Claire Takes On The Galaxy

Claire - Chapter Seven

After a week of freezing out on the valley of Devil’s Pit in shake-down company exercises, Claire led her friends to the James-Maddie house to find that a grand entrance porch with columns had been added since her last visit. James opened the door.

“Do you like the new entrance?” he asked. “The columns are Greco-Roman. I finally managed to make them properly white – hard with the local materials.”

“You didn’t have an entrance a few days ago.”

“Building here is no problem, not least because no building approvals are required. You just do it. You said something about the building being ‘blocky’, so I decided to add a feature.”

“Blocky – I did?” Claire thought she might have said something but couldn’t remember.

“Anyway, the Space Administration guys have been after me to make the housing more attractive. Helps to get people here. I told them to send me a mansion design with an enclosed pool, although you’d also need a synth to clean it. Now they want me and the techs to make carpets – carpets! The battle to make toilet paper in bulk made me old before my time, and now they want carpets. It’ll need a whole new vat line.”

“You don’t look old before your time.”

“Thank you, but what you see is a shell. Inwardly I’m on my last legs. Whenever you see toilet paper here think of my lost youth.”

Maddie took Claire and the others upstairs to meet her virtual friends. As advertised, Ella chatted politely with them, Suri told them about her efforts to grow plants using crystals and Rey complained about the new teacher.

“Told you, amazing stuff,” said James when he came to reclaim his guests. “State of the art education package and you get a flake and a crank.”

“Because it’s more interesting,” said Claire. “Friends you can tell stories about to other friends – like being able to tell stories about bank robbers you know.”

“You’re using the term robber again.”

The three miner friends of James were, also as advertised, presentable, at least for miners. The only one that made any real impression on Claire was Brew, short for his surname of Brewer, a man somewhere in his 20s to 30s of wiry build with a short, black beard and glittering eyes.

“There’s nothing better than discovering a lode of crystals,” he said to Claire, but with his eyes flicking to Lou, “especially at current prices. What really worries me is that someone on earth will work out a way to synthesise the crystals, and there won’t be any need to mine the stuff out here.”

The miner then found reasons to speak to Lou, Claire noted, without her friend seeming to mind. James, as host, was careful to pay attention to Taylor which Adria later commented on appreciatively. As for the marine medic, she was able to lounge decorously, attracting considerable male attention, and hold her wine glass up for the occasional refill. That was what being a marine was all about, she said later, lounging and having wine being brought to you.

Claire, being Claire, continued to interrogate James. She was having fun, in a judgemental way, working out more of the James mystery. That was all that it was, she told herself, fun. At one point both she and James were hanging off the side of the deep end. Lou had just used the diving board – a display which Claire thought might have been put on to pique Brew’s interest – splashing them both.

“Have you known May long,” she said suddenly.

“She came after me when they set up the Doll House – about three years ago,” said James, thinking that Claire looked very pretty when wet. “I was soon her fix-it guy.”

“How did she pay you?”

“I never took p*****t in trade if that’s what you mean,” he said, looking curiously at Claire. “It was my job here. I was paid as the other guy – the guy I impersonated. I had to give up some of that money, but now I’m paid as an engineer for the Space Administration. I don’t get the big bonuses for coming to Devil’s Pit like my colleagues, but I can earn money on the side fixing stuff. I met Brew when I repaired some of his equipment. He’s one of the few of the independents who’s done well, incidentally. He found and staked a deposit of crystals of good quality, missed by the house miners. Why are you interested in May?”

Clare shrugged. James thought it was a pretty shrug.

“Finding out about the Doll House was a shock I guess.”

“I noticed,” said James. Claire smiled. “Humans can be on the other side of the galactic arm,” he said, “but they are still humans. The SMC’s attitude to these matters is something like that of the French army. During the Indochinese war in the 1950s, the French army presented two s*x workers with a military decoration, the Croix de Guerre. The citation read ‘For services to remote garrisons’. Anyway, if the Doll House wasn’t there you and your friends would be getting a lot more unwelcome attention.”

