Jungle (Colony Book 2), page 22
Well, by association, I guess. His job, after all, was going to be making sure that everyone else could study things. But close enough. After all, I’m sure all those other planets we’ve found had to have some sort of security force along to make, sure everything stayed safe. Probably a real dream job for some of them, though. He smiled. Imagine being the first to set foot on Arcadia.
His fork stuck empty cardboard, and he looked down with surprise to see that his meal was mostly gone, only traces of gravy left in the corners of the package. Well, I guess that’s that, then. The plastic of the fork let out a faint hum as he scraped it over the waxed cardboard, gathering up the last traces of his food. Time to get to work.
He dropped the packaging in the disposal by the door as he walked out, leaving little sign that he’d been in the galley other than the missing meals. The commons room was empty, but he paused for a minute anyway, taking in the view through the overhead glass and fighting to keep his balance as a sense of vertigo struck him.
Amazing. None of the stars’ positions made sense—in fact, he wasn’t even sure of some of them were stars. For all I know, some of those brighter ones are planets … though I thought we were heading out of the system rather than into it? Maybe across?
Either way, the view’s still impressive. He couldn’t recall who had told him in the meeting that the conference room paled in comparison to the commons room, but they’d been right. Like the room below it, one wall and part of the other two had been made of transparent material so that the occupants could look out, but with most of the ceiling being made of it as well …
It’s like standing on a cliff, Jake thought, stepping up to the front of the room, just shy of the glass. A faint chill crept across his face, the dark cold of space fighting to make it through the whatever material had been used in making the view. Except instead of staring off at some distant landscape, a single step feels like it could be out into the stars.
He brought his eyes back down, away from the uncountable pinpricks and closer to reality. Ahead of him, the top side of the Sojourner stretched across his view, grey metal lit by running lights that glowed faintly against the distant black. There were other sources of light too—most of it from a matching bit of glass further forward down the front of the ship. The conference room they’d used earlier.
Well, I can see why they’ve got the seats in this room laid out the way they do, he thought, turning away from the glass. Though I’d think it’d be a little hard to focus on work with such an expanse stretching by overhead. Speaking of which …
He took a last look out of the window, watching as some of the closer pinpricks of light slowly slid across the sky. Ships, most likely, though coming or going, he couldn’t tell. Or maybe satellites.
Crud, for all I know they’re space stations, or just hunks of rock reflecting sunlight.
Still, as impressive as it was to watch … It’s not doing anything to help me get my part of this new job done. He turned away from the window, heading for side of the common room. There were only the two rooms on the topmost deck of the ship, not counting a crew-only storage area that was beyond the elevators. But outside of that, the commons and the galley were the only reason to visit the topmost deck of the Sojourner, and as a result there wasn’t much to distract him as he made his way back to the elevators.
Deck … one. The elevator let out a soft chime as he made his selection, the doors rolling shut. At some point he’d have to see what deck two was dedicated to, but at the moment …
There was a momentary sense of lightness that took him to his toes as the elevator dropped towards the first deck. Weird how we get that inertia in an elevator in space … where there isn’t gravity, but not on Earth, where there is, he thought. Beneath him, the elevator swapped speeds, momentum pressing him down as the car slowed to a stop. Must have something to do with how the artificial gravity works.
The elevator doors slid open, and the first thing he heard was the voice of the one who’d “greeted” him and Anna at the door to their quarters. “—I’m saying is it would work.”
“Sure it would, Johan,” someone else said. It took Jake a moment to place the voice as belonging to Naomi, the rough-looking biochemist from Hades. “A lot of things work.” The pair were standing in the hallway, Naomi clearly interested in stepping inside her quarters with one hand in the doorway, Johan clearly trying to persuade her otherwise. “But just because it could work doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“But—”
“I have work to prepare for,” the biochemist said as she stepped through the door. “Something you yourself should be thinking of, rather than pressuring the group to find ways to name the planet in your favor.”
