Bastion Saturn (3 page)

His first job was as a last-minute replacement with a small force assigned to oversee the peaceful final touches on a contract joining the drug-making establishments on Dione and Pandora. He was given a battered shuttle that had been converted for police work and sent alone to rendezvous with the Pandoran-based contractors who were already in route to Dione.

To reach the rendezvous, Caleb had forty-plus hours of flight time to contemplate the swiftness of his career change. The uniform created in him its intended effect: for the first time in his life he felt a part of something greater than himself, and while his instincts accepted that notion as being good on the whole, his gut, the thing he trusted most, still rebelled against it. Relying on others had always ended in disappointment for him. From his parents and grandparents, to his aunts and uncles, to anyone else who took him in, relationships ended in acrimony—girlfriends especially. Work? Jobs! Jobs were way-stations from pile of shit to pile of shit. Nevertheless, his survival instinct ruled for the moment. The uniform was a positive development, and he vowed to himself, beyond the empty vow that he had made to the Hanson Chamber of Commerce, that he would give this opportunity his best shot. Being a cop meant being something greater that just another cog in some clockwork. Being a cop meant being an overseer of the greater society, someone who helped his fellow citizens stay within the social contract. Perhaps best of all, being a cop gifted him with power. Caleb had never felt powerful (except for when he had successfully made off with things). Power, anchored in the foundation of the ruling class (for that was who had the real power), felt exhilarating.

The Pandoran flotilla comprised one large container ship surrounded by five smaller police ships. Caleb was directed to bring his shuttle into the formation by a police sergeant named Gunderson who was directing things from the bridge of the container ship. In a society without an official military, the formation felt very marshal to Caleb.

Though the orbits of Titan and Dione caused the two moons to come relatively close to each other on a regular basis, for whatever reason, the Pandoran flotilla chose to rendezvous with the smaller moon when Dione’s orbit was on the opposite side of Saturn from Titan. As far as Caleb was concerned, this required an illogically long trip—but who was he to question it?

After a few days of mind-bogglingly boring travel, with little to no communication, they finally approached their destination. As the fifteenth largest Saturn satellite, Dione was yet another pockmarked gray body, not terribly different from the bulk of Saturn’s airless moons. Primarily a dirty ice ball, its craters served as foundations for the domed acreage that was the hallmark of the farming community. Huge mirror-arrays guided the nurturing sunshine to the crops beneath and automatically tracked the star to maintain their intense focus as the moon orbited its gas-giant mother. When the Sun was out of view, hydrogen power plants did the rest, converting the energy locked up in the ice into electricity for UV LED banks. The climate inside each dome was adjusted for the type of crop, though most crops on Dione were of the cannabis and poppy variety.

The 3,942,021 people who had set out for a new life in the Saturn System had a natural libertarian streak, bonded by a consensus that this new land of opportunity, made up of likeminded, live-and-let-live people, would need very little in the way of law enforcement. Such a conceit naturally assumed that every man woman and child would choose to be armed. What better way for a population to honestly thrive than to ensure that individuals were well armed? Nothing keeps folks in line better than cold loaded steel (or in most cases a short-range nerve disrupter) nicely displayed on everyone’s hips. As a result of this mutual understanding, only one hundred cops had made up the original token force, in a planetary-lunar system that far exceeded the landmass of humble old Earth. In a community where everyone had a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag, there were nearly infinite possibilities for treading.

Without a nanny-state enemy to fear, and theoretically safely removed from the evils of AI and a planet full of ABE jerk-offs, the natural thing for these humans to do was to find new enemies. Cliques formed, with sides taken and property squabbled over, and in the land grab that ensued with the settlement of any of Saturn’s sixty-two utilizable moons, inevitably conflicts arose.

After the chaos of year one, the police force expanded to eighteen-hundred mostly disaffected individuals who had found that colonizing grit didn’t come to everyone. Additionally, the mighty Bez Hanson, father of the new colony, had asked for deputized law enforcement volunteers to fill the gaps. These folks acted as local constables while simultaneously going about their daily occupations. Monty Teach was one of those. With his pot farm dome established on Dione, Monty found it advantageous to add cop to his title of farmer. As the Pandoran flotilla came into orbit, both the pot farmer and cop sides of him frowned as he gazed at the arrival on the co-op’s telescope array. The baker’s dozen of farmers and chemists in his syndicate stood in the room behind him and stared at the screen as well. They had set up a bar with real booze and put up a sign that read: “The Dione-Pandoran Company—Together—Better Pharmaceuticals.”

