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“Just figure out what the hell is going on in there. I don’t need any other goddamned incidents on Venera, you hear me?”
Shay heard Errol loud and clear.
She had heard him loud and clear all the way to Hydroponics. And now they were here, with Errol’s two security men, standing in the long corridor with a solitary large door at the end. It was all that stood between them and Ron Silverbaum’s hermetically sealed kingdom. Since they had arrived, Ron had been ranting through the PA system.
Silverbaum had seen Shay on his camera feed and decided he would talk to her and not to “those two fuckin’ apes or you, Errol, you fuckin fascist prick!”
Errol sighed and signalled his security guards in relentment. As Silverbaum requested, the security men and Errol backed down the corridor towards the transporter.
Shay looked back and could only see Errol’s meerkat head peeking around the curve of the corridor. She wondered for a second if they would attempt to rush the door, force her out of the way, and charge in. The huge round door turned, halting just enough to allow Shay to shimmy in sideways. Looking back, right as the door slammed shut, she thought she could detect disappointment in Errol James’ stern face. The reception area was a mess. A meek light pierced a fug of stale air. A small sofa had been pressed into service as a bed in the corner. Sheets hung slackly from it, well used. A riot of food parcels and wrappers clustered around the sofa bed, protesting the muddle. Beyond it, behind a glass partition, a pair of desperate eyes watched Shay.
“Ron, I presume,” said Shay.
Silverbaum came around the partition, an injured wolf, emaciated, wary, his eyes fixed on Shay. Pleading, desperate eyes. Shay shot a hand towards him, and he flinched. She held the hand fast, confidence masquerading as a lack of patience.
I cannot be fucked with this.
Eventually, he stretched a bony hand out, taking hers.
“Pleased to meet you finally,” Ron said, almost stammering.
Shay served a weak tea smile and cast another glance around the room, trying not to wrinkle her nose as various scents accosted it.
“Ben told me so much about you; let me just deadlock this door, and then we can go into the lab,” said Ron, not noticing the minor signs of distaste from his guest. She followed Ron’s stooped frame as he took her through a second, much smaller door. His stained jumpsuit hung from his bones. Body odour tumbled into his slipstream as he walked.
They emerged in a bright, giant space. There were dozens and dozens of tall shelves, each brimming with plant life. The shelves stretched tens of metres to the false sunlight of the ceiling. Each row and rung of shelving was attended by a series of robots hanging from rails. They moved to their own symphony, spraying, picking, pruning, grooming and plucking. Each bank of shelves ended in a collector where other machines checked and sorted the produce before moving it to another stage or process beneath the deck plating. The shelves were not uniform; some hosted tall corn stalks swaying in a manufactured breeze. Others held small trees, grains and bushes, whilst others were root vegetables submerged in a growing medium, their roots and fruits floating transparent and free.
“This is the second largest compartment on Venera,” said Ron, stopping to follow Shay’s roaming gaze.
She breathed easier in the massive warehouse, free from the strong odours of a cloistered man eschewing hygiene.
“We produce well over eighty percent of the food requirements here, the rest coming from either automated sources or imported from Earth,” said Ron.
He walked on, and she followed, marvelling slack-jawed at the sheer scale of the operation. They stopped before a row of small trees producing apples.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
Shay nodded.
“We also recycle fifty percent of the air.” he continued. “Perhaps this solution will be used on deep-space, inter-generational ships, a totally organic system. That is the main focus of my research. Alas, you didn’t come for a tour, did you?”
Shay shook her head.
Before she could speak, Ron continued walking, shaking his head. “Those security drones led by the Dixie-Droid himself, Errol, couldn’t find their fuckin asses in their own trousers. Useless sons of bitches.”
They got to a small door at the rear wall of the massive space. It was the same dull metallic surface as the rest of the wall. Ron pressed his palm to the door, and it slid away to reveal a smaller room. He beckoned her inside. As soon as Shay was in, the door closed behind them. There was another unmade bed, the same lived-in smell, a small desk and several rows of plants in hydroponic fluids, though not as complicated as the exterior robotic setup. Shay instantly recognised the smell of weed and confirmed its presence by examining a telltale leaf shape under a lighting gantry. Silverbaum sat on the bed, pointing to the chair at the small desk.
“There are no ears in these walls. We can talk here,” he said.
Shay cut him off, sensing more of the rhotic ring of his Bostonian accent was heading her way.
“What the fuck is going on, Ron? I come to see you, and you’re barricaded in here. Angela Shields, who told me about you, is in a coma in the hospital, and no one has told me a single thing about what happened to my dad. I feel like I am losing my fucking mind here!”
