Ch. 8: Journey
“I will kill those pirate bastards myself if nobody beats me to it.”
Written with German Yanovsky
CHAPTER EIGHT
Earth I (Luna)
2120-07-03 (next day)
Ursula Heorot’s teapot was stainless steel, Art Deco in its aggressive swooping lines. The handle of her teacup had the same stylized convergence of angle and curve as the pot, but both were otherwise devoid of ornament. The bone-white china was so thin as to be translucent, and it rattled pleasantly as she returned the cup to its saucer.
The teapot and the saucer both had designated places on the marble slab of her desk. So did her notebook, her fountain pen, and the locked containers she kept for incoming and outgoing correspondence too sensitive to travel over a network. But the dominating feature of the desk was the large, curved screen into which she was now frowning.
“Begin recording,” she said, and the screen shifted to reflect her face. The wall behind her was polished concrete relieved by long vertical window slits, each filled with hazy sapphire light. Cracks in the ice created an effect reminiscent of the stained glass in cathedral windows.
“Captain Galthwaite and crew of the Aethonic JKX-09.” Heorot crisply enunciated every word, letter, and number: it was jay-kay-ex-zed-nine. “We here at headquarters are following your progress closely. We are proud of you, we continue to anticipate record-breaking bonuses at year’s end, and we are transmitting updated guidance for the normalization of operations at ten thirty six Ganymed.”
She paused a beat. Took a breath. Then resumed her narration, still measured and professional as ever. “First, the drone deployment strategy has not changed. As soon as you begin your approach to the station, your pilots will launch explosive-armed drones and attach them to the key structural support locations previously identified.
“Once again we emphasize the need to confine any detonations to the habitation areas rather than the mines or refinery: our surveillance has already registered the formation of dust clouds, and it’s imperative to the bottom line that clean working space be maintained. A total loss of life aboard Journey Station is acceptable. Debris over the mines is not.”
Another measured breath, in and out. Then and only then, Heorot let her eyes slide to the side, and took the time to lift her teacup once more. She took a moderate sip and carefully returned the cup to its saucer before continuing:
“Therefore, initial communications with ten thirty six Ganymed are to follow the script already transmitted. Identify yourselves, and confirm the station’s intent to unconditionally surrender, whilst simultaneously deploying your drones. If at any time subsequently hostilities are triggered: you will respond by detonating.”
Heorot’s short, sleek hair was a paler silver than the teapot, and her skin was warmer than the marble of her desk. But her eyes glittered with exactly the same icy light as the windows. She went on:
“Assuming Journey Station remains intact following your initial approach, you are to dock and demand that certain high-value individuals board to the Aethonic JKX-09 immediately to formalize the handoff. These individuals are Alexander Gardezi, John Tolse, Thaddeus Niels, Eti Lefe’e, Casimir Jones, and most especially Bardo Arai. Once aboard, they are to be arrested and placed in detention. Consider them all responsible for the tragedy aboard Valentine.”
Heorot took another deliberate sip of tea. “Arai in particular is required for our negotiations with the North American Alliance. We also anticipate that removing this cohort will eliminate the risk of effective resistance aboard Journey Station and its affiliated ships. We will of course be seeking to resume work in the mines as soon as possible—if the station’s habitation areas and pre-existing workforce do not survive, you will receive updated guidance. Your communications relay gap will be just under twenty four minutes, so most consequential operational decisions should be delayed and deferred back to us here at HQ.”
The ghost of a smile creased the hard corners of her mouth. “If all goes to plan I anticipate your team will be named our Most Valued at the end of this quarter. Keep up the good work.”
She leaned back in her tailored leather chair, and made the semiconscious interlocking pattern of gesture and thought that constituted her signature. The screen blanked, returning to her central workspace and a rendering of the Aethonic logo: a winged horse, drawn with spare, stark lines converging in muscular simplicity, above block-spaced letters spelling out the company name.