A guy named Bill Withers had convinced them all to create the first co-op, and then convinced them further that a big cash haul would come from further consolidation with the Pandorans. Withers harrumphed at the approaching ships saying, “Don’t know why they need a police escort. Deal’s all signed off. Formalities is all.”

Monty said, “Well, if it’s got some official stamp, maybe I better throw on a uniform.”

While the newly minted Officer Day had orders to maintain geosynchronous orbit above the main dome that was labeled on his heads-up as Monty’s Retreat, the Pandoran container ship landed first, followed by the rest of the police escorts. The whole situation felt bizarre to Caleb, made more so by the fact that he hadn’t really been filled in on anything. There had been almost no communication on the trip from Titan, and now that they were at Dione, other than the confirmation of his arrival and the order to stay in orbit, a command followed to maintain radio silence, including all text transmissions. He hadn’t been trained for such a mission, hadn’t been filled in on what the game plan was. His mission packet merely informed him to report to the rendezvous and follow orders from there, and that he was expected to act in a standard security role as described in the police handbook. As he watched the other ships land, he scanned the handbook again in his heads-up display. He couldn’t find anything that quite related to the current conditions. His police shuttle had a fully functioning non-networked computer system with trillions of bytes of info about every known settlement in the system. The non-networked element ensured independence. Networked systems were ripe for AI control, even at an average of 1,400,000,000 kilometers away from Earth. He decided to look up the folks on Dione. There were thirteen registered farms, all also listed as pharmaceutical manufacturers. All of the farms had been established at the edge of the trailing orbit of the moon and therefore less susceptible to hits by foreign objects. They were, however, constantly dusted by the very fine smoky ice powder raining in from Saturn’s E ring. Ten of the farms were family operations with an average of five members. The forty-one children in the group were all home-schooled, but each farm took turns offering extracurricular activities. Four of the children had been born on Dione. Caleb raised an eyebrow as he scanned through the birth photos of one of them. Giving birth information to the governing bodies on Hanson was purely voluntary beyond the sex. One baby was an oddity indeed: it was long and bowlegged with extremely thin limbs and a large head with a puffy face. Was this the future of men in lower G environments? There had been lots of speculation on new races or at least shapes of humans arising from mutations within and around the rings of Saturn. Each moon had its own level of gravity. Titan had gravity greater than Earth’s moon, with air pressure one and a half times as great as that of Planet Earth’s, making the air feel a bit like walking in a swimming pool. What would babies look like on Titan? A flash in the corner of Caleb’s vision caught his eye. One of the farm domes erupted in a huge fireball and just as quickly died down to small scattered flames. Then another one, the explosion sending bits of dome and plant debris scattering two-hundred meters all around. Caleb instantly brought up the situation display and called out to the Sergeant.

Gunderson calmly replied, “Maintain orbit, Officer Day. You are weapons free if you see any vehicles trying to get off this moon. Out.”

Caleb looked across the control panel.
Weapons?
“Did you say weapons, sergeant?” With the word weapons uttered, a new image came up on his heads-up offering the choice between a multi-stage laser (for everything from blinding to cutting) and a pod of missiles. “When were they going to train me on this shit?”

Another voice broke in on his com. “Hanson PD. Hanson PD. This is Officer Monty Teach, chief deputy constable, Dione. We’re under assault. I repeat, under assault. The ship you are escorting has discharged attackers. We’re under assault!”

Caleb called out to his fellow cops again, “Sarge, you getting that? Attackers on that container. Do you have the situation under control?”

“We’re the ones under assault, Day. Stick to your orders. We’ve got this. Out!” came Gunderson’s reply.