“Well,” Ron said. “Where to begin? I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t believe this was all a series of accidents, and I certainly don’t trust any one of these assholes on this facility with my work. Someone tried to hack into my computer core, and I suspect it’s someone from within Artemis. Angela got hospitalised before I could talk with her. Now I don’t know what’s going on, but I ain’t leaving my research to any of these assholes!”
This was far from what Shay wanted to hear. She just wanted a straight answer about Ben. Now, she felt like she was drowning in details, all obfuscatory and unimportant. Why should she be bothered if some skeleton she just met had his research stolen? Didn’t everything here belong to Artemis? She looked into Ron’s eyes and found a whirlpool of emotions, all likely to drag her in if she kept up her current, offensive tact.
She took a controlled breath and asked, “Who is trying to steal your research?”
“These fuckers! The company! Hell, The Chinese, even Brotherhood people, are trying to repatriate this very facility; who knows? But I know one thing: those bastards must get through me to get my computer core. That data is mine!”
The last statement was yelled. Ron stood, ranting more about conspiracies, and Shay watched as he petered out to incoherence. The elastic of her patience could no longer stretch around his swollen monologue.
“Look, Ron, I’m going to level with you; I don’t give two flying fucks about your research or any of that. Not my business. I just want to know about Ben; what happened to my dad? Can you tell me?”
Ron searched her eyes for a long moment, his manic energy dissipating. He wilted, sighing, and moved to the desk where she sat. He swiped, clicked, and flipped through holos until a video feed emerged.
“What’s this?”
“Just watch,” Ron said.
The image flickered, grainy, and aged like it was from another century. It showed a corridor with a dead end and a large door. Beside the door was a control panel. The top left of the holo had a timestamp: 0021 hrs, July 8th. They watched the fuzzy image jerk and jump until a large shadow cast upon the door. For a moment, it looked like a cloaked figure, its hood high on its head. Then, the shadow was replaced by its source. A large spacesuit or armoured figure approached the door. Its thickly clad hand went to the controls, and lights strobed red across the lined image. There was no sound, and the figure was calm and composed despite the lights. There was a pause as it looked back. The eyes were black coals set in an oddly shaped face. The mouth was tubes, machinery set into a bulky neck piece. The shoulders were bulbous, perhaps plated. The thing looked away from the door for several seconds until it opened, then it turned, with no hesitation and walked out, disappearing from view. Cold crept up Shay’s spine. She recognised the door. She had come through one very like it upon arriving on Venera. The holo faded, taking the video feed with it. Shay was holding her breath, immobile. Ron slid himself onto the desk where the holo had been.
“Was…that, was that my dad?”
Ron nodded, head bowed.
“What was that…thing?”
“Your father’s work, the biomech suit. He took it out of the airlock and jumped. Just jumped.”
Shay shuddered, trying to catch her breath. Something too visceral, emotional and deep grasped her and held her still from within. Some mechanism buried deep fought to adjust, to compensate, seeming to fail like a brake disc pressed into a wheel spinning too fast. She felt something crash inside her skull, and the lights faded, and she was falling to nothing.
Then something.
She woke with a start and fell straight into Ron Silverbaum’s broomstick arms. His lined face bled with concern, and his eyes flitted desperately over hers.
“Are you ok?”
Shay nodded, steadying herself on Ron, finding him more solid than his ageing, emaciated figure suggested. They were still in the same room, the secret room.
“What happened to me?”
“You blacked out for a second, kiddo; you ok?”
Shay nodded, her breathing calm, her pulse placid. What had she just seen? And what had just happened? She thought back to Selina Garvey’s description of her implant failing: “It’ll be like a guitar string snapping in the centre of your skull.”
She had never felt that before, which was not what she felt there. It was more akin to a piano being pushed down a staircase that led from her crown to her spine. Some mental cog or flywheel came loose, disabling her entirely. She refocused, steadying herself as she stood upright.
“What was that, Ron? What do you know? How did you get that video? Tell me everything.”
Over tea, he told her of Ben’s work, biomech suits for use in hazardous and harsh environments. He mentioned the same synthetic biology Selina had, repeating her claim that its development was not allowed on Earth.
“It was more like a hobby to him,” said Ron.
They spoke of Selina, Ron’s dislike of her and how she was something of a pariah on a platform floating above a hostile planet filled with other pariahs.
