Destination Europa: Chapter 14

The Stakeout

Aug 02, 2024

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Previously, Tark found another anomaly, this time in the pattern of water consumption at certain water dispensers. She and Quill decided on a stakeout to try and catch the culprit.

Deck 12, furthest aft of the Leifr’s habitable decks and closest to the vast cargo holds that took up two-thirds of the ship’s length, was the domain of the Leifr’s own engineers and technicians. The Blue Ring was busy that morning. Quill and Tark passed a cluster of technician cadets rolling a cargo drone on a trolley towards the machine shop, while a couple of senior engineers squeezed past on their way to a meeting. Unlike the colonists, who had little to do on the voyage, none of the engineering crew appeared to be simming as they walked. One or two nodded or said a brief hello as they passed.

“Whoever’s behind this, they’re probably not doing it in the daytime,” commented Tark.

“If there is anyone,” said Quill, still thinking about the night before and the relief of finding out he had jumped to the wrong conclusions about his nephew’s illness. “I mean, what if I am just going crazy out here?”

They stopped at the ladder to the Green Ring.

“Come on, Dr. O,” said Tark. She patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. If you’re going crazy, we’ll go crazy together and you can teach me Habitat Engineering in the psych ward.”

The water dispenser for Deck 12 was in the Yellow Ring, near the ship’s central axis. On other decks, this would normally be the least-used of the Leifr’s three concentric rings. On Deck 12, at least that morning, it was bustling with technicians transferring crates of galley supplies from the cargo hold, sending them up through the central shaft to the galley on Deck 6. Quill and Tark pushed slowly towards Section C, where the dispenser was, looking carefully for potential hiding places while trying not to look as if they were doing anything out of the ordinary.

The dispenser was set into the corridor wall a couple of metres from the hatch into the zero-g shaft. Quill stopped below the hatch and looked up, wondering how long one could cling to the ladder and watch the dispenser, even at Yellow Ring gravity levels.

“Coming through!” A shout from above, a pair of magnetic boots narrowly missing Quill’s head as someone came sailing through the hatch. “Watch it, mate!”

“Sorry,” said Quill, moving aside. Another tech followed the first, and they clomped round the curve of the corridor, muttering something rude about Martians. They stopped at the dispenser and began to refill their canteens.

“Notice anything?” asked Tark.

“Those guys are — well, not worth me wasting bad words on?”

“Apart from that. Look at the lights.”

Quill looked up at the strip lights that ran along the tight curve of the ceiling. Most of them were fully lit on mid-morning spectrum, giving the Yellow Ring the effect of bright sunshine on a Scandinavian summer’s day. But just around the curve from the hatch, in the section where the dispenser sat, the lights were off. At that time of day, it simply meant that several metres of the corridor were pale primrose-yellow rather than daffodil-bright, but in his mind’s eye Quill could imagine that with night-time lighting, it would be significantly darker.

“What do you think?” Tark asked in a low voice. “Coincidence?”

Quill shrugged.

“I’m going to talk to these guys,” Tark went on. She marched over to the dispenser and stood behind the Leifr techs, waiting for them to finish filling their canteens. Quill hung back just around the curve of the corridor, feeling he would be more of a barrier than a help, but he amped up his audio filters so he could hear the conversation.

“Olaffson,” said Tark, nodding to one of the techs. “Swanson. How’s it going?” Quill heard Tark’s vowels shift as she slid into a more regional FSS accent.

“Alright, Tark,” the one named Swanson replied, but they seemed disinclined to talk. Swanson sealed the mouth of his canteen and stepped away from the dispenser. Tark stepped forward as if to drink from the water fountain, then glanced up and made a sound as if surprised.

“Huh. What’s up with the lights?”

Olaffson looked up at the ceiling and shrugged. Swanson didn’t look up, but grunted in response.

“I reported that last week. Supposed to be fixed. Why AiLeifr hasn’t sorted it, I don’t know. Damn weird if you ask me.”

“It was fixed,” added Olaffson. “But now it’s out again.”

“Huh,” said Tark. She hesitated, then continued in a lower voice. “Anything else weird going on around here?”

Olaffson gave a kind of snort. “No. Come on, Swannie. We don’t need more of that crap.”

“What crap?” asked Tark, curious.

“Don’t mind him,” said Swanson. “Always a grumpy sod. We’ve just had a couple of guys telling ghost stories lately. Seeing things, jumping at shadows. You know how it is.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tark. “I guess it’s that point in the voyage, huh?”

