Glassborn, page 14
The Auditor grabbed Kellan’s wrist, yanking him around to face him. He unlocked Kellan’s restraints. "Your sentence is complete when the mission is a success,” he said, voice flat and emotionless. "You will be a free man when you leave that module so long as you carry out your commitment here."
Kellan rubbed his wrists, the pressure suit balancing on his forearms. They always loved to crank the restraints on tight, and this Auditor had taken extra joy in it. Free to die with these fool volunteers, he thought bitterly. Still, the absence of restraints was a relief.
"If you attempt to leave or fail to comply with instructions, you'll be returned to detention immediately," the Auditor said. "Understand?"
Kellan nodded, not trusting himself to speak without saying something that might earn him one final cuff upside the head.
The Auditor turned and began walking away, and before Kellan could turn to count the Blinkers he’d be digging with, he heard his name shouted across the tall, echoing ceiling.
His head snapped around. “Jace!”
There weren’t just Blinkers here. He spotted a small cluster of NPCs in one corner. Jace was already running full-bore toward him, and threw his arms around Kellan in a fierce hug. It knocked the pressure suit from his arms and nearly sent Kellan to the floor, but he staggered to keep his balance.
“Thought I’d never see you again,” he said, words muffled against his best friend’s shoulder. “They said no visitors.”
“For us, not for them,” Jace said, hooking a thumb toward the cluster of Blinkers. For each one holding a pressure suit, there were at least four others circling them, crying and hugging and reassuring. “Rules for me but not for thee, what else is new. Man, your mother's been going crazy. Auditors threatened to arrest her, we damn near had to lock her in her room to keep her safe.”
"I saw her once," Kellan said. "They wouldn't let her stay." But things were clicking into place. He glanced back over at the cluster of NPCs. All of them were holding pressure suits, and there was an extra one lying in a heap on the ground. Kellan shoved Jace hard. “What the hell, you volunteered?!”
“Somebody’s got to represent our interests,” he said. “If we’re not out there keeping them honest, maybe they don’t even bother hooking us up to the new system.”
“I would have made sure they didn’t do that.”
Jace threw an arm over Kellan’s shoulder. “Yeah, well, we weren’t going to let you be on your own with those credit pigs. Everyone who was willing drew straws.”
“Is that Dr. Anya?” Kellan asked, squinting around all the pop-ups in his vision telling him orientation was starting soon. “What’s she doing here? We can’t afford to lose our best doctor.”
"We can't afford to go mucking about in the regolith without an NPC doctor here," Jace argued back. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to everyone.” As they walked, he asked, “How was Blinker prison?”
“Lonely,” Kellan said, blinking hard a few times in rapid succession, and to his surprise, a couple of the notifications disappeared. Okay, something he did there worked.
“What are you doing, man? You okay?”
“This fucking implant–”
Jace stopped dead in his tracks, just a few feet from the others. “Oh shit. They made you get one?”
Kellan blinked again, just once this time, in confusion. "You don't have one?"
Jace shook his head, horror written all over his face. "We all refused."
"They told me it was non-negotiable, that it was the only way to detect a Glass infection while we’re digging,” Kellan said. “And then they pinned me down and injected me with a sedative, so I guess for me it was non-negotiable."
Dr. Anya came over and pulled him into a hug that felt almost like the ones his mom gave. "Honey, I'm so sorry about how they treated you. They didn’t have the right."
Kellan was discovering that the Blinkers took a lot more liberties than the NPCs believed they had a right to, and the consequences were not forthcoming.
"They just let you refuse?" he asked.
Jace nodded. "We told them no NPCs would dig, but we’d all show up here and bar the dig crew’s entry to the module if they tried to force us to get implants."
"They needed the bodies," Dr. Anya said. "I don’t think they got as many volunteers as they expected from their ranks.”
Kellan looked over to the veritable going-away party the Blinkers were having on the other side of the atrium. Indignation bubbled through his veins at the fact that Valence was inside his head, and yet he wasn’t even allowed to hug his mother goodbye before he entered what very likely would be his tomb.
He felt Dr. Anya’s hand on his back. “It’s okay, honey, that thing doesn’t change who you are. Come meet the others.”
KELLAN
YEAR: 2179
A stocky man with onyx skin and graying temples extended a calloused hand to Kellan. "Dex Okafor," he said, his grip firm. "I run our water reclamation systems."
Kellan nodded. “I’ve read your reports a few times. You do good work.”
“So do you,” Dex said, releasing his hand. “Don’t let the Blinker sludge tell you otherwise. That pressure fix you did saved those people in the laundry module. Happy to dig alongside you, son.”
Kellan’s chest felt tight, not sure what to do with praise for the action that had ultimately taken three lives, so he just turned to the next person in line. She was a woman about five years older than him and Jace, with sharp, intelligent eyes and short-cropped hair and the same dark complexion as Dex.
“Iska Okafor,” she said, nodding to him. “His daughter, better hydro tech than him.”
Dex laughed and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not a competition.”
“Only because you’d lose,” she shot back.
