Severance (31 page)

Bruce looked at the closet unhappily. “I am going to get
stuck and die down there.”

“I’d come back to feed you.”

§

After an hour of scraping and crawling and bitching, Stein and
Bruce emerged into the light. Stein pulled herself out into the open and turned
around to watch the little maintenance robot get pushed out of the tube behind
her. A few seconds later Bruce emerged, looking not unlike an overused pipe
cleaner.

Following a minute of stretching, knee massaging, and
complaint ignoring, Stein got to her feet. They were in another pressure booster
room, a massive fan dominating half the room, connected to another arterial duct.
She crossed the room and opened the filter chamber, peering inside. They would
hopefully have lost the trail of any pursuers by that point, but the plenum
would still be an excellent place to hide. Pulling strongly on the hatch to
open it against the negative air pressure, she stepped inside the plenum and through
another filter wall.

“Jesus, it’s hot in here,” Bruce said, dripping sweat as he
stepped through the filter wall behind her. A damp man in many conditions, Stein
knew he wouldn’t react well to their new hiding spot. Thanks to a reheat coil
on the other side of the fan, the air here was much hotter than in the other
artery, which is why it was such an ideal place to hide. He dropped the little
robot on the floor and sat down beside it.

“Good place to hide from IR scans,” she said. “Though I now
wonder if they’ll simply be able to smell us in here.”

Bruce nodded and stripped off the upper portion of his
uniform, fanning air under his upstretched arms. “So, what’s the plan?” he
asked.

“Don’t have one.”

“Good, me neither. Wanna play cards?”

Stein smiled and nodded sleepily. Whether it was the
temperature, or the adrenaline wearing off, she suddenly felt very tired. She sat
down against the thin metal wall of the ducting and slumped back, letting her
eyes close. “So, you think we’re safe here?” he asked.

She tipped to one side, lying down on the floor, head resting
on folded arms. She could hear him messing around with the little robot,
distracting himself with his hands. “Are we safe anywhere?” she responded,
before drifting off to sleep.

Sure you could, but why would you want to?

Harold turned off the display and rubbed his eyes. Another
dead end. The message from the fabrication clerk cut right to the heart of the
matter: there was no legitimate reason anyone would possibly want to print
disposable bits of plastic on the Argos. Every bit of information that anyone
could possibly want to see could be displayed or distributed far more readily
on a terminal. Everyone had one of those; they were practicably disposable
themselves.

Three months had passed since Allan Eichhorn, the Argos
Extreme editor, had been found strangled. The second murder in a year had
attracted surprisingly little attention in the press, most of that from Argos
Extreme itself. The other feeds had been faintly dismissive of the story.
Harold got the sense the dead editor wasn’t widely liked amongst his peers. And
with other, more pressing events rolling around — mandatory genetic screenings,
wide–scale gene tinkering, the Turn — Eichhorn would have had to have died
multiple times a week to stay on the feeds.

Harold didn’t know how the young editor had been discovered
by the conspirators, but he could guess. Security was monitoring the network,
scanning it for copies of whatever information Kevin had stolen. That in itself
was a gross abuse of their powers, but not a surprising one, at least when considered
in light of the gross abuse of their duty to not murder people. The lesson to
take from it was clear: anyone who put that information on an active terminal
ended up dead. Which was strangely comforting; all of his paranoia and
precautions had not been in vain.

“And that is why, Mr. Fabrication Helpline, I can’t simply
send out an e–vite,” Harold said to his desk. He sat up in his chair and
stretched, back arched, hands grasping at the air behind him. The pamphlet angle
had seemed like an ideal solution. He couldn’t tell one person at a time — that
just seemed to result in one person getting brutally murdered at a time. He
needed to tell a lot of people, all at once. Without using the network. Handing
out pamphlets on a corner was a laughably inefficient solution, but that in
itself might be an advantage. It meant security probably hadn’t even considered
it. Harold could get flyers into hundreds of people’s hands before security
found out; he’d even drummed up a couple of cloak and dagger schemes for
distributing them semi–anonymously. But if he couldn’t even make the flyers in
the first place…

