PLAGUE CITY
by Jonathan Morris
THE SHINING MAN
by Cavan Scott
For Sue and Steve
The rings of Saturn were a sight that Laura Palmer would never tire of. She had been 23 when she caught her first glimpse of them, a rookie travelling back from her first off-world assignment. She had been one year into her Federation Security training, seconded to a military pacification battalion to gain what her squad commander had charmingly referred to as ‘nuts on the ground experience’. That had meant dealing with an Ogron incursion into Federation space; a half-hearted attack on the food supply shuttle delivering grain to the Davy Crockett colony in the Sirius-B system. Dealing with it had been so swift and unsophisticated that her fellow recruits seemed to regard it as little more than boisterous recreation. As far as Laura had been concerned it amounted to a total waste of her time, and had almost resulted in her dropping out of the Security Programme altogether. It was what had happened on her way back to Earth that had changed her mind.
The convoy that she was travelling with had made an unscheduled repair and refuelling stop at Titan. Micrometeorites had punctured the outer casing of the plasma disbursement fins of several ships whilst they were traversing the Kuiper Belt, and there had been a very real danger of catastrophic warp derailment if the damage wasn’t dealt with swiftly. When the announcement came from the flight deck that their journey back home was going to be delayed by nearly seven hours, Laura could have screamed with frustration, but when her troopship had dropped out of hyperspace around Saturn, a single glance out of the viewport next to her seat had changed her life for ever.
Laura was familiar with Saturn of course – she had seen enough documentaries and security training films over the years – but nothing had prepared her for the sheer, breathtaking majesty of the planet up close. The gas giant itself had been impressive enough – a vast glowing ball, its surface dimly reflecting the glow of the distant sun, lightning storms crackling and flashing deep in the depths of the monumental cloudscape – but it was the rings that had made the breath catch in her throat.
They soared round the planet like wings – huge, ethereal, impossibly vast. It had only been when the other recruits around her had started to laugh and jeer that she realised that her jaw was literally hanging open with awe.
Seven hours that had initially seemed like a life sentence of boredom went past in a heartbeat. Whilst her crewmates paced the central corridor of the troop carrier, cursing and whining, poking fun and trying to goad her into responding, Laura had sat as if glued to her seat, face pressed to the viewport, watching the kaleidoscopic display of ice crystals and rock tumble and spin with a grace and elegance that she would never have believed possible.
When the repairs were finally complete and the troopship had started to move out of orbit ready to make the warp jump to Earth, the ache of longing that she felt when the rings slid from her view had been almost too much for her to bear. It was at that point she vowed that she would return to Saturn. Return and live there.
Once back on Earth, Laura hurled herself into her training, spectacularly outperforming her fellow recruits over the next three years and ultimately graduating from the Federation Academy with Honours. That gave her the pick of the security assignments that the Federation had to offer, so it had come as something of a surprise to her commanding officer when she requested assignment to Kollo-Zarnista Facility 27.
Laura could still recall the look of bemusement on his face when he had summoned her to his office. Frank Gammadoni had been good to her during her years at the Academy, and it was only fair that she provided him with the explanation that he obviously wanted.
The Datapad sitting on his desk was active with her request for assignment, unsigned but obviously not unread, when she entered his office. As he gestured for her to sit down, he had picked it up and read through it again.
‘Kollo-Zarnista?’ A well-manicured eyebrow had risen slowly in bemused disbelief. ‘Palmer, are you aware of what that facility is?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s a dead end. It’s a babysitting job, it is so far beneath your ability that I can’t even—’
‘It’s not what the facility is, sir.’ To this day Laura still couldn’t believe that she’d had the nerve to interrupt him like that. ‘It’s where it is.’
‘Ah …’ A look of understanding had flickered across Colonel Gammadoni’s face. ‘Saturn.’
‘Sir, if you will allow me to explain—’
‘There’s no need.’ This time it was the Colonel’s turn to interrupt. Placing the Datapad back on the desk, he had pushed back his chair, and walked to the huge picture window that looked out across the rain lashed skyscrapers of New York City. Several seconds had passed before he spoke, his Italian-American accent warm and mellow.
