Provenance I - Flee The Bonds (6 page)

As part of his induction, SIS had insisted he visit the Detention Centre and witness one of the interrogations. Francois suspected it was a warning.

Strapped into metal chairs, a cylinder of light bore down on their white coveralls, while in the shadows, the black and red uniforms of two SIS Interrogators circled. After fifteen minutes of unproductive questioning, the Interrogators left the shadows. They clamped open the wife’s eyes and tortured her husband. At that point, Francois had asked to leave.

His MCD flashed, the SIS report had arrived.

Advocate Captain Arrowsbury, second-in-command of Quad Alpha-One. Seven commendations.
Tres bien
. Francois scanned the PSYOPS evaluation; a compassion score too high for SIS and several red flags against library requests.
Excellent.
When he reached the photograph, he jerked up. An unfamiliar feeling snatched at his chest, panic. He stabbed at the MCD. Ahead, the mirror cleared, replaced by a man with a lustrous horseshoe moustache under a shark-fin nose.

‘Yes—’

Francois cut him off, ‘The assignment of today is cancelled. You must stop acquisition of the targets.’

‘Why, sir?’

Francois glared, surprised at the question, angered by its temerity. ‘Do not question me, General
Perignon
. It is an order, the assassination is cancelled.’ As his English General continued to pull at the impressive moustache, Francois wondered if he would have to retire him.

Perignon
lowered his hand. ‘Yes — sir.’

Francois exhaled noisily. ‘I will send new orders tomorrow.
Au revoir
.’

Francois watched Perignon dissolve into black. Motivation for joining the Resistance was as diverse as its members. Two motivators that burned particularly bright were resentment and envy — and in his Regional Commander, the fire raged. Continuity Barons had stolen his wife’s fortune, and the Council had rewarded him with a tax bill. His
fureur
proved useful, but it needed to be controlled.

Perignon had scheduled the assassination of two Advocates today; but once again, fortune had shone its light.
Ability without opportunity is futility.

Francois eased back and studied the dignified face in the photograph,
café noir
hair,
vert olive
eyes, and a battle-weary stare.
Or is it disillusionment?

He was impatient to meet Advocate Captain Stephen Arrowsbury. The sole surviving son of two SCITECH officers, of two saboteurs.

15:21 SAT 21:10:2119

Maintenance Bay 12-08-04, Provenance, LEO

Dee swung into the doorway, and crouched. His arms extended in front of him, his Cogent sweeping a mass of battleship-grey. Two storeys high and a football field long, Provenance’s maintenance bay 12-08-04 appeared empty.

To his right, the MECTECH labs’ yellow doors and window frames dabbed colour along the matt grey wall. Above, the enclosed gantry with large oblong windows gave access to the upper labs. He glanced left at the bulkhead, its bare wall perforated by a solitary red doorway, the inner airlock. Dee edged forward, moving his head in a circular motion. Fifty metres in, he reached the shadow of the gantry’s metal staircase, crouched, and raised his arm.

Bo arrived, his thick lips sandwiched into a sulk. ‘I do not understand why I cannot bring APR.’

Dee sighed, ‘Same reason as last time, this ain’t no intergalactic battle cruiser, there ain’t no force field.’

They cleared the upper labs last. No one was home.

Through the gantry window, Dee looked down and chewed over their options. One exit route was the opposing entrance in the right-hand bulkhead and the other the airlock. He glanced right, that’s where they’d be expecting them.

Bo rested his slab of a forehead on the glass. ‘Where is everybody?’

‘Where do you think? They ain’t gonna let you loose near anything breakable, including the crew.’

Bo’s lips curled, creasing the deep scar splitting his right cheek, ‘Then it is not real.’ His tree trunk neck cranked his head right. ‘I suppose they wait there, hiding behind door like girls.’

Dee punched him on the arm. ‘Right, so we don’t go that way.’

Bo’s eyebrows rose. ‘We not go outside?’

Dee skewed a smile. ‘Who’s the girl now? Look, I got it all figured out. We work our way across to the AM eject port, up the inspection shaft, through the AM tubes and into the control room, easy.’

‘That means we must cross exhaust.’

‘So?’

‘It is half K wide and no clips.’

‘We don’t need clips.’ Dee struck his thumb right. ‘There’re at least two jetpacks over there.’

His shoulder plate creaked under Bo’s grip, ‘Remember what Steve said, they make it easy for you to kill yourself.’

Dee huffed. ‘This is my mission, and I say we go out. Don’t worry; I ain’t ever got you killed.’