Heorot had more enemies than she could count. And yet she sat within her crystalline fortress, the absolute mistress of all she surveyed. The victor of every battle in which she’d taken the field.
Save for her battle against entropy. The power that cooled existence, leaching heat from her tea with every passing instant and collision of molecules. Leaching strength from her body with each hot outbreath. Beyond those sapphire windows was only vampiric vacuum, a sucking nothingness hungry for thermodynamic equilibrium.
It was implacable, but so was she. And insofar as karma, justice, some sort of universal balancing mechanism was necessarily closing in around her with every victory…Ursula Heorot had her own plans, and her grip now stretched so far as Mars. Her troops were loyal. Her strategy was well prepared.
The entire solar system was coming to a tipping point, a culmination of the chemical reaction that had begun four billion years ago in Earth’s early waters. First the building blocks of life, amino acids and self-replicating RNA: then complications, competitions—evolution. Single celled organisms devouring each other, or cooperating for mutual advantage. Cyanobacteria, algae, plants, animals, the Cambrian explosion. Leviathans gliding through the seas; thunder lizards stalking the lands.
Then a convulsion, a mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs and almost everything else. Giving small, scurrying, adaptable mammals a chance to emerge in new niches.
Humans were merely the next stage in that unstoppable biochemical reaction. Surviving and breeding and slowly dominating until they covered the planet: until they had stripped it, and exhausted it, and left it behind. At least—Heorot, personally, had left it behind.
The rich and the forward-thinking had moved themselves and their money up the gravity well, where the desperate and angry masses could not follow. Those who remained faced a world of hurt, a gladiatorial arena where too many hungry people scrabbled against each other on a depleted planet with ever-diminishing carrying capacity.
Like the dinosaurs, any who could not adapt to the contractions of the spent Earth would now be destroyed.
Heorot didn’t see this reality as particularly unfortunate. It guaranteed operations like Aethonic’s a glut of workers desperate for employment in the controlled biomes of space, and there was a great deal that could be done with all that cheap labor. Investors were ravenous for what they saw as safe harbor for their capital. Even the long lost tyrant lizards could still be made useful: plastics were made from fossil fuels, so in a way humanity rode dinosaurs to the stars.
And now the ambition of her shareholders knew no bounds. It swelled and swelled, powering rockets, fueling ships, consuming warm and cold bodies alike and converting those raw materials into more fuel for the great reaction. All that energy built over long epochs of struggle was now theirs to command—and all the resources of the galaxy, theirs to exploit. Laws and governments were obsolete. It was time to test more fundamental limits.
She refreshed her tea. Heat and calories: a necessary infusion to keep entropy at bay. Steam twisted upward from her cup, wisps of energy lost. A small sacrifice in the greater scheme. Then, with a flick of her fingers, she moved on to her next agenda item, and the next plane of her conquest.
Every action had its reaction. But karma had never met a bitch like Ursula Heorot.
***
Space, near Luna
same day
Not far from Heorot on a cosmic scale was a particular ongoing reaction in which she had little interest: specifically, the nuclear fission core powering Sebastian Francis’s grand folly, the Renunciation. A luxury ship custom-built to the scale of a fortress, it had cruised in lazy loops through the empty dark around Earth and its moon for many years, and would keep circling for as long as its seething atomic heart continued to receive fuel.
It could be described as a temple. It could be described as a prison. From the outside it was forbidding, an angular slice of dark metals and plastics carrying two huge tanks of propellant attached like stunted wings. During its periodic accelerations and decelerations, the eerie glow of superheated hydrogen—the light of its own wake—glittered back from hundreds of telescopic camera eyes and receiver arrays mounted across its surfaces, poised to take in information from all directions.
It carried innumerable passengers, though only a few dozen were alive in the traditional sense. One of those, a Renunciate in white robes, strode at a measured pace through a central passageway to the bridge.