‘I must have been about your age when I got my first glimpse of Saturn. I was a volunteer aboard one of the construction tugs assigned to the reconstruction of the Titan refuelling platform after the great fire of 5012. Have you ever been to Titan, Palmer?’
He hadn’t waited for her reply.
‘It’s brown. All of it. The corridors of the bases, the uniforms, the ground, the sky, the very air … brown. The three months I spent there were the closest thing to living in hell that I ever want to experience.’
He had paused for a second, lost in thirty-year-old memories.
‘My gang boss must have just got fed up with looking at my miserable face for day on end. Crocker was quite a character, bald as a coot, one eye missing and with a jerry-rigged pneumatic arm that went wrong practically on a weekly basis. He’d been out on the frontier his entire adult life. One day he just grabbed me by the collar with that rusty old arm of his, bundled me into a shuttle pod, and took me up to see the rings.’
The Colonel had paused again, then without a further word had turned, lifted the Datapad from his desk and stamped it with his digital signature.
‘Assignment approved.’
That had been four years ago, and Laura was about to start her fourth tour of duty as the Federation Security Liaison Officer to the Kollo-Zarnista Mining Operation. Her fourth year living and working around Saturn. And unfortunately, her fourth visit to Titan. The problem was that in order to get to Saturn, you had to spend time here first. Laura had come in on one of the deep-space transporters late last night. As soon as she had landed she had presented her ID to the base supervisor, handed her kitbag over to the shuttle loading crews, and registered her g-Taser with the base security mainframe. Then she went down to the rec level to kill the hours until the shuttle picked her up for the last leg of her journey …
As Laura stepped through the door of the gloomy company bar, several grizzled heads looked up in hopeful expectation, and then looked away almost as quickly as soon as they caught sight of the Federation Security Service badge on her cap and the dark stubby shape of the g-Taser on her belt. Sometimes the fear of authority was a blessing.
She grabbed a menu off the bar and ordered a salt beef sandwich and a beer. The barman barely made eye contact with her, pouring her beer in silence, and handing over the rather limp-looking sandwich with a look of nervous mistrust. He obviously didn’t like having security personnel in his bar.
Paying for the meal with the chip in her wrist, Laura took a long gulp of her beer. Thirst slated, she crossed to a window seat, pulled off her cap, and shook her hair loose. She glanced around at her surroundings and smiled. Colonel Gammadoni had been dead right about one thing: Titan was indeed brown. The construction teams had tried their best to disguise the prefabricated modules and bare rock walls of the facility, but a corporate lack of imagination permeated everything, from furniture to colour scheme to signage.
Taking another sip of her beer, her gaze drifted to the vista outside the thick, triple-glazed window, watching the thick fog drift sluggishly across the rust-brown dunes of Titan. She craned her neck, peering up past the spinning radar dishes and untidy aerial arrays that ringed the edge of the base. High above those murky, pendulous clouds was Saturn.
She closed her eyes. Only a few hours to go …
It was only when the harsh blaring noise of the embarkation klaxon jolted her upright that Laura realised she had dropped off to sleep. Cursing her lack of discipline, she scrambled from the table, snatching up her cap and pushing the uneaten sandwich to one side. She hurried across the bar and out into the corridor. A dozen or so mining personnel were making their way towards the shuttle bay, amongst them were a couple of familiar figures. She jogged to catch up with them.
‘Jenny! Arcon!’
‘Laura.’ Jenny Flowers gave her a huge hug. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Arcon grinned and tousled her hair with a massive hand. ‘This one would never leave if she could get away with it.’
Laura slapped the big African’s hand away in mock irritation. ‘At least I come back because I want to. Every year you tell me you’re going to leave for something better and every year when I get back, here you are.’
‘Ah, well this year it’s going to be different.’ Arcon tapped at a patch on his overalls.
Laura peered at the badge and raised an eyebrow. ‘Someone was stupid enough to promote you to Supervisor?’
‘A woman of great taste and discretion.’ Arcon flashed a grin at Jenny. Jenny was a senior manager at Kollo-Zarnista Mining, and it was a badly kept secret that she and Arcon had been an item for some time.
