Bastion Saturn (4 page)

He only had two weeks of simulator training on the beater. Fortunately, the shuttle was pretty much point-and-go, not equipped with the pilot-brain interface of higher end ships, but still pretty sophisticated. Nevertheless, landings and docking caused folks to fuck up the most. Every celestial body had a different gravitational force and the machine needed to be made aware of that force and consider it into its calculations. Fortunately, the major moons of Saturn were well studied and their statistics fully programed into the shuttle’s flight system. The pharmaceutical farm cluster on Dione was already a primary waypoint, so technically all he had to do was focus the scope on the sight he thought looked the flattest and hit “Execute” on the flashing LAND icon.

Dione, being a larger moon, wasn’t nearly as complicated to land on as smaller bodies, which required a far more sophisticated landing procedure. When the ship touched down like a feather on a pile of down, he patted the console in praise. The design of the shuttle did not suit sightseeing, patrolling, fighting or whatever else a crew or passengers might need a big window to do. It moved things from here to there. As a conceit to the human need for reassurance, there was a single small portal window that functioned as a backup to confirm that the craft had actually landed on solid ground and not the edge of a cliff. A camera array on the roof and underbelly offered the appropriate viewing possibilities, and he activated the 360-degree vision to fill his displays with the surroundings. There they were, hiding behind a raised dune turned to solid ice. Their heat signature stood out against the cold, a blazing splash of orange red and blue. They were at 180 degrees, directly behind the ship. Caleb sent a private text to Teach’s helmet, promising salvation.

How do I know this is not a trap?

Because it’s easier to just leave you out there to asphyxiate.

How do we know you don’t intend to capture us?

Because my compatriots are busy killing everyone else back on your farms. Prisoners don’t seem to be part of the plan.

There was a long pause, and Caleb became increasingly concerned that Sergeant Gunderson might notice his absence in orbit and begin to investigate. Finally, a message from Teach appeared:

We’re eight, nine with you. That shuttle has a life support system for a maximum of eight.

And?

I guess we have a decision to make.

Make it in a jiffy. The douchebags fucking up your gig are bigger douche bags than I’ve ever dealt with. I’m sure they’re putting it together that I’ve landed and I don’t know them at all, so I can’t speak to their next move . . . so . . .

Caleb watched the group standing in a tight circle. They engaged in some animated arm waving, and five whole fucking minutes seemed to go by. He was starting to really get antsy and shot out another text:
Tick tock
.

One figure finally sat down and leaned against the ice dune. A small person, probably a child, clung to the adult and had to be pulled away.

“Fucking great.”

He punched the code to open the airlock and felt the ship shift on its landing gear as the seven refugees piled in. He observed them on the airlock feed. After confirming that they were all aboard with the outer door sealed, he hit the compression button.

With air in the lock, they could hear him over a speaker in the cramped space. “Leave the suits in there. The dust will fuck up the recirculators.” He watched as they disrobed and cocked an eye as a man and woman climbed naked out of their suits, the woman wearing only a pair of entertainment glasses. “Must have been going at it when the shit hit the fan,” he said aloud before realizing his mic was still open. The couple, already well into the how-do-I-cover-myself, looked stricken. A teenage boy, maybe fourteen, snickered and tried not to stare. A young girl, maybe eight, brought things back to ground when the guy in the deputy uniform pulled off her helmet and let her bawling wails out into the room. Caleb glanced back at the external monitors. The one they left behind was laying on her side. She had removed her helmet.

In the airlock, a tall dignified woman, in her thirties he guessed (though who knew anymore?), stood up straight, fixed a loose lock of hair behind an ear, and said with the accent of a Southern Indian, “We have removed our suits. Would you please open the door?”

Caleb stopped staring at the dead woman outside. “Uh, yeah.” He punched the code to open the inner door, and the shabby group filed in. He turned to them while pointing at what would be the outside. “What the fuck! You leave this kid’s mother out there?” He pointed at Monty. “You’re a cop for fuck’s sake. You let her take the hit?”

The Indian woman held the girl to her side. “Mary had a fourteen-inch piece of steel through her side, a shrapnel wound. Her life systems monitor indicated a precipitous blood pressure drop indicating a bleed out.” The girl continued to sob as the Indian woman continued, “The rules of triage protocol placed her in the position to stay.”

