The Cage of Zeus (18 page)

“Yes, we have several,” replied Kline.

“Good, we’ll use them for sanitation purposes. We also need antiseptics—sodium hypochlorite, isopropanol, phtharal—whatever you can get your hands on. A research station like this one should have plenty of what we need.”

“You plan to go in without knowing how many terrorists you’re up against?”

“We’re trained in counterterrorism, Ms. Kline. Their numbers are irrelevant. There’s no need for worry.”

“That’s right,” Harding grunted. “Shirosaki, you keep negotiating with her. I’ll command the rescue.”

“Good. But don’t kill her.”

“Why not?”

“We need to know what exactly was spread in the special district. Karina is a biologist. If it’s a virus of some kind, she could have valuable information about how to neutralize it.”

“The captain’s orders were to eliminate the terrorists.”

“When we’re through interrogating her, you’re welcome to do what you want,” Shirosaki said. “But keep her alive until we’ve had a chance to question Karina.”

“I don’t recall having to take orders from you, Shirosaki.”

“Then I’m asking you as a fellow officer.” Shirosaki bowed his head toward Harding. “There are babies in that community. I don’t want them to die in vain.”

Harding bit his lip and grumbled, “All right,” before leaving the control room.

As soon as he was gone, Shirosaki instructed Arino. “Keep an eye on him. If you can, get to Karina before he does.”

“Right.”

After Arino rushed out of the room after Harding, Shirosaki raised the volume on the microphone and resumed negotiations. “All right, we’ll hold off from opening the access door for now. But tell us at least what we’re dealing with. Is it a biological weapon of some kind? Or chemical?”

“Now why would I tell you that?”

“Come on, Karina. What are the symptoms?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

“How long do the Rounds have if they’re not treated?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Then at least update us on Album’s condition,” Shirosaki said. “We can walk you through the steps to treat em.”

“I’ve stopped the bleeding. He’s alive for now.”

“You’re not a doctor, and ey needs to be properly treated.”

Karina was nothing if not composed. Shirosaki wondered just where that self-assurance came from. Was she bluffing about having contaminated the Rounds? Or maybe she was telling the truth and intended to use the cure as a bargaining chip.

The cure. The data to create an antivirus. She might be planning to use that knowledge to demand something in return. Or maybe she had no interest in negotiating and had already secured an escape route off the station.

“I’m begging you. There are babies in the Round community. The babies and the young ones will be the first to go down if they’re infected.”

Karina’s lip curled upward almost imperceptibly. She pointed the gun directly at the screen and said, “One thing you should know. Only I know the contents of the substance that was dispersed. If you kill me, you can kiss any hope of an antidote goodbye. Remember that.”

There was a violent crack and then the monitor went black. The transmission abruptly ended.

“Just as I thought. She’s planning to use whatever data she has to bargain her way off the station.”

“But she shot out the screen.”

“Probably to keep us from learning their numbers.”

Miles, who’d been talking to Calendula on his wearable, turned around and reported, “There can’t be too many of them, although it’s hard to tell their exact numbers. Fortia and Album are the only hostages. The rest of the Rounds are concentrated around the access door. But no one appears to be watching over them. Calendula doesn’t know what was disseminated, but so far no fatalities. Whatever this substance is, it hasn’t taken effect yet.”

“Then all we need to do is go in and secure the situation in Fortia’s residence.”

“Yes, but the intruders are armed with a long-range sniper rifle. That’s how they dispersed the contaminant.”

“How far is Fortia’s residence from the entrance?” Shirosaki asked Kline.

“About five hundred meters in a straight line.”

“Someone is a good shot,” muttered Miles.

“A straight line would take you there in six to seven minutes, but it actually takes about ten minutes on the winding path.”

“How are the bioengineered plants arranged?”

Kline pulled up a schematic of the special district onto the big screen.

Shirosaki took a hard look at the layout, his mind working a mile a minute. They would be able to use the bushes as cover. The question was how they would access the special district.