His terminal flashed, alerting him of an incoming
appointment. Harold yawned and stood up, grabbed his lab coat, and left the
office. The gene tinkering was going on around the clock and had been since the
captain and mayor had agreed to make genetic screenings mandatory for every
person on board the ship. It had taken a few months for Dr. Kinison to sign off
on Harold’s automation scheme for the gene–tinkerers, a delay which frustrated
Harold no end. Although a bureaucracy of only two people, it was still,
somehow, incredibly inefficient. But it was the law: gene tinkering was a fussy
technology, prone to concurrency errors, overwriting problems, and a host of
other spooky issues. However frustrating, the multiple layers of oversight were
a necessary part of the work.

As he walked to the operating room, he examined his next
patient’s chart, refreshing his memory on the man’s condition. Martin Stahl, 26
years old. 3.4 X 10
⁵
Denebs off baseline, across all major organs,
higher variances in the liver and testicles. Not the worst he had seen. But not
that great either. Mr. Stahl’s life had been shortened by ten to twenty years
without his permission. And he had no chance of procreating, at least not on
this ship. Harold entered the operating room, “Hello, Martin. My name’s Dr.
Stein.”

“Hey, Doc.” Martin looked up from his spot in the comfy
chair. The big padded chair which sat in the center of the operating room was a
pleasant surprise for most new gene–tinkering patients. Whether the patient was
relaxed or not turned out to have little effect on the tinkering process, but after
the comfy chair had been tried once during an early trial, it had proven so
popular that it soon became a tradition.

The only other furniture in the room was a desk set against
the wall and a small, wheeled stool. Harold pulled the stool over to Martin and
sat down. “So, I understand you’ve absorbed massive amounts of radiation,” he
said, smiling at his patient’s suddenly enormous eyes. “Relax. It’s entirely
treatable.”

Martin nodded, his throat clenching up and down. “The nurses
said it was no big deal.”

Harold smiled. If it had been no big deal, Martin wouldn’t
be sitting here. A simple system of screenings and pre–screenings had been set
up to sort out the simple cases from the bad ones, and with a couple of decades
of experience poking around in the genome, Harold didn’t get tasked with the
simple ones. “It’s not.” Harold said. “In fact, we’re almost done.”

“But I just got here. I mean you just got here. I got here
about an hour ago.”

“I’m sorry about the wait,” Harold said, lying. “And the
reason we’re almost done is because I’ve been working on your course of
treatment for the last three days.” That was mostly true — he had started the
process three days earlier. But most of the work was automated, the nanobot
programming determined algorithmically, based on the statistical analysis of
the patient’s current genetic variance and the baseline genome kept on each
patient’s file. Harold only had to review the work. His main role was simply
being human, a living mind to ride herd over the nanobots, a bit of technology
that humanity still felt a bit uncomfortable around. Laws on Earth and the
Argos ensured these machines were only let out of their cage under the close
supervision of someone who possessed several degrees and was capable of passing
regular sanity tests.

“Basically, we’re just going to need you to ingest a couple
pills, and then enter quarantine for about four weeks while the tinkering takes
effect.”

Martin looked at the clear plastic bottle Harold produced
from a pocket and the large gray pills inside. “Are these nanobots?”

Harold smiled warmly. “They are. Don’t worry. It’s
completely safe.” Seeing Martin look unconvinced, he added, “They almost never
drive anyone around like a puppet anymore.” A pause. “I’m kidding, Martin.”

A choked mockery of a laugh slipped from Martin’s throat. “Thanks,
Doc,” he eventually wheezed out. “I guess I owe you one. If you ever need
anything, just let me know.”

Harold nodded absentmindedly.
A lot of people owe me
favors these days.
He tapped a couple of notes onto his terminal. “The
nurses told you about the quarantine, correct? Your family knows? Your work
knows? Supervisors?”

“Yeah, they know. They made some jokes.”

“I’ll bet. That’s what friends are for,” Harold said. He
checked Martin’s chart one last time. “What do you do, Martin?” he asked as he
did so, just to make conversation.

“I run a pair of lines at a fab plant.”