She was initiated to a higher degree than the girls aboard Valentine had been, and her vestments were strikingly different from theirs: full length, and made not of shiny, synthetic satin, but a soft-draping natural linen that rustled with her footfalls. A few locks of white-blond hair escaped her hood, which was bent respectfully as she traversed the sacred space. A closed eye inside a stylized sun glittered from a golden chain around her neck.
To either side of her, lining the way, were full-body cryogenic chambers. They rose in several levels, like an array of bleachers, except that the ‘stands’ were comprised of individual tubes housing supercooled corpses. Above them a vaulted archway completed the grand passage.
These were the Founders whose fortunes had built, and continued to sustain, the Renunciation. Their desiccated faces could be seen only as vague shadows behind frosted windows. The adept showed them her reverence as she passed, touching two fingers to her holy symbol and murmuring a dedication: “Visita interiora terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem.” She did not lift her head until she had reached the bridge.
An automated hatch slid open to admit her. This compartment was, like the grand passageway, built largely to impress, but at least it lacked the corpses. It was lined instead with screens. Some displayed feeds routed from its exterior cameras, showing not only the empty space surrounding the Renunciation, but also worlds left behind: Luna, Earth, specific patches of land captured from a great distance and many-times magnified, to the point where structures appeared as dollhouses and vehicles crawled ant-like across webs of networked roads.
Other screens displayed streams generated within the ship itself or received from satellite. Most of these were unstable, images prone to swirl into coherence for just a few moments before dissolving. A large fraction were explicitly pornographic, bodies of all shades and shapes writhing together in many configurations. Others were nightmarish: glimpses of monstrous faces, crawling vermin, panicked figures fleeing through endless hallways or screaming as they fell into nothingness. More Renunciates were at work here, their cowled heads bent over consoles, tapping and gesturing at their individual interfaces.
Sebastian Francis lounged in a central captain’s chair, his attention immediately refocusing as the doors opened. He also wore robes, but his were of unrelieved black. “Soror Vanessa,” he said. “What does the dawn bring us?”
“Hope, as always, Frater Sebastian.” Vanessa’s near-white hair made it hard to judge her age, but her face looked youthful, a lightly tanned complexion smooth and without blemish. Her features were almost eerily symmetrical, cut by broad dark brows above gray-green eyes: the product of tasteful and extensive gene-modding. “The oracles, however...”
She sighed. Sebastian continued to give her the courtesy of his undivided attention as she went on: “They grow no clearer. The universal motifs still recur: the Orphic egg, the falling or hanged man, the many-rooted and endlessly branching tree. But we are seeing a steady climb in the percentage of scenarios that end prematurely, in fire. Also…”
She drew a breath, then plunged on. “I will be the first to admit that I speak from an abundance of caution. You know my interest in self-fulfilling prophecies. You cannot blame me for being wary of creating one.” She smiled: confiding, self-deprecating. “But I believe there is now cause to draw a distinction between the black dog upsurgence and a parallel figure occurring spontaneously in—”
She looked off to the side, fingers moving in a quick pattern as she brought up the answer from her implants. “Nearly fourteen percent of our ongoing simulations. In this subset, the animal antagonist has become more of a wolf.”
Even then Vanessa wasn’t finished, although her tone became apologetic as she continued: “And clearly so, in my estimation. There’s an additional seven percent that are ambiguous, but wolf-leaning.”
The Renunciation’s captain hummed softly, taking a few moments to absorb this information. “Unsurprising,” he judged. “The display from Ganymed is having an influence, as it should. Our dreamers have integrated the ‘Captain Wolf’ figure into their pre-existing narratives.”
“Yes,” Vanessa agreed. “But for our own weightings, I believe it’s important to draw precise symbological distinctions. The black dog is associated with the English uplands, crossroads and electrical storms, the gytrash and the shagfoal, the Voice of the Fire. The black wolf by contrast is primarily Germanic or Slavic and ultimately leads back to Ishtar—a very different narrative lineage!” She managed to lay stress underneath her words without raising her voice. “If these two are crossing at an inflection point in history, we should keep our analysis as clean and precise as possible, if only from fear of cross-contamination.”