“We’re due back at the cargo lock,” said Olaffson abruptly.

“Alright, keep your hair on,” said Swanson. “Bye then.”

Their footsteps, hard with the magnetic boots they used for zero-g work, echoed round the corridor towards Quill. He propelled himself round in the opposite direction, the low gravity helping him bounce out of sight until the men were safely through the hatch.

“What do you think?” asked Tark. They were peering into a closet a little round the curve from the water dispenser. With the lack of overhead lighting in that section of the corridor, the interior of the cupboard was in shadow, but it was easy enough to see that there was very little space inside. Most of it was taken up by a cleaning robot and its charging station, along with a couple of shelves of cleaning supplies.

“Cramped,” said Quill. “But it’ll do. Very lucky it’s here, actually.”

Tark nodded. “We’ll have to wedge the door open a little, and hope the ghost doesn’t see us.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that.”

“Sorry,” she said repentantly. “Forgot you don’t like ghosts. I was just thinking about what those guys were saying.”

“I know,” replied Quill. “Sorry. But hey, looks like we’re not the only ones noticing unusual things, huh?”

“Right.” Tark closed the door of the closet. “Right. So tonight, I guess we should take turns.”

Quill nodded. “If you go first, I’ll take the second half of the night.”

Tark looked as if she might argue, but then exhaled and nodded. “Alright. When do you think we should start?”

“Maybe 20:00? I guess the corridors will be quiet after that.”

“Alright. I’ll be here at 20, until say 01:00?”

“Midnight,” said Quill.

“No. When are you planning to finish? 06:00? I can’t let you do all that time.”

“05:00.”

“Still, that’s not fair.”

“It’s my thing,” said Quill.

Tark glared at him. “Dr. O, this is not ‘your’ thing. If there’s something going on, it’s all of our thing.”

Quill opened his mouth and closed it again without saying anything.

“Right,” Tark went on. “I’ll do 20:00 until 00:30, then you do until 05:00. Deal?”

Quill nodded reluctantly. “Deal.”

This is ridiculous. Quill adjusted his position, trying to find a way to lean without one of the cleaning robot’s protrusions sticking into his side. There was no space to sit, but at Yellow Ring gravity that was no great hardship. 01:23, and I’m hiding in a cleaning cupboard like a dodgy private eye from a period drama, waiting for a ghost or a figment of my own imagination. He took a bite of one of the doughnuts Tark had brought, and washed it down with a mouthful of lukewarm coffee from his flask. A crumb or a grain of sugar from the sweet half-stale pastry stuck in his throat and he suppressed a cough.

He could see only a narrow slice of the darkened corridor through the gap between the closet door and the wall. Since Tark had left a little under an hour ago, there had been neither sound nor motion other than his own breathing and the occasional rustle of his overalls. The only illumination came from the dim yellow of the night-mode lighting from around the curve of the corridor. From the angle of the door he couldn’t quite see the water dispenser, and he had to resist the temptation to push it open just a little wider. He thought about doing a crossword puzzle to pass the time, but worried about losing focus. Lord, help me stay alert. Help me stay hidden.

Another half-an-hour passed. 01:54. 1907 days to go. No, 1906 now, it’s after midnight. I’ve got to stop obsessing about this. Got to stop counting the days. Not doing me any good. He drank a little more coffee. Better not drink too much or I’ll have to pee. So tired. What am I doing here? On this voyage, not just in this cupboard. I could blame Rob for persuading me, but it’s not really his fault…

“Quill, did you know about this?”

Rob’s face, strained and weary in the thin sunlight filtering through the dome of Ransom City. The shallow silvery water of the Central Park lake reflecting the unruffled leaves of the thin trees. The shouts of kids from a PE class playing tennis on the hard courts behind them, the whistle of their teacher refereeing. Quill glances at Rob’s face then looks back at the water and nods once.

“Well, I knew—”

The angry exhalation of breath, the flaring of Rob’s nostrils. “You knew? You knew she was planning to leave? And you didn’t see fit to talk to me about it?”

The beating of Quill’s heart, the sweat in his palms, the desire for everyone to think well of him. “Rob, I’m sorry. But I felt it was for Priska to bring to you, not for me to go behind her back.”

“Chain of command, Aquilla. The Handbook. Chapter 13. As her team leader, you should have come to me immediately you had any hint, any suspicion, that she was unsettled.”

