Extermination, p.1
Extermination, page 1
Extermination
Jonathan Bartell Space Agent
Patty Jansen
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
More By This Author
Chapter One
THE WORST THINGS about Olympus were the corridors. They were grey and featureless, with a grey floor covering, grey walls, a grey ceiling that was almost low enough to touch, and an endless progression of doors on each end. The doors bore little plaques with numbers, but other than that there was no indication to show where you were.
Of course, while coming here as delegates for the conference, Jonathan and Gaby were only allowed to see a very small part of the station. And that was more than enough to know that it was a mind-numbing, confusing warren of a place that harkened back to its low-budget commercial origins.
For the duration of the conference, Jonathan occupied a room in what was called the B corridor. Gaby was with the women in the C corridor. Already, when going from one to the other, Jonathan had wondered if maybe they should have asked to stay as a couple in the same room. Not that there was a luxury, or, as it were, awkwardness of a double bed available, but at least they would not have wasted so much time looking for each other. But they weren’t a couple, as such, although Jonathan wouldn’t mind if they were. It was just that . . . well, he guessed he was afraid she’d say no and their relationship would be irretrievably broken.
They were colleagues. A team. They were meant to do work together.
Jonathan’s little room had no less than four beds, but it was more than amazing to suggest that four people were expected to stay in this tiny cubicle for any length of time without killing each other.
Well, his and Gaby’s work showed that killing each other was in fact a fairly common occurrence in space.
Even the breakfast room was small, with a very low ceiling. In fact, the only place where any concessions had been made to the fact that this old commercial station was now used as a conference centre was the conference room itself. That side of the dumbbell-shaped station had been renovated, with a beautiful conference room that sported all the newest technology. The accommodation quarters, however, were old and tired, presumably to be upgraded some time in the future.
About two hundred delegates had come to this conference on the maintenance of closed ecosystems. It sounded like a boring enough subject, but Jonathan and Gabby had already been through a number of adventures that proved otherwise.
It meant recycling.
It meant clean air.
It meant human waste—like, shit.
It meant talking about processes and equipment that turned the latter into the former.
It meant contamination that might make a habitat unliveable and the atmosphere unstable, and could put the various cleansing and composting processes out of balance.
It meant the difference between life and death.
And in that respect, this station was quite an unremarkable place to hold a conference about scientific advances in something of that importance.
But apparently, the commercial company who ran this conference—a first in the asteroid belt—had big plans for it.
When coming in on the shuttle yesterday, Jonathan and Gaby had seen various promotional videos about the big plans the company had for the conference station, hosting military, civilian and mixed events in this refurbished pimple of a mining station in the asteroid belt.
And after a brief welcome address by the company, Jonathan and Gaby had been invited to come and have a few drinks with a couple of their colleagues in the B corridor, and that was when Jonathan had gotten lost.
He wandered about the corridors with many empty rooms, some in the process of being refurbished; he wandered into corridors that were closed off with tape and had little signs saying “Renovation in progress”.
He checked his pad for a map, but found that it was “forthcoming”.
What was so difficult about copying a map of this warren of a place?
Unless they had to edit out the secret sections.
And then a man said behind him, “Oh, Mr Bartell.”
Jonathan turned around, hoping to see the research officer who had invited him to the party, but it was a different man.
He was tall and slim, looked fit, and was probably in his fifties. He wore a pair of old grey jeans—seriously, who still had those? They belonged in a museum—and a loose grey jacket with no identifying features. His face, however, looked very military—clean-shaven. Jonathan had no idea what it was with scientists and beards.
He had probably been in the conference room for the opening address, but Jonathan didn’t know him, so he had not noticed.
Jonathan asked, “I’m looking for the B-corridor common room, do you happen to know where that is?”
“I’m not a local, but I think I might. Come with me and we’ll go there.” His voice sounded oddly formal.
He took off down another featureless grey passage. Jonathan tried to figure out whether he had already been here.
“Are you enjoying the conference so far?” Jonathan asked, to start the conversation.
“I am,” the man said, and then let another uncomfortable silence pass between them. “I actually wanted to speak to you.”
“Me?”
“You are Jonathan Bartell, the expert in bio-crime?”
“I’m an expert in recycling. I’ve had a few adventures at the orbital launch station and also at Johnson base, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert.” He hesitated.
Jonathan wasn’t sure that he was allowed to talk about these things to civilians. Probably not. He smiled, feeling uneasy. How did this man know these things, anyway?