“Bu—” Naomi didn’t even give Johan time to finish his sentence, shutting the door in his face. He stood there for a moment, a sullen look on his face, then turned and spotted Jake by the elevators.
“Hey!” he said, a smile on his face and his arms open wide. “There’s our corporate guy.”
“I’m an investigator of corporate crimes, not a manager,” Jake said, trying to suppress an inward sigh. Apparently, the earlier glimpses of Johan’s energetic personality had been right in line with his normal attitude.
“Sure, sure, but now you’re our guardsman. Security man!” He took a step forward, flashing a grin. “So … thought about what you want to name the planet yet?”
“No,” Jake admitted. Is he like this all the time? There were bound to be those who took issue with the man’s in-your-face attitude eventually. Then again … it’s disarming. Good cover.
“Well you should!” Johan slid up alongside Jake, snapping his fingers. “We’re going to be the first ones on it, so we’re going to get to name it! We’ve all got to be thinking about that. Eternal glory!”
“Do you know who named Mirkshir?” Jake asked.
“I …” The ecologist paused, a look of puzzlement on his face. “No …” he said slowly, his forehead wrinkling. “I don’t.” Then his expression brightened again. “But I do know the origin of the name!”
“Oh?” Random factoid memorized as part of a cover? Or just a random fact in general?
“Yup,” Johan said, oblivious to Jake’s internal scrutiny. “Lots of forests, dim central star, you know, you know … It was named after the Mirkwood from the book The Hobbit. By Tolkien.”
“Never read it,” Jake said, frowning. That’s a good disarming fact, I’ll give him that. “I think I remember seeing an old movie of it once, in a classics collection—”
“You should read the book sometime,” Johan said, cutting him off. “It’s a classic for a reason. The movies …”
“They made more than one?”
“Rebooted like clockwork every thirty years or so. A lot of ‘em are pretty far from the source material.”
And we’re pretty far off topic, Jake thought. “You read a lot growing up?”
“A bit,” Johan said. “Mirkshir’s a bit out of the way.”
“How’d you become an ecologist?”
Johan shrugged. “Just sort of fell into it. It was interesting. It’s like looking at a puzzle, or a really complex machine. Everything fits together—not always perfectly, but it fits. Sometimes something looks like it doesn’t fit, but it really does. Other times, you get something that really doesn’t fit, and the whole system shifts because of it.”
Well, at least he likes his work. “You ever see anything like that?”
“What, an upset? Sure. Happens all the time. Gets all the bleeding-heart clockstoppers in UNSEC all bent out of shape, but there’s not much they can do to stop it.”
“Clockstoppers?”
“In a minute,” Johan said, lifting a finger and cocking his head to the side. “First question first. Back on Mirkshir we’ve got a particular breed of tree-spider. More of a land-based crab, really. Anyway, they’re garbage feeders, right? They live off of the scraps of the ecosystem on the continent where they’re based. Anyway, mankind shows up and starts living life, right? And making garbage. Follow me so far?”
Jake nodded. Pretty straightforward. “Garbage attracts tree-spiders?”
“Ah, but does it stop there?” Johan asked, his eyebrows waggling. “Answer: It doesn’t. Man makes refuse in piles, looking to create ground that can grow low-light crops. Tree-spiders love it. Suddenly tree-spiders are hanging around garbage piles and eating a lot. Now, that would almost lead to a boom in the population, but at the same time, tree-spiders have predators. One of which flies. Normally, tree-spiders would be under trees, but …” He shrugged. “Garbage piles man makes tend to be more open.”
“So … predator boom?”
“Not by much, but yes,” Johan said. “And you’d think that’d unbalance everything, right? But if you did, you’d be wrong. See, tree-spiders started changing. Adaptation. The original ones are more deep forest spiders now. The new ones? They come in two types: Fast and quick, or hard to catch, and nocturnal, so the birds aren’t able to hunt them as effectively. And the system balances itself out, see?” He shrugged again. “Puzzle pieces. An ecosystem is like an old-world watch, with thousands of tiny little parts, all shifting. Hence my extreme skepticism that this as-yet-unnamed planet we’re heading to really is a single biome planet.”