Caleb grabbed the old-fashioned joystick for his scope and trained the eye on the next closest dome to the container ship. He detected small figures, who, having jumped out of a squad ship, were bouncing in the low-G toward the dome. Two of the figures were clearly wearing police exosuits and were highlighted by the scope as such. Three more had come from the container ship, dressed in antilaser armor. Two space-suited farmers stepped out of the dome’s airlock brandishing weapons and were immediately gunned down by the ones in antilaser gear. Then, while the police covered them, Caleb watched as those three began laying something at the edge of the dome. At the same moment, a smaller, suited figure stepped out through the dome airlock. Was it a child? It kneeled next to the two locals who had been gunned down. One of the police stepped up to the smaller figure and fired a nerve disruptor into the back of its helmet. The body slumped over what Caleb assumed were the child’s parents. He felt his blood drain from his face and move away from his limbs and into his core. In another moment, the charges at the edge of the dome went off, blowing half the delicate structure away with the fury of a force-five tornado lifting the roof off a football stadium.

Deputy Monty Teach broke through the group com again, his voice steeped in deep anger and rampant fear. “Mayday, mayday. If there’re any real police officers out there. We need help. We’re being slaughtered.”

Caleb moved the scope across the farms of Dione and watched the figures from the container ship mixed in with the highlighted shapes of his fellow police officers spread out across the complex. The intention was clear. Dione was meant to be neither competition nor partner. The supply of product needed reducing. One by one, they were destroying the farm domes and killing anyone who attempted to step outside. Teach broke into the com once again, and this time Caleb’s scope picked out and highlighted a figure as the constable. He was surrounded by six others making their way away from the chaos toward a ridge line that might hide them from the ground troops. There was no place to go down there. Caleb saw it for what it was, futile—human nature unwilling to accept death as inevitable, even as the noose is placed around the neck. “Mayday, mayday,” called Teach.

A foreboding sense of helplessness clenched Caleb’s muscles. His stomach found gravity in the base of his torso where no gravity existed. This certainly wasn’t what he had signed up for.
Fuck, he’d been totally sandbagged
. His first mission as a cop had come to watching the streets for stragglers as a legally sanctioned massacre occurred inside the house. Or maybe it wasn’t sanctioned. Maybe these cops were rogue. Either way, he was implicated. If he went along, kept watching the street, he was no doubt an accomplice. If he blew the whistle, he was a snitch. If he . . . if he just left, he was a deserter. He couldn’t imagine meeting and greeting these fellow cops—killer cops—after this. The whole event made his faux gravity stomach swell with bile. He might be a thief, but he wasn’t this. He knew how it worked with gangs. They got you to go along on a crime, and the next thing you knew they had something to hold over you. Peer pressure did the rest.
Well, those fuckers aren’t my peers.

He kept watching Teach and his fellow refugees flee bouncing across the barren landscape. “Mayday, Mayday,” Teach kept calling. Caleb turned the sound down and stared out of the ship’s small viewing portal. He was barely aware of his habit of speaking aloud to himself, and often he was taken for someone a bit off. In a human world of ABE connectedness, no one living on Earth actually spoke aloud anymore, unless they stubbed their toe.

“Fuck. I know. Shit happens. But fuck. One gig that finally feels like it could be right and… murderers. Fucking murderers!”

Caleb chewed on the inside of his cheek while a mayday message wormed across the text field in his heads-up. The douche bags blowing everything up and murdering everyone down there probably won’t even bother with these stragglers. “Where the hell are they supposed to go?” It was a colonist’s worst nightmare, getting stranded on an airless ball of ice. There were plenty of tales of pirates out here doing just that to crew members of commandeered crafts.

Another bright flash grabbed his attention, and he watched the silent eruption of another dome. This one must have touched off a hydrogen storage tank because the explosion was so big that it rocketed debris beyond the moon’s gravity well. A bunch of weed and other pharmaceutical plants were about to permanently garnish Saturn’s rings. The debris would probably dust the other moons around Dione: Helene and Polydeuces. “Polydouched-us,” chuckled Caleb. “No, Pandora douched you, fuckers.” He scanned the fleeing group again while nervously itching his left palm. A voice in the back of his mind quietly whispered,
You’re an asshole, Caleb Day. You’re a selfish, narcissistic, loner, asshole, and everything you touch turns to shit.
“OK, that’s enough of that,” he admonished.
No, you’re not going to blow me off this time. This time you’re going to do the right thing.
“And what’s that?”