Laura gave Arcon a hug. ‘That’s great, I’m pleased for you.’ The significance of the promotion suddenly hit her. ‘So, you really are going to be leaving Saturn?’
Arcon shrugged. ‘No supervisor vacancies here. Not unless Delitsky is planning on retiring sometime soon. There are openings on the Jupiter operation.’
‘Or Neptune, if the rumours are to be believed,’ said Jenny with worried sigh, obviously not thrilled about the prospect.
Arcon’s cheery manner evaporated. ‘Neptune is never going to happen,’ he snapped.
There was an awkward pause. Laura said nothing. The truth was she had seen the security assessments for a potential diamond mine on Neptune and it was a far more likely proposition than Arcon realised. It was also predicted to be the most dangerous assignment in the solar system, and Federation officials were already balking at the potential costs of maintaining a security presence then. If it went ahead, Jenny would have every right to be worried about his safety.
Any further conversation on the topic was halted as a warning siren sounded and, with a hiss of hydraulics, the huge pressure doors in front of them started to slide open, revealing the shuttle beyond. The ship was ancient; its once pristine hull pitted with the scars from dozens of meteorite hits and caked with the dark brown mud that covered the surface of Titan.
The massive doors hit their stops with a thump that shook the floor. The little crowd of impatient passengers bustled forward, making their way through the tangle of umbilical cables that snaked across the hangar and up the steep loading ramp that jutted from the belly of the shuttle.
Promising to catch up with Jenny and Arcon once she had reported in, Laura hurried to her assigned seat and strapped herself in. The pilot was obviously on a tight schedule, because no sooner had the ground crew checked the last person on board than the cabin lights dimmed and the loading ramp started to retract. The second that it locked into place, a harsh electronic voice echoed around the shuttle interior.
‘All ground personnel please vacate immediately. Depressurisation countdown in progress. Repeat. Depressurisation countdown in progress.’
A few moments later, the shuttle vibrated violently as the last traces of breathable atmosphere in the hangar were vented into space, and Laura felt the familiar lurch in her stomach as the launch pad started its climb towards the airlock doors that separated the hangar from the toxic atmosphere of Titan.
Reaching into her jacket pocket, she removed her comms unit and slipped the tiny bud into her right ear, tuning the frequency to that of flight control. Immediately the chatter between the shuttle pilot and the traffic control team filled her ears, drowning out all other noise. Laura adjusted the volume so that it was a little more background. Monitoring traffic control was by no means part of her duties, but it had become something of a prelaunch ritual for her. A perk of the job, she liked to think.
‘Transport shuttle Glamorgan, this is Titan flight control. All lights green on my board. Launch window is clear. Kollo-Zarnista guidance beacon is activated.’
‘Thank you, Titan. Umbilicals retracted. Raising radiation flare shields now.’
‘Roger that, Glamorgan. Retracting main hangar doors in five. Four. Three. Two. One. You are clear for launch. Have a good flight.’
With a deafening roar that drowned out the voices in Laura’s ear, the shuttle’s main engines ignited and she was pressed back into the padding of her seat as the little spacecraft launched itself into the thick Titan clouds.
Laura shifted her attention to the tiny porthole alongside her. Clouds of vapour and streams of liquid methane streaked across the window as the shuttlecraft tore itself free of the atmosphere. Gradually the choking clouds started to thin out and then, abruptly, the clouds were gone and there was nothing but blackness and stars beyond the window.
The star-scape started to slide across her field of view as the shuttle banked, and Laura held her breath, waiting for the sight that she had been dreaming of for the last three months.
Slowly the planet came into view. Vast. Beautiful. Like nothing else in the solar system. Saturn and its rings.
Laura let out her breath with a deep, contented sigh.
She was home.
Kollo-Zarnista Mining Facility 27 hung ugly and motionless amongst the swirling clouds of Saturn. Nearly a quarter of a mile across, it was home to over three hundred miners and support personnel and had now been in almost constant operation for over fifteen years.