“Right,” Jake said, nodding. Still doesn’t prove anything. A case like that would be well-documented. He could have read about it. “What about that clockstopper thing?”
“Oh, them?” Johan rolled his eyes. “Bleeding heart ‘environmentalists’ who don’t know a thing about how the world works. They go on and on about ‘evolution’ and ‘the natural world,’ but anytime anything like it actually happens in nature, they try to stop it. Night comes, and all they want to do is freeze everything in its tracks. Make the world so it never changes. Clockstoppers. Annoying, uneducated, know-it-all dreglickers who thrive on telling other people what to do.”
“Sounds like you’re not a fan,” Jake said.
“Well, since they actively exist to screw up my job, yeah, I don’t like ‘em. People like them are the reason we don’t have polar bears anymore.”
“Wait? What?”
“Well, outside of zoos.” Johan shrugged. “Anyway, no matter how interesting this ecosystem on K-2-whatever is, bet they’ll find a way to screw it up.”
“Right.” We’re getting a little off-topic here. “So, what made you part of this expedition? Trouble with those clockstopper people?”
Johan let out a short laugh. “Actually, no,” he said. “And in case you were guessing ahead, it’s not my penchant for bugging everyone either.”
“Wasn’t even thinking it,” Jake replied. It was almost honest.
“No, what got me stuck here was differences in opinion over the way Mirkshir’s natural resources were being exploited.”
“Too much?” Jake prompted.
“As if,” Johan said, throwing his head back. “Too little. We had to import everything! Even wood. You know how much timber there is on Mirkshir?”
“A lot?”
“Yes!” The ecologist threw his hands up in the air. “It’s a planet of forests! All different kinds, all different species. Everything on Mirkshir revolves around those forests! But can we cut them down? No, not unless we’re clearing space for new buildings. Then can we use the wood? No, it has to be returned to its natural environment to rot. Who cares if that dumping comes with its own problems.”
“Like what?”
“They don’t rot easily,” Johan said. “It’s effectively making a … never mind.” He waved a hand. “It’s complicated. Anyway, it’s all stuff like that. Natural fruits that mankind can eat? Ignore them! No cultivation. You want fruits, you import them from Earth, or Harmony, or some other planet.” The ecologist was walking back and forth across the hall now, waving his hands. “It’s dreg is what it is.”
“Probably makes for a thriving black market, though.”
“Oh it does, but local UNSEC authorities come down pretty hard on it,” Johan said. “Anyway, I’ve been pushing back at it for years, since it would do us all a world of good if we could get some of our limitations taken off. I finally put together a massive report that combined about fifteen years’ worth of collected data to show that we would actually be less problematic for the local ecosystem if we integrated some of our economy with it rather than trying to wall it off. Pulled some strings, got a bunch of important people to back it and … wound up here.” He let out a short laugh. “It was that or find a new job.”
“Sounds … well …” He shook his head. “That sounds like UNSEC alright. At least in my experience.”
“Yeah, they made a pretty solid example of things too,” Johan said, scowling and staring at the wall. “Letters to my superiors, thinly-veiled threats about the sources of our funding, pressure on different parts of our organization …” He let out a sigh. “They hit everything and everyone they could. Even went after my dad, though we couldn’t prove it. Used the local council to put pressure on his business. Threatened him with an audit of his resources, claiming that my own numbers had called everyone’s into question. Of course, they were only checking him by pure chance.”
Jake nodded. “Your dad, huh? Are you native to Mirkshir then?”
“Technically, no,” Johan said. “But I’ve always considered myself one. We emigrated from Earth when I was four.”
“Paid?”