They would be found out if they went through the front door. The access point the intruders had used would likely be blocked or booby-trapped by now. What other route could there be?

Shirosaki pointed to a spot on one wall of the space station that was in proximity to the special district. “What about this air lock?”

“We haven’t had the occasion to use it since it was installed,” Kline said.

“Was this air lock put here for the purpose of connecting the station with the supership—the one Fortia was talking about?”

“Yes, that’s right. The air lock will be used to travel back and forth between the special district and the
Apertio
.”

“Can it be opened?”

“Yes. It’s locked, but we can deactivate the program from here.”

“Then please do it. This is our way in. The task force will wear space suits and exit the station. They’ll move along this inner wall here and enter the special district from this air lock. Since they won’t be going out to the outer wall, their space suits should protect them from the cosmic radiation. Let’s get to work.”

Once they had procured the necessary supplies and completed preparations for the mission, Kline asked Shirosaki, “What kind of woman is Karina Majella?”

Shirosaki regarded Kline stone-faced. “I’d be revealing a part of your friend’s past you may not want to hear.”

“I want to know the truth.”

“She’s a notorious terrorist that various agencies have been hunting from Earth to Mars. She was active mainly in Asia, someone whose name I’d heard often up until twenty years ago.
Majella
isn’t her actual name but something like a pseudonym, perhaps taken from the Latin word meaning ‘greatness.’ Rumor has it that she also carries around the medal of St. Gerard Majella.”

“St. Gerard?”

“The patron saint of childbirth. This medal has an odd design. St. Gerard is depicted holding the crucifix with something like a skull or severed head sitting on top of the table next to him. As a non-Catholic, I find it a curious thing to have for a charm,” Shirosaki said.

“Has Karina always been associated with the Vessel of Life?”

“Back when she lived on Earth, she belonged to an organization called Libra. In the early part of the twenty-first century, China established the free trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, giving birth to a massive market of 2.9 billion people. The agreement, along with the exploration of underground resources of the Russian Far East and the development of a logistics network for natural gas and oil resources, sparked a period of great economic activity in Asia. An Asian monetary unit and an unthinkable volume of products, electronic currency, and laws to regulate them were born.

“But economic development doesn’t always work to eliminate inequality. This newfound prosperity gave rise to a whole new host of problems. When the economy is booming, the underworld grows more bloated and the powers that once acquired unimaginable wealth inevitably go to ruins. This is a fact of every society. Societies are born to mutate. How much and in what direction you choose to correct that society determines its shape, however short-lived. Libra is an organization that chose to make those corrections through violent methods. They do not desire change through civic engagement or rely on the law enforcement agencies of the state, but resort to violence and strong-arm tactics to force reform. At first, vigilante groups from crime-ridden areas and well-meaning community groups gathered to protest against the government and transnational corporations, but in time, extremists transcending borders and race came together and called themselves Libra.

“Those seeking immediate and dramatic results became supporters of Libra’s activities. The government authorities were none too pleased, of course, but they may have also benefited, in part, from having Libra as a common enemy against which they could rally their citizens and other countries to nurture a sense of solidarity. The terrorist organization has continued to thrive over fifty years after its formation.

“Karina joined Libra with her mother when she was nine. Her mother fell in love with a man belonging to the group and became involved in his activities. As Karina roamed the world, always a step ahead of the international police and government agencies pursuing them, she was trained in the ways of combat. After picking up a gun for the first time at the age of ten to provide cover fire for the members of the group, she began to actively engage in combat. By the time she was sixteen or seventeen, the word spread about Libra’s frightfully accurate sharpshooter, and soon she was feared across Asia. That’s the Karina I know.”

“Have you ever confronted her?”

“No,” Shirosaki said. “But there is one incident that’s been talked about among the antiterror units. One task force—I don’t know of what country—charged into the building where Karina was hiding. She and only three others wiped out the entire twenty-man team. The task force tried to conceal the incident, but they had been so completely obliterated that the scandal spread like wildfire.”