Bo released his grip. ‘You have not been in charge before.’

It took thirty minutes to inspect the Extravehicular Mobility suits and jetpacks, twenty minutes longer than it should have done.

They stood facing the airlock. Bo’s deep voice sounded tinny inside his helmet. ‘Steve was right.’

Dee grated his teeth. ‘I was gonna check anyway.’

Four of the orange EM suits hanging in closets had jetpacks and all had been sabotaged. Swopping the primary thrust potentiometer for a bridge connector was crude, but effective. It would have locked the horizontal thrusters on full burn, accelerating them into Earth’s atmosphere. Someone downstairs might have looked up and made a wish upon their spectacular cremation.

A misty film had already formed inside Bo’s visor. ‘I would like Jason and Steve to be here.’

Dee spun and grabbed Bo’s arm. ‘The suits are fine, the packs are fine, everything’s fine. We don’t need any goldtops telling us what to do.’

‘You do not like Steve because Jason choose him for Captain.’

Dee dropped his arm. ‘You know it ain’t that. It’s like always, I gotta wait in line behind every goldtop just cos I didn’t go to the Academy.’

He knew Jason was always going to choose Steve. They were at the Academy together, joined CONSEC together, practically lived together.

‘Steve try to help you.’

Dee’s shoulders slumped. ‘Yeah, I know.’ Bo was right. Steve had persuaded Jason to classify this mission as a promotion assessment, and it was Steve who’d suggested the eject port’s inspection shaft.
But then, it’s easy to be generous when you’ve already got everything.
Dee mused at the floor. Somewhere below his over-boots was Citadel, the best of the best Advocates stored in cryostasis. So far, they’d all been selected from Academy goldtops. Lieutenant Deon ‘Dee’ Brandleson intended to change that.

He rolled his shoulders. ‘Ready?’

‘No.’

Dee raised his right arm, tapped the attached MCD, and pointed it at the airlock interface. The doorway edge flashed red and a clanging alarm echoed in the hanger as the doors slid apart to reveal the transfer bay’s subdued interior.

He reversed into position, locking his arms through the restraining hoops lining the walls. Bo stood opposite, his breath rasping in Dee’s earpiece.

‘You okay, Bo?’

‘No.’

‘Just follow me; we’ve done this a hundred times.’

‘Six times.’

‘Just follow me.’

A dull clunk resonated through the transfer bay; they’d attached to a Highway rail. Half a kilometre wide and three times as high, the Highway allowed transference between the rotating core and the outer hull.

As his EM suit lightened, Dee looked up inside his helmet and selected the far right icon. ‘AG on.’ Artificial Gravity micro-thrusters in his shoulder plates fired.

Bo raised his thumb. ‘AG on.’

Dee waited for the light above the outer doors to flash green before walking across the bay and pulling the D-shaped lever.

His eyes widened. He’d seen it before, but it was never the same. Smooth pale blue and mottled bronze daubed with clouds of cotton white, all wrapped in a hazy blanket. Despite its size, Earth was defenceless — like a peeled egg. He’d watched the simulations; Colossus would strike off the southern tip of Italy, evaporating the Mediterranean in a blink. The shock wave would reach his parent’s New York home in six seconds, three seconds before the fireball. Dee had promised them. Neither he nor his sister would witness it.

Bo’s panting intensified; condensation streaked the inside of his visor. A bio readout on his chest blinked amber.

Dee grabbed Bo’s arm. ‘Take it easy man. It’ll clear once the anti-humidity kicks in. We’ll do this in hops. Wait here.’

‘Okay . . . okay.’

Dee scanned the illuminated icons inside his helmet, ‘AG off, MDP on. Moving out now.’

‘Okay.’ Bo’s breathy response lacked conviction.

‘No, not okay, come on.’

‘Sorry. Roger.’

The Multi-Direction Propulsion arrows appeared on Dee’s Head-Up-Display and a tracker dot followed his eye movements. Beyond his visor, a celestial band of blue bounded the curvature of Earth. He closed his mind to its captivating beauty. Many had not and their rotting remains littered the pitiless reality of space.

Inhaling pure oxygen deep into his lungs, Dee fired the horizontal thrusters and jetted into low Earth orbit.

After thirty metres he rotated right, his view filled with the shadowy curve of the number one starboard exhaust cover. Provenance had four exhausts, a starboard and port pair, five kilometres apart. Each cover had the diameter of four baseball fields and each protected a pyramid of three hexagonal exhaust vents. Dee was no quantum physicist, but he knew the anti-matter engines could produce 230,000 kilograms of vacuum thrust. Two years after engine ignition, Provenance would slice through space at 300,000 kilometres a second.
If they can get ‘em started.