Johan shook his head. “No, freeloading. We didn’t have the money for tickets. We just boarded a ship with everyone else UNSEC was shipping offworld. My parents wanted to get away.”
Jake nodded. “New horizons and all that?”
“Pretty much,” Johan replied. “My dad was from China—the Dragon Bloc. My mom was from Korea originally. One of the refugees from North Korea after the quantum bomb went off. Her parents brought her into China, she met my dad, and, well …”
“You?” Jake proffered. Johan let out a short, rapid-fire chuckle.
“Close, but no,” he replied. “I mean, yeah, I was part of it, but no. Korea and China …” He rocked his head back and forth, from one shoulder to the other. “Never really been on the best of terms. Too much bad blood. My dad was raised by traditionalists. My mom, not so much, but that didn’t mean either family ever saw eye to eye. My dad said my mom’s family was more accepting of their relationship than his was, but honestly, that’s not saying much. Plus,” he said, his eyes darting off towards the wall again, as if it was somehow responsible for the situation. “If that were true, maybe we would have stayed with them.”
“So they left.”
“As far as they could go,” Johan said, nodding. “I don’t remember much about the trip. Just that it was crowded and cramped, and my mom got really sick. She uh … didn’t make it.”
“Oh.” He felt a sudden pang of guilt for bringing up the man’s past. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It happened,” Johan said, shrugging. “It was some bug out of South America that we’d never been exposed to. Plus the stress, the tight quarters, everything else. She made it for a few weeks on Mirkshir, but after that …” He shrugged again. “Stuff happens, you know?”
“So you grew up on Mirkshir, then,” Jake said, pulling the subject away from the subject of Johan’s parentage. Plus, if I can get him talking about his life in the colonies, it adds more proof that he’s not working for UNSEC. “What was that like?”
Johan grinned. “Different, but fun. One of the few advantages to UNSEC’s colonization approach of piling everyone onto a ship and dumping them wherever is that it tends to keep everybody from clumping up in isolated groups. Which is kind of what my dad wanted to get away from anyway. I mean, sure, it was a little different—the outpost we started out in only had a few hundred people when we arrived, and after living in the Bloc, well … It was pretty different. Lots of open—well, forested—space, clear skies. I remember being super uncomfortable when we got our own place and I had a room.” He let out a little laugh and shook his head. “I couldn’t handle sleeping all alone at first. It was weird. But … I settled in, made some friends, and did kid stuff before long. Got in trouble, got lost in the woods, that kind of thing.”
“Lost?”
Johan shook his head, letting out a laugh. “Not that big a deal as long as you’re prepared. All the kids on Mirkshir—at least in the outer edges—wore little trackers.” He held up one arm and tapped at his wrist. “The adults let us know what kind of dire trouble we’d be in if we ever took them off for any reason—and made good on it with anyone who did too—so we weren’t in much trouble of getting lost.”
“What about wildlife?”
“Like predators?” Johan shrugged. “We had ‘em. Most of them had learned to steer clear of humans. We didn’t go too far without someone armed, though.”
Jake nodded. “Sounds like you had a lot of fun growing up.” Johan’s answering, almost mischievous grin confirmed his words. “So then … did they have a school on Mirkshir? I mean a university,” he corrected when Johan started to frown.
“Oh, that,” the ecologist said. “Yeah. Just the one, though. There’s only a couple of million people on Mirkshir, most on Silvani—one of the continents,” he added. “Mostly it’s trade schools though, like most colony worlds.”
“Right,” Jake said, nodding along. I guess I’ll take his word for it. “And ecology?”
“It’s a good choice for a world that’s still being discovered,” Johan said. “Plus, after being born in the Bloc, there’s still a lot of wonder to me for something as simple and yet complex as a patch of forest. There isn’t an endless fount of money to do the research with, but there’s plenty enough to discover and enough curious eyes that we weren’t ever short.”
“And then you got tangled up getting in UNSEC’s bad graces when you started noticing a lot of the logical holes in their policies.”
