Shifting Infinity

Chapter 2-1

2

MELATI FOLLOWED her former Base Commander out onto the flight deck. They walked past the Fleet private, whom Cocaro dismissed with a “Just wait a moment until we’re ready.”

He snapped into a salute with a “Yes, ma’am,” but Melati could see the bewilderment about whose orders to follow on his face. Bewilderment that had, in fact, divided a huge section of the ship that regularly got caught in the power struggles between Fleet and Force.

Cocaro led Melati to a part of the flight deck where the command modules were powered down, away from the curious ears of the bored attendants. She leaned against one of the workstation chairs.

“I’m very sorry I have to drag you into this,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“The captain is making a grave mistake taking a hardline approach to this situation. I managed to stop the man being transferred to the Repentance.” That was the fleet’s prison ship, and being transferred there was usually one step away from execution.

“What were they going to do with him there?”

“They want to put him in isolation, off the ship, and question him under force.”

“Torture him.” Melati shuddered.

“The term, Lieutenant Rudiyanto, is ‘strong questioning’.” Cocaro met Melati’s eyes with a penetrating look. Melati always had trouble guessing the meaning of Cocaro’s looks. “The captain says he’s a spy and doesn’t want him on the ship. She seems convinced that he’s a plant from Allion through New Hyderabad and that Finlay has something to do with it.”

“Because he complained about his treatment?”

Cocaro grinned and a moment of understanding went between them. Silly, pompous, nervous, dishevelled Socrates Finlay would make stupid decisions, but everyone who had lived at the station and knew him would know that he wasn’t smart or patient enough to hatch plots or keep secrets. And he would consider his accounts much more important than any ideology, whether ISF’s or Allion’s. That was precisely the thing that had gotten him into trouble.

Cocaro’s expression sobered. “This escapee is important to us. We want to reestablish the base.” Sadly, Allion’s occupation and the infection of the computer systems had made it necessary to decouple the base. “We need as much information from inside as possible. We need it. I don’t want it second-hand, passed through some Fleet personnel who couldn’t care less about the station.”

Another penetrating look.

“I know your objections to the procedure, but I’m going to ask you to take a mindbase readout.”

Melati nodded. Her boss, Dr Chee, objected strenuously to mindbase technology being used in questioning. “I could simply question him in B3.”

“You could, but there was more to that recording that she didn’t show you and that was not more of that thug of hers trying to change the shape of that poor man’s face. He appears, in fact, quite deranged, and frankly I have no idea how he managed to pilot that ship. It’s not straightforward. He’s not a simple escapee, not a simple spy either. I think mindbase technology might well do the trick of unmasking what he really is. As well as giving us much-needed information about the station.”

And that information had been painfully scant.

Apart from the sporadic contact between Ari and the hypertechs that centred mostly around questions about Uncle, Grandma and the Aunties, the only other communication between the ship and the station would be the occasional broadcast sent by Allion’s station director Sep Kerakis.

Whenever one of those came in, Dolchova would call for a general assembly of the crew, and they’d all laugh at his pompous language and empty threats. But his messages never contained any useful information about the station.

“I know you think that we have forgotten your family, but rest assured that I at least haven’t. I’m acutely aware of the fact that we still have over ten thousand civilians trapped on the station and that those people are my responsibility. At this point in time, I’m not in possession of any hardware to do anything about it.”

Of course Dolchova adhered to the Fleet version of warfare: long distance battles where you couldn’t see the enemy and where war was being fought in terms of orbits and engine burns. They shot from great distance. Nice and clean, where you couldn’t see the suffering inflicted. They didn’t fight for stations, much less enter them.

And Cocaro had left all her materiel behind and was left at the mercy of a captain unwilling to support her.

“I’ve been able to negotiate a delay of transfer of one day in which you can see him.”

“One day is not enough to examine a mindbase.”

“I know. I’m sorry, it’s all she would let me have, and unfortunately, this is her ship and she has the ultimate power. Talk to him. Take whatever equipment you need down there and do the best you can. Evaluate his mindbase and judge why he’s here. Make a case for further study. Argue for his transfer to be delayed.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Melati was about to return to the Fleet Private who was still waiting patiently, when Cocaro held her back.

“There is no second chance,” she said in a low voice. “We get one shot at this. Something is brewing and everyone is nervous as hell. Allion has been too quiet recently. We may have hung around here for ten months doing nothing, but that is about to change. Do your magic while it’s still quiet. We owe it to all those people who were left behind.”

The look of pain that crossed her face did more than anything to explain why she looked tired and unhealthy. Melati found it a bit embarrassing, but it had not been the first time that Cocaro let her guard down in her presence. It seemed that she considered Melati as spokesperson for the tier 2 people of New Jakarta.

Lieutenant Kool was one of these people whose name sounded like a B-grade comic, but people laughed about it only once, at least in his presence. When new relief crew arrived aboard the ship, they would say, “Is that really his name?” And then they were informed that yes, it was.