“Oh, you’re being too modest. You have quite a reputation.”
What a strange man.
Jonathan was sure that a lot of people at the conference had reputations far greater than his, far more experience and superior research projects. He was just starting his career, and he tended to draw the unlucky project where, as soon as he started, some sort of problem developed.
“I think you may be confusing me with my father,” Jonathan said.
His father did indeed have quite a reputation both in the Force and out. His father had also worked in science, and would probably still have been around by the time this man started his career.
“No, I’m talking about you, although you’re right—I did work with your father, who was also a well-respected researcher. In the short time that you’ve worked for us, you have already done some very good things. You’ve prevented two disasters from happening.”
“Sorry, us?”
“Ah. I mean us researchers.” Two red spots developed on his cheeks.
Ex-military, clearly.
And a really strange character.
“I’m sorry; I don’t know you. What’s your name?”
“Stevens. Mark Stevens.”
He shook Jonathan’s hand. His palm was sweaty.
Jonathan asked, “And you work for. . . ?”
“I’m in between projects at the moment.”
“Is there anything I can help you with?”
“Yes, there is actually, strange that you should ask.”
Well, not so strange at all. “Tell me about it.”
“I’m speaking to you in a position of complete confidence, I hope you understand.”
“Well, yes, though as far as it relates to the safety of our systems, we’re obliged to let the authorities know if we’ve spotted issues that could cause problems in the management of base recycling systems.”
The man shook his head. “Oh, no, the situation is far beyond that. I really need to talk to you in private.”
A female voice came from behind. “Oh, there you are!”
Jonathan turned around. There was Gaby. Thank the heavens. He was glad for her familiar face.
She came to him looking flustered, as if she’d been running around. “I’ve just searched the whole place. I thought you’d gotten lost.”
Jonathan gave a sheepish grin. “I did get lost. These corridors are ridiculous. They’re all the same.”
“I know. Anyway, the B-corridor common room is just around the corner. Come. The party’s already started. You won’t believe who’s here.”
Jonathan nodded at his mysterious scientist. “Are you coming? There’s a pre-conference party going on. Drinks are on the Ceres team. You can talk to me there.”
The man shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t really like parties very much. But the conference will be for a couple of days. I’ll speak to you later. It’s not like we’ll be going anywhere.”
No, they were in a space station on the outer rim of the asteroid belt. It was quite isolated and the only way off the station was via a shuttle bay that held only two vehicles at a ti me. No one was going anywhere in a hurry.
Chapter Two
ONE COULD ONLY GET ON with life, because life went on whether you went with it or not. In space, it was a given that people died, especially people who had looked after themselves as poorly as Ken. Grew up on Mars, never did any of the prescribed exercises, declared that he hated it. Ate too much, too often, sat on his backside all day.
Tara had never known him to be anything other than unhealthy. He had the works. Heart problems, weight problems, diabetes, kidney problems, joint problems, you name it.
His demise had come quickly and mercilessly, in his living room, through a massive heart attack.
He had been only fifty-two, and that was altogether too young. But for someone who had neglected his physical form as much as he had, he had probably done quite well.
It was just that Tara missed him. He’d been a good boss, even a friend. He used to run the lab in a relaxed fashion, never worrying too much about the work that needed to be done as long as it did get done. But his side projects were the really interesting part of Ken.
Ken was always interested in the work. He’d spend more time in the lab than Tara had ever known any scientist to do. Most of them went to a lot of meetings, let their students do the work, let the junior staff manage the students, and only collected the rewards at the end.
Ken was not like that. He hated administrative meetings, and once told the station manager “to get fucked” over an administrative burden. He said he was here to do science. His mind was as sharp as his body was soft.
There were lots of rumours of course. Ashley, Tara’s co-worker in the lab, said that Ken had been under a lot of stress.
When Lemura, the company that owned the station, had gone broke, its property had passed into the hands of the Space Force. They were rumoured to be sending managers to sort out everything the Force didn’t like, and lots of rumours circulated about what those things were. Tara didn’t know what to believe, but she’d heard rumours that the lab would be repurposed to look into the use of chemical and biological weapons for military purposes. And Ken was just about as peaceful as anyone could be.
He sure had to feel the pressure about this.
Many of his experiments didn’t come with admin approval. He had just started the experiments on a hunch or a whim, about topics that interested him, and as a way to kill the idle time that one always had plenty of when living in a small community and not being particularly social.
