Vyyda Book 1: The Haver Problem (8 page)

             
It had happened once or twice before:  agents on free time in the rundown settlement, finding conflict with the locals.  They had an informal collection of roughnecks to subdue Bureau troublemakers, popping them into a locked room somewhere until HSPB officials made contact and arranged for release.  The punishment that usually followed such incidents was reassignment from Luna to some other Bureau outpost.

             
"What about the others?" Caroline asked as Stovall, still with a hand on her arm, hurried her along.

             
"They'll find their way back."

             
"It's not right.  We should -- "

             
"No.  You and I need to go."

             
As luck would have it, the
skip-shuttle
bound for HSPB-Luna was docked and open.  They approached it and the pilot held up a hand, slowing them.

             
"Not going anywhere for quite a while," he said.

             
"What?  Why not?" Stovall demanded.

             
"Lockdown.  Installation's on lockdown.  Nothing goes in or out until further notice."

             
"Lockdown for what?" Caroline asked.

             
"I don’t know.  Just got the word five minutes ago."

             
Lockdowns were extremely rare for HSPB-Luna.  There hadn’t been a single one during Caroline’s five year tenure.  HSPB didn’t do ‘drills’.  This was real.  Something was happening.

             
"I did hear the word 'hostage' back and forth on open comms before they cut off transmissions," the skip pilot offered. 

             
"I need to get on your comms," Caroline said, moving to step onto the skip.

             
"Can't let you do that," the pilot countered.

             
"And why is that?"

             
"I'm responsible for every inch of this craft – right down to the comms control.   Somebody sends a message during transmission silence and it's my fault."

             
"I'll take the blame," she said.

             
The pilot merely shook his head, giving no ground.

             
A couple hundred meters behind them, it appeared that a handful locals were making their way cautiously into the tunnel.  They may have come with greater urgency if Caroline's single, deft kick delivered to the shopkeeper hadn't been so effective.  Still, as more joined the group, a growing collection of silhouettes against light issuing in from Ell-C, it appeared their approach was inevitable.

             
Ell-C had a collective attitude toward Bureau personnel that was a mixture of resentful dependence and outright hatred.  The Bureau represented the closest thing to a piece of Earth to come their way. 

             
"Load up or be left behind," Caroline ordered the pilot.

             
"I've told you:  I have responsibility -- "

             
With an arm sweep and leg roll Caroline disabled the skip’s pilot and nodded to Stovall that he should carry their now-limp colleague aboard the small craft.

             
Sealed tight, it would still take several minutes to prep the vessel for departure.  The crowd from Ell-C had drawn much closer, some peering inside the narrow windows to view what could be seen of the occupants.

             
One of the friskier locals, hammer-fisted and burly, pounded on the skip's exterior.  The others in the group took a step back as the hum of the mag-strip launch apparatus engaged.  Hammer-fist, however, with intensity and clenched teeth, continued his assault on the Bureau craft, with no apparent understanding that he had a better chance of surviving on the surface of Luna with no oxygen than making so much as a dent in the HSPB skip. 

Anyone famil
iar with mag-strip propulsion – even vaguely – would move away, out of self-preservation.  He must have had a long history with Bureau personnel, Caroline thought, as she glimpsed the brute and his manic tirade.  

             
When it became obvious that the skip’s attacker wasn't about to back off, Caroline threw the switch and engaged the mag-strip release, propelling the shuttle forward to the departure chute from Ell-C's port complex.  She had no way of knowing what had happened to the fool who refused to cease his pointless assault on the skip.  If he’d fallen into the trough in which the skips hovered on the mag-strip, his companions would be faced with the prospect of extracting his carcass from its grisly end.

V              V              V              V

              It took less than ten minutes to cover the distance from Ell-C to HSPB-Luna.  Caroline had started transmitting requests for clearance to land right away – each received no response.

             
“A breach?” Stovall suggested.

             
“No one in U-Space could make it so far as Luna before being stopped and no one in C-Space has…a reason.”

             
As the words left her lips, Caroline’s inflection nearly turned the statement into a question.  Her own father had been contemptuous of Earth.  She didn’t really know how many in C-Space might have the requisite anger to actually do something reckless.

             
“There’s always a first time,” Stovall noted.

             
Transmissions continued to be ignored.  Caroline double-checked the frequency and carefully, manually, entered her call sign to be sure that it wasn’t simply an error in syntax that was causing the silence.

             
“We could go back to Ell-C,” Stovall said.  “Even with that rowdy bunch – we just sit there and wait it out.  They can’t get inside the skip.”

             
“No.”

             
“So you want to keep circling the installation?”

             
Finally, after more than three dozen attempts to raise word from HSPB-Luna, a terse response appeared.  “Lockdown.  Return to Ell-C.”  A direct order.  The installation was not breached, the Bureau maintained control.

