Chapter 11

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“Then why the fuck am I hearing a security alert in this section?”

O-Face stirred restlessly behind her, fiddling with his riot baton and chuckling at the high-pitched whining sound the e-cells made when he extends it. Nero threw an elbow back against his chest to keep him in line. Their knees buckled momentarily as the cargo elevator’s motors surged into motion, taking them down into Sci-Sector’s slave pens. Most of the marines called the guys who worked down there Morloks, but whoever coined that term got their metaphors crossed; the intellectual elite lived below while most of the menial labor took place on the surface and in the shining towers of Sisyphus-1.

“The alert has been cancelled,” she heard Saras’ neatly-clipped, accent-neutral alto voice from her earpiece. On cue, the ringing klaxon cut away in the middle of a downward drone. The sudden silence stung her ears. “It has been logged as a false alarm. You may return to your normal duties.”

Nero snorted incredulously and made herself double-check the report on her P.C.I.. “A false alarm? Who logged that? We’re the closest responding units. I heard the call.”

“This is Doctor Sandeep Patel,” said an unfamiliar voice over the comm. The voice was brisk, rushed. A little breathless. “You can stand down, Corporal. There was an accident in one of the labs. A small chemical spill. Got into somebody’s eyes and one of the lab techs panicked.”

“Is everything all right? I can call for medics.”

The doctor gave a heady laugh, “Oh no, no. Our facilities are more than adequate. Please, you needn’t concern yourself.”

Nero thought about it for a moment. Keyed her mic: “Copy that, Doctor. You have a good day, now.”

O-Face holstered his riot baton and headed for the lift controls. “Didn’t wanna spend all day trippin’ over their comic books down there anyway.” But Nero slapped his hand away from the panel. “Hey!”

“Can’t hurt to check it out if it’s nothing,” she shrugged. If there’s one thing she learned working in the British Embassy it was how to tell when she was being snowed. That nervous “it’s nothing” chuckle set off her bullshit detector like she was watching a presidential candidate debate. She didn't really want to say that, though, because King would probably make some crack about women’s intuition or ask her a bunch of questions she didn't want to answer. “Besides, I’m tired of walking the fucking mall. Never seen much of Sci-Sector beyond the front offices.”

O-Face grimaced. Evidently Nero wasn't much of a liar anymore either. “You gonna get us into trouble.”

“I don’t take orders from that guy. Or that computer.”

They were going to the fourth sub-basement, which was a little misleading in terms of the distance the elevator was going. The bottom two floors were separated from the rest of the station vertically by about a mile of ice, with a vast stretch of nothing in-between. The elevator traveled even farther than that, riding a steep angled track so it could haul heavy cargo and better withstand Callisto’s inconstant geological stability. To Nero’s imagination, it resembled more a huge mine car with no doors or walls, only waist-high rails marked with hazard stripes. Soon the landing gantry for the second sub-basement passed behind them and shrank to a black spot at the limits of her vision. All that remained in either direction was the repetitive, featureless cross-hatching of support girders and the slow parade of yellowed utility lights marching overhead.

A stiff, constant wind rushed down the shaft. The shaft was an umbilicus: water, waste, and power are exchanged through pipelines, air blown down from the tremendous scrubbers at the top. It was bitterly cold, blowing her hair forward and into her eyes. She turned around to face it and saw King rubbing at his bare arms, hopping on the balls of his feet to keep his circulation going. Nero gave him a queer look, to which he smiled sheepishly and chuckled, his breath rushing from his mouth in a white cloud.

“You don’t feel that? It’s gotta be ten below in here.”

She looked down at her hands, feeling surprised and a little stupid. As she flexed her fingers she could feel tightness in the joints, see the skin drained of color. She shook some feeling back into them and stuffed them under her armpits. “Back on my first tour through Kuiper the Chinese started using magnetic mines. Only these didn’t pick up on scanners because they fused rock to ‘em. Made ‘em look like small pieces of drifting asteroids. By the time you knew anything was wrong—if you even noticed—you were already well within optimal blast range.”