Claire shrugged again over that point but let the matter drop for the time being.

The event evolved into a card party with the participants wrapped in towels and Adria condescending to play twenty-one. A simple dinner came and went with Maddie playing host by bossing the Synth and auto-cook around. Finally, the ladies left, with James pointing out that they should go back to the barracks before the evening got too cold.

“There’s no underground connection between this place and the barracks,” he said.

“Excuse me – underground?” said Claire.

“You didn’t tell her about subway connections?” James asked Maddie.

“I forgot. You know I don’t like to use them.”

Maddie took Claire and the others through a basement which contained little more than ducts, pipes and discarded pieces of machinery, to another door. This opened on a short passage which took them to a completely circular, dimly lit tunnel bored through the rocky sub strata of the valley floor.

“The townies use the tunnels at night when it’s cold,” said Maddie. “All the buildings are connected. My school is the second exit on the right that way.” She pointed off into the gloom.

“But you don’t like using it?” asked Claire.

“Not much. It reminds me of the Shade attack. It was dark and we were in a tunnel like this one and I could hear them – a sighing. It sounds like ghosts. I didn’t pay much attention at first I was playing a game on my device.” She held up her hands to indicate a screen or phone in front of her. “My foster parents were outside of our mining transporter looking for crystal deposits. Then they were attacked. I just saw whitish shapes and red eyes through the transporter’s screens and heard my parents screaming.”

“Stars!” said Lou. “That’s horrible! What did you do?”

“About all I could do was drop the device and scream myself.” Maddie paused as she remembered the horror of the moment. “Then they attacked the transporter, shaking it. I ran into the back. I heard them smashing the side of it. Then it stopped, like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I was shaking in the back for a long while before I came out calling for Lydia and Ben. I knew how to use the glow sticks we had, so I cracked one and tossed it in front then I saw a Shade. It was large like an ape with whiteish skin, no hair, and skull-like head with horrible teeth.” She bared her teeth to demonstrate. “I screamed and ran and hid in a nook in the cargo bay and the next thing I knew James had found me.”

James insisted on walking with his female guests back to at least within sight of the marine barracks, but no further.

“You don’t want to be seen with any of the townies. You have reputations to maintain,” he said. This meant Claire had a chance to question him about Maddie’s story.

“Do you believe her about the attack?”

“Oh yes! Hers is not the only incident. Three other transporters and their pilots – Maddie’s foster parents is the only dual attack – have gone missing. The transporters were later found, badly smashed up, but we’ve never found any bodies.”

“Maddie’s attack has been investigated?”

“Yep. A hot-shot investigator came out here, and spent three months trying to blame everybody, even me and Brew, for the attack, the bastard.”

“Why Brew?”

“He first raised the alarm – the independents, the indies, look out for one another. Maddie’s foster parents were indies. After I found Maddie I got Brew to go back with me to check the area. We didn’t find anything, or any traces of the Shades but neither of us are trackers and those tunnels are confusing. That was his sole involvement. I’m a wanted felon so I guess the investigator had some reason to come after me, but Brew’s got no record – nothing. He was just helping out. In academic circles back on earth Shade sightings are on a par with those of the Loch Ness monster. Looking back, that investigator was probably under orders to clear up the Shade nonsense. He was so stuck for theories that he tried to convince Maddie she had killed them and hidden the bodies.”

“What?”

“I had to get him to back off. A pre-high school girl who wanted a balcony because of a fondness of Romeo and Juliet is not a cold-blooded killer. Anyway, how did she move the bodies? The whole thing was absurd. The investigator then accused me and Brew of conspiring with Maddie to move the bodies. He dropped Brew as a suspect, but I was left as chief body mover. The only motive he could come up with was that we wanted to perpetuate the Shade myth or some such. Brew got sick of him, I got sick of him, the other miners got sick of him – eventually he left, but filed a report naming me and Maddie as chief suspects in the attack…”

“Chief suspects,” spluttered Claire, thinking of Maddie. “Did anything happen?”