“Even if that would have just made her more dissatisfied with the Alliance?” Guilt and fear trembling in Quill’s voice. Rob doesn’t know about their affair. Doesn’t know the full extent of Priska’s unhappiness either.

“That would have been for me to decide.” Rob’s voice is hard and flat as a shovel. “Don’t you see the danger here, Quill?”

“What danger?”

“To the Alliance. She’s not just leaving quietly. Amicably. That happens, of course it does. But making a statement like that? She’s stabbing us in the — in the guts, Quill. In the heart. I’ve already had Pastor Kim calling me to ask what’s going on.”

“I knew she was thinking about leaving. I didn’t know about the statement.” He’s not surprised Rob feels it as a betrayal. He would too, if he didn’t know Priska better, if they hadn’t spent hours arguing about it again and again until that moment on the Athena, the return journey to Mars at the end of their term in Tromsø, when she’d told him that was the end.

He sees tears in Rob’s eyes, diamond-hard. “I thought things were going so well,” says Rob, his voice trembling a little as well. “I was going to suggest…”

“What?” asks Quill, trying to be gentle.

“I was going to make her Tromsø team leader for the next term.”

Silence, the thwack of weighted balls from the tennis courts, the lake unmoving as aluminium plate. No cry of gulls or chatter of chaffinches, no buzz of mosquitoes, not in Ransom City.

“What about me?” asks Quill. “Where were you going to send me, if you were making her team leader?”

Rob looking across the lake’s half-kilometre span to the water recycling plant on the other side.

“I was getting worried about you and Priska,” he says eventually. “Worried you were getting too close. That kind of situation can be dangerous, you know. You know. The risk of moral failure.”

Too late for that. The thought is bitter as wormwood. Quill tries to imagine bringing it up now, confessing it right there on the spot, on his knees before Rob on the edge of the lifeless lake, and fails.

“So where were you going to send me?”

“Europa. You and Silent. The new colony. If you can get in.”

I wish Silent had made it. No, I wish I had confessed then. Then they’d have kicked me out and I wouldn’t be here in the first place. Quill blinked rapidly. 02:04. The thin strip of dim yellowish corridor against the black, an inverted cat’s eye slit. The soft rasp of his own breathing. Then, in the darkness, a moment of total clarity. It’s all going to be OK. The thought landed softly as a dove or a pigeon. This is where I’m meant to be. I’m not alone. I’m not abandoned. Despite my failures, I’m part of a greater plan. Just for that instant, his fears were silenced. His questions seemed, not unheard, but subsumed in something greater. In the darkness, leaning uncomfortably with his eye to the door, he felt filled with light.

The joy was so intense that he nearly missed the shadow passing the door. A flicker caught his eye, and he pulled his attention back to the corridor and the cramped cleaning cupboard. Hardly daring to breathe, he put his eye closer to the crack in the door. There. A dark mass, treading softly and deliberately like a large cat. No aikon. No readings on his visuals, nothing apart from what he could see in the dimness with his naked eye. The ghost.

The ghost stopped at the water dispenser and placed something on the floor, then leaned forward to the machine. There was a soft gurgle of water running into a large canteen, the frequency sliding up the scale as the water level rose. The ghost set the full canteen down and replaced it with the one that had been on the floor.

The whole thing took no more than a few minutes. The ghost finished filling the canteens and began to slink back the way he or she had come. As the shadow approached, Quill pulled the door closer, so for half a minute or so he could see nothing at all. He couldn’t risk them getting a direct line of sight on him and having his aikon pop up in their visuals, assuming they had any. His heart was hammering so loud he felt vaguely surprised that the ghost couldn’t hear him.

When he was sure the ghost had passed, he cautiously pushed open the closet door and slipped into the corridor. I have to follow. I have to find out what’s going on. He crept round the curve of the corridor, keeping well back. Approaching the ladder down to the Green Ring, he saw the ghost, the shadow, look round briefly before sliding downward, and he shrank back against the wall. For a second he thought it was faceless, then he realised it must be wearing a mask of some dark material.

He was about to step away from the wall, when something soft and tough hooked him by the throat. He staggered, and would have cried out had a hand not covered his mouth. Something hard jammed into the small of his back, and his legs gave way beneath him.

“On your knees. Keep quiet.”

It was Safira, and she was holding a gun to his ribs.

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