All Fall Down (19 page)

“Ah no, that’s OK. You’re only the second off worlder I’ve actually met in person. I could listen to you for hours. I love my Colony, but I know SysNet is censored. I don’t know how you cope with it all the time.”

Win chose to keep quiet about Kiran's memory. It would have been modified following his trip out of system, he had probably met more than one offworlder. Win didn't want to disillusion him. “I think we look at Fall and wonder how you cope with so little.”

“If I may, Sir, I'd say we cope well. Things change slowly. We have time to understand it.”

Win felt uncomfortable. He thought about Fall with its hidden status and people like Kiran who liked to be hidden away. If the MI team wasn't successful, Kiran’s world would collapse. “I hope I am not distracting you too much from your piloting, Kiran.”

“Oh no, that’s OK. We’re mostly on computer control now.” Kiran clucked his tongue, “Ah, you’re being polite. You need to work. Sorry.”

“Well, it would be useful to perform a final diagnostic of the probes.”

The shuttle spiralled through space in the unseen Ortema tube, a tunnel formed by the competing gravitational forces of the suns, planets and dust in the system. The tubes ran along the boundaries where the gravitational forces cancelled out, reducing the resistance and fuel needed to travel.

Their destination was a similar place, a Lagrange point, a volume of space between Fall and the yellow star where the gravitational forces of the planet and sun would keep the probe perfectly stable, perfectly balanced between the two bodies.

The probes were ready. One would stay at the Lagrange One point, between Fall and the yellow sun. The other would find an Ortema tube and travel to a Lagrange point between the wormhole and the effective centre of the system, a moving point between the blue and yellow suns. Win checked his geometry and calculations, watched the icons flower and grow and pollinate and fruit in front of him: his organic math holicons. Another favourite of Djembe’s. Win thought over his mission progress. Incident site inspection was complete. Probes about to launch. The visitor hadn't been spotted. Kiran had said the blue sun was a day or so from eclipsing the yellow.

“Kiran. You mentioned an eclipse earlier. Are there any effects I should know about?”

“I don't think so. We had a three quarter eclipse once. There was minor seismic activity and some electromagnetic interference. Amazing auroras. Your probes should be fine.”

           
The shuttle released the two probes. They came silently to life. Now began their study of Fall's hidden faces, hidden journeys.

           
The shuttle plotted its journey back to Fall. The probes watched its journey, the first from its stable point, the second as it engaged its engines to travel to the system edge. Win checked the feed from the L One probe. One of the inner system planetoids crossed the face of the yellow star. Approaching, degree by angular degree, was the blue sun, coming to eclipse.

The cargo container had been easy to procure. As Operations Director, Sophie occasionally inspected the mineral contents. It bobbed next to her on its antigrav cushion. By now Daoud would be talking to Masjid about his options and how they might be reducing. It was a shame. After so many years when there had been nothing to study, now was the perfect time to involve the scientists in the pods' development.

           
She was back in the depths of the Colony to collect Doctor Cassel's body. Sophie went to the access panel and prised it open. Inside she reached for the mechanical lever which Masjid had pulled earlier.
 
To her right, the bio-plastic wall section once again opened. It released its secret as smells: stale sweat, a faint perfume from the Doctor's bathing lotions, the exotic-sweet aroma of Compound X. And added to that were the new and sharp smells of the dead: the burned material of his uniform and lab coat, an affectation the Researchers had adopted to fit in with the station's design aesthetic; the sweet-meaty smell of burned flesh, and somewhere in the mix the not-yet unpleasant smell of the beginning of decay.

           
As she lifted his body from its temporary morgue, she reflected that soon all of these smells would be neutralised by the planet's sun and storm. The cargo container dipped when she laid the corpse inside, before resuming its former distance from the floor. Sophie removed any personal items from Doctor Cassel's clothes – she could no longer think of him in the familiar, as Peter – and put them into her tunic's pockets. She would leave these in his lab later when she left the suicide note and altered the lab records and security holos.

           
With Doctor Cassel's body inside, she sealed the container with her thumbprint and pushed it down the corridor. A number of automata moved out of her way, the container wide enough to shadow the coloured lines that ran down each corridor, which the automata followed. When she reached a junction in the corridor and floated the makeshift coffin around it, she looked back to make sure she wasn't being followed. The automata she had passed had grouped together, their principal cameras pointed at her retreating form, and she couldn't escape the feeling that their accidental shape was that of a council of witnesses.

Kate finished her final interview with the Colony directors. There was an hour until the next project phase, the next team meeting. Improbably, she had some spare time. In the nearest elevator, Kate asked to be taken to the nearest refreshment centre. A subtle sinking feeling wound its way up into her stomach.

           
The doors opened onto a rough hewn cavern of iridescent rock columns. Darkness conspired in the spaces between, out of which clamoured a great hubbub, the filtered stream of the Colony's thought life. Kate walked to the cool white glow of a drink dispenser. “Coffee. Black. Strong.” Sound animated this place. Its colours were the fluid vowels of Baseparse bubbling into remnants of other languages, its furniture the consonants, interruptions and exclamations of conversation. The soundstream acquiesced into muted, indistinct conversations as she passed into a privacy filter.
 