“No, the report also said there wasn’t enough evidence for legal proceedings and that’s where matters stopped. A prosecutor sent us both letters saying that the investigation was under review. I showed them to Dog who said that the matter should go away of its own accord. I would have framed them as well as that other letter, but Maddie was upset over it.”

“Being accused of murder would upset anyone. Is she all right now?”

“Seems so. I’ve been reluctant to discuss the matter. Here’s where I should leave you. We could always organise another pool party for next week?”

The others moved on, leaving James and Claire facing one another.

“Maybe.”

“Or a trip to the main mining pit? I have a transporter that should fit everyone.”

“A hole in the ground is worth looking at?”

“It’s a scenic hole in the ground, with tunnels to explore.”

“They’re still holes, and dangerous creatures may be in them. I’ll see what the others want to do.”

“As I still don’t have your number you’ll have to call. No call and I know that Private Claire Williams cannot be bothered. Whether you are bothered or not, incidentally, best not to mention me to your officers, particularly Colonel Murchison. He’s sore with me at the moment.”

“Why is he sore?”

“A story for another time – and don’t mention Shades. The official SMC line is that they are the result of miners drinking too much of their own hooch. A newly arrive private questioning that line will be slapped down fast.”

Facing another week of training out on the valley floor, including night exercises of unspecified duration (the schedule just said ‘night exercises’), Claire’s colleagues thought that another pool party was a good idea. If the miners also turned up, no one would object.

“Brew says he will be there,” Claire told Lou during the week after chatting with James.

“That’s nice,” said Lou, in a tone of studied neutrality. Claire also passed on the information that Brew had a claim on a lode of high quality crystals. Lou’s only response was to comment that the miner seemed like a determined guy, but Claire later saw her checking out information on lift crystals, when she thought the others were not watching.

For his part, James began carefully digging into the Devil’s Pit marine base Artificial intelligence systems, with the immense advantage that he did not have to hack into them – he already had administrator status. This was the result of an earlier incident in which one of the marine systems had gone haywire, after its regular update from Earth. Despairing of fixing the problem, the lieutenant in charge of the support group at the time had secretly given James administrator access. After some messing around James realised he could make the sub system revert to an earlier version, which still worked quite well. The problem vanished. The lieutenant wrote a stiff note to the software administrators back on earth about quality control, thanked James and took away the administrator access, but not before the criminal had built a backdoor into the system. After all, James told himself, one never knew when such access might come in handy.

Even with that access, however, the task was far from easy. As James quickly discovered, privacy protocols on the base system kept him out of the contents of email accounts. James had seen plenty of shows where computer hackers had almost god-like ability to uncover information from computer systems. They tapped their keyboards a few times and found what they wanted, without being detected. Lacking such powers, or a magic wand, the email accounts were out of bounds.

After a couple of hours of virtual tramping around the base computer system, fearful that one of the headquarters marines would realise an unauthorised person was snooping on it, James realised he could approach the problem from a different direction. He had access to details of when individuals were on and off the network; when they were creating emails and the size of the files they created. Were there any unusual patterns? That turned out to be another dead end. As part of the deal of being transported to a god forsaken place like Devil’s Pit, marines were not charged for the data sent or received. As a result, every marine was transmitting what James suspected was banal stuff; selfies of themselves in an alien landscape ‘look this is me beside the river Alph – only it’s more of a trickle then a river’, or videos of life in an off-world barracks or any other nonsense that would clog up the squeezed light link.

On the third night of James’ quest, May came over for coffee and a catch-up.

“How’s it going?”

“Slowly. Who knew that there would be so much junk in email systems. Anything from your end?”

