Destination Europa: Chapter 13

Water

Jul 26, 2024

Previously, Quill discovered something odd about some of the log files from the Farm, then received a summons to attend a meeting with the SymbioNor Personnel Officer. Meanwhile, Tark was following some other lines of investigation.

“Quill, honey, there’s no reason we have to put up with this crap.”

They’re sitting side-by-side at the end of the dock, feet trailing in the cool dark water, fjord stretching flat in front of them and forest thick behind. Quill folds the paper the sandwiches had been wrapped in, rectangle to ever smaller equilateral triangles and finally to isosceles. A herring gull angles low towards them and leaves with a disappointed cry when it sees the food is all gone.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

Priska kicks the water impatiently, sparkling it into spattered life. “You know what I mean. We’re working our asses off at SymbioNor, then pretty much every evening and weekend is either some ministry or some Alliance nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense…”

Priska turns her head to look him in the eye. “Quill, hon, think about it. This last week - Monday night, team meeting, fair enough. Tuesday, you were on that Daniel Facilitators’ call for what, nearly three hours? Wednesday, Bible study. Thursday night, doing all these stupid expense reports. Like, they don’t trust us with how much cheese and butter we buy? Why the heck do they need us to report the amount of sugar we’ve used in a month, to the nearest 100 g?”

There’s fire in her eyes now. Quill shifts uncomfortably, looking back at the water.

“Then Friday night, you’re working overtime at SymbioNor finishing that report, and I’m trying to write a prayer letter that will communicate something real to my supporters without making them think I’m about to go off the deep end!”

“I know it’s a lot…” he says. “But, you know, Taylor Campbell—”

“Don’t you dare start quoting Taylor bloody Campbell!”

Quill looks at her, startled to find tears like bright beads in the corners of her eyes. She takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“Look, I know Taylor Campbell is one of your heroes,” she goes on. “And I know this might shock you. But honestly, the more I read about him, the less I like him. I know the Alliance isn’t a cult. But sometimes some things about it do feel, well, cult-adjacent. And that’s before we even consider the moral implications of trying to reach the FSS by working for a conglomerate that — well, you know as well as I do how messed up it is.”

Quill’s mouth is open but he can’t think of anything to say. Out in the fjord, a motorboat putters past, sending a rippling wake that splashes the dark water up their legs.

“What are you saying?” he replies eventually.

“Let’s leave,” she says immediately. “Quit the Alliance. Build a life together. A life with more integrity than this one.”

Priska, my love, maybe you were right. If I’d seen that then, would that have saved you? Kept you from leaving altogether? Kept you in the faith?

Quill shook his head, allowing the memory to fracture and tessellate then fade away. No point dwelling on that now. He swung into the Deck 5 Green Ring corridor and loped towards the Personnel office.

Solveig Lund looked at the four of them with eyes hard as marble. The SymbioNor Personnel office felt crowded, and thirty minutes into the meeting, the air was thick and tense as cumulonimbus. To Lund’s side stood Jörg, representing the FSS Personnel department, Bowen being part of the long-term FSS crew of the Leifr rather than a SymbioNor employee. He seemed to be avoiding eye contact. Beside Jörg was Gundarsson, the Leifr’s Chief of Security. He hadn’t spoken a word other than an initial nod of greeting, but had spent the meeting scanning each of them, his gaze flicking over them like the tongue of a snake scenting for prey.

“Consider this a friendly warning,” said Lund, though there was nothing friendly in her voice. Her fingernails tapped a slow metallic beat on the hard edge of her desk, surprisingly loud in the cramped space. “It’s probably a good thing your team is no longer in the competition.”

Demas clenched and unclenched his fists. “I would like to point out again, for the record, that you have no evidence that our team name was in any way intended to be political.”

“Noted,” said Lund, in a tone that showed she still didn’t believe him. “Don’t do it again, Deluiker. Try anything even remotely like that and you will all have a formal warning on your record. This is no time to be stirring up trouble. Understood?”

Quill glanced at his teammates. He had expected the meeting to be about the letter, rather than Demas’ decision to change the name of their Vampyre Hunter team for the tournament. But if it’s just about the team name, why did it take until now for them to call us up on it? On the other hand, there probably hasn’t been time yet for higher up to get Demas’ letter, decide what to do and communicate back with the ship. So what’s going on? Is it a kind of warning shot, giving us time to retract the letter before they have to actually deal with it? And why is Gundarsson here? I can see how Personnel might want to caution us, but why is Security involved? As Quill looked back across the desk, he saw Gundarsson glance at Safira. She met his eyes for a moment, lips pursed, and gave a tiny shake of her head, a single fractional left-to-right motion. Is she signalling something to him? Or did I just imagining that?