In design it was little more than a vast, thick disc, twenty storeys high, the smooth, featureless hull broken only by the four chunky gravity inverters set at equidistant points along its circumference. Pinecone-like in appearance, the strange, bulbous shapes of the huge machines were totally at odds with the construction of the rest of the station, the unfamiliar lines betraying the non-human origins of their design. Each inverter was made up of a series of overlapping plates that constantly tilted and turned as they compensated for the immense gravitational grip of the planet below, their ceaseless movement occasionally revealing a sickly yellow/green light glowing deep within the alien machines.
Tucked in tight beneath the main disc was the mine-head itself, an untidy tangle of command and support modules, dominated by the four vast winches that formed the core of the facility.
Inside the main control room, Rig Chief Jorgen Delitsky glanced impatiently at his watch as the seconds ticked down relentlessly towards the start of mining operations for the day. The shuttle was running behind schedule, and that would result in the mine starting its first shift behind schedule too. Today was not a good day for that to happen.
He glanced across to where Nettleman and Rince were standing at the main control bank. The two Kollo-Zarnista senior executives had arrived the day before yesterday to conduct what they kept referring to as an ‘urgent investigation’, but as far as Delitsky was concerned they had done nothing but get in the way and waste everyone’s time since they got here. They had demanded a tour of the facility, had called dozens of meetings with senior managers to go through figures and review security arrangements, and spent the rest of the time asking for coffee every five minutes and generally distracting his people from their work.
Even now, when everyone should be concentrating on their duties, the two company men were chatting with his extraction team as if they were all at some fancy drinks reception. Claire Robbins, currently on scanning duty, had barely glanced at her screens in the last ten minutes. It was time to put a stop to it.
‘Robbins!’ Delitsky’s voice was like a whip-crack across the room.
Robbins jumped, swinging her chair back to the controls that she had been neglecting with a wince. ‘Sorry, Chief.’
Delitsky was pleased to see the smiles drop from the faces of Nettleman and Rince. It was time for them to learn who was really in charge around here. ‘I’m still waiting for an ETA on that shuttle docking!’
‘On it.’
She busied herself with the controls. ‘Shuttle locked on beacon. Gravity funnel holding steady. Docking expected at zero plus seven.’
Delitsky gave a frown of irritation. Seven minutes behind schedule. That wasn’t going to look good for any of them. He turned to the small figure in grey overalls perched at the control console next to him. Jenloz was their designated Cancri liaison for the mine, responsible for the maintenance and operation of all the non-human equipment. He was also currently Acting Chief Engineer.
‘Anything we can do to speed them up, Jenloz?’
The little Cancri looked at him inquisitively. ‘Meaning?’
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ Delitsky muttered under his breath. ‘Tweak the settings on the gravity funnel, bring that shuttle in a little bit faster.’
Jenloz tutted theatrically, amusement making his startling green eyes sparkle like emeralds. ‘Really, Chief? You know how strict the rules are with regard to gravity compensation procedures. Are you sure you want to break them with the company bigwigs watching?’
Delitsky gave a wry grin. ‘It might be worth it to see their faces when they realise that the shuttle is coming into the docking cradle at maximum speed, but no, you’re probably right.’
‘A slight adjustment might be possible, Chief. Let me see what I can do to shave a few minutes off the ETA.’
‘That’s great, Jenloz. Let Tobins know what you’re doing.’
Gerry Tobins was the longstanding pilot of the Glamorgan, and Delitsky knew that he wouldn’t mind bending a few rules if it helped his punctuality figures.
As the little Cancri busied himself making adjustments to the gravity controls, Delitsky turned to face the rest of his crew. ‘Listen up, people. We’re expecting docking confirmation in the next five to seven minutes. I want all ionisation crews ready to spark up as soon as that confirmation comes in. No excuses!’
The control room was suddenly alive with activity as the crew settled into a familiar routine. Deliberately ignoring the two company executives, Delitsky made his way down the short stairwell to the command pod, slipping into one of the seats and fitting a comms bud into his ear.