“Heard about that. Didn’t the use of mines get banned?”

“Sure, if you could prove it was happening. If you could get one intact, prove it was made by the Chinese and prove that it was used on the directive of the military. You probably don’t know how they operate out there, but they’re partisans. And they don’t have a private sector; all their shit’s military. If some of our people get shot at or blown up, they’ll say ‘well what can you expect from idiot colonists? They never call. They never write. We didn’t tell you we’d put a station there? Fuck, those are hard to keep track of, aren’t they’?”

“We were running a shipping lane patrol from the Ceres Hydroponics station. The hit happened right behind where I was standing. Didn’t breach the hull too badly, but it didn’t have to. Concussion’s enough to bounce everyone inside around like the inside of a bag of popcorn. Sends me head-first into the far wall, breaks my neck, collarbone, splits about four vertebrae. The shrapnel cut straight through the weave armor right here, exposed me to vacuum. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Blacked out from the pain.”

O-Face cringed. “Sheee-yit.”

“So we get boarded. Last thing I remember is Bottin dragging me out, telling me I was gonna be okay. Then he dropped on top of me, left half of his head blown off, the other half…napalm. Covered in napalm. Looked like a burning match. I couldn’t feel it, but I caught a good piece of the nape too.” Nero sticks her thumb into one of her nostrils and blows, clearing out her nose. O-Face is looking like he’s seriously re-evaluating his current line of work. She hasn’t thought about Bottin in years. Couldn’t remember his first name anymore, just that one night drinking he corrected all of them, red-faced and angry, on the correct pronunciation of his last name. ‘Bo-teeeeeeen,’ he’d say, to which everyone parroted ‘Bo-TEEEEEEEEN! Bo-TEEEEEEEEN!’

“Anyway, I spent about 18 months in rehab just learning to walk again. The surgeons implanted a pain filter, a full set of spinal wires, reflex jacks, optics package. Other stuff. The filter blunts off pain, reduces tremors and palsy in my hands. I know it’s cold but I guess I don’t feel it as much as you do.”

King wasn’t comforted a whole hell of a lot. “Oh I’m feelin’ it. I guess if I was going to re-up for another tour out there I’d volunteer for all the upgrades they’d give me, too. I just can’t believe you’d come back for more after injuries that bad.”

Nero’s face felt tight, probably numb from the rushing wind. No wonder the eggheads came down here in parkas. She turned to look down the shaft, thought she could see some light at the end of the tunnel at last. “I’ve had worse.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

O-Face almost shoved her out of the way once the lift sighed to a halt and the rails dropped. He slapped the door control and let the pressure doors cycle. Nero was surprised to see how dirty it was down here. Grimy ice and frozen grease settled in deep ruts shorn into the ‘crete flooring, evidence of heavy machinery and traffic. It was clear that the custodial staff was chased out of here a long time ago, probably afraid that they might clean some rambling doodles off a dry-erase board or throw out a string of pseudocode scribbled on a Nacho King napkin. Who could process ice samples and write code for robotic surface rovers with someone running a shop-vac underneath their desk? There was no downtime down here, always a shift of bleary-eyed hackers and middle-managers working on code and signals intelligence data. Never a good time to change the light bulbs.

Still, it surprised her how unlike the rest of the station this part of Sci-Sector was The lighting was dim and there was a metallic tang to the air, brought on by the thermal system that King was enjoying greatly at the moment. It reminded her of outer colonial posts, of her old combat tours. Work got done here. A lot of it. It all had that broken-in look, like a good pair of jeans. The office space here might have been a shambles and an organizational nightmare, but that wasn't to say the thought-product out of here was substandard.