Quill looked around Tark’s cabin curiously. When he’d been there earlier he’d been too overwhelmed to take much notice of what it was like. On the wall beside her bunk she had stuck a large poster showing a view of Old Putingrad, when it was still St Petersburg, a summer scene with the high sun gilding the water of the Neva, a couple of seagulls soaring above the city. Above her desk was a small photo print of a couple Quill presumed were her parents, taken sometime before her father’s last mission. It was clearly an old print; the corners were dog-eared and the colours slightly faded. They were dressed in the fashions of ten or fifteen years ago, bright tones and sweeps of fabric. Other than those two pictures and a straggly lüluo plant trailing in the corner, the cabin was as bare as if it had been newly assigned.

The door slid open and Tark came in with two beakers of chai.

“That’s my mum and dad,” she said, handing Quill one of the beakers.

“I guessed as much. You look like your dad.”

“So people say.” Her voice was flat. She sat down on the bunk, and Quill turned to face her. He ran a hand through his hair then scratched his stubble. He’d forgotten to shave that morning.

“Uh, are you sure it’s OK for me to be here?” asked Quill.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

He shifted awkwardly in the chair. “I mean, people might get the wrong idea.”

“Whatever.” Tark shrugged. “I don’t really care what people think.” She looked at him mischievously, one eyebrow raised. “Although I’m guessing you might, huh?”

Quill smiled weakly. “No, I, um, yeah, I mean, no, I don’t care. Not so much, anyway, nowadays.” Can’t really explain the Alliance rules. Anyway, that ship sailed long ago.

“Right,” she said. “So, what have you got?”

Quill took a sip of his chai, the liquid hot and sweet in his mouth, then told Tark about the strange timestamps on the Farm log files.

“But I don’t think it’s Joe Rock,” he concluded. “And it can’t have been him taking my stuff anyway.”

“So you think someone faked his username?” asked Tark, both eyebrows raised. “That would mean…”

“I know.”

There was a short silence. They both knew it would need someone with admin privileges for the Farm sub-system, or someone with the skills to hack in without being detected by AiLeifr. Or AiLeifr itself. Quill left the thought unspoken.

“Know anyone who could…”

Quill shook his head. “Not on the Leifr, anyway.” Priska was up there, but I don’t think even she could get into a ship’s ai.

“Right,” said Tark. She opened an interface and flicked through to the Anomalies folder they’d created. In the Farm document, she added a note about the log files. “OK. Now, I’ve got something else to report.”

“Oh?” Quill looked at her uneasily.

“It might be nothing,” she said. “But it’s another little thing that on its own might be nothing, but together with all the other little things, might be something.”

“OK.”

Tark opened another data file. “I didn’t really get anywhere with the printers. That all looked normal, apart from that one in Engineering running out of powder too fast. So I thought, well, O₂ consumption was that tiny bit up, right? What about water?”

“Water?”

“Yeah.” Tark scrolled through a series of charts. “Look, overall water consumption is pretty much bang on the line for what we’d expect. But look here.” She expanded one of the charts.

“What am I looking at?”

“This is daily water output for the dispenser on Deck 11, for the last month.”

“The one near my office?”

Tark nodded. Quill leaned in and looked at the bars more closely. Every three or four days, there was a spike.

“That’s an odd pattern,” he said.

“Yep.” Tark skipped to another chart. “Now look at this one. This is the Deck 12 dispenser.”

“The same pattern!”

“But it’s offset,” said Tark, zooming out on the interface so he could see the charts side by side. “Look. Deck 11, the spikes are here, Wednesday, and here, Sunday. Deck 12, here, Monday, and Friday. Pretty consistently.”

“Just for this month?”

“No.” Tark tapped in the interface and produced a couple of charts with a longer timeline. “Look, three months, same pattern.”

“That’s a significant amount of water each time,” Quill commented. “That’s what, two to three litres more than normal?”

Tark nodded. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think we should have a stakeout.”

“A what?” The Norsk word she had used was unfamiliar to Quill.