“What’re you, some kind of doctor?”

“Yes.”

Caleb shut up. But for the sobbing of the girl, the ship went silent. Finally, the teenage boy said, “Uh, shouldn’t we be rock-hopped by now?”

For lack of a better plan, Caleb aimed for the center of the E-ring. It wasn’t dense enough to really hide in, but his small craft would require some work to pick out. The girl had finally stopped sobbing. She sat strapped into her seat in a catatonic state. Caleb reluctantly gave his spare elastoware to the naked couple who were now strapped in and staring into the air in shock. The other two passengers were a couple named Bob and Rob. Without asking, they raided the ship’s food stores and passed meal tubes around to everyone. Caleb accepted the tube, and his stomach growled out a thank-you.
What the hell have I done?
His inner voice repeated the question over and over while he sat still in the pilot’s chair, choosing not to swivel around to look at the refugees. His desire to wish them all away was interrupted by Deputy Teach, who finally cleared his throat, saying, “Thank you.” Everyone else but the girl murmured a similar courtesy.

Caleb let out a long sigh and spoke with his back to them. “What did you people do to deserve that?” He swiveled the seat to get the answer. The deputy seemed to be the spokesperson of the group, so Caleb glared at him.

Bob quietly spoke up instead. “We got greedy.”

“How’s that?” asked Caleb, cupping a hand behind one ear.

Rob reached out and firmly grasped his partner’s hand. “We had a good thing going.” He glanced at Teach. “But we were talked into trying to go bigger. Money got offered and—”

Monty interrupted. “Clearly we showed our force structure to be inadequate. Clearly, the Wang Fat people calculated the cost benefit of removing us rather than consolidating a saturated market—so much so that they have killed whole families without blinking an eye. Clearly,” Teach continued while gesturing at Caleb’s uniform, “the powers-that-be were made aware of this. That or some cops are now mercenaries. Why did you save us, Officer Day?”

Caleb cocked an eyebrow and sucked the last of the meal out of his tube. “Impulse control issues.”

There was a long pause, and then the Indian woman spoke. “Your impulse remains appreciated, Officer Day. My name is Saanvi. Dr. Saanvi Badami.”

“Caleb Day. Let’s skip the officer crap. It feels disingenuous, no? This was my first and last mission.”

The teenager spoke up. “My parents live in the research base inside Telesto.” He looked at Teach and then at Caleb. “I was interning with one of the other farmers, Mister Withers. We can go to my house.”

The male of the couple who Caleb assumed had been caught
indelicato
pointed at himself. “Dave,” and then pointed at the woman, “Jennifer.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes subtly and said, “I can speak for myself.”

Dave said, “Of course you can.” Then he turned back to Caleb. “I think I should note that we all have an ID problem.” He pointed over his shoulder in the general direction of Dione. “If that was sanctioned, and we show up as checking in on any base, officially anyway, the folks on Hanson will be alerted. You’re anonymous out here . . . until you’re not. Pharma folks like us forgo anonymity simply by being in the trade.” He nodded. “Your situation is tricky as well. We all witnessed a major crime. Your disappearance from the scene makes the math easy. They will be looking for you, and maybe some refugees as well.”

Monty pointed at the pilot’s screen, which showed the line of debris that was floating away from the moon and into the rings. “Or we’re there. Anonymity potentially restored. If we’re smart.” He unclipped himself and floated to a panel adjacent to the pilot’s chair, popped the panel off and began digging past bundles of fiber-optic cable.

“Hey!” demanded Caleb.

“This ship, like any ship, has a transponder.” Teach had his arm buried in the cables, his eyes casting about at the ceiling while he dug. “I have, I mean, had this same model on Dione for moving product. Some product occasionally needed to get lost.” He kept feeling around. “The transponder on this thing wasn’t designed to switch on and off.” He jerked his arm and said, “There. Invisible—sort of.” He turned and looked at the fuel readout. “Hmm, maybe just enough.”

“Enough what?” asked Caleb.

“Enough to reach Pheobe. I have friends on Pheobe.” He shooed Caleb to get out of the pilot’s chair. “You mind?”