             
Nevertheless, Caroline kept trying to get a landing clearance.  Caroline Dahl was, and always had been, a “good soldier”.  Yet there was nothing wrong with ambition, was there?  Why couldn’t she serve faithfully (regardless of treatment by Earthers) and still pave a way to move up in the ranks when the chance presented itself.  Most people would agree that was reasonable…wouldn’t they?  Whatever had caused the lockdown was serious enough to represent opportunity – opportunity for a capable agent to shine.

             
Then, a new idea.  Caroline prepared a transmission that demanded immediate landing clearance on the basis of an emergency:  Stovall was seriously injured.  He needed medical attention from the staff at HSPB-Luna.  Explaining the lie would come later, after the landing and discovery of what had triggered something so extreme as a lockdown.

             
For several minutes, the new approach didn’t bring any better results than the first.  Then, shortly after the third (and increasingly urgent) version of the emergency transmission, clearance came.  They were to land and remain in their skip until medical personnel arrived.

5.

From Islington

There was no way Dorsey could have put
Tomas Witt off forever.  And, now that he'd been cornered and coerced, little point to delaying the task given him.  He was only halfway to his quarters when an alert sounded on his
fleks
, the narrow, tresanium-laced coil worn around his wrist, alerting him to Witt’s deposit of the FTC-45 documents in his personal comms line.

Dorsey’s living space amounted to less than half of what Tomas Witt and other senior faculty members enjoyed.  Not that it bothered him.  What he had was comfortable
enough.

The small sliver of a kitchen, plain-looking table (which doubled as a desk) and reasonably comfortable bed were
all together in a single-room set up.  Only the lav had been separated from what could easily be seen upon entering the residence.

Ether-screens could be triggered in two
places:  above the table or before the foot of the bed.  Dorsey chose the former on his way to the pair of cupboards that contained provisions.  The screen still held the triple-panel image of an Earth tree (of particular fascination to Dorsey) in various stages of growth.  It was a somewhat common image that had been reproduced countless times through U-Space, passed along and treasured by many.  Not only did it represent the life that could grow from a piece of ground when proper elements existed, but it also demonstrated how something so small could become extraordinarily large (from a U-Spacer’s point of view) on the home planet.  It was Dorsey's default screen, and had been for years, one situation after another – from Hyland forward.

The image was one of the few personal touches to be found in the quarters.  Not only had there been little in Dorsey's travels to which he'd become attached, there was also the question of practicality.  Some items just made for tough moves. 
However, through the entire path he'd followed, from Hyland to Sykes, there was a trio possessions Dorsey had managed to keep close:

The first was a thermometer of the sort carried by cargo joks on the molkas where they spent interminable hours.  Dorsey hated the cold and had attempted to use the thermometer he’d gotten
(during a brief tenure working laundry on a molka) to convince Pietro Sklar to raise the temperature in the sector of residences where his rooms were located (to no avail).

He kept a narrow, ten centimeter whistle constructed of some cheap metal beside the thermometer.  It featured four holes that he’d been taught to cover in various combinations with his fingers as he blew through the mouthpiece.  He’d been told it was of Earth, but never believed the tale.  It looked too new and the material from which it had been crafted resembled closely many other cheap items fashioned from the available resources in U-Space.  Nevertheless, it made an interesting sound and he had spent hours simply blowing notes – never coming up with anything approaching a pleasing composition – instead of listening to the artif
icially created music piped in to residences.

Finally, hidden away in his lav, Dorsey possessed a small globe with what purported to be the lines of land and ocean on Earth.  It was made of a composite common in U-Space manufacturing and had been painted to reflect the blue o
f water and tan of land masses (as suggested by the occasional maps of Earth bouncing around U-Space).  The colors had chipped away in certain spots, but it sat atop the sink squeezed between his commode and the unbelievably confining shower.

Peeling off his official Sykes vestments, Dorsey made a
quick check of his kitchen cupboard.  His dwindling supply of syntho-cheese had gone bad.  He set it on the table to keep from forgetting to discard it.  That left only rebro-paste, semi-stale breadstuffs and sweetwater (which was also on the old side).

Opening the FTC-45 materials
that Witt had sent on his ether screen, Dorsey focused in.  It was difficult initially to make sense of what he was reading.  Most of it appeared to be information related to transport manifests.  There were also shift assignments and official decrees of death for half a dozen or so of the settlement’s citizens.  Uninspired, these in no way offered meaningful revelations.  And then, the flow of information from FTC-45 was interrupted by a personal note from Witt, separating the underwhelming appetizer from the main course of the exercise:

Dorsey,

No more numbe
rs.  One man’s story.  Scour it for clues in the language:  syntax, idiom, vocabulary and the rest to tell me you believe it to be as old as its written date indicates (and I’m confident you will). 

p.s. – No shame in joining a cause late in the day…so long as you join.