“Maybe she was just lucky. She may not survive were it to happen again.”

“You may be right. But that she had luck on her side even once is a part of her skill. It’s because she survived that she’s been able to torment as many people as she has and forced us here to Jupiter to confront her.”

“Has she altered her face?”

“Yes. Not just once but many times. It’s likely she’s altered her bone structure on the molecular level. She clearly had Japanese features in the profile we received, but now she looks like she’s of mixed heritage. She still looks Asian, of course, but she’s also become a stunningly beautiful woman. I’m certain more than a few men have fallen prey to her feminine wiles.”

Shirosaki saw the disgust on Kline’s face and said no more.

“Why did she come to Europa as a researcher? Unlike the Vessel of Life, Libra doesn’t actively oppose bioscientific research.”

“She left Libra when she was nineteen.”

“Why?”

“She wanted to leave earlier but waited until she had learned to survive on her own. She escaped in the midst of a fierce battle between military forces. Her whereabouts have been completely unknown these last twenty years. She must have gone to school in that time to become a scientist, which explains how you came to know Karina as a microbiologist on Europa. She’s always been an intelligent woman; perhaps she’d had a childhood dream to go to school as normal people do and become a scientist. It’s entirely possible she used her good looks as a weapon to survive on the run, to scrape together a living and save enough for college. While her methods were dubious at best, I believe Karina might have been maximizing the advantage accorded to her beauty. I suppose she was, to use an old phrase, exploiting her sexuality. Although, she must have gotten her hands dirty in other ways as well.

“Shall I go on?” Shirosaki asked.

“No, that’s quite enough.” Whatever Kline was feeling, she didn’t let on. She thought long and hard with her arms crossed and finally said, “Whatever her motives, Karina is, at present, a threat that must be eliminated. You must apprehend her by any means necessary. Interrogate her in any way you see fit. Get her to talk about what exactly that substance is. The Rounds are my only concern now. Not Karina.”

“I understand.”

Kline sat at the computer terminal and reported back to Mars. There was a considerable time lag between interplanetary communications. Unable to hold a conversation in real time, the parties involved usually had to wait twenty to thirty minutes to receive a reply to a message they’d sent.

Kline viewed the response from Mars and sighed.

The news of the terrorist attack on Jupiter-I had reached Earth and Mars before Kline’s message. The Vessel of Life had already released a message claiming responsibility for the attack.

“We, the Vessel of Life, firmly oppose the experiments taking place on Jupiter, which disregard bioethical principles and trample over the sanctity of human sexuality. The existence of a bigender subspecies is a desecration of our moral principles, serving only to spread values that it’s permissible to sleep with anyone and to invite moral confusion. The Rounds will destroy the natural order of society, snuff out the richness of our cultures arising from sexual distinctions, and create a dull and homogenous society without individual difference. At present, the Rounds are legally prohibited from interplanetary travel, but they will eventually seize that right and invade our planets. Before that peril reaches our shores, we seek to destroy the research facilities on Jupiter. The existence of a bigender race signifies neither human progress nor evolution. The experiments on Jupiter-I are an inexcusable violation of human life.”

For the love of God!

Kline nearly tore her hair out. Just what year did they think it was? She could hardly believe the stigma that continued to haunt sexual minorities in this way.

Did the Vessel of Life think the Rounds went around indiscriminately throwing themselves at every person they met? The Rounds chose their partners. They didn’t sleep with anyone other than someone they had feelings for. They had individual tastes and criteria and exercised discretion regarding with whom to have relationships. In that regard, they were the same as ordinary humans. Did the Vessel supporters throw themselves at and grope whomever they laid eyes on? Or did they live every day in agony trying not to act on those impulses?

Eliminating gender differences would homogenize the culture?
Kline thought.
What narrow-minded drivel! All we did was increase the number of humanity’s possibilities by one. Not once have we demanded that everyone become like the Rounds.