Dee faded into shadow as he coasted over the exhaust cover towards its mounting. A minute later, he bumped into the house-sized mounting and hooked his arm through a support bracket. He and Provenance were travelling at thirty thousand kilometres an hour.

‘Alpha two, alpha one. Three-zero h then ten d-v. Turn nine-zero d-g-r, one-ten h and drift.’

‘Alpha two . . . roger.’

Dee watched the orange EM suit glide out into the starlit expanse. Bo’s erratic breathing filled his helmet, ‘Alpha two, alpha one, you’re doing fine. Drop ten and begin your turn.’

Bo’s breathing became faster, louder, desperate.

‘Alpha two, alpha one, turn now.’

No response.

‘Turn, Bo! Turn!’

‘I, I cannot see. Cannot turn. Something wrong, not working.’

The orange suit had drifted a hundred metres from the hull. Dee’s chest clenched. He didn’t understand, they’d tested the anti-humidity blowers in the hanger, all had checked out. He crouched and sprang away from the mounting. ‘Hang tight, Bo. I’m on my way.’

It took three minutes of emergency thrust to reach Bo and when Dee grabbed the ‘buddy’ grips on Bo’s jetpack, he was already in full reverse. ‘Gotcha.’

‘Thank you. Why you take so long?’

Dee smiled, nothing like a near death experience to calm the nerves.

A five-minute burn was enough to return them to the sunless obscurity of Provenance’s underside and bring them within sight of the target hatch. Dee angled the thrust and drifted up to meet it.

The inner air lock normalised in two minutes, flooding them in cobalt light. Dee glanced up in his helmet, ‘All clear, visors up.’

Bo’s blue hued face glistened in the cool metallic air, ‘I do not understand, the blowers work, but visor covered with water. MDP shut down.’

Dee bit his bottom lip. ‘We must’ve missed something. We’ll check later, let’s get outta here before they send someone to check the hatch.’

They stood on a ledge in the circular air lock, their arms wrapped behind a rail. A ladder opposite would take them up alongside the ejection conduit and into the injector bay.

As Dee climbed the airtight tube, he looked through slot windows into the circular void. Strips of light curved around the walls, highlighting the vertical rods that guided the anti-matter tubes to the ejection port. MECTECHs used the inspection hatch to check the port’s emergency explosive seals. Ejecting the AM tubes was bad enough, having them slam into the ejection port door was a whole lot worse.

The ascent to the injector bay took ten minutes and if someone was coming to investigate, they hadn’t arrived yet. Dee’s eyes rested on the line of silver torpedo like cylinders slotted into the left wall. These hydrogen proton injectors fed the anti-hydrogen tubes. He didn’t intend to be in here when they inserted them.

He slid around the wall, in defilade of the cameras pointing at the tubes.
Nice one, Stevie
.

They exited the bay into a cramped corridor and removed their EM suits. Dee extracted the scrubber filter from Bo’s Air Supply Unit and squeezed it. A stream of water splashed onto the deck. ‘Unlucky man, you picked the suit with the booby prize. I doubt it was in the tank, probably someone with a syringe.’

Bo’s hand thumped the metal wall; a sharp boom resonated along the corridor, ‘This is an exercise!’

‘We’re Advocates, it ain’t ever an exercise.’ Dee flashed a smile. ‘Maybe it was personal.’

‘I make it personal when I meet them.’

Dee dropped his smile. ‘I need this, when the mission’s over you can do what you want. Okay?’ Gold-plated heritage aside, Steve had stuck his neck out to get them aboard Provenance, and Dee intended to prove him right.

Bo nodded his curled-up lip. ‘Okay. You tell me when mission over.’

Dee followed the narrow corridor to a silver coloured door with bold red lettering, ‘ANTI-MATTER STORAGE. UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL WILL BE TERMINATED.’ Anti-Matter was stored in the outer hull. In the event of a catastrophic failure and as a last resort, they could jettison the outer ring and eject all the AMS storage pods. Humanity would end its days drifting into extinction. Dee unclipped his Cogent, and pulled the amplitude slider to the backstop. ‘Cogents off.’

The door slid left and Dee leaned out. In both directions, a mesh fence bounded a narrow walkway marked with yellow lines. Behind the fence, two-metre wide silver tubes sprouted from the white floor for three metres before disappearing into the charcoal ceiling. Above the walkway, a single light strip failed to disperse the shadows lurking amongst the forest of tubes.