She sat at her table musing on her conversations with each of the Colony's directors. None of them – Doctor Currie aside – had been affected by the death, or professed to know much about it. They had each used it as a reason to review safety procedures in their own directorates. Kate allowed herself to relax. Perhaps this wasn't going to be so complicated after all. She still couldn't see the end point, but it felt close. There was discussion and analysis to undertake with her team, and agreements to make with Daoud. But it seemed everything was contained, and was on its way to being disappeared. That only left the issue of the illicit research. That remained Kate's biggest concern. Who had been murdered? Doctor Maki? Or was murder about to happen? And what sort of hybrid was being created? Some mixture of human and animal? Now the transparent part of her mission was all but sewn up, she would need to work closely with Djembe and Win to see what they'd discovered.

           
She put the coffee to her mouth and blew gently onto the steaming surface. “Real coffee?” The smell surprised her; she sank into the chair a little more. The coffee filled her nose, warmed her mind, muting the space around her. The tiredness which dogged her would not be around for much longer. She was confident they'd discover what the illicit biological research was. Then she could pass it over to MI's espionage section for resolution.

           
Kate dared relax. The full promotion to General was as good as hers.

           
She thought of her family. She wondered, sometimes, in the depths of space, while wormholes corkscrewed around whichever ship she was in, if she was growing away from them. Would she ever have the time to spend with them and regain the closeness they'd had when she was young? Ever since she left for university she'd been focused on her career. Trips home had been tolerated, a distraction from her next achievement. She wanted to tell them about her promotion.

           
She held her cup, its warmth. Did her parents look older now? Had they decided to take the standard anti-ageing treatments that stretched human lives to a hundred and forty years or more. They were approaching seventy, a time when nature would start to make them old. Her shoulders tightened, hunched, as she thought of them. The tension she felt from giving up her family for her career was starting to show. She'd pursued her doctorate, her move to MI, her second doctorate, and this team with blind energy. And now in her mid-thirties, she wasn't sure it was what she wanted. The greater good took away from the personal good. She was starting to understand why people stayed on Fall.

           
“Keep it together, Kate. You're losing focus.” She sipped her coffee and waited for the caffeine to kick in. Putting her cup down, she rubbed her eyes, which were grainy with lack of sleep. She picked up her cup again. Maybe it was the pressure of first contact, making her want to run away, hide in the bosom of her family. Coffee drifted over her tongue again and through her nose. Admiral Kim's words surfaced. Kate focused on them instead, back on the mission, gave the words time to be, to live inside her. “
Commander Leland, for the duration of this mission you are free to act with the authority of MI. For the mission’s duration you will have a field promotion to General.
” Was she acting the way a General should act? So far, mission planning aside, she'd only had intense discussions with the Colony Administrator and productive if unchallenging ones with the directors. There was something missing. The mission was too easy. Why had they been sent straight from their previous assignment? Something didn't make sense. A promotion for a simple coroner's job and digging around in some data files for a secret research project?

           
“Think, think, think,” she stared into her cup. Anxiety grew in Kate as the caffeine brought her out of tiredness again. “What am I missing?”

           
Around her the darkness multiplied, people drifted back to their work shifts. She was left alone in the cavern, in solitude, with the weight of the Colony above her.

Sophie took the service lifts to the hangar floor, avoiding the majority of the colonists. Her activity would not have attracted suspicion anyway. Her occasional quality checks on the minerals were well known, and the sight of her involved with the direct operational running of the Colony was a source of respect and pride for the colonists. Sophie cared about their reputation, the planet's, the Colony's, its materials and its people's. It was not the gaze of others she wished to avoid. There would be no awkward questions.

           
Except from her own conscience. As the plan approached its irrevocable turning point, she had started to question again the agreements she'd made with Daoud, and with herself and her own vision. The toll the plan was starting to exact was high. The ruthlessness of their actions, especially her own these past days, were gnawing at her. She tried to tell herself it was for the greater good, but something felt wrong. The sooner she could get rid of the body, the sooner she could retreat to her meditation chamber in her quarters.

           
The first death, Doctor Huriko Maki's a few days ago, had awoken a feeling of moral uncertainty. When General Leland had arrived, Sophie had, for the first time since her own idealistic youth, come up against a mirror of herself. Or who she had once been: the Sophie of long ago who had agreed to Daoud's plan. This Kate Leland reminded Sophie so much of herself: ambitious, intelligent, capable and compassionate.

           
And now Doctor Cassel was dead. She had not personally murdered him, in the same way she had not personally murdered Doctor Maki. Both of them had a chance, a slim opportunity, to escape the situation Daoud wanted them to fall into. But she was complicit. On her walk along the service corridors in the bowels of the Colony pushing the container in front of her, up in the service lifts and then quietly into the hangar unseen, to a dark, little used bay, she tried to quieten her old self, which now took Kate's Leland's face, who threw questions and accusations at her.

           
She left the body, still concealed, in a service lift coming from the hangar. It was little used, for emergencies only. She sealed it. Later, when the Colony returned to its night time, she too would return, and take the body to the surface. The storm or the suns would get it and deal with any evidence.

           
She returned to her quarters, and entered her meditation chamber. She had much thinking to do. About the old days. About the holo Daoud had shown her. About her actions now. And what to do about Daoud's plan.