“A stakeout. You know, sit and watch for who’s using it?”

“Oh. Right. Like in old movies.” Quill scratched his stubble again. “But there’s nowhere for us to hide around there, is there?”

“Not on Deck 11, unless we go in someone’s office, but maybe on 12?”

Quill tried to picture the layout of Deck 12. He couldn’t remember where exactly the water dispenser was.

“You know what?” Tark continued. “This is the first thing we’ve found where there’s actually something predictable. That’s something, right?”

Quill nodded, and for the first time that day felt a spark of hope. “Yeah. Yes it is.”

“You know what else?”

“What?”

Tark closed the interface and looked at Quill with one eyebrow raised in the quizzical twist that Quill had come to recognise as a smile.

“Right now, I can think of two explanations for all these anomalies. One, we’re both going a little spacey, they really are just little things with simple explanations, and we’re turning them into a giant knot of paranoia.”

Quill gave a half-smile back. “What’s the other thing?”

“We have a ghost on board. A poltergeist, like my grandmother used to talk about.”

Tark was fully smiling now, a glint in her eye, but a chill rippled through Quill’s stomach, and without warning he saw again the pale phantom of Priska outside the Observation Lounge viewport. Tark must have seen something in his face, because her eyes and mouth flattened abruptly, and Quill realised she’d been joking.

“OK, you’re messing with me now,” he said. He tried to smile, but the chill had settled in his stomach like mud in a Scandinavian lake.

“Sorry,” she said, sounding slightly puzzled. “No, but seriously, the fact that we don’t have an explanation yet just means we need more data, right?”

“Right,” said Quill. “Right. Sorry. Until tomorrow, then.” He got up to leave, but the sense of nauseous cold stayed in him all the way back to his own cabin.

Quill slumped into his chair and opened an interface. He opened a secure shell and loaded his Alliance message cache, then sat bolt upright, heart beating faster. A message from Archie, sent several hours ago. Numpty! Why doesn’t he send a normal ping through the FSS comms like Dad?

“Hey, Quill!”

A thumping sound. From the low-resolution video, his brother waved at him, then the camera swung round to show his nephews jumping off the sofa. Somewhere in the background, Kath shouted at them to keep the noise down.

“Hey, boys, say hello to Uncle Quill!”

Cal and Marty ran over and pushed in close to the camera, so that Quill could see only Marty’s left eye and part of his nose, and Cal’s nostrils and gappy teeth.

“Hi, Uncle Quill! Cal was sick but not me!”

“I was sick but I’m a lot better now! Look, I learned to do a handstand! Watch!”

Quill paused the video. He felt tears welling, and breathed a prayer of thanks and relief.

“As you can see, we’re well over that bug,” his brother went on. “Hey, do you remember that painting of Mum’s that used to hang in the hospital? Looks like they’ve replaced them all with new ones. I’m going to have to ask someone and see if we can get it back. I was in there the other day visiting an old lady from church.”

The tears unfurled down Quill’s cheeks. So that’s why he was in the hospital. And I was worrying about Mars lung for no reason.

“Oh yeah, and I got some news about Priska for you. Well, not news, really. I just ran into her cousin when I was taking the boys to judo. Gerry, remember? He was the year below me in school. Haven’t seen him in ages, but he was back in Ransom for a visit. So I says to him, how’s your cousin Priska? Hang on.”

The background noise from Marty and Cal was getting louder. Archie walked into the kitchen of their unit.

“And he says to me, Yeah, Priska’s doing alright, saw her a couple of weeks ago. So there you go. Alright, I better go. Oh, here’s Kath. Hey, honey, you want to say hi to Quill? Alright, love you, bye!”

Quill played the video again, listening for hidden undertones, but everything looked and sounded completely normal. He played it again, savouring the sound of their voices and the pixellated sunlight of Ransom City falling on the children as they leapt from the furniture. Lord, how long? One thousand, nine hundred and eight days? How can I bear it? He wept then, until the sleeves of his overalls were wet with tears and snot and his throat felt raw.

When he collapsed into his bunk after barricading his door again, he felt the hard lump of the Fiducezol bottle under his pillow. I need to find a better hiding place. No, I need to get rid of the stuff. Tomorrow. Before the stakeout. But is there even anything to have a stakeout for? Cal’s fine, I was paranoid and twitchy about that, put two and two together and made a gazillion. Am I doing the same with, well, all of this?

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