Elevation, page 1
Elevation
Space Agent Jonathan Bartell Book 5
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
About the Author
More By This Author
Chapter One
At the outer reaches of the solar system, the ice world of Miranda was the forefront of human settlement.
The ball of rock and ice hung in the ink darkness, rendered in hues of white, grey and blue. The strange scarred and pitted moon had no atmosphere, but clouds of particles glittered in the sunlight that was pale and washed out, but that still had, somehow, the strength to cast sharp shadows in the craters and clefts of the inhospitable surface.
The moon itself was one of Uranus’s smallest round satellites, marked with pits and cracks, reminiscent of a walnut that had lain on the road and that had been run over, trodden on and kicked without shattering.
It was beautiful. It was alien. It was utterly inhospitable.
Jonathan peered at the screens in front of the pilot.
The shuttle was now too close to see the moon in its entirety, and the roughness of its surface became clearer.
Jonathan and Gaby had boarded the shuttle at Lotus-III Space Station, a functional and unimaginative military outpost that belied its romantic name—seriously, who named these settlements?
It was a small vehicle, dedicated to take just Jonathan and Gaby and three other military personnel down to the surface.
The three sat in the rows behind Jonathan. They were local workers returning from leave. Low-ranked personnel, all of them quite young, who had probably earned their trip off the ice ball by displaying a high level of good behaviour.
They were bemused about Jonathan and Gaby’s presence, and had quizzed them relentlessly about the latest news from the inner system. Out here, bandwidth for personal use was a rare commodity, and the lower-ranked personnel got the short end of it. But, having exhausted Jonathan’s knowledge about sport, they had fallen silent. Jonathan knew little about the subject anyway.
The pilot, Flight Officer Young, had already explained that not many visitors came to Miranda. It was a long way from anywhere.
The only settlement on the surface was a military base, the purpose of its existence somewhat mysterious, like all such bases.
“Are we flying over the plains to the west of the base?” Jonathan asked.
As far as he and Gaby had been told, this was the area that was the reason for their visit. Major Edmundsen had said something about weirdly-shaped ice cracks and unusual bacterial life. From their communication with the Research Officer Bernard Vika, Jonathan guessed the landscape would be something to behold when viewed from the air.
"We can’t enter that area,” Young said.
“Why not?”
“The sector is closed to all traffic for security reasons.”
"What?" Jonathan asked. “What sort of reasons?”
“This area is contaminated with an unknown type of bacteria. Dr. Vika doesn’t want anyone to go into it.”
“But the bacteria are on the ground.”
“It’s what I’ve been told. All ships must avoid the area. You can raise it with him if you want access.”
Jonathan would want access, and to ban even flights over the area sounded a tad excessive, but who was he to question? A local would have much more insight into the problem.
He glanced at the utterly desolate landscape passing underneath the shuttle. “Do you get a lot of traffic out here?”
“Quite a few ships.”
“All the way out here? What sort of ships? I didn’t think the Force had any nearby bases.”
“We get visits from military and commercial ships.”
That was not what Jonathan had expected to hear. “Commercial? Are there any companies all the way out here?"
As far as he knew, this area was fully under Space Force control.
”Oh yes. The commercials like to say that they arrived here first.”
“What are they doing here?”
“All kinds of things. Microgravity industry, spaceship design, base design, you name it.”
“And mining?” Although there was so much to mine just in the asteroid belt that there would be little pressure to venture further out in the solar system, since the risk to personnel increased the further out you went.
“Yes, mining, too. All kinds of rare resources.”
“On the surface?” Jonathan found that strange. Most mining was in space because it was so much easier.
“They want to mine the ice, and take sub-surface samples, and if they can’t get the permits, they will try to land illegally when we’re not looking. They operate from large base ships that can move very quickly.”
Gaby, seated next to Jonathan, snorted. “Sounds like the wild west.”
“It is,” Young said. “Complete with skirmishes and contraband.”
Jonathan said, “They will actually smuggle surface samples? What compound is valuable enough to justify that?”
“Rare earths, mostly. Have you seen the market value of a kilo of Dysprosium lately? Or Cobalt? There is a huge grey market for those.”
“Good grief. Have they forgotten that we’re trying to win a fight against microbe infections? They’ll spread contamination that way.” The subsurface water reservoirs of these moons were hotbeds of bacterial contamination, waiting for a warm human ship to proliferate.
Young nodded. “Not just that. They’re under-resourced, get into trouble and then we’re expected to rescue them. We’ve already had a couple of cases. One group of idiots got a truck wedged in a crevasse. It was an enormous operation trying to reach them. They were there illegally.”
