrace. This was her natural habitat; San’s hands danced across the panels, forcing the docking locks to disengage with a clank, the noise invoking an overwhelming wave of relief.
“I’ll get to Ganymede,” San whispered. “I’ll make you both proud.”
Her mother’s warning still rang through San’s mind: Do not trust Zhelnikov . . .