Juno Rising

Chapter One “MEDICAL,” SAID THE OFFICER with the name tag Private First Class L. Manning. He stopped in the grey and featureless corridor at the door of a room that wafted smells of antiseptic and where, out of the line of vision, someone moved with soft footsteps and rummaged in plastic wrappings. Fabio’s courage sank, then, deep into a place he didn’t want to be, a place where he was lying face down on a hard and cold bench and a nurse was shaving his head. Locks of hair tickled over his face on the way down to making black curly snow on the table, leaving an itchy trail on his face. All he could do was blow them away because his hands were strapped to the table; a drip was in one arm, and sensors were stuck to his head, which were attached to beeping machines. A thin tube fed into the drip through which, at the press of a button, the surgeons would administer the anaesthetic to knock him unconscious. The doctors weren’t quite doing that yet; they were talking to each other in low voices, a mush of mumbled conversation with medical words like cranial lobe and neuro-reflexes. Deep breath. He was back in the grey and scuffed corridor at the ground floor of Calico Base, on Io, being shown around by a fresh-faced Private First Class with the name tag that said Manning, who had met him when he came out of the transport tube and who was still talking, “. . . anyway, it’s nothing special, just the regular tests. A few months ago, a guy came over from Ganymede and brought chicken pox. The whole base went down with it . . .” He laughed, and the laughter sounded muffled in the woolly space inside Fabio’s head. The recent scar at the back of his head itched. He took a breath of the static-dry, sulphur-laced air, and another. The air flowed into his lungs, then, as if he’d forgotten to breathe. There were no such things as innocent medicals. There was nothing regular about having a blood test. Not for him, ever. “I have . . .” he started to protest, but he remembered that he’d vowed to keep his mouth shut. And he remembered that he didn’t actually remember what he had, or didn’t have, medically. Worse, he had an audience. A few troops in dark green Space Corps fatigues sat on plastic chairs outside the entrance of the room, wordlessly staring at him. Two privates, a private first class and a sergeant. Fabio recognised some of them because they had been with him on the transport, a short-range in-system barge that ferried people from the Galilean sling to various points in the Jupiter system. Hard to miss each other when you’re sardined into a tin can for eight hours. Judging by the discussions he had overheard on the transport, they were base relief staff and most seemed to have been sent here as punishment for some sort of transgression. A private with a shaven head nodded at Fabio and raised an eyebrow at Manning. Curiosity oozed off him. Look, who’s this geezer that he requires a personal minder? What’s with the non-standard uniform? Is he crazy or dangerous? Manning sat down and Fabio took the chair to the right of him. He stared at the open door to the medical room, where he could only see shelves full of jars and part of a workbench. He heard voices in the room and wondered what was happening inside. Doctors with vicious needles. Nurses with jars and vials. Those worried him, because those were for collecting things that weren’t theirs to collect. He jammed his hands under his legs, but his right leg wanted to jiggle. He clamped his jaws to suppress the jiggling— “Hey, you’re new, too, aren’t you?” The voice from his right was young and female. Fabio whirled around. The woman jerked back, her expression startled and defensive. She looked quite young, dark-skinned with big brown eyes and glossy black hair in a bun. “Whoa, mate. I didn’t want to offend you. I thought . . . I saw you on the transport. I was sitting on the bench against the opposite wall. I thought you were new . . . because you looked like it was your first trip out, with the Sarajevo tag and all that . . .” Her gaze went to the chest of his uniform, where he wore a badge with three tiny embroidered stars. It was a shirt that ISF used for Earth-based recruits. It had been given to him on the transport, and he had no idea whether this meant that he’d been demoted or that they didn’t have gear appropriate to his rank. “Um, yeah.” He stared at the opposite wall, grey with scuff marks. “Yeah, I’m new.” He was hoping she’d shut up. He did not want to talk and be reminded of the vast areas of blackness inside his head. He did not want to be here. He did not want a medical. He was supposed to work for some Major called K. Doric and he wanted to ask Manning when he was going to meet this person— “Hey, I’m new, too. Got transferred from Europa. Where did you come from?” He met the woman’s eyes again. Where did he come from? The