"Is anyone taking action against these people?" Gaby asked.
"Trying to. When those idiots with the truck were rescued, the base commander ordered the louts to be put in a lockup. But their boss protested and there was a big stink about that he had no authority to detain civilians—which he hadn’t, so he had to let them go—and pay for their passage to Lotus-III. They’re leeches. Sooner or later someone’s going to get hurt, and I can make no promises about the ability or willingness of the people on the ground to help them. Worse, because they’re civilians, they don’t fall under base command, but they do expect us to go out there and rescue them.”
Yes, Jonathan knew that people forever skirted rules and tried to make money doing illegal things. How much was it the authorities’ responsibility to save people from themselves? Which authorities? Especially since most authorities were heavily engaged in cover-my-rear-end activities.
Young spoke to someone on the surface.
The screen showed the face of a woman wearing a headset in a well-lit room.
A moment later, he said, ”I’ve got permission. Hang on. We are going in."
Jonathan checked his harness, which was already done up pretty tightly.
Then again, the small moon had next to no gravity and the manoeuvring wouldn't be half as tight as on some of the other worlds he had visited.
He looked at Gaby. Best to be quiet while Young did his job.
The three grunts behind them had stopped talking, too. It seemed he was not the only person not terribly keen on landings.
Young steered the craft into a curve for the final approach.
The pitted surface on the screen slid past without indication what was up or down.
Jonathan felt a bit queasy.
Then Young said to traffic control, “I’m spotting an unidentified object travelling in our direction at speed. Can you confirm its identity?“
The crackling voice said, "Negative. We have no outgoing."
"It’s recording a much higher temperature than surrounding space. The NAR shows it coming closer, EITA at 4:23. Scan says it’s 95% likely to be artificial. Request to take evasive action.”
“Granted.”
"There." One of the men behind them pointed at the screen.
Now Jonathan could see it, too. A speck of light was coming in their direction, getting bigger at a rather alarming rate.
Young looked over his shoulder. “Hang on back there. I’m going to change course.”
And change course, he did. He pulled out the manual override column and steered the craft in a hard corner.
The landscape on the projection screen shot away, replaced by the darkness of space, then a bright speck that was the sun appeared, followed by a vast band of light-coloured specks: one of Uranus’s pale rings.
Jonathan lost all sense of direction.
The forward screens didn’t show the approaching object anymore, but one of the side cameras was trained on it.
It got bigger and bigger, until Jonathan could just make out that it was round like a ball, and reflected the sunlight off a smooth, metallic surface. Then it zoomed past, fast g
"Evasive action successful," Young reported to traffic control.
"What the hell was that?" Gaby asked.
Chapter Two
The shuttle came down to the surface with no further incident. The gravity on the moon was so light that all disembarking passengers were supplied with magnetic boots so that they could walk relatively normally on the magnetic surface. This was all right as long as your boots were in contact with the ground, but it felt distinctly odd when lifting your feet. Jonathan had been to the Moon, and he knew what that felt like. This was much worse.
Young announced that the onboard communication system had logged a message for Jonathan to meet Bernard Vika in the base next to the space port, the central—and pretty much only—settlement on Miranda. Jonathan had looked up the details and found that the military had only a few thousand people on the surface. Most of them were probably not volunteers.
But as they were about to disembark, Young asked him, "I would like you to come with me to the traffic control centre if you don't mind. I need to file a report about the unknown outgoing object. A witness report will be most valuable."
“Yes," Gaby said, just in case Jonathan hadn't already understood the motivation behind Young’s request.
It was always a struggle to convince your superior officers that you were still in a proper mental state to do your job. Once an incident happened, your file started to expand with doubt, and there came a point where, no matter what you did, you were destined to be dismissed from the service for having an “unsound mind”.
Jonathan had seen it happen to his father.
As doctor, Gaby had seen the other side: of space-craziness left unchecked.
A lot of strange stuff happened on these space stations, isolated colonies and long-distance ships. The top brass would say that at least ninety-nine percent of the military behaved properly, to which Gaby would say that it was the one percent that tended to spoil it for the rest. She had intimate experience with the victims of that one percent.
It was a continuous battle.
After Young finished the debrief to the control room, he, Jonathan and Gaby went for a walk through the surprisingly spacious buildings. This far from the sun, the light was pale, but strategically-placed mirrors around the halls created the illusion of more light.