But it wasn't what she expected. Controlled chaos made sense for Marines, but it seemedwrong in a place of science. But she’d never poked around down here—no call for it, it’s always been quiet—and she didn’t really know what kind of work went on down here. She’d thought it would be the kind done in pristine labs, with Bunsen burners and microscopes, measuring temperature in Kelvin like scientists enjoy doing while wearing impossibly clean white lab coats and birth control glasses. People chasing other eggheads around shouting “Look! Look! I’ve managed to turn this beaker of shit green! Let’s test it on a baboon!” Come to think of it…

“Where are all the geeks?” asked O-Face, his lower-jaw still shivering.

Nero was already bringing up the floorplan on her P.C.I., calling up the locator implants implanted in the base of the skull of every registered colonist and officer on the station. Nothing came up; the screen on her wrist hung up on the floorplan, showing only a single blue dot in the center: herself.

“What’s wrong? Bad reception?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She drew her sidearm, a blocky Flechette pistol that shot tiny packets of needles at about Mach 3, which did things to a human body that can best be described as turning whatever they hit into a sloppy joe. Barely made any sound except for the shrill keen of the inner mechanism and a polite coughing sound when it fires.

“Jamming?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated impatiently, “Maybe.” It was hard to tell. They were around a lot of heavy machinery like the thermal units. It was hard to jam the Marine P.C.I.; it used spread-spectrum techniques specifically to resist interference. But it was possible. But Saras should have had audio pickups down here. It should have heard this whole conversation, and that thought set loose a stampede of paranoid thoughts.

“Chime in anytime, Saras.”

Nothing. Halls stretched out in three directions before them, windowless rooms sealed each with manual double-doors. Colored stripes were painted along the walls, handy navigation aids to the major labs. Nearby there was an office directory listing the numbers for each staff member’s office under a floorplan on the wall almost identical to the one on her P.C.I. It looked like the interior of a hospital without the patients or medical staff.

Nero held up a finger, calling for silence, and closed her eyes. With a mental trigger, she exhaled slowly, turning her head between the halls arrayed before her. She could hear a pair of heavy heartbeats pounding in her ears, something she quickly tuned out like nearby voices in a crowded room. She could hear the others, dozens of others. Could almost see them through the walls. She opened her eyes.

“Everyone’s indoors. Inside their labs and offices. They’re not moving, probably barricaded inside. They sound relatively calm.”

O-Face clicked his tongue, shrugged, and took out his own sidearm. “Okay, let’s check it out.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna find myself a coat before I take that elevator back.”

Nero laughed and led the way, following the red stripe on the wall that led to the microbiology labs. It sounded like the kind of place someone would get chemicals accidentally sprayed into someone’s eyes. “A coat? Yeah you might have to pull that off someone’s dead body.”

She almost slipped and fell the moment she rounded the corner. A sticky black pool of blood streaked all over the ‘crete, spread underneath the body of a young woman. She had Asian features, but her skin was so drained of color it was nearly blue. The blood coated the front of her body, staining her coat like a dark apron. An ugly, sucking hole filled the middle of her face, as someone had either torn or perhaps bitten her nose off.

The woman’s hands were still clasped at her throat in death, probably in some desperate attempt to staunch the torrential bleeding at her throat. Nero didn't need to look her over with her implanted heartbeat sensor to know that she’d been dead for a while. There was blood everywhere, smeared and sprayed into streaky semicircles by the last desperate thrashing of her legs like some grisly snow angel.

Bloody footprints led from the scene of the murder: wandering, pacing prints of bare feet that circled the body a number of times as if the killer didn’t know what to do. Strange circular red stains dotted all over the walls along with a second trail of bare footprints leading back and forth between the body and the nearest door, an unmarked room that looked more like a supply closet than the entrance to a lab.

Nero squatted down near the body, motioning for O-Face to cover the hall. “Jesus,” he said in a shaky voice that told her this was the first time King’s been exposed to this kind of shit, “What am I looking at?”

She pulled at the woman’s hands. Lifeless, they dropped easily away from her throat. Half-coagulated gore spilled down her chest from a gaping, ripped-open wound that looked like it was caused by a mauling dog. Only… “These look like human teeth marks. On her throat and her nose.”

“Why wouldn’t they want security in on this?”