Ken had grand plans. He wanted to leave behind a legacy of research that would be useful for people; that was what he always said.
She met the new boss for the first time yesterday. His name was Fred Wilkins, and he was a military man. Lean and strapping, somewhere in his fifties and wearing a uniform, with his face hard and unemotional. His eyes looked sad, with the eyelids drooping down, and age had turned the corners of his mouth down as well. He looked kind of like a frog in a fairytale.
He asked her some generic questions, and Tara had given him some generic answers.
Like how many people worked here and what their hours were.
Tara thought that if he had been properly briefed on his job, why didn’t he know those things already?
And why didn’t he ask about the research?
He was obviously not a researcher, but a manager.
So she asked him what research facility he came from, and got some vague story about quarantine at the Moon bases.
That didn’t fill her with confidence. Quarantine was important, but it was not the same as research. Maybe the Space Force lumped it under research, because his uniform said “Special Services”, but that still didn’t make it research.
What was his interest, she asked him, to which he replied that in the Force, you didn’t have the luxury of delving into interests.
“Life in space in the Force is lived on a knife’s edge. We are there to solve the problems faced by the frontline troops.”
“Then what are we going to do in this lab?”
“I’ll take stock of what is here, and then we’ll turn this into a first-rate facility.”
Implying that it wasn’t already good and that nothing of what they were doing mattered.
He inspected Ken’s office, which she was in the process of cleaning up, and his face showed distaste.
No, it wasn’t a military-style sterile and clean place with not a piece of equipment out of place.
Ken’s office was full of obsolete equipment, stacked on the shelves in haphazard fashion, with cords dangling down. Ken had books, the paper variety, which were quite rare in a place like a space station.
He always believed in keeping the useful parts of technology alive. He kept quite a bit of non-useful technology, too, hoarding it in his room. Just in case.
Books were handy, he said, because you could leave them open and look things up.
The new boss just stood at the entrance to the office.
“I’ll make sure I clean it all up,” Tara said. And then she felt annoyed at the thought that she should apologise for the state of the room. It was none of his business. Had he actually arrived when they said he would, everything would have been cleaned up.
“Yes.”
“They were very quick assigning a new person to this position. I hadn’t expected you to arrive so soon.”
She wanted to know where he came from, and why he was here so quickly. In her experience, it usually took months for the bureaucracy to churn through its cogs and a little bit more time for more bureaucracy to let the other person leave their old position, and then still more for a ticket of passage to be secured from wherever the person was.
The research division of the Space Force had to be desperate. She wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing.
He walked through the lab in between the benches, stopping here and there to look at some of the work going on.
Tara had been analysing samples from plants that they used for nutritional experiments. It was always a challenge to keep people fed in a space station, and the crops they grew in the agricultural facilities were engineered to deliver the maximum amount of nutrition.
The analysis lab was a separate room from the experimental facility, separated by a hermetically sealed door. Beyond that door was where they grew the crops in trays. The trays slotted into shelving units that had several banks of lighting. These units could be moved around according to experiment design.
The chamber was an old entry bay through which cargo used to come when the station had just been built. The airlock was still there and operational. Ken used it for some of his private experiments.
The lights were currently on in the controlled environment room, with the bright glow coming out the little window of the door into the lab. The new manager stopped at the door and looked into the room. The glow lit his face.
“Mushrooms,” he said.
Which was obvious.
He glanced aside to the hazard suits that hung in the suiting room next to the door, as if deliberating if it would be worth his time getting dressed and going inside.
He decided against it.
“What type?”
“These are called chanterelles, and this type comes from the beech forests of Norway.”
“Are they poisonous?”
“Heavens, no. They’re considered a delicacy.”
“So, good eating, huh? Did the previous boss enjoy mushroom cook-up feasts?”
Seriously, what sort of remark was that? Yes, Ken carried too much weight and he did enjoy his sautéed mushrooms, but that had nothing to do with the work here.
He continued through the lab, oblivious to her annoyance.
He stopped at the drying oven, looking in through the glass door.
The shelves inside were crammed with trays of material that Ashley had harvested yesterday.
“Carrots,” he said.
“We are testing these to see if we can breed better carrots that are more resistant to the leaf moulds and rots that we have problems with in closed environments. We have normal orange carrots, purple carrots and yellow carrots from old seed collections in Europe. Some of the older varieties are a lot hardier.”