Caleb unbuckled himself and pushed off to float over Monty’s shoulder.

Monty started typing into the trip computer. “It’s a long way, as you know.” He frowned. “In its current orbit from here. Let’s see—three weeks forty-six hours. We’d have to slingshot off Polydeuces to get up enough speed.” He looked at the fuel level again. “Maybe enough, maybe. It calcs out to one landing attempt if we don’t burn anything after we slingshot.”

“Why can’t we just go to my folks’ house?” whined the teenager.

Monty turned to the kid with a gentle smile. He pointed back in the direction of Dione. “Your folks may get an unexpected call from them. We should probably shoot them an encrypted warning and let them know you’re all right. They just can’t know where we are going.”

Rob opened the food locker. “The water recycler should hold up if we only use it for drinking but, we don’t have three weeks’ worth of calories for this many people. Maybe two, tops.”

“Then we starve a little,” shot back Monty.

Jennifer’s stomach hurt. She had dieted a bunch of times in her life. Mostly fasts. So she was used to that first day of tummy shock when her stomach, anticipating a meal and getting nothing, protested with waves of useless gastric juices, but this was different. This pain bloated within her, the emptiness of her belly replaced with the sensation of expanding air-pressure, as if her body was trying to trick itself into feeling full.

They hadn’t gotten up quite as much speed as Monty had hoped for when they sling-shot around Polydeuces. Three and a half weeks passed and they still had more than a million and a half kilometers to go. On top of that, to make up for the reduction in speed they had to burn precious fuel to alter their angle of interception. Then they discovered that the landing harpoon was malfunctioning, an electrical issue that no one could trace out. That left an old-school engine burn. They had a one-shot hope for a hard Phoebe landing. They also endured a slow starvation, all of their stomachs in deep protest. They “survived” on eight-hundred calories a day. At least Jennifer had some hips to burn off. She stared at Dave, who pretty much slept all the time now, intentionally sedating himself to ensure minimum calorie burn. Dave had always been a skinny guy. Jennifer liked the wiry type, and she had seriously considered seducing him, before everything went to hell. Though she and Dave had been coincidentally undressed when the attack on Dione struck, it wasn’t because of what the leering fool Caleb implied. Caleb. Now he was exactly her type. Handsome bloke, knows it, assumes it’s a pass to get out of charm school. Anyway, Dave had no body fat to feed on, and he looked like a mummy zipped up in his sleep sack, hanging on the wall. In fact, most of the refugees were sedate. Stephanie, who had lost her mother, welcomed the sedation as a blissful departure from the pain of consciousness. Only Caleb, Monty, and Jennifer remained awake—Jennifer because she was slightly allergic to the sedatives, Monty and Caleb because they claimed to be running the ship. Running what, she wasn’t sure. The thing was on auto-pilot.

She scraped her tongue along her teeth to try to break off some of the fungus that she could feel growing there. Hygiene had become a serious problem, moving well past the revolting body odors. The overworked sanitation system was at the edge of failure. The water filtration cartridges should have been replaced before the trip even began. The air was so foul as to be tactile, laying heavily against the skin, coating the nostrils. The CO2 levels hadn’t reached a critical level yet, but she’d lost count how many times Monty and Caleb huddled to work out the numbers as they did now.

Monty shook his head. “Damn.”

“Shit,” said Caleb.

“What?” asked Jennifer.

Caleb turned in his chair, strapped in. He hated floating around, or so he claimed. “Air filters are failing faster than we hoped for. This piece of shit shuttle should have been retired for scrap.”

“I know. You keep saying that. Why the cussing?”

Monty said, “Because we’ve run the numbers every which way and no matter how we crunch them, we’re dead before we get there. Day after tomorrow, maybe the day after that we are unconscious. Total asphyxiation a few hours later. We have another week before we hit Phoebe—dead.”

Jennifer stared at the men with wide eyes. Just coming out here to the far reaches of the Solar System required a certain level of uncommon bravery. She had bravery to spare. Even when she had fled across Dione, with no real hope of rescue, she hadn’t contemplated actual death. What Monty was saying guaranteed absolute and certified death. She swallowed the feeling of cotton growing in her throat, then looked at the sedated passengers.