Tomas

Dorsey read on:

7 February 2163

I am a refugee from planet Earth.  This record of the days following removal from my home in Islington is the best available means to maintain sanity and exert some measure of control over my life.  That is my purpose in this exercise.  I've no way of knowing if anyone besides myself will ever read these words, nor if they'll be sympathetic to my point of view.

I've heard that similar attempts to chronicle what's going on off-Earth have been met with hostility by those running the relocation centres of the sort I'm in right now.  Some have been beaten and, rumour has it, others killed.  As a physician, I've been given greater freedom and special treatment to administer to the sick.  Consequently, I've been left out of personal searches thus far.

I can't say exactly where this place is in relation to Earth, but all indications suggest that we are far beyond the outer reaches of the solar system and destined never again to be any closer to the planet on which we were born.

Around seventy of us from Islington (complete families and all) were gathered and eventually joined with several hundred more from other parts of London.  We were then transported to the space elevators just outside of Bath.  Years ago, as a boy, I saw the Bath lifts from a distance at night.  That image of soft, green glowing tentacles rising from the surface of Earth and disappearing into the sky provided the most exotic, imagination-stirring sight of my young life.  Platforms were racing up and down those glowing lines, back and forth between the near reaches of space and the ground on which we all walked.  I commented on the incredible nature of it all.  My parents remained silent, not even acknowledging that I'd spoken.

Riding one of the lifts just days ago for the very first time gave me anxiety equal in measure to the enthusiasm I felt as a boy.

The transport onto which we were loaded from the lift carried a total of more than three hundred people.  In turn, when we arrived at the relocation facility, the three hundred from our vessel were herded into an area that held thousands.  I heard French and Spanish spoken in close proximity along with the English that can only come from Americans.

We were provided meals twice a day and padding on which to rest, but the food was bloody awful and sleep only came as the result of days on end without slumber.  The chaotic, rumbling quality of the large, unpartitioned area we were in made it difficult to lie down, close eyes and find peace.

They left us with nothing to occupy our time; only the uncertainty of the future to contemplate.  After nearly a full day under these conditions, it was a group of Americans just down the way from our Islington bunch who provided a bit of entertainment.

Grey-uniformed "facilitators" have been present in small bunches ever since our arrival.  Their stated purpose is to aid in our transition to new lives, but their demeanor and occasional forcefulness suggests a more sinister reality.  One week ago, they began to appear, little by little, in our cavernous holding area.  Before long, there were several dozen.  The only weapons visible among them were batons harnessed across their backs, easily retrieved.  None of them spoke at first.  The rest of us let our conversations dwindle. 

A pointy-nosed facilitator arrived and spoke, informing us that we should be prepared to move and be sorted for final destinations shortly.  He repeated the message again and again as he walked through the crowd, dozens of his men behind him.  Pointy-nose didn't bother to raise his voice much.  He seemed to want anyone just out of range to make the effort to get closer and hear him.  He was cocksure and cold; proudly insensitive to the anxiety and suffering around him.

The other facilitators began separating people from the few personal possessions they'd been allowed to bring – one small bag each, at most.  If you couldn't wear it on your person, it was taken away.  Each individual was searched, forced to turn pockets inside-out. Worse yet, confiscation did not end with material goods.  The groups from various parts of the globe which had remained segregated until arriving in the holding area had started to disperse and blend into one another.  Facilitators, under the watchful eye of pointy-nose, began shoving people back into point-of-origin categories.

One group I knew to be French were addressed by pointy-nose:  "You will all take the surname of Grenoble."

The message was related in French by one of the other facilitators.  Immediately after the translation, another gaggle of these unctuous authority figures went from man to woman and child, recording them one by one on devices that indicated "rebirth", erasing previous identities.  I could hear small bits of complaint exchanged between the new "Grenobles"; unfortunately my French is so poor that none of it made sense.

This is roughly where the Americans brilliantly entered the picture.

As facilitators followed pointy-nose down through the crowd, the Americans watched from perhaps fifty meters away, figuring out what was happening and chattering among themselves.  The pushing, pulling and renaming of people drew ever closer to the refugees from the U.S.

I suppose it's not only Americans who would have done what they were cooking up.  They certainly had time to assemble a plan.  Yet, there was something quite "Yankee" about it – insofar as I claim to understand the American nature and spirit.

One facilitator asked a trio of U.S. men what city they came from, only to receive defiant stares and replies such as, "Figure it out yourself" and "Your ass".  Another American announced that he was from the moon and had only been on Earth to visit relatives.

"You made a big mistake dragging me all the way out here.  When everybody on the moon learns about this, you'll lose your fancy uniforms."