When Jonathan commented on the nice buildings of the base, Young said, “It’s a modern base, that’s why. Not a day goes past that some company makes a statement that our bases are soul-destroying and whatnot, but it’s a matter of ageing infrastructure. We can’t upgrade everything all the time, and they would understand that if only they thought about it.”
This seemed a continuation from the discussion they’d had earlier. He seemed to really want to gripe about these non-military businesses.
Jonathan wasn’t particularly interested in his hangups. The discussion turned to the mysterious object they had seen. Jonathan wondered if Young had any idea what it could be, possibly a satellite or some other human made device.
Young said, “This thing was much too big for that. The satellites are no bigger than a box, and they’re in the database so that everyone knows where they are. They don't put out quite as much heat, and when you call them up, they respond."
"I presume the ship tried to communicate with this object?" Jonathan asked.
"It does that automatically, once it establishes that it’s of artificial nature.”
“And it was definitely of artificial nature?”
“I don’t know any other reason why something should be producing heat. It’s my guess it’s something that belongs to the commercials and shouldn’t be there. It was at too low an altitude for it to be a satellite anyway.”
Those commercials again. Walking behind Young, Gaby actually rolled her eyes.
They arrived at the office, a spacious room where four people wearing headsets sat facing a bank of screens. Various moving specks of light drifted in the blackness of space, each accompanied with their registration numbers. Those were approaching vehicles, a surprising number of them.
The base was a research station, Jonathan knew. Did that justify this many visitors?
"I want to file a report," Young said to the female operator who addressed him.
He told her what had happened, and she asked him questions about the nature of the object and what they had seen. She asked Jonathan and Gaby what they had seen, too. Not having been privy to the shuttle’s read out, Jonathan could only describe what he had seen on the screen. That it was definitely an artificial object, that didn't look like it was communicating with the shuttle, and that it had disappeared into space. It was a weirdly defensive procedure, as Young had already outlined, designed to indicate no wrongdoing on Young’s side, rather than finding out what the object was.
He gathered that if he had been in space that long, he would probably react the same. For that space was so vast, the reality of these people became very close-minded. Hang onto your job. Prove you've done nothing wrong. Prove you are still capable of doing it. Prove that you’re not mad, an axe murderer, or even contaminated with alien microbes.
He knew what happened to those people when they were sent back to Earth. His father had been one.
Chapter Three
All of a sudden, the people in the control room went quiet. Backs straightened. A coffee cup disappeared under the desk. The staff nodded polite greetings.
Someone had come into the room behind Jonathan and Gaby.
The newcomer was a stiff-faced man in officer uniform with patches that identified him as Major in the Auxiliary Division - Research B. Vika.
He was quite tall with dark eyes, dark hair and the overly bronzed skin that was quite common amongst inhabitants of the outer system bases who spent too much time in the solar capsules.
"There you are, finally,” he said, meeting Jonathan’s eyes.
Jonathan glanced at the Control Centre workers, all of them lower-ranked officers. This guy was really that scary, huh?
"I'm sorry about the delay. We were just about to come and meet you,” Jonathan said.
The man held out his hand. "I'm Bernard Vika. Senior Research Officer of Miranda Base Station.”
Jonathan shook his hand. “I’m Jonathan Bartell, and this is Gaby Larson, my partner."
It felt good to finally be able to say that, and to mean the word partner in all possible interpretations of the word.
"Pleased to meet you," Gaby said in her professional voice.
They started walking, out of the control room.
"What did they want over there?" Bernard asked while they walked down the corridor.
"We almost had a run in with some object just when we were coming into the base," Gaby said. “The pilot wanted to file a report and asked us to file witness reports. We were witnesses, so we—”
“Young could have told me.”
Whoa. This character was not to be messed with. Jonathan said, “I’m sorry, I should have notified you, but usually in small bases, news like this travels quickly and I thought you would have heard about it—”
“A shuttle almost hitting something? There are small chunks of ice all over the place. They exist at low altitude because of the low gravity. I don’t know why Young wasted your time in this manner.”
Jonathan didn't think it was an ice chunk, but he let it rest. After all whatever they had almost hit was not important. Authorities would sort it out.
“Well, we’re here and ready to start work,” Jonathan said, making an attempt at levity.
“Great. I will take you to the lab first," Vika said.
Crap. Jonathan had hoped to be taken to their rooms. The journey was quite long and he wanted to freshen up and change into more comfortable and less sweaty clothes.
On the other hand, his experience was that many of the scientists that they visited were so keen to get started that they found it hard to give him and Gaby that time.