Harold looked up. “Oh, yeah? Cool.” He wondered what the
odds of that were. A fabrication engineer who owed him a favor had just fallen
into his lap. Harold felt his heart beat faster, his ever present paranoia
squeezing his adrenal glands.

“Doc?”

“Yeah? Right. Okay, we’re ready for your treatment.” He
opened the bottle and allowed the two robot pills to slide into his palm before
retrieving a cup of water from a basin at the side of the room. Returning to Martin,
he handed over the pills and water. “So. You take these and go through that
door over there. That’s our quarantine ward. There should be a bed set aside
for you — there’s a nurse who can show you around. It’s pretty full right now,
so apologies for the lack of privacy. Although I hear they throw some pretty
good parties in there.” He smiled, then watched Martin swallow the pills.
Helping the young man up, he guided him to the door. “Good job, Martin. I’ll
see you when you get out.”

Martin gone, Harold returned to the stool and sat down,
rotating back and forth, thinking about his possible in at a fabrication plant.
If it isn’t a trap. It probably isn’t a trap. It hopefully, probably isn’t a
trap.
He spun around on the stool, considering the possibilities. It
definitely sounded like it was worth pursuing. But his paranoia had served him
well so far. What if it was a trap? Were there any precautions he should take?

He hadn’t allowed himself to think about it but couldn’t
afford the self–deception now: there was a good chance that if he kept pursuing
this task he had taken on, it would end up poorly for him. He shuddered
involuntarily but felt no rising wave of panic.
Good, Harold. Steady on.

If he did die, if he failed to spread the word himself, he
needed to find a way to pass this information on post–mortem. Kevin’s trick,
stashing a terminal in a closet, having that terminal not get found and deleted
by a janitor, had been a massive stroke of luck. By all rights, the truth
should be lost by now. If the knives came out for Harold, he would want a sturdier
backup plan.

There were some snags with that. First, who to send the
message to? He had no next of kin. Both parents long dead, no siblings. His
closest friends were work friends — not that close, and certainly not people he
wanted to drag into this mess. The way some of them talked, many of their
sympathies might even lie with the conspirators. In truth, the only person he
had fully trusted was his almost–son Kevin. And he didn’t think he had any more
sons left in him. He did have a reproduction credit that he had never cashed
in, but it was a bit late in life for that now. And if he read the political
winds right, they weren’t going to let him build any more canned babies.

He looked at the big comfy chair that Martin had recently
vacated and the empty pill bottle lying on it.
But they were letting him do
that.
He swallowed. It was as unethical an idea as he had ever had. But it
could work.

And fortunately for Harold, flexible ethics were rapidly
becoming a specialty of his.

Kinsella poked at the heap of green and brown mush on his
plate. Bletmann had assured him that there was nothing different about the
food, but watching the way it clung and clutched at his spork, Kinsella wasn’t
so sure. It was possibly a psychological effect — in the good old days, people
would have paid a tremendous amount of money per plate of mush for the
opportunity to speak with him, even more to get their picture taken with him,
post–mush. Now, in the bad new days, Kinsella was lucky he didn’t have to pay for
the mush himself.

“Come on, Stan,” he said, pointing a mush–laden spork at
Stan Reynolds, an old friend of the apparently fair–weather variety. “You know
this will pay off.” He directed his spork along the length of the table, threatening
the others gathered at the Reynolds home with the trembling mush. “You all know
I’m good for this.”

Reynolds put down his own spork. The current chair of the
Argos Club, a collection of some of the ship’s most self–important assholes,
Reynolds had supported Kinsella for years. He hadn’t done this out of any
special passion for public policy; it was more in the same manner in which an
ancestor of his might have taken an interest in fast horses. Or really mean
chickens. “Eric, you’ve been a good friend to us. And you’re always welcome
here.” He smiled, obviously thinking of a joke. “No matter which door you use.”
A trill of laughter from the lesser weather vanes around the table. Security
had been almost invisible in this half of the ship since the riot two days
earlier, but Kinsella hadn’t let his guard down, still entering and exiting
from back doors and side entrances, often bewigged. “But this doesn’t look good
for you, does it?” An obvious spot for a wig joke, though thankfully Reynolds
didn’t see it. “It doesn’t look good for us,” he said instead.