question twigged nagging unease. Jumbled memories exploded into confusion, closely followed by rage. “Where did I come from? Does it matter where I come from?” Her eyes widened. “Sorry, I was only asking.” She looked away and leaned to the side, away from him. Fabio took deep breaths and resumed clamping his jaws to keep from jiggling his leg, but the nerves took over and he jiggled anyway. His knees were shaking with it. The question repeated in his mind. Where did you come from? Where did you come from? A memory came to him. He was on his stomach on a bed in the hospital. He could tell he was on a ship because the mattress under him vibrated. There was no one in the room and when he lifted his head, a sharp pain speared through his neck. He wanted to scream, but his throat was too dry. He coughed and that made the pain worse. But he couldn’t stop coughing because his throat tickled. He couldn’t breathe. The door opened and a nurse ran in. “Don’t move!” He wanted to scream, I can’t breathe, but he couldn’t. He wanted to ask, Where am I? but he couldn’t. He wanted to know where the ship was going, and what he was doing here, and who had put him here, but he coughed and coughed until blackness encroached on his vision, and someone in the echoing cavern of darkness said, “Keep the sedative up.” That, he remembered. But where he came from? No, that information was lost in the depths of his mind. A man in Space Corps fatigues came out of the treatment room. The young woman went in next. Fabio waited, jiggling his leg, clamping his jaws, sitting on his hands. A few Flight Force Ensigns arrived in the corridor, dressed in their black everyday uniforms. One of them asked if this was the place where they had to go for the medical. When the Space Corps troops said that was so, they dumped their duffel bags on the floor and leaned against the wall, talking and laughing. They spoke with drawling accents and used a lot of abbreviations. Fabio recognised some of the abbreviations, but not all of them. The Space Corps—planet-based—troops fell silent and eyed them with suspicious looks. That he remembered: the continued animosity between Flight and Corps. Flight troops called Corps dirt crawlers. Corps troops called Flight personnel Dreamers or other less polite words that referred to their aloof stance and lewd speculation about what they did with their time when in between destinations. The seat next to Fabio remained empty. His leg wouldn’t stop jiggling. He stared at the opposite wall, ignoring Manning, doing his utmost best to ignore everyone. Where had he come from? Getting to Io took months, depending on where you came from. Not from the Jupiter system was all he knew. He didn’t remember getting on the interplanetary. The woman said Sarajevo. That was ISF head office. That was— Admiral Sanchez. A broad-shouldered man with enough gold and glitter on his chest to blind a person. Salt and pepper hair. Penetrating eyes. His office was a statement of opulence: polished wood, a soft carpet, cool air. Intricate models of big warships— “Hey,” Manning said. “It’s your turn.” Fabio’s heart jumped. He stared at the door. He rose abruptly, swung his duffel onto his shoulder. It hit the wall with a thud, which drew raised eyebrows from the people in the corridor. He went in. The narrow galley-style room contained an examination table, covered in white disposable liner. The walls were lined with shelves crammed full of jars and sample bags, tubes, pre-wrapped wound dressings. Bottles. Needles. Blood pressure machine. A heart rate monitor. A drip stand. Gloves. A brain activity scan machine with the patches stored in a clear plastic box on top. Fabio knew those things. Each of those items had a story to tell about where it went and what people did with it. All those stories were shouting for attention in Fabio’s brain, while he stood there trying to ignore their voices. Somewhere in that racket he found the presence of mind to say, “Oh, hello.” A med officer sat at a workstation tapping at his deskscreen, clad in green hospital outfit, with short-cropped hair. He said, “Be with you in a mo,” without looking up from his work. Fabio’s mouth had gone dry as the ash and sulphur desert outside. “I did all the regulation health checks before I left the Interplanetary Transfer Vessel. They should all be on your system.” That, he remembered, too. The med officer looked up. His eyes were brown. “Your name?” “Velazquez, Fabio.” The med officer scrolled over a screen, and tapped it with his stylus. “Ah, yes, here you are. Got the details. Lieutenant First Class, Tech Services. Contracted to the Research Division.” He frowned at Fabio’s uniform. “Did they run out of gear?” Fabio nodded, hoping this meant that he hadn’t been demoted, and that someone soon was going to tell him what had happened or what he was meant to