“You both volunteered?” Kellan asked, blinking too many times and pulling up something that looked like a page out of the colony manual.
“I drew a long straw,” Iska said. “He wouldn’t let me go without him.”
“And I’m Torrent,” the final NPC volunteer stepped in, holding out his hand to Kellan. He was lean, tall, and Kellan recognized him.
“Mr. Hesp’s partner,” he said.
Ed Hesp had been Kellan and Jace’s teacher all through school. They often saw him and Torrent eating lunch together, and once, Jace had swapped out their cricket-meat tacos for ones with live crickets in them. When Mr. Hesp took one bite and threw his taco across the room, Jace had howled so hard tears were coming down his eyes but then he and Kellan both got after-school clean-up duty.
The hazards of being best friends with the class prankster, guilt by association was a frequent occurrence.
“You volunteered?” Kellan asked.
“Drew a long straw,” Torrent said. “Eddy drew a short straw and I told him not to do anything stupid like Dex over there. The kids need him, and I’ll be back as soon as we’re done here.”
“That’s right,” Dr. Anya said. “We’re going to take every precaution and get the hell out of here healthy.”
“You really think that’s possible?” Kellan asked. The Auditors had fed him all that tank sludge about how once he finished replacing the atmospheric conversion unit, his debt would be paid and he could go back to sector four, but he couldn’t really bring himself to believe it. He’d spent the last week steeling himself to walk into that fabrication module and never come out again. He figured that was the whole plan.
“We’ll do everything we can,” Dr. Anya promised, not exactly a fully fleshed out strategy.
Kellan didn’t respond, too busy fighting back the nausea as another notification swam across his vision. Mission orientation is commencing, five credits. All citizens not part of the dig crew, please depart now.
Ping, five credits went into his account, and were deducted immediately back out. Kellan blinked twice, big and purposeful, trying to dismiss the notification, but only managed to make it bigger.
"What are you doing?" Jace asked.
"Nothing," Kellan lied.
"It's the implant, isn't it? Can you feel it in your eyeball?" Jace leaned in and tried to look at it, and Kellan gave him a shove. Jace staggered back a step, the window closed abruptly, and it left Kellan looking into the distance, where the Blinker volunteers were saying their final goodbyes to their families.
They all looked just as nervous as the NPCs – maybe even more. It was supremely unsettling. If anyone was going to feel reassured that they were protected and special and perfectly safe, it’d be them.
Kellan accidentally locked eyes with one of them, and his heart dropped into his stomach.
Her dark hair was pulled back in a shiny ponytail today. Her jaw was set with determination and her shoulders were squared with confidence. He'd seen that same defiant glint in her eyes before, seven years ago, in her father’s med clinic when Kellan thought his mom was dying and she had tried to comfort him with a rabbit.
Quinta Voss.
“What on Deimos is she doing here?” Jace asked, following his gaze just as Kellan began desperately searching for something, anything else to look at. “That’s the girl with the rabbit, isn’t it?”
“That’s a Voss,” Dr. Anya said, astonished.
"She's not here to dig, is she?" Jace wondered.
"Can't be," Kellan said, eyes still sweeping around the atrium, looking anywhere other than at her. "Must be here to say a few inspiring words or some shit like that."
"She's holding a pressure suit," Iska pointed out.
Kellan risked a glance back at Quinta and sure enough, she clutched a shiny new pressure suit to her chest, and her eyes were still locked on him.
LIRA
YEAR: 2083
Lira spent the rest of the day alternating between messaging Jamila to check on her and calling people whose vitals were within normal range, who hadn't had any clear first- or second-level exposure, and who appeared from their requests for medical attention to be, well, freaking out a bit.
She stumbled through the first few calls on audio, not confident enough to have these conversations on video. People who were terrified, who only knew how to get angry when they were scared, who felt like they were being ranked and deemed not worthy of the small stash of antibiotics… those people were not easy to reason with. She tried explaining the locked down clinic from a medical perspective, which wasn’t well received, and then from a statistical one – which went over far worse. She even tried pointing out that nobody even knew if the antibiotics would work yet, so those who hadn't gotten any weren’t truly missing out on anything.
That didn't work, either. "You were exposed, you got your antibiotics," one woman hissed.
"Actually, I haven't received any antibiotics," Lira tried to explain, but the woman just grumbled, "Yeah, right," and hung up on her.
After about a half dozen of those calls, in which Lira was absolutely sure she'd done more harm than good, she finally got through to someone. The difference was that when he started ranting about how scared and frustrated everyone was, Lira was already worn out from the first six calls, so she just stayed silent and let him rant. After a while, he ran out of steam and calmed down, and Lira was able to talk honestly about the situation.
No, we don't know exactly what is going on, and we don’t know the prognosis for sure.
The people who are sick now aren't progressing nearly as fast as the dig crew did, and that's good news.
Yes, we are testing all our antibiotics against the bacteria, and the microbio team is making more as we speak.