“Fear? Or opportunity?” Sebastian’s challenge was mild, and Vanessa responded with a slight tilt of her head: an acknowledgement, but not necessarily an agreement. He swayed toward her in his chair: “I hear you, Soror. Spin off a subpopulation from one of the uncontaminated prediction-threads and keep it isolated if you like, as a control. But for the others: analyze, and recombine.”
“Solve et coagula,” she said, once again touching two fingers to the glittering symbol on her necklace.
Sebastian straightened, satisfied. “Indeed. Now, what are we picking up on external surveillance?”
“Weather patterns confirm no relief in sight for the sub-Saharan drought. Another column of refugees is massing near Morocco, and the European Union has deployed troops and naval assets to reinforce Gibraltar. Meanwhile the North American Alliance and the United Federation of Asia appear to be at the brink of war, with belligerent statements from both sides followed by a complete breakdown in direct negotiations.”
Vanessa’s presentation was straightforward, delivering the news without emotional color or implicit commentary. “The arrival of the Aethonic deep miner at Journey Station in nine days may defuse the immediate conflict, but only if the NAL accepts a settlement and retracts their spacefleet in response to the change of ownership.”
Sebastian made a noncommittal sound. “Assuming Aethonic is successful in their gambit. What do the dreamers have to say about that?”
“High uncertainty,” Vanessa answered promptly. “They keep bringing in the wolf-figure, and the flames almost always follow.”
“Fenrir will slip his leash sooner or later. We have more hope of guiding the resulting chaos if it happens sooner. Now that our agent is fully integrated within Journey Station, I expect it to act.”
“Frater…” Vanessa began. He smiled tolerantly and cut in.
“Soror Vanessa, your objection has been anticipated. I value your feedback as always, but this decision is beyond either of us. Now, is there anything else?”
Once again her eyes slid to the side, checking an interface only she could see. “The dominant signs are Gemini and Capricorn, the numbers are six and fifteen, the herbs are wormwood and orchid.”
Sebastian nodded gravely. “Thank you.”
She bowed her head to him before retreating. The others on the bridge continued their work, uninterrupted. And behind them, all around, the screens continued to flicker in as-yet uncategorized patterns.
***
Mars
same day
Though she was unaware of it and would have been incensed to learn, one of the screens on the bridge of the Renunciation displayed a pleasurable dream that Miriam Liberski was enjoying, half an AU away. At least the time delay in communications meant that she had nearly twelve minutes of privacy before scenes from the simulation in which she was participating were relayed back to the mothership for analysis.
In the scenario she had chosen, she was lounging on a seaside pavilion, waves crashing against ancient sandstone steps and warm Mediterranean breezes caressing her skin. Also caressing her were Kim Cuc and Aisha, the two girls who had been her passengers aboard Valentine. They were now adorned with flower garlands and nothing else. Liberski herself was draped in a Romanesque toga, the flowing folds of which were easily slipped aside by slow and deliberately dragging fingertips.
The languid sweep of smooth limbs crossed her skin again and again, circling, teasing. Her cheek lay against a pink-tipped breast and when she moved her mouth fractionally she was able to taste it. A gentle push urged her knees to part, glossy black hair brushing across her thigh. She drew a sharp breath, and the woman behind her shifted: Liberski’s mouth was left empty, but only for a moment, before soft lips closed over hers.
Waves washed over the steps of the pavilion, crashing and retreating, their lacy edges forever fraying into foam. Liberski stiffened, and shuddered, and gave small panting gasps as she came undone with the tender remorseless lapping of the tides.
Gradually the vision dimmed, and she reoriented to reality. She was lying on a medical-style padded table in a small chamber outfitted with a number of electronics, a few draping filmy scarves, and a scent diffuser that was still pumping out a perfume of roses and seaspray. Kim Cuc carefully lifted the VR mask from her face, just as Aisha with the same delicacy removed the device that had been placed between her thighs. Both the Renunciates were wearing their skimpy tunics, though Kim Cuc looked a little disheveled, robes askew and lipstick smeared across her pretty face. Liberski was wearing an old pair of coveralls from the Valentine, partially opened.
