All Fall Down (11 page)

           
Peter took a seat. He smoothed his short grey hair, then absent-mindedly played with a scar on his left chin, “It's the pods.”

           
“Again?”

           
Peter nodded and adjusted his position in the seat. His Medé skin paled, “Have you managed to talk with Daoud yet?”

           
“A little,” Masjid sighed, “He knows about the activity. The other issue is occupying him, though. The MI team has arrived.”

           
Peter paled further, “Good. That's... good.”

           
“You're not implicated, don't worry. The records are very precise about where your involvement ends.”

           
“If Verigua discovers anything, it will be in touch with the AI Thought Space immediately.”

           
“It won't. Now what's on your mind. Something with the pods?”

           
Peter started playing with his scar again, “The levitation we witnessed is more widespread. And the energy discharges are changing. They're focused. One of them almost broke out.”

           
Masjid's wrinkled face scrunched into thought, “We'll have to be careful. Do you think it's time to take control as we discussed?”

           
“I, ah... This is wrong, Masjid. Alien hybrids. I can't go on with it.”

           
Masjid thought about what Daoud had told him. An alien visitor to the surface, similar to the one Daoud had used to gain his original DNA sample. “You know how Daoud got his original DNA?”

           
“Yes. Some alien life form.”

           
“It's returned.”

           
“What do you mean, 'returned'?”

           
“Daoud says it's here, on the surface.” Masjid nodded upwards.

           
“At least the MI team are finally here.”

           
Masjid nodded, thinking about Huriko's death.

           
“Weeks since I sent it,” Peter was shifting in his chair, nervous.

           
“Sent?” Masjid smoothed his beard. He didn't like the tone of Peter's conversation so far. He was the fourth member of their conspiracy, the only other scientist apart from himself who'd worked on the pods.

           
Peter shifted more in his chair, then suddenly pushed it back and stood up. He walked to the opposite end of the room before turning back, “I sent a coded message to MI. About Huriko.”

           
“What?”

           
“Someone had to do something. It's getting too much!”

           
“What have you done?” Suddenly Masjid was alert. Everything was going wrong.

           
“I said. A message to MI. Warning them. We can't keep this hidden. Huriko murdered. The pods turning into who knows what? And now you tell me an alien on the surface.”

           
Peter was roaming around Masjid's office, picking up ancient medical devices that Masjid had collected over the years. He put them back down haphazardly, not even looking at them, obviously desperate for some distraction. He picked up a scalpel, something ancient, made of steel, “What are we going to do? We should meet these MI people, tell them.” His eyes were wild.

           
Masjid held tight in his chair, refusing to let panic in. He looked at Peter and spoke softly, “When you next get an opportunity, clear your rota and get back down there. Strengthen the bio-containment. But be careful. With this MI team here we'll have to account for our movements to the second.”

           
“Anything else?”

           
“Re-run all the old tests. If the data hit the scenarios we discussed, terminate the pods. I'll think about the MI team. You're right, this is going too far.”

           
They finished their meeting. Masjid deactivated the security lock out on his office. He thumbed his wrist pad and they talked over procedural matters, laboratory reports and staffing issues. Peter left, dragging his bad feeling with him.

           
Fall was supposed to have been a researchers dream. Instead Masjid had become entangled in something that could get him imprisoned for life.

           
He went to see to the laboratory staff, thoughts of bio-containment and terminating the pods in his mind. He knew that technically you couldn't mutiny against a secret experiment, but if he had to kill the specimens, Daoud would want to serve some justice of his own. Masjid thought desperately about a way to avoid private justice and secure his name and security with his official biological research.

Chapter 6 - Ours Is To Reason Why

Sophie had taken General Leland and Commander Cygnate down to the Central Operations Room after their meeting, and was due to meet Commander Ho-Yung in the hangar soon.

           
First she returned to her private study. It was sparse. There were no pictures or holos of family or loved ones on display. It was furnished with a wide holopit, a desk which featured its own flat and holo displays, an AI-reality access panel, a separate desk which was plain but for an engineering tool, and an ink drawing of an ancient and crude network diagram.

           
Like Daoud and Masjid in separate occasions before her, she keyed a sequence into her wrist pad and waited until a holicon appeared. She was now unmonitored by the Colony's AI.

           
Unbeknownst to Doctor Currie, the block they used to keep private conversations out of the AI's reach had been more carefully planned than he realised. It had not, as he surmised, been created after the current Colony was occupied and the pod research project initiated. Sophie had built it into the design schematics. It gave her certain advantages, including being able to view all of Masjid's and Peter's conversations.

           
She opened the last recorded message between the two, which played out in a matter of seconds, a barely visible laser flickering from her desk directly into her eyes.

           
With everything that had happened recently, the turn of a key in their long plan, the opening of doors to undetermined futures, both she and Daoud had ignored Doctor Currie's audience requests. She quickly looked through the recent recordings and reports on the pods, using the conversation she'd just watched to guide her.