be doing here. The officer tapped the screen some more and frowned, then shrugged. “Welcome to Calico Base. Sit down.” Fabio sat, having regained a sliver of hope that none of this prodding, poking and swabbing would, in fact, be necessary. The med officer—his nametag said Lt. Hansen—swivelled his chair to face Fabio. Manning remained at the door, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest. His arms were thick and freckled, covered in a fuzz of ginger hair. “First time on Io?” Hansen asked. Fabio nodded. At least he thought it was his first time, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe those black holes in his mind contained previous visits, times when he had done goodness-knew-what, because someone had obviously made him forget important things. “OK, so you are unaware that it’s base policy to do our own tests, since we apply quarantine to all new arrivals, regardless of rank.” Hansen now took a container off the shelf that held plastic-wrapped syringes and yanked a pair of gloves out of a dispenser. Shit. “But the officer on the ship said—” The rubber gloves went on, snap, snap and he took a pre-wrapped syringe from a container. “The ITV med officer would be following regulations from headquarters or Flight Force. They don’t meet our requirements. They don’t have to deal with the infection risks posed by a high turnover staff population in a closed-system base.” He ripped the plastic in a kind of definite way that said, Headquarters can stick their regulations up their arse. That made him uneasy. Did Base Commanders have that level of authority? “But I . . .” he tried again. Sweat was running down his back under his shirt. His chest suddenly became too constricted to breathe. Only the last week of his trip, as far as he could count, had he been free of medical equipment. He’d only just learned to walk properly in a spinning habitat of the interplanetary. In his experience, any time he went near medical equipment, he became worse off. The officer gestured for Fabio to put his arm on the desk for a blood sample. Fabio glanced at Manning, still at the door, and considered his options. Refuse, and be treated as difficult from his first day here? Try to run out of the room, and be disciplined? The International Space Force brand of discipline usually involved more medical procedures; he remembered that, too. He put his arm on the desk. Defeat. Hansen rolled up his sleeve, applied a strap, and prodded for a vein. Fabio watched the needle plunge into his arm. Blood spurted into the vial. Blood, the giver of life, the betrayer of secrets. Something triggered a flash of memory in his mind. He saw lists of results, numbers arranged in tables. Certain figures had been circled with red. He remembered names. “What sort of tests are you doing?” “Pathogens, a few basic parameters.” “What sort of parameters?” “HB, blood sugar—” “Chromosome Normality?” The word nanometrics was on the tip of his tongue, but a vague half-hidden memory stopped him saying it. He sat in a hall amongst lines of Space Corp personnel, a sea of dark green. A high-ranking officer, red-faced, was shouting at him I don’t want any more freaks like you under my command. He pointed at Fabio and everyone in that hall looked at him. Hansen laughed. “Chromosome Normality is a long-term health parameter. It’s not of interest to us unless you’re on a permanent placing. We’re only interested in pathogens and your immediate health.” His rubber-gloved hands unclicked a full vial of blood and replaced it with an empty one. Hansen dumped the full vial in a tray where it rolled across the metal bottom before coming to rest against the tray’s far side. He met Fabio’s eyes, frowning. “Are you a med officer? I thought you were the contract astronomer.” “I am.” All right, so that was why he was here, apart from meeting this mysterious person K. Doric. He tried to remember what an astronomer did, and came up with a big dark space inside him where, clearly, some knowledge was supposed to be. This Major Doric wasn’t going to be impressed— “I’ve been given orders to rush you through, for understandable reasons. They really want you to start work up there. The tests should be done by tonight. Until then, you’ll have to stay confined to your cabin.” Fabio nodded. Confined to cabin was fine by him; he had no desire to talk to anyone except those necessary to do his job. The rushing through made him nervous, though. The officer withdrew the needle, swabbed away the drop of blood and sprayed a neat round patch of wound adhesive over the site. “Peel off after an hour.” Fabio nodded again; he knew the drill. He pulled down his sleeve, suddenly very, very tired. “Finished?” “Not yet. Lie down on the bed, please.” Fabio glanced at the bed and noticed the headbands and electrode net on a shelf, and thick braids of leads. There was also a