“Better?” Aisha asked. There was just a hint of a teasing smile at the corner of her mouth.
Liberski sighed and rezipped her clothes. “Yeah,” she admitted. There was a moment of silence that seemed only awkward for her—the other two were occupied with sterilizing and stowing the equipment. She searched for something to say and came up with: “You’re settling in well.”
As a conversational offering it was a little stiff, but Aisha gave her another smile. It was Kim Cuc who answered, in confident tones: “We are where we are meant to be, walking our path to the infinite heaven.”
Liberski rolled her eyes as she sat up. She was facing away from Kim Cuc so it wasn’t as rude as it could have been: and Aisha’s smile deepened into dimples, privately sharing the assessment. “And you?” Aisha prompted.
Liberski’s expression grew tense. “It’s been…” she started, then seemed at a loss to finish her own sentence. Aisha placed a comforting hand on her knee. Liberski looked down at it and said: “Hard. I’m glad the NAL fighters are on their way, but I’m not in the loop. Valentine’s in probate so I’m grounded here, I don’t know for how long. I sent a message to Captain Marks’s estate. I don’t know who will get it, but I told them how much he liked telling stories about his niece and nephews.” She sighed, and passed her palms over her face, scrubbing at her cheeks. “I promised them there will be justice.”
“If not in this world, then another,” Kim Cuc assured her.
But Liberski reacted badly to that, pushing off the table with an angry surge that forced Aisha to draw back. “Wrong,” she said as she regained her feet. “I will kill those pirate bastards myself if nobody beats me to it. What do I owe you?”
“Two hundred,” Aisha said, and though the answer was straightforward, her voice was soft with sympathy.
Liberski made the currency transfer with a few tight gestures—she had no implants, but wore a wristband with her personal electronics embedded. Then she grabbed her coat and pushed her way out of the Renunciates’ pod.
She emerged into bitter cold and a brightness so harsh it made her wince even with her eyes closed, as she hastened to fasten her coat and draw up its hood.
The light was entirely artificial. The colony was underground, in a natural cavern created some three billion years ago by lava flowing on the flanks of the now-extinct volcano Pavonis Mons. A section of the lava tube had been sealed and pressurized, and floodlights set at staggered intervals among the habitation units. Outside the habs the temperatures were freezing, but within its hermetically sealed cavern area the colony did generate heat. Were she on the surface, Liberski would have been very much colder still.
As soon as her eyes had adjusted she set off walking, stamping booted feet down a broad road that formed the colony’s main drag. It was wide and flat enough for vehicles. The original placement of the habitats and the grid of systems powering them had been planned in an orderly fashion, but the colony had existed for long enough that some pieces of equipment had failed and been replaced with different models. Secondary structures—like the Renunciates’ pleasure pod—had been brought in and wedged into gaps, and wires strung up to provide auxiliary power. So now Pavonis had a slightly ramshackle, frontier-town look, despite its underlying unity of design.
The original habs were rounded and modular, made of stark white plastic that left them visible even between floodlights. Liberski passed from light to darkness and back again striding down the main way. She rubbed her hands together and washed them with the steamy gusts of her warm breath as she went.
Side streets branched off at regular intervals, marked by signposts lettered in multiple languages. The riot of neon common to unregulated commercial spaces was absent here, but some of the habs did have illuminated signage, near the doors. She stopped at one labeled CAFETERIA / столовая / 餐厅 / कैफटिरीअ and shouldered her way inside.
Her entrance drew little notice from the sparse crowd already there: it was late by local time, so families were asleep, and the only people inside were either locals on night shift or spacers like Liberski who had not yet adjusted to the rhythms of the Martian day. There were long tables set in rows, with benches attached; Liberski threw her coat down at the end of one and went to grab a tray.