The rumour went that the name meant “cabbage” in some old Earth language, but fart jokes were also strictly off-limits in his presence.

He was the head of Correctional Services and Internal Security on board the ship, Fleet Division. He was at least two heads taller than Melati, and twice as wide. He shaved his head shiny like a snooker ball and his skin was black as space. He wore his on-board fatigues in impeccable condition. They were comfy, if not the most elegant of outfits, known amongst the crew as “pyjamas”.

“Correctional Services” of course meant the brig, not a place that Melati, working in Research, had much to do with.

The department consisted of a long and bare corridor at the very outer level of the ship’s habitation donut. It rotated over the various reactors and engine chambers that powered the ship. The constantly shifting magnetic fields generated by the engines made it not the healthiest of places to be. Regular staff were subjected to limits as to how long they were allowed to work there. Such concerns, however, did not extend to the potential occupants of the six cells at the end of the passage.

The lowest level of the ring also operated at 1.3g, which made it an exhausting place, especially for big guys.

Lieutenant Kool was one such guy, but his muscles compensated for any disadvantage caused by his height and bulk. When Melati came out of the lift with an oof, feeling heavy and lightheaded, he met her.

He shook her hand, but all she could think of was how she’d seen him hit the prisoner with those hands.

“Coming to see our prisoner of war, huh?” Why did she have the feeling that he was laughing at her?

He took her down the corridor, past offices with computers and through a security door to the section with isolation cells on both sides. The ship’s crew must be behaving themselves, because the five remaining cells were all unoccupied, and the doors stood open. The rooms were a few paces across. The walls, floor and ceiling were white, and there was a small bench against the wall for sleeping, with a pile of neatly-folded blankets and sheets on each, as well as a toilet in clear view of the door. A smell of antiseptic hung in the air.

The door to the last cell was closed. A prison warden stood guard next to it, his feet apart and his hands behind his back. He carried a laser on his belt.

Through the security glass window Melati spotted a man in bright yellow overalls lying on the bench, staring at the ceiling. The overalls came with eyelets in the upper arm and leg sections, which allowed thin leads to run to patches stuck to his skin. The other end of the leads went to a machine which displayed a screen with bars that indicated electrical currents delivered to the prisoner’s muscles to keep them in a permanent cramped position.

This was a particularly cruel and exhausting way of immobilising someone.

Lieutenant Kool unlocked the door. The prisoner’s head was pinned in position by two patches on the base of his neck. She could see the muscle straining under the brown skin.

“Why is he restrained like this?”

Lieutenant Kool described a little circle over his forehead with his index finger. “He was giving us too much trouble.”

That was not what she had seen.

“I’ll need all this off in order to read his mindbase,” Melati said, not holding out much hope that the readout would be accurate.

The man’s eyes turned to her at the sound of her voice. The irises were sad and brown. The swelling of his eyelids had gone down since the making of the recording that she had just viewed in the command room, but the skin was still dark from the injury. He definitely had too much of a beard to be barang-barang. It was longer than it had been in the recording, too.

“He’s violent.”

“Then put him in handcuffs. I’ll be trying to measure tiny, tiny currents in his brain. This . . .” She gestured at the machine. “. . . is the equivalent of a high voltage power plant. It’s going to mess with my equipment.”

“Hmph.” Lieutenant Kool knocked on the inside of the door. The warden opened it. Melati hadn’t realised how stuffy it was inside the little cell until a waft of cool air came past.

“Get Lois here with the chair,” Lieutenant Kool instructed.

The warden left.

Melati went to the bed.

Close up, the scent of the man’s sweat was very strong in the little room. It ran off his face and made wet huge patches under his arms. It was old sweat, too.

“Urgh. Doesn’t he get shower privileges?” The ship was no longer filled to capacity and the recycling plants could easily keep up with the crew’s demands for water.

“When he stops talking garbage.”

Garbage? Did it ever end with the jabs about her culture and her language? She snorted. “All right then, let me talk some ‘garbage’ to him to see if he will talk ‘garbage’ back to me. If I were you, I’d call in the cleaners.”

He flicked his eyebrows.

The door opened again and a second warden with the name Lois on the patch on his chest came in, wheeling a trolley bearing a heavy metal chair with straps for tying a person’s wrists, waist and ankles.

He put this contraption in the middle of the room. It was, Melati realised, the chair in which the prisoner had been sitting in the recording when Lieutenant Kool had hit him. The prisoner’s eyes went wide with fear.

“I need him lying down,” Melati said. “I have to attach a harness to his head that keeps it absolutely still. I can’t do that when he’s sitting up.”

Lieutenant Kool grunted.

“Can’t you tie him to the bed?”

Another grunt. Annoyed.

One warden secured the prisoner’s arms and legs to the bed while the other started pulling off the leads on the man’s arms. The prisoner’s feet twitched. Another lead came off. Another twitch. Another lead pulled off. The prisoner let out a cry of pain.