control screen of a scanner with the familiar MediXScan logo. Brain scan. Panic closed like a vice on his chest. Any moment now and Hansen would put that thing on his head. Fabio could feel the weight of those leads and the pinch of the net pushing all those electrodes to his skin. Another memory: they usually shaved him when they used that thing. At some point in the past, someone had used that machine on him and produced a three-dimensional image of his brain. He could still see it appearing on the screen. He saw the officer move the stylus to select which parts to scan in detail. He felt the jolt of the current delivered by those electrodes, the pain, the whirlpool of images through his mind— “No.” Hansen frowned. “We’re not going to hurt you, only—” Only violate my memories. “No.” “It’s base regulations, so that we can—” “No!” Fabio rose, black spots dancing before his eyes. He was sweating all over, feeling sick. Manning took a couple of steps into the room. “Is there a problem, sir?” Hansen said, “Not that I know of. I need to complete—” “Don’t touch me!” Fabio backed into the shelf on the other side of the room. Manning blocked his way to the door. Manning and Hansen would gang up on him. They’d tie his hands and force him on the bed. They’d restrain him so he couldn’t move and then they’d put the thing on him. They’d read his mind. That’s what they did with those machines, didn’t they? “Calm down, Velazquez. It’s a routine procedure that has never given us any problems. It doesn’t hurt, and doesn’t tell us anything about your thoughts.” “Then why are you doing it, if it doesn’t tell you anything? It’s bullshit, I tell you. I don’t believe anything you’re saying. I retract my permission for this medical.” He was shouting and he couldn’t stop. There would be trouble, but he wouldn’t calm down. His hands trembled so much that his whole body shook with it. Hansen retreated to his desk and hit a button on the wall and Manning stopped and held up his hands. “Whoa, calm down, calm down. All the doc here wants to check is if you have any implants.” “I don’t. That was already tested on board. You have the results already. You have no right to do this.” “Medical examination is a base regulation.” “You can’t force me.” Then another snippet of knowledge fell into place. “It’s in the ISF charter under privacy regulations, section 87a, page 413.” Red spots appeared on Hansen’s cheeks. “But we . . .” He swallowed whatever he was going to say. “We have to—” A woman barged into the room. “Hansen, Manning, what’s this?” She was taller than Manning without being lanky, had a sharp-nosed face and shoulder-length dead straight platinum blond hair, which swung loose over her shoulders. She was in Space Corps uniform with senior officer’s stripes. Both Hansen and Manning stiffened and saluted. “Just a medical test, Ma’am,” Hansen said. “You pressed the emergency,” she said, her voice flat. “That’s not ‘just a medical test’.” “He . . .” Hansen hesitated, glanced at Fabio. “He looked like he was going to fight. I wasn’t doing anything except standard procedure, Ma’am. To request backup in case . . .” “You know this officer’s name?” “Yes, Ma’am. It’s Lt. Velazquez.” “Well done. Did you look at your task sheet, Hansen?” “I did, Ma’am.” “Then what does it say behind Lt. Velazquez’s name?” Hansen looked. Froze. “Oh.” “What does it say, Hansen?” “Contact Research Command.” “Does it say: submit him to standard entry procedure?” “No, ma’am.” “Then why didn’t you contact Research Command?” “It was a mistake, ma’am.” “I am getting very tired of your mistakes. The time may come that I will discuss your ‘mistakes’ with Commander Banparra.” “That’s not necessary, ma’am.” She glared at him for a couple of very long seconds. Then she turned to Fabio. “Come.” Fabio scrambled to collect his duffel bag. He was still trembling. Manning stood at the door, looking uncertain. “Do you want me to come, ma’am?” She stopped to face him, eye to eye, her nose no more than a hand span higher than his face. “You’d like that, eh, Private First Class Manning? The more time you spend away from your general duties, the better. Tell me, what need would Lieutenant Velazquez have for your sorry arse if you can’t even follow your f*****g orders and keep him out of the bureaucracy down here?” “I didn’t get any—” “Can’t you read, Private First Class Manning?” Silence. Manning went red in the face. “I apologise, ma’am.” “You apologise, as if that’s an excuse for your dumbassery.” “I didn’t know what—” “Shut up.” He shrank visibly with every second of her death stare. “f*****g imbecile. Come with me.” The latter to Fabio. He glanced at Hansen, who waved his hand at the door. “I’m sorry, but where are we going? I’m supposed to meet—” She turned her cold grey stare on him. Then she held out her hand. “Major Katarina Doric. Welcome to Calico Base.”