           
The pods were active. It was as they'd hoped. None of them could be sure what the pods would develop into, or what capacity they would have. Silently she agreed with Doctor Peter Cassel's qualms, things had gone too far. Yet whenever she thought that, a different voice spoke in her head and told her it was necessary, it didn't matter. Sophie silently followed the thought and forgot about her qualms.

           
Doctor Cassel had said something about a message to MI about the pods. So that explained why MI hadn't just sent a coroner. She sent a high priority message to Daoud, advising him to meet Masjid again. This could be dangerous. There was a little over a day until the eclipse and whatever came after the herald. Daoud didn't really know, just that it was the perfect opportunity to start a war and save humanity.

           
She turned her attention to the MI team.

           
Sophie had never been a part of the military. Over the years she had often been around them, sometimes helping and sometimes hindering. The recording which Daoud had shown her had brought up old memories, of times and people and, how would she term it now? Of escapades in her youth, situations long since relegated to nostalgia, recollections sleeping through these long years. The Corporate Wars were so long ago; another life time.

           
She wondered what Daoud's real motivation was in showing her the recording of her ship broken up in the jungle of Anansi Prime, her old body broken and partially destroyed. Was he looking to remind her of what she owed him? A life debt could rarely be repaid in the manner it was granted. But then Daoud was not one who asked for fealty in that manner. Loyalty, then? She had been loyal for more years than she cared to count. She had never once wavered, never once shown any hint – nor felt any such feeling – of betrayal or disloyalty. When her ship had crashed she had just successfully delivered a payload that had helped bring an end to the great strife, to end great suffering. When she'd eventually woken, re-grown, alive, Daoud had nursed her to health, shielded her from the immediate consequences of her actions and told her of his plans. It had taken very little time for her to see the truth of what he said. Her own cause, to which she'd devoted her life, for which she'd had to convince her family she was dead, and to which she'd commit more friends and loved and respected ones than she cared to remember, seemed to so naturally align with Daoud's.

           
Freedom from war and oppression.

           
Daoud maintained there was a war coming. Instead of waiting for its arrival, he wanted to precipitate it. Divert it. Shorten it.

           
The electric blue of the holos in front of her showed various files and recordings from the MI team. The glow tinged her face with uncertain shadows. Her round eyes and square-ish chin set in a way that no Fall colonist would recognise of her: she looked uncertain. She felt uncertain. Perhaps Daoud – for once – was being as transparent as he said, simply wanting to remind her that their plan had started in significantly different times, an age of war where death was all too familiar, and that she was capable – albeit briefly, maybe intensely, but as he confirmed, necessarily – of going through it again.

           
In the same way that the body does not remember pain, only the emotions and thoughts associated with the physical sensations, she knew that neither she nor Daoud, nor the body politic, remembered or was prepared for war. They all knew what it entailed, they could all wince at the memories of what happened, but the feeling of being at war could only truly be felt when it arrived.

           
And it would arrive soon, she thought, and decided that was why Daoud, after these long years, had shown her the recording. Her body, her mind, her emotions had brought back all those old feelings and memories. It was a preparation as good as any, even if it wasn't the real thing.

Win drank in the Colony's construction and visual appearance and its corridors' life and activity on his journey up to the hangar. It was time for some action.

           
The corridors followed an ancient design ethic, looking unfinished, but deliberately so, carved out of the sandstone of the planet's regolith. He wondered what had happened to the planet to make the surface water either boil away or percolate to seventy kilometres below the surface. There was no sign of tectonic activity now, which meant the water had flowed deep millions of years ago. Whatever had happened, Fall had once been a wet world; the amount of sand on the surface suggested past oceans. Had life arisen once, long ago?

           
The corridors were curved, so that they circled the Colony's central air shaft, as well as their archaic design. As he walked along them, Win watched the automata scurrying about, some delivering items, others checking walls, pipes, inspection hatches. Doors swished open and closed around him. The Colony was a busy place.

           
Its people, the Colonists, dressed in clothes suited to their jobs. Technicians were in common overalls, grey and blue. The kind found on any planet. Others were dressed according to their cultural background. There were the boxy and angular clothes of the Tau Cetians, which supplied some of their air processing. Genetic manipulation centuries ago had left them used to different oxygen and trace gas mixtures. The flowing robes of the Sagittans swept by, and the mix-and-match clothes of those from newer parts of the Settled Quarters, where isolated cultures had come together and creoled their cultures. People rushed by him carrying datapads or pushing supplies on anti-grav boards. When Win waited for a lift up to the hangar, the first few were full of school children on an outing into their Colony, learning about its function as a mining outpost and science research centre. The teachers dressed in casual clothes, but wore banding on their shoulders so they could be identified quickly in an emergency.