There wasn’t anything hot left out. Just plastic-wrapped sandwiches and a big bowl of wilted salad that still looked like luxury to Liberski, who habitually went for months without ever seeing a fresh vegetable. She grabbed one of the sandwiches and loaded up the rest of her tray with browning lettuce, sliced translucent radishes, and carrot confetti. Back at the table, she had just sat down and was squeezing a packet of dressing over the salad when the clatter of another tray settling across the table made her look up.
“Hi, I’m Sasha,” the newcomer said, seating himself. He spoke with a very faint Russian accent, and had an angular face and a ready smile. He looked about her own age. She didn’t smile back.
“Hi,” Liberski grunted, and focused on squeezing the last drops of seasoned oil from her dressing packet.
Sasha didn’t seem affronted by her unfriendliness. He unwrapped a sandwich. “Let me know how you like those carrots,” he said, casting a frankly appraising eye over her tray. “My friend grew them. Trying a new cross, he said.” He tilted his head, his smile crooked. “He’s botany. I’m biochem.”
Liberski gave the interloper a long, deadpan look before picking up her fork, deliberately stabbing a pile of greens, and shoving it into her mouth. She chewed sloppily, losing a dribble of dressing before smearing it away with the back of her hand. “Dewishuz,” she slurred around the mouthful.
Sasha gave a gusty laugh. “I’ll pass on your compliments,” he said, with a small tip of his sandwich. Then: “Listen, I won’t bother you. But I know who you are, and I wanted to say, you know, this place. Pavonis. It’s not like back on Earth.”
Liberski just kept chewing. Sasha was looking at her intently, almost imploringly. “We’re scientists here,” he said. “Sure, technically, we’re part of separate teams and backed by separate governments. But look around—” he waved an expressive arm. “Could you tell where the NAL section ends and the UFoA one begins?” Like most, he pronounced NAL as one syllable—nahl—but spelled out each letter of the you-eff-oh-ay.
Liberski swallowed, and speared another forkful of greens. “This a geography quiz?” she asked. “Didn’t study.”
Sasha dropped his arm. “No,” he said gently. “It’s an attempt at condolence. I’m sorry about what happened to Valentine. We all are. If there’s anything we can do to help you...please...let me—ah, pizdetz.” He held up a finger in the universal gesture of one who is being interrupted by an incoming call. “Excuse me, I have to—”
He rose and walked off a short ways, ducking his head into his shoulder and speaking intently, quietly, in Russian. Liberski, affected by what he’d just said, put down her fork with its speared salad left uneaten. She cast her eyes around the canteen aimlessly in an attempt to settle her emotions. By the time her gaze made a full circuit of the room and returned to Sasha, he’d grown more intense, punctuating his turns at speech with animated gestures as he paced back and forth against one wall.
And Liberski had regained control of herself, so she resumed eating her salad.
When Sasha returned it was only to collect his things. “My research ice,” he said, in tones of obvious sorrow. “We drilled it from the Planum Australe, brought it all the way back here for study—but because of the hijacked shipment, the whole colony is short of water now, so. No more research ice. I have to go.”
“I’m sorry,” Liberski said, looking at him forthrightly.
“So am I,” Sasha answered ruefully. “Remember, if there’s anything—” He flicked his fingers at her, and a light flashed on her wristband, alerting her to an incoming request to exchange messaging privileges.
She accepted it, but by the time she had, the Martian was already gone.
If you want to read ahead, Journey is available in paperback and e-book formats from Amazon ($2.99 for Kindle). But what it really needs is word of mouth, so even better than buying the book is leaving an Amazon/Goodreads review, or posting a link on your social media, or forwarding to a friend. The first reader to make a TikTok about it will receive a free signed paperback—link me your video to redeem this offer.
On the Journey Station soundtrack (Spotify | YouTube), the three scenes in this chapter are set to UNSECRET’s “Revolution,” “The Untold” from Secession Studios, and Liberski’s personal theme: “Climb” by ADONA.