Nero shook her head and moved for the door. She could hear a single heartbeat within, steady and slow. Almost too slow; the internal processor in her head clocks it around 52bpm. They took positions on either side of the passage. Nero reached for the door control when she heard a voice on the other side. Almost in a sing-song cadence. She threw the door open and King performed the entry, rushing inside while Nero followed at the opposite angle.

A large chair dominated the small, closet-sized room. It reminded her of a dentist’s chair if not for the elaborate IV stands clustered around it and the heavy nylon straps dangling from the armrests and base. The lights had been smashed; the only light came in through the doorway. Recumbent on the chair was a young man, looking quiescent despite the blood caked all over the front of his bare chest. His expression was one of dreamy satisfaction, like a man pleasantly engorged after a Thanksgiving meal.

“Down! Down, fucker! Down on the ground!”

The man’s eyes lolled open, looking at Nero under heavy, leaden lids that looked swollen and black from sleep deprivation. His brow was pronounced, the sockets of his eyes deep. His scalp was shaved and scarred with red and white knots of tissue from old surgeries that never healed properly. He wore only the drawstring cotton scrub-bottoms of a surgeon, once powder blue but now wet and sticky with blood.

“No…” he seethed, stringy red rivulets of saliva clinging to his lips. “I want to stay in the chair. I didn’t like it before, but I want to stay in the chair. I want to stay in the chair. I can think clearly here. Can come up with my poetry.”

“Don’t make me say it again, shouted King, “Get your ass down on the ground or we’ll put you down.”

“You will?” the man looked up, his face hopeful. His eyes were steely and full of tears. “You’ll kill me? Kill me!”

“Shut up.”

“Kill me! I can’t do it myself. I was going to bite into my own wrists, but I don’t know if it will work.” He held up his hands, and Nero could see that he had no fingers; they’d all been torn—or gnawed—off after the knuckle.

“They won’t let Jericho die,” he wept, “They won’t! They want Jericho to stay awake all the time and type. Always typing what they want. Recursion. Quantum logic. I don’t want to know what Jericho knows. I don’t want to think this way anymore.”

Nero put her sidearm away and got out her riot baton and a pair of handcuffs, although she had no idea what good handcuffing him will so, or even if they’d stay on. Better to have a gag. “Cover him. He even looks like he wants a bite of me, take the shot.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whined, turning his chair away from her. “They wanted to hurt me. Now it’s over. They can’t make me type anymore.”

As the chair moved, she could see a tangle of bodies dressed much like the woman outside. Three or four other men in lab coats. The body on top was looking with sightless open eyes at her with his head twisted unnaturally to one side. Nero hissed in disgust. How was this freak even capable of murder? They must have come to subdue him and he killed them all. She backed up, baton raised to strike.

She realized that Jericho had been staring at her intently, as if he could read her soul as plainly as if it were written on her face. He smiled a toothless, grisly smile. “It can’t get to you, can it? But you’re not safe. You need to get out.”

Nero jammed the end of the riot baton into the madman’s ribs. He pitched forward instantly, spasming into a fetal position. She cuffed his ankles together in an attempt to keep him from kicking. “Let’s get him back to the elevator,” she said.

Jericho sobbed miserably into the floor. Nero was about to stand when she heard him mumble a name into the floor. A name she recognized. “What?” She kneels down. “What did you say?”

“Robin” he whispered, rolling his head so that he could see her out of the corner of his eye. “You were going to name the baby Robin if it was a girl. Robin Lee. Ethan if it was a boy. After your parents.”

Nero staggered backward into the wall, letting her baton drop to the floor. “Who the fuck are you? I never told anyone…”

“You’re not safe!” he shrieked, his voice cracking at the limits of human pitch, “I know the cold of the unwell, I know the cold of traitor’s hell…”

Nero stared uncomprehendingly down at the gibbering, deformed mess of a man on the floor, and at her bloody hands, clutched protectively against her stomach. O-Face put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed comfortingly. She looked into his face just as he rammed the pointed end of his riot baton into her throat.