In the brightly lit hangar below him, the squat grey shape of the mining bell sat in its support cradle, waiting for the hatch below to open, and the long descent into the Saturnian atmosphere to begin. Like the mine itself, the spherical pod featured the pinecone-like inverters that bulged from the metal skin like some strange, alien fungus, glowing with that unhealthy green inner light. Boiler-suited technicians scurried around the sphere like ants, checking fittings, making adjustments.
Delitsky flicked a switch on the communication console in front of him. ‘You all right in there, Baines?’
‘Oh, sure. You know how much I love my pressure armour. That’s why I named it!’
Delitsky grinned. The two dozen men and women specially trained for the extreme-depth diamond mining all had a peculiar love-hate relationship with the Cancri-designed pressure armour that they had to work in. They referred to themselves as ‘the Diamond Dogs’, and each of them had customised their individual suits of armour with lurid and crude graffiti – much to the disgust of Jenloz. Roger Baines had painted his suit a vivid red, with the words ‘Queen Bitch’ emblazoned across the shoulders. Delitsky was convinced that the Cancri’s insistence that an elevated pressure level was maintained inside the suits was purely because he was unhappy with this disrespect of his equipment.
Delitsky recalled that Baines had actually argued that the suits were an unnecessary additional precaution given the extreme safety testing that the mining bells themselves went through, but Federation insurance brokers and Kollo-Zarnista health and safety officers all insisted on the double redundancy feature, and having seen first-hand what the pressures of Saturn were capable of, Delitsky wasn’t about to argue with them.
Baines’s voice crackled in his ear once more. ‘What’s the holdup, Chief? Shouldn’t we have been under way by now?’
‘Shuttle’s late. Blame Tobins.’
Baines cursed loudly. ‘The sooner Tobins gets that transfer to the outer rim that he keeps banging on about, the better.’
‘I hear you.’
A light on the communications panel started to blink, and Delitsky tapped at the bud in his ear, changing channels. ‘I hope you have good news for me, Robbins,’ he growled.
‘The Glamorgan’s just docked, Chief. Shuttle bay crew are locking it down now.’
‘That’s what I wanted to hear.’ Delitsky tapped the ear bud again, leaning forward and barking into the microphone in front of him. ‘All crew, this is Delitsky.’ His voice boomed from speakers around the control room. ‘The transport shuttle has already put us behind schedule, so I don’t want any of you giving me reasons that will make that situation any worse. All prep teams clear the hangar. Ionisation teams, commence countdown.’
He shut off the microphone and leaned back in his seat, watching the crew in the hangar bay below him hurrying to their stations, closing the huge pressure doors behind them. In the background a harsh electronic countdown had started, and telemetry had begun to stream across the screens on the instrument panels hanging above him. At the console across from him he could see Johanna Teske, the medical officer, peering intently at the bio-readouts being relayed from the mining pod, monitoring Baines’s vital signs for any anomalies.
Delitsky liked Teske. She was the only one on the station remotely close to his age, and one of the few who shared his desire to see that everything was done properly. Not like those two clowns from head office. They were only interested in getting things done cheaply.
He craned his neck to see where the two managers had got to. Thankfully they had seated themselves in the observation gallery, well out of the way of his crew who were now fully engaged with their duties. Delitsky nodded with satisfaction. Good. With luck that meant they would stay out of his way for the next few hours.
Turning his attention back to the task in hand, he cast a practised eye over the instruments. From the look of things, the slight delay would only have a minimal impact on their schedule. Jenloz had obviously done a good job speeding up the shuttle arrival. He made a mental note to ensure that the little Cancri got a little extra in his bonus.
He swiped a hand over the meteorological diagnostic controls. The storm below the mine was really moving. He tapped his ear bud again. ‘I hope you strapped in tight, Baines. Looks like it’s going to be a little lively down there.’
‘You know me, Chief. Always up for a challenge.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
Delitsky closed his eyes, listening to the mechanical voice of the station mainframe as it counted down inexorably towards zero. This was where things got real. And dangerous. All levity faded from the Rig Chief’s voice. ‘All right, Baines. Stand by. We’re initiating drop in … Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Drop.’
Through the armoured glass, Delitsky watched as the hangar doors snapped open and the grey sphere vanished into the boiling clouds of Saturn.