“Nobody gets up here on purely ethical merit alone. You might have seen that. I’m here doing my penance - let’s just leave it at that. Dr. Garvey? Well, Glasgow University chucked her out for moral dubiety, too. Mind you, my dubiousness didn’t stretch to experimenting on kids. That made Ben stand out here, aside from the engineers and maintenance folk up for big paydays. He was not some academic hot ticket. Christ, he told me that Selina had to beg and plead to bring him and eventually told them her coming here was a package deal, take it or leave it. I miss that big son of a bitch, I really do.”
“Me too,” said Shay.
They drank more tea, Shay feeling fine again, though still curious.
“How did you get that video?”
Ron looked at a junction box on the wall by his makeshift bed.
“I wire in there. Gotta watch these Brotherhood types, our so-called patriotic countrymen, Shay, I’ve been watching ‘em. From that slimy prick Myers through to Mr. butter-wouldn’t-melt Milne, the head honcho, I don’t trust any of these people.”
“I thought Milne was Irish,” said Shay.
Silverbaum just laughed. “Yeah, about as Irish as me. The only thing Irish is the accent; he acquired that after working abroad. I know him of old, as fucking corrupt as all these other Brotherhood and Party members. A real true believer, but not as open as the others. I reckon that’s how he got the job here, who he knows rather than how good he is at anything.”
Shay thought of Craig, an early convert to The Party and a fully paid-up Brotherhood member. She deigned to mention that, opting to stay on topic and out of the past.
“So,” she began. “you hack into the video feeds for all of Venera?”
He shook his head. “No, just the ones who happen to pass by the optical data shunt in this room. You need to have a fairly powerful compute core, and the only two people on Venera with that would be Selina Garvey and me. Last I checked, she has more compute horsepower than I do, mines just runs Hydroponics; goodness knows what hers does.”
“Perhaps I will find out; that’s the lab I am assigned to,” said Shay.
They spoke a little more, Ron telling her that he had seen her father the night of his death. He had seemed fine, not sad, just angry after a “dispute” with Lionel Myers.
“How many Myers are there on Venera?”
“Only one. That ginger fascist, Lionel,” said Ron.
“Milne told me that nobody was allowed to leave Venera after my dad died, but I was on the drop ship with him. He was a bit of a prick if memory serves. Why would Milne lie?”
Ron rubbed two fingers on his forearm, the Brotherhood salute.
Shay nodded, then paused, brows knitting together. “Who saw the fight between my dad and Myers?”
Ron blew his cheeks out. “Maybe a dozen or so people. Ben came back with me that night after the argument, if you can call it that, occurred in the refectory upstairs. It was heated words, Ben venting, something I had never seen him do before. He was normally such a placid man. Myers provoked it. It was just childish words being thrown, not hands.”
“This was the night he died?”
Ron nodded. They left the small room at the back of Hydroponics and moved back to the reception area. Shay looked around at the fallout from Ron’s self-imposed exile. This was not the product of a healthy mind, she decided.
“You can’t live like this Ron, trapped in here. When were you last out?”
Silverbaum walked to the room’s far end, leaving Shay to slowly circle in the opposite direction, toeing mess, kicking cartons and shifting containers from her path. She rounded the interior of the partitioned section, seeing a video feed from outside the door. Errol James paced as his two security colleagues seemed busy beyond the camera’s view. Leaning down to see if she could better understand what they were up to, a small white paper square caught her eye. It was wedged hard down the side of the console. Instinctively, she reached down, pulling the paper free. On the side, it said in bold letters “For Shay”.
Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest as she held the note.
Ron was speaking, but she had no ears for his words.
“Ron? Where did you get this?”
She held the note up, her name facing him.
“Get what?”
“This note, Ron, this note addressed to me. Where did you get this?”
He took a few steps across the room, her repulsion from him magnetic, pinning her to the walk behind.
“What note?”
Shay opened it, seeing Angela’s name at the bottom. Her hand went over her mouth as she folded and pocketed the note.
Ron moved towards her, asking, “What note?”
There were two physical buttons before Shay; one had a lock symbol above it, and she hit it, moving forward as the exterior door jerked open.
“Shit! No, what are you doing?!” cried Ron.
Shay barged him out of the way, knocking his thin frame to the floor. Her brain was a kaleidoscope spinning fractured fragments of thought into new and awful patterns. She kept moving, breaking into a sprint once clear of the door. Before it was fully open or Ron had time to close it again, Errol and the other two black jumpsuits moved into Hydroponics. As her feet pounded soundlessly on the carpeted floor and up the corridor, all she could hear was Ron wailing her name and asking, “Shay! Why? Shay!”