Things started to go a whole lot better after that. Lira started calling from her tablet so people could see her face, even if they didn't want to show theirs. She positioned the device on top of one of the rabbits' 3D-printed tunnels and pointed it into the grass, sitting in the middle of the play area so the people she called could see the rabbits hopping around in the background while they talked. She let them rant as long as they needed to, and she stopped taking it personally.
They weren't screaming at her. They were screaming at the terror of the situation, the fact that they were all trapped in a petri dish they once called home.
Some of them were screaming about the friends they'd lost already, and the ones who were sick now.
Lira could relate to that.
There were others who screamed because it seemed like Earth wasn’t interested in helping the colony. Lira talked to a satellite operator named Marcus who said the replies from VossCorp had been sparse and unhelpful.
"They just keep telling us to stay calm and keep them updated,” he said with a huff. "As if they’re doing anything with the information we feed them about this. They’re not even trying to help us look for a cure."
"My understanding is they’ve never received a sample of the bacteria,” Lira said. That fact had baffled her when she heard it from Jamila. Was the CEO really so possessive he would stand in the way of scientific progress? He’d built an entire Mars colony full of scientists!
"They never wanted a sample,” Marcus said. “You know what I think? They were afraid to have it. They must have known something we didn’t.” He rolled his eyes. “And considering how this is turning out, they were smart to be.”
"They don’t have the bacteria, but they’re helping our microbiologists do research, sending relevant studies, things like that. Aren’t they?” Lira had heard rumors to that effect.
"I don't think so," he said. “The last communication I saw just said stay tuned, we're working on it."
That conversation stuck with Lira for a whole day after it ended. Partly because she didn't think she'd helped Marcus feel better, and partly because if what he said was true, VossCorp wasn’t working very hard to stop the outbreak. Why? This was their colony, something Sorin Voss had poured billions upon billions of dollars into.
And now he was just going to let come what may?
Lira got a clue about why that might be in her first call the next day. A hydro tech told her about a message she'd gotten from an uncle in Sarajevo.
"It's forty-seven degrees Celsius every day there now. He can't go outdoors during the day at all anymore," the tech, Lys, said. "The Miljacka is so low kids walk across it, and the water is sludge thanks to all the pollution.”
She told Lira about the potato barrel her uncle had on his balcony, extra calories just in case, but Lira was thinking of her mother a continent away in Manila.
She hadn't heard back after her message about the ring. It always took a long time for a message to get to Earth and a reply to come back, especially with VossCorp first running all the colonist communications through Valence's filters to make sure they complied with company policy. Those filters had become even more strict after Ada was jailed, and they were certainly working overtime right now.
Mention of a deadly bacterial outbreak would get a message sent to quarantine. Lira knew better, but how many other colonists had attempted to reach out to their loved ones with the news in the past few days?
If Sarajevo was so hot, how was Manila faring, thirty lines of latitude closer to the equator? Was the flooding getting worse? Would her mom ever let go of that house and move to higher ground or would it take a rescue team to come get her in a boat while she sat on her roof?
Could she even climb to the roof with her knees?
That could be a reason why VossCorp wasn’t helping. They were based in Houston, just fifteen meters above sea level. The daily briefings from mission control often reported that humidity there was nearly one hundred percent all the time now, coupled with rising temperatures and rolling blackouts. Houston was on the verge of existential crisis, like many places on Earth. Were they too busy fighting for their lives to help the colonists fight for theirs?
"Has your uncle ever grown potatoes before?" Lira asked, trying to put her attention back on the conversation.
"No, but he's obsessed with them now," Lys said. "He brings it inside at the hottest part of the day and mists the soil with whatever he can spare from his water rations. He didn’t have any children, but he has potatoes now."
Lira let her talk until the potato topic ran dry, then shifted the focus to the rabbits hopping around near her. She told Lys their names, a little about their personalities, and promised to introduce her in person as soon as the quarantine ended.
“If you don’t have the credits, I’ll spot you,” she said.
By the time the call was over, it felt like she’d actually moved the needle a little bit, unlike with Marcus the day before. Unlike a lot of them, who needed to vent but stayed on edge, on the verge of panic, no matter what Lira tried.
Plus, she had the rumors emanating from the microbiology lab to contend with.
It seemed like on every other call, there were new reports from the microbiologists: They confirmed it was V. martialis, however, it had mutated. They thought the radiation exposure had worsened the illness in the dig crew. They reported that those who'd received broad-spectrum antibiotics showed a slowed progression – they were all still alive sixteen hours after the onset of symptoms.
Good news, but it caused a new set of problems. New demands for prophylactics flooded the system, but the doses weren’t available.
And when it somehow leaked that there were only a hundred and fifty courses left in the entire colony, people got desperate.
When the first person with second-level exposure died on day four, that was the match lit next to an oxygen tank.
LIRA
YEAR: 2083
“Dr. Ethan Kalb’s biometrics are offline.”
The warm female voice that VossCorp had assigned to Valence was jarringly ill-suited to the message it had just delivered through the rabbitat speakers. Lira had been trying to contact Dr. Kalb with no luck, and then she’d thought to search for him on the hab map.
She couldn’t find him. Anywhere.