At the same moment, the entire station shuddered as the ionisation satellites seeded through the planet’s atmosphere flared into life, sending lightning arcing through the clouds.
A short time later it started to rain diamonds.
The upper level of Kollo-Zarnista Mining Facility 27 housed the vault – a vast chamber filled with the diamonds extracted from the crushing atmosphere of the planet below. Here in this huge room there was more wealth than on the rest of the planets in the solar system combined.
Not that you would guess from its appearance. The floors, the walls, the ceiling of the vault were all a flat, uniform grey. The tube-train-sized cylindrical containers that radiated around the walls seemed unremarkable. Unremarkable save for the huge quantities of Saturnian diamonds that each of them held.
These stones were the lifeblood on which the ever-expanding empire of the human race depended. Without them the species may not have even survived, trapped for ever in a backwater of the galaxy with ever-diminishing resources. There were no precious metals left on Earth, Homo sapiens had stripped their home planet bare almost before they had taken their first steps into the universe. Mars and Venus had soon followed and, with Mercury offering no discernible benefits to mankind, the masters of Earth had turned their attention to the gas giants instead.
The possibility that the atmosphere of Saturn and Jupiter harboured an untapped source of precious stones had been theorised as far back as the early twenty-first century, but reaching them was an entirely different matter. The initial attempts to extract the wealth from these behemoths of the solar system had not gone well. Mission after mission ended in disaster: hundreds of lives were lost, men, women and equipment vanishing for ever into the swirling clouds, dragged down by the monstrous gravitational forces of the huge planets, and crushed out of existence.
But, like the gold prospectors of antiquity, the miners were undaunted, spurred on by the promise of untold wealth if they were successful, and the increasing desperation of a planetary elite that sensed their imminent extinction if these new resources could not be exploited.
Salvation came in the form of the Cancri, an alien race from beyond Cygnus-A, who arrived (unlike so many alien races that stumbled across the Earth) with no threats of destruction or dreams of conquest, but purely with an offer of assistance.
For a price, of course.
The Cancri were also expanding into the universe, and they too had started to exhaust their home worlds. What they did have, however, was a mastery of pressure and gravity. To the scientists of Earth, the technology they brought was advanced to the point that they could barely understand it. But it was exactly what they needed if they were going to make any headway in extracting the diamond wealth that the human race so desperately needed.
And so, a partnership was agreed, a business deal between the two planets, and Saturn was agreed on to be the first test site. The Cancri would provide the knowledge of how to create new alloys that could survive the crushing pressures of the gas giant and the gravitic machinery needed to keep a mine safely in orbit within that atmosphere. They would also give the technical support needed to keep that machinery functioning, whilst Earth would provide the labour force. As payment for their services, the Cancri would take a percentage of the diamonds mined, although only a few people high up in the corridors of power knew exactly what proportion of the wealth the Cancri leaders had managed to negotiate.
The truth was – as many experts had pointed out over the years, when the question of how much the Cancri were taking became a political sore point – whatever proportion it was, it was worth it. Without the Cancri gravity inverters, there would be no diamonds; without the diamonds, the expansion of the Human Empire would grind to a halt.
And so the partnership had blossomed. As well as the mines on Saturn there were now diamond extraction facilities on Jupiter and, if the colonies on the rim worlds continued to grow at the current rate, there would soon be the need to start operations on Neptune as well.
The success of the Human-Cancri partnership did not come without its problems, however. The transportation of such vast wealth from the mines to the home worlds inevitably attracted the attention of those who found it easier to acquire the diamonds without going to the trouble of mining for them. Time and time again, diamond shipments were raided, either on the way to Earth or to Cancri, until finally the losses to jewel thieves became so great that the governments of both planets agreed that a solution had to be found.
Once again, it was the Cancri gravity inverters that provided a solution to the problem. Initially diamond shipments had been on a weekly schedule, on the assumption that the sooner they were removed from the mine environment, the safer they would be. It was a young Federation security officer called Gammadoni who had pointed out that it was the cargo transporters that were the weak point. Given their locations, the mines themselvesthem,