“The usual barrack-room blather. Our ban on Henshaw and Gellert got their attention. The colonel is not happy.”

“We’ve achieved something at least. Does anyone hang out with Henshaw and Gellert? Are they part of a larger gang?”

“Not that my contact can see. They’re not popular guys.”

“Maybe if I concentrate on Henshaw and see what I can turn up. Now that I think of it, service records are easier to get to than emails. I’ve just got to make sure my queries don’t show up on any obvious list.”

“What can I do?” asked May.

“Like before, keep an eye open for someone who may be capable enough to be a conspiracy leader. If there is a conspiracy Henshaw and Gellert would be just the muscle, at best. I’ll look at service records and cross check, and we’ll confer. Major Horne has asked to meet me, incidentally.”

“Without the rest of us?”

“It’s informal. Maybe he wants the knife back. I’ve told Dog and now I’m telling you. I’ll drop you a line when it’s over.”

May left and James resumed his investigations. He managed to download the service records of the officers – he supposed any agent would be an officer – as well as his friends Corporal Henshaw and Private Gellert, and started studying them. Major Horne came for lunch the next day walking to casa James-Maddie from the marine administration building.

“Fine place you have here,” he said, over sandwiches.

James shrugged. “It’s an exile but at least it’s a comfortable exile. What can I do for you major?”

“You got one up on the colonel with that ban on Henshaw, Gellert and Sergeant Wettenhall.”

“The council banned them not me, and it’s not a question of anyone getting one up on anyone else. If the colonel wasn’t going to do anything we had to. The girl who got knocked over is due for compensation, and the Space Administration doesn’t like paying compensation. As I understand it, the contracts for Doll House workers provide for arbitration, so it won’t end up in court with the resulting unfortunate publicity. Your colonel can thank his stars for that.”

The major grimaced. “He’s retiring at the end of this tour, so he doesn’t care what the marine hierarchy thinks of him.”

“A distinguished career no doubt, but he’s missed out on his general’s star and is taking it out on us?”

“Maybe, but you didn’t hear it from me. What I was hoping was that the council would lift this ban in a week or so. I’ll have a heart-to-heart with both soldiers about their behaviour, and with Wettenhall about how enforcing rules in the Doll House is part of his job.”

“I’ll sound out the others,” said James. Privately, he thought that if Henshaw and Gellert started using the Doll House again, they might say something out of turn; giving him more to work with.

“That would be appreciated.”

“Why come to me with this, why not go to Do.. I mean Mr Grimes?”

“I understand you have to approach him at the right time,” said Horne tactfully.

“When he’s sober, you mean. That can be a problem.”

“And May seems unwilling to see beyond the safety of her girls.”

“Understandably so.”

“True,” acknowledged Major Horne, nodding. “It’s understandable. I thought you and I might have a quiet word about the matter and sort something out.”

“Like I said, I’ll talk to the others. Maybe keep the ban on another couple of weeks to make our point then let the matter drop, but May is the one to convince. I’ll have to let you know.”

Before he left, Major Horne was given the house tour which included the pool room.

“I understand that a few of The Two-One female marines went to a pool party here.”

“They did. All well behaved. The ladies left after dinner.”

“I have no doubt, but a few marines of The One-Five were asking why they couldn’t also go to pool parties.”

“A whole entertainment complex which includes several pools is planned for the settlement, for use by everyone. Land has been allocated, plans have been drawn up; but the administration people keep on changing priorities. I think they have too many committees. The next item on the to-do list is making carpets.”

“Carpets?”

“Yep, carpets. There is also the problem of boosting our bio-fuel output for the transports and equipment of The Two-One. The pool complex is now well down the track.”

“Sounds like you have quite a few tasks ahead of you. I hope you’ll have time to discuss our problem with the others.”

“Oh yes, I’ll do that.”

As he waved the major off, James